Turtle Rock's next game may be another Left 4 Dead spiritual successor
The next game from Turtle Rock Studios has started development, and it could be something familiar.
Turtle Rock, the team made up of veteran Left 4 Dead developers, specialises in creating co-op shooters. Its first project, Evolve, wasn't the big success it hoped it would be, but the studio bounced back with the excellent Back 4 Blood.
And now, it looks like the studio has begun working on its next project, which, unsurprsingly, is going to be a co-op shooter. As spotted by GamesRadar, Turtle Rock put up a job ad for a senior combat designer.
The role, posted on Greenhouse, has a list of requirements that include love of first-person shooters, co-op and multiplayer games. While the description is careful not to divulge too many details, it does confirm the existence of melee and ranged combat, which admittedly isn't much given Turtle Rock's history, but it at least suggests the studio's next game won't be, say, a medieval ARPG.
The listing also hints at the game including PvE and PvP elements, as there's a focus on how combat feels against AI and other players. Turtle Rock wants someone who has experience with class design and boss encounter design, which is yet another hint.
There are several other listings for the same project, like this one for a lead mission scripter, which reveal a mission-based co-op shooter with PvE and PvP gameplay. Theme, setting, structure and all the other relevant details have been left out, for obvious reasons.
Interestingly, the developer seems to be prioritising controller gameplay. While Turtle Rock's games have always played well on controller (with some calling Back 4 Blood's controller gameplay one of the best ever), gunplay was never really a speciality for the studio.
Turtle Rock announced earlier this year that it will no longer produce new Back 4 Blood content as it begins work on its next game. Back 4 Blood received a healthy dose of DLC and gameplay tweaks over the course of its life, which improved what was always a co-op shooter with a solid mix of modern expectations and old-school gameplay.
It's difficult to speculate too much based on the information we have. Turtle Rock never made a sequel to any of its games, but Back 4 Blood seems to have done well enough that a Back 4 Blood 2 would make sense.