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Sorry PS3 owners, but it still looks like you won’t be getting any Left 4 Dead 2.
Don’t expect Valve Corporation to take Left 4 Dead 2 to Sony’s videogame console. In a recent interview with GTTV, Valve managing director Gabe Newell dismissed any and all PS3-related rumors when asked by host Geoff Keighley if the studio was trying to understand or learn how to tackle the shiny black hardware.
“Uh, no. Not in any real way,†Newell says.
At least once a month we hear someone from Valve dismissing the hardware. Painted as hard to develop for, Valve has consistently said it isn’t interested in fiddling with its innards. There’s nothing new here. Valve hates the PS3 and any respectable clown wears a red nose and huge shoes; confirmed. Well, until next month (or a week, whatever) it will remain so. Like a good clown, Valve is constantly entertaining. Pie flinging never gets old, but the custard can get ratty from time to time.
The latest episode of GameTrailers TV included a branch of new information regarding Left 4 Dead 2. A katana will be available to slash up and slice zombies with, and a new campaign set in an amusement park has been revealed.
Get ready for a battle in the bayou as Adam Sessler previews the upcoming ‘Left 4 Dead 2′. Sit down with Chet Faliszek from Valve to talk about the game’s iconic characters, the daylight setting, the new director and myriad of new charaters.
Back at San Diego Comic-Con, we got our hands on one of the most highly-anticipated games of the event (and of this year), Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2. This shooter sequel was a surprise announcement at this year’s E3, but with its November release just around the corner, it’s looking as polished as one might expect.
We played half of the “Swamp Fever†campaign that was unveiled at Comic-Con, which amounted to two levels. Those levels, unlike the “Parish†campaign from E3 set in New Orleans, took players to a thick marsh in the Deep South. Players traversed land and water in equal parts, but we definitely tried to stay as dry as possible. Deep water was dangerous, which often inspired our ragtag crew of four all-new characters to take detours on dry land and traverse choke points fashioned from makeshift plywood bridges.
Another difference from “The Parish†was the apparent absence of daylight. The daytime mission in New Orleans quickly set apart Left 4 Dead 2 as a marked departure from the dark locales of the original game, but here in the swamps, it’s near-as-makes-no-difference dark again. It could be dawn, or dusk, or really any time of day, for very thick fog clouds out sunlight and leaves what visible sky there is a deeply grayed shade of blue.
But this game isn’t about the sky, it’s about the zombies. But where other games might crowd their sequels with more baddies (like God of War 3 or Gears of War 2), Valve has given its zombies more talents and abilities to make things harder for our party of four. We’ve already mentioned the Charger, whose job it is to push people around in Tank-like fashion and break up tight groups. But I was surprised to see how un-Tank-like he actually was. He has the height and bulky upper body of the boss zombie, but not his seemingly endless strength. The Charger, like other Special Infected, goes down after two or three bullets.
Another new Special Infected, the Spitter, made her debut at Comic-Con. She has the same mission as the Charger, which is breaking up groups that have their backs to the wall. True to her name, she spits out acid which corrodes players to death if they don’t clear away from the burning ground. The effect is not unlike fire from anywhere else in the game. It’s even the same shade of orange as fire, so the signal is crystal clear: move.
Some Common Infected, too, have gotten some tweaks. With the same attack power and general weakness as your average horde zombie, they’ve come to be called “Un-common Infected†for the extra bells and whistles they come with. There have been reports of zombies decked out in hazmat suits, making them invulnerable to the fire from a Molotov Cocktail, or in Kevlar, making them only vulnerable from behind. In “Swamp Fever,†we came across crouched Infected. They hang out down low, like a Hunter ready to pounce, and they’re surprisingly hard to hit. They’ll also take you by complete surprise if you’re wading through waist-deep water, making the swamplands even more dangerous.
Thankfully, our Survivors have some new toys to take out these new zombies with. Much ado has been made of new melee weapons, but my experience with the cricket bat didn’t sell me on the idea, and I longed to return to a weapon with bullets. All of those guns, by the way, have been transformed to look like something more military-grade. The Hunting Rifle, for instance, now looks like a full-blown sniper rifle. But my favorite toy was the all new automatic sniper rifle. Slotting in between the Assault Rifle and the Hunting Rifle, this weapon packs a 30-round clip, firing no more than 2 rounds per second, and adds a scope to assist in long-range shooting. With my new friends packing the usual Assault Rifles and automatic shotguns, I helped target those slippery Special Infected lurking in the distance and entrusted my teammates to wipe out the closer zombies.
The game’s infamous AI Director must have approved of our plan and it rewarded us with an upgrade. The usual tip popped up to alert us to its presence, but a little icon of a gift-wrapped box with a bow let us know that we had done something special and deserved to be rewarded. Near the next ammo cache, a small box offered Incendiary Ammunition. I took a dive with the ammunition and came to regret it at the next major zombie horde fight.
One level has a “climax event†(the parts where players trigger something which alerts the horde) set in the shell of a downed airplane. Players can take on this challenge in a variety of ways, such as going out on the wing, but we chose to stay in close quarters inside the plane. This was a problem for my incendiary ammo, which exploded into small batches of fire with every round I fired. Before too long, two teammates were incapacitated from my setting them on fire. They were a bit angry, but I found it to be the hilarious result of a long string of things which will never be repeated.
That uniqueness of each round is what I’ve always enjoyed about Left 4 Dead. And as I hinted in my most recent Pushing Buttons column, Valve’s latest just feels like more Left 4 Dead, not a full-blown sequel. But I, for one, love it for that. I suspect that the millions who’ve already pre-ordered the sequel, despite all the Internet nonsense, will feel the same.
Left 4 Dead 2 arrives on Xbox 360 and PC on November 17.
Here is some Left 4 Dead 2 footage from Comic-Con 2009.
LazySAGamer speaks out his opinion and feels that Valve shouldn’t have set Left 4 Dead 2 in New Orleans.
So apparently there is some mini organisation out there trying to get famous by claiming that Left 4 Dead 2 is racist because it has black people in it and some of those black people are zombies.
Now I still feel that there were some racist undertones in Resident Evil, even though I feel they were based more on ignorance than ill feeling, however that being said I cannot for the life of me see how Left 4 Dead 2 could possibly be racist. Some of the lead characters who save the world are black, doesn’t that make them the hero’s?
There is however something I feel Valve did wrong, they set the game in New Orleans. The city that recently was struck by Hurricane Katrina which killed nearly 2000 people and turned the city into a death trap. Setting your video game (which includes death, zombies and disease) in this setting is uncaring and a cheap ploy to try and grab some extra attention.
I think too highly of Valve to believe that they didn’t realise this during their design meetings and therefore I can only believe they did it on purpose. Which is a bit tacky in my opinion.
Will this put me off buying the game? Absolutely not, I missed the boat on the first Left 4 Dead and there is no way I am going to miss this one as well.
This just raises the old question of when does it become acceptable to turn terrible acts into entertainment? Katrina smashed the city 4 years ago so some would think enough time has passed.
However there are still hundreds of houses that are yet to be cleared out and over 700 people still marked as missing so it’s still pretty fresh in a lot of peoples minds.
Do you agree or disagree with him? Post your comments.
Last week, Destructoid sat down with Left 4 Dead series writer Chet Faliszek to talk about the followup to 2008’s critical smash-hit zombie co-op game, Left 4 Dead 2. They discussed why the sequel was announced so soon after the original’s release, why New Orleans makes a great game location, and why charges of racism in this new game are “utter insanity.”
We also discuss how the original Special Infected are getting new models and voices, the integration of melee weapons into Versus Mode, and whether Batman could take on a Tank. If you’re a Left 4 Dead fan, then you’d do well to check this out, so come with me as we interview Chet Faliszek.
Destructoid: Developing a sequel to a game only a year after the original title is very atypical of Valve. What made you decide to work on a new game so quickly, considering your history and usual MO?
Faliszek: There’s a couple of factors there. One was, as we were finishing Left 4 Dead 1, the team size grew, and everyone at Valve played the game continuously. That’s not like, going home and playing it continuously, that’s working ten hours a day, playing it continuously. And everybody really gets into it, we have really long-range grudge matches, and during that, the people who weren’t working directly with the team got excited about the game and with them came a bunch of new ideas, and with the people who had been working on it came a bunch of new ideas.
We play the game a ton. To give you some idea, when we had the launch party here, we had this big event where we hit the button that actually put it out onto Steam, and it was the same day as the 360 release. The minute it was out on the PC, we ran upstairs, away from the party and away from our families to go play some Left 4 Dead with the public. We play it all the time, and we just thought that there were all these ideas we have for what we want to do that aren’t these simple, one-off pieces or aren’t independent.
Survival Mode was independent, we could do that new game mode [for L4D1], which was released in the Spring. But when you’re talking about these across-the-board changes of how the Director works — I mean, the Director’s fundamentally changed. It does all the highs and lows that the first one did, but it does a whole lot more. With that, there are also certain creatures [where we'd say] “That would really work if we had this,” and to make the new creatures takes a lot of time, and to make the new events, and it was a perfect storm of looking at all this and going, “We are not going to release this in six months, this is something that’ll take a year,” and for Valve, a year seems like a short amount of time, but really, we’ve been releasing since I’ve gotten here, Half-Life 2 Xbox, Episode One, Episode Two, Portal, Left 4 Dead. We’ve released a lot of content.
Everybody had talked about what they loved in Left 4 Dead, and what they wanted to see improve, and the underlying mantra that struck through all that was making sure that the best way of playing Left 4 Dead was the funnest way to play it, and there’s a lot of subtle little changes that go into making that become true. Having that focus and being able to do it let us do it in this quick space of time, while making that many big changes.
Destructoid: Bill, Francis, Zoey and Louis became iconic characters in their own right following the success of Left 4 Dead. Was it difficult to leave those four behind in favor of an all-new cast, and do you think the community will grow to love the new faces as much as they loved the original survivors?
Faliszek: So, leaving them behind was a weird case of us wanting to expand the world and not saying we’re done with them yet. They’re not dead, but we wanted to have this kind of other track, and we talked about going to the South, and it doesn’t make sense that, like, Zoey’s in her jumpsuit down South and she’s mysteriously living in Savannah as well.
The Left 4 Dead World doesn’t have a super amount of strict fictional rules, but it does have some fictional rules. The characters actually did a little arc, they go from Philadelphia and eventually to like, Airy Peiy, and they escape, and they’re up there now, so we wanted then to do this other thing and go across the South, and with that it didn’t make sense to have the same characters.
It’s scary making new characters, it’s a terrifying process because you look back at Zoey and Louis and Bill and Francis and you see people’s excitement over them, and your own excitement for them, your own love for them, and it’s really scary, I’m like, “Oh my God are we going to go through that again?” But you know, we’ve done GLaDOS, we’ve done Alyx Vance, we’ve done other characters that I think people remember and I think every time we do it it’s this scary thing.
I’d say the characters took the absolute most time [to develop]. From January 1, until you saw them at E3, was just non-stop working on them.
Destructoid: New Orleans is not a game setting you see often. What influenced the decision to set L4D2 in Louisiana, as well as Georgia?
Faliszek: I have no idea why it’s not a game setting more, honestly! It is a beautiful city, it’s such a cool city. The South in general, it’s this thing. You go to Savannah, it’s a beautiful city as well, go watch the movie In the Garden of Good and Evil [which is set in] Savannah and it’ll show you the beautiful old homes and such. We don’t quite go there in the game, but it’s a really cool setting.
We want to have swamps. I’ve lived in New Orleans myself, so when they said swamps, I thought of my bayou experience, south of New Orleans, and it’s like, New Orleans is this great city, it’s got these balconies, it’s got this very “gamey” space in the French Quarter, so we just wanted to go there.
Destructoid: Did you ever feel, when choosing your game’s location, that there would be backlash from those ready to cry racism and insensitivity to Hurricane Katrina? What do you make of the few instances where people have tried to make those links?
Faliszek: Utter insanity! Seriously, no offense to journalists anywhere. There’s mixed races of zombies, there are all different races of zombies that you shoot, and since we placed it in New Orleans, that makes it racist? I honestly re-read the paragraph about five times, and then there’s another blog post by his writer friend who tried to defend it, but he didn’t defend it, he just talked about something else. Maybe it was a bad day, I don’t know what, but when two of the characters in your game are African American, it’s a weird thing to be accused of. We’re like, “how does this work?”
When we were choosing characters, not to say that we don’t look at color, but we were caring about who lives in this part of the world, who makes interesting characters. Essentially, Coach is playing the “Bill” role, the wise old guy, and he’s just a high school football coach from down in Savannah, and we were like, “wow, that’s a great character, we want to do that character,” and I’m not sure setting in New Orleans makes it racist. I’m at a loss on that one.
As far as Katrina goes, if you go down to New Orleans, Katrina’s still going on. I mean, it’s messed up, it is crazy that the city is still in the state it’s in, and we treat that with the utmost respect, our CEDA thing is not some subversive commentary on anything. This is a videogame, those are real people’s lives, we are not trying to make a statement with that. Again, I’ve lived down there, we’ve all gone down there, I’m gonna go down there again for a while this Fall, it’s a place we love, it’s dear to our hearts. We would not cheapen it. It’s not a brick for brick representation of New Orleans, it’s a fictional version, and I love that city.
Destructoid: L4D2 has new weaponry, most notably the melee weapons. My first thought when I saw these was to wonder how they would affect multiplayer. Will players have a means to counter these weapons as the Infected, or will they melee weapons even be a factor at all?
Faliszek: They play a factor into the multiplayer in the fact that you just have to be aware if someone has one when you come in close. The Hunter would be a good example — getting axed out of the air is a humiliating thing. But if I’m a Boomer and I see a guy with a melee weapon, I’m happy, because he’s gonna have to make some choices there. Well, he’s probably gonna drop it and shoot me, but you know, it’s just an option there, it’s fluid, they’re strategically good to have in some situations, and some situations you want to use your guns. We let you mix it up.
As an Infected, it’s about how you make that choice of when to attack. Like today, John was reloading his gun, and I’m the smoker, and I got to see him look up and know, “Aw, I’m screwed, I’m gonna get Smokered.” The same will happen with certain melee choices, but sometimes, an Infected’s gonna jump in, and it’s gonna get axed, and that’s what happens.
Destructoid: The main thing that disappoints me so far about the game is the fact that the old special infected, most notably the Hunter, Smoker and Boomer, are recycling their character models from L4D1. Is this a stopgap, will you be planning on remodeling them? If not, why keep the exact same look?
Faliszek: One of the weird things with Left 4 Dead 2 is that we’re not showing a finished product, yet it plays like a finished product, so all those guys are getting re-skinned and remodeled. They’re going to be mutated to the area — it’s the South, it’s a little hotter, a guy running around in a hoodie’s gonna be a little rare. We haven’t shown that yet, we’re gonna be showing it … actually I don’t know when we’re going to show it, but it’ll be shown before release.
Destructoid: One thing that pleased me was the inclusion of daytime levels in L4D2. I’ve always felt zombies were scarier during the day, for a number of reasons. Is this something you agreed with, hence the inclusion, or did something else factor into it?
Faliszek: One of the things we found is that it’s fatiguing for it to always be at night and in the dark. Even with the flashlight, there’s still that feeling of being in the dark. If you look at something like 28 Days Later, when they have those great open scenes and you see the zombies rushing, it’s this terrifying thing, so it’s a little mix of those two things and, again, wanting to give some variety. So, some [stages] are bright, some are dark, some changed, we mix it up.
Destructoid: It was said that L4D2 may have a more cohesive story. How are you looking to make that deeper, and was that something you feel was missing from L4D1?
Faliszek: Well, the way we told the story in Left 4 Dead 1 was really deliberate. We talk about some stuff in the commentary a little bit, things we tried, but we always wanted to do a lot less than more, and partially that was the want to have you at ground zero, because you are in the city where the infection breaks out in the US, so what you know is going to be very limited, you’re just running, gunning and surviving. For L4D2, we’re getting a little bit more distance, we’re in Savannah, we’re not at ground zero, we’re actually in a city that’s evacuating before it’s been infected. And we go from there, and as we cross the South, we see how different people interact with the infection and try to save themselves, and we end up in New Orleans where it’s very clear that the tables have turned and that the military is in control. CEDA’s not running the show, and they’re trying to do some different things there. So with that, just having the characters go through this changing world where in L4D1 it was this static world, where pretty much every city’s the same state. With Left 4 Dead 2, things are radically different, you run into different things — there’s no military in the first campaign, because they’re just evacuating, and it’s through that you learn more, and through the characters talking, there’s just a little bit more.
We still don’t do cutscenes, we still don’t go, “let’s stop the action and do a story here,” it’s still all about these people, and the four of them meet the infection at the same time you do, so there’s a little bit of curve there, where the story gets injected.
Destructoid: Valve is known for having top-notch writing in games, especially the Half-Life series and the witty dialog of Portal. How important do you feel writing is to a videogame?
Faliszek: It is and it isn’t. If you have a really great game, with really great gameplay, your guy can be talking gibberish and people are gonna play it, right? Equally, if you have a really bad game, it’s gonna be a really bad game no matter how good of a story it has. Shakespeare’s not gonna save some games.
But then there are games that do a marriage, where both are really well done. I think Call of Duty 4 is a really good example. I was into that story, it helped propel the game, to make it even greater than it was. So in that case, it’s super important.
The game Prototype, I had a ton of fun playing Prototype, but I don’t think they’d be winning awards for the confusing story, where I was saving humanity by killing people and merging with them. But, I had a ton of fun playing it.
I’m a writer, but I know that I’m also in gameplay. That’s where the meat is.
Destructoid: How dramatic are the changes to the AI Director, and more specifically, just how much can he alter the paths and experiences of a chapter? How much power does he have when it comes to changing the shape of any given stage?
Faliszek: It depends on the campaign. For example, in the French Quarter, there’s a map right before that where you go through the cemetery, and he’ll alter the entire setup of the cemetery, and how it works. That’s based on how you’ve done up to that point. There are things like the weather events that will happen, based on how you’re doing. If you’re just barely hanging on, the Director’s not going to send a storm at you to finish you off. The best experience is just sneaking in by the skin of your teeth, and not feeling like you’re in a race game where you know you’re gonna win. You can die in Left 4 Dead.
Destructoid: How likely is cross-compatibility with L4D1 looking? Is there a chance that you’ll pursue this on the Xbox 360 as well as PC if it works out?
Faliszek: We’re looking at it on both platforms, part of that’s a bigger discussion with Microsoft and a bigger discussion with our Steam team on how to do that. It’s also a discussion on what it means, how we package that, what it’ll look like. We don’t have anything solid yet. That’s something we’ve been working on since E3.
Destructoid: There must have been a staggering amount of ideas that never made it into L4D1 and 2. What were some of the most outlandish ideas you had for Infected and scenarios, the ones that were just too over the top or unbelievable to use?
Faliszek: Zombies on the Moon! It could happen. One gets up in a spaceship, just there on the moon, in Space 1999, the Moon breaks off from its orbit, and you’ve gotta fight with Martin Landau? C’mon.
The thing about Left 4 Dead 2 getting developed in this timeframe is that everyone had a really great understanding of the game, so most of the ideas were in the ballpark of what we would deliver, and it showed in meetings of design and of the world and in the creatures. We were really of a singular mind on that, so there’s less of that than you might think. There are some crazy ideas we have stored that we don’t want to give away yet, we might still keep working on things as the mutation keeps going, but this close to ground zero, we don’t want to go too far out. Something like the Charger or the Spitter are in the same vein as the first set. At some point the mutation may be spreading even further, we live with it for a couple of months and maybe something’s happening.
Destructoid: Finally, who’d win in a fight between Batman and a Tank?
Faliszek: Dude, the Tank.
What in the utility belt is gonna help him against the Tank? What? We’re saying Batman without the vehicles, right?
Destructoid: It’s based off the Comic-Con photo of the two cosplayers.
Faliszek: Right, so there were no vehicles there. There is nothing in that utility belt that is gonna save Batman. Seriously, what? A rope? No.
[Destructoid would like to thank Chet Faliszek and Valve for taking the time to speak with us.]
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