Left 4 Dead 2

Speaking to Valve’s Chet Faliszek at PAX, we asked how many melee weapons will make it into Left 4 Dead 2. At the time, Faliszek told us he wasn’t sure, but he knew there were more melee weapons in Left 4 Dead 2 than there were guns in the original game. We followed up with Faliszek after the show and we can now share all ten of the game’s melee weapons.

Without further ado, they are:

* Baseball Bat
* Cricket Bat
* Crowbar
* Electric Guitar
* Fire Axe
* Frying Pan
* Katana
* Machete
* Tonfa (police baton)
* Chainsaw

The question you have to ask yourself: Which one of these would you abandon your teammates for? Remember, a teammate constricted by a Smoker is a teammate that can’t pick up that katana over there.

Source

Tank Attack Gameplay
The below video shows footage of a Tank attack. We also see the Jockey in action and hear what he sounds like.

Dark Carnival Direct Feed Blowout
The below video shows gameplay of a level in the Dark Carnival campaign and includes footage of the Charger, the Spitter, and the Jockey. It also shows use of the electric guitar melee weapon.

I received a hot little rumor while walking the PAX grounds on Sunday. A friend had been playing Left 4 Dead 2 on the floor when his screen froze. He wasn’t being helped, or monitored, and he discovered a new weapon that has not yet been revealed…

Find out what it is and how it’s going to change the way you play Left 4 Dead 2, after the jump.

While playing Left 4 Dead 2, his game froze. After hitting the guide button and apparently restarting a different scenario, he discovered a “Defibrilator.” When he discovered the item, the on-screen tips showed up and said something to the effect of, “revive your dead teammates.”

Wow… Shocking…

Adding a defibrillator to the game could drastically change how the game is played. For one thing, it would be fun as hell to shock the undead back into the abyss. I can only hope that there will be a nice shock effect that sends the zombies flying…

Also there’s that little, “shock your friend back to life” deal. Is it a one time, one use item? Would it replace one of your weapon slots? One can only guess as this hot little item remains a rumor only, at this point. I’m sure there’s more goodies that remain to be announced from Valve as the days go on. Let’s see if this rumor pans out.

Source

Left 4 Dead 2 was one of the most popular games being shown at PAX this year. Lines were long with fans from the first game waiting as long as three hours to get their hands on the zombie shooting sequel from Valve. As for myself, along with the rest of the SFX360 staff, we had an appointment allowing us to walk right into the press room inside Valve’s booth for a private session.

We got to play the Dark Carnival campaign which started us out on an abandoned freeway filled with lots of empty cars, trucks, and of course alot of zombies. Starting weapons included a shotgun and a silenced submachine gun. As we plowed through the zombie horde on the freeway, we then made it to a motel where literally all hell broke loose with quite a few boss zombies making the trek to the safe house even more difficult. Finally, our battle would take us to the swamp where the terror level most certainly increased. Good thing was before we entered the swamp we had some Level 2 weapons to help us out. There was also some melee weapons, including the battle axe, adding to all the fun.

Now for those of you who consider yourselves “zombie slaying experts” in the first Left 4 Dead game, let me assure you that Left 4 Dead 2 is much tougher. The AI Director is well aware of your tactics and will trick you up. The new boss zombies make the orignal boss zombies look like a pushover. The new boss zombies that we battles in the demo included the Spitter who spits acid at your feet. There’s the Charger who literally charges after you while shoving other zombies out of the way. If you get caught by him, he will slam you into a wall and even smash you. Finally, we saw the Jockey who will ride your back and seperate you from the rest of the survivors. If there is a Witch nearby, the Jockey will take you right to her along with startling her and making you dead meat. Don’t forget that the original boss zombies are also here as well.

Just like the original Left 4 Dead, communication is a major key to success along with staying together with the rest of the survivors. A good thing to keep in mid is to call out boss zombie locations as well as helpful items like Level 2 weapons, second pistol, extra ammo, health kits, pain pills, molotovs, and pipe bombs. Don’t follow these important rules and you’ll never make it to the safe house alive.

Overall, Left 4 Dead 2’s November 17 release date can’t come fast enough considering the fact that the game is that good. According to Chet Faliszek, Left 4 Dead 2 is the definitive Left 4 Dead experience. Clearly this game was what the first game was meant to be. This is one of the must have games of the holiday season. We’ll have more info regarding Left 4 Dead 2 in the coming weeks. If you can’t wait for this new game like I am, don’t worry because the new DLC for the first game called Crash Course is coming later this month.

Source

Pre-order gifts are all the rage these days, and who is Valve to deny a trend? You may have heard that Left 4 Dead 2 will be offering an in-game treat to those who pre-order the sequel at select retailers, and that treat is an exclusive melee weapon, the baseball bat.

The bat will, apparently, not just be a re-skin of the cricket bat that is available to everybody in the game. It will have its own unique characteristics to make it a worthwhile and desirable brain-batterer. Quite how it will be different, I can’t quite imagine, but it will be. Maybe it will be gold, like most pre-order goodies.

The best part about the baseball bat is that it won’t be so exclusive that you can’t play the L4D2 with someone who has it. If someone without the weapon ends up in a game with someone who pre-ordered it, the baseball bat will be available to all. Yay Communism!

“How it’ll work is, if you’re playing with somebody that’s pre-ordered it, everybody playing gets it,” confirms Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek.

The baseball bat will be available in both the PC and Xbox 360 version of the game. I eagerly await the trendy Valve haters who will find a way to claim this is evil and bad somehow.

Source

Major points:

-Left 4 Dead 2 will be full of surprises and challenges; much more than that in the first game.
-The Jockey has a described sound that ‘hovers uneasily between an asthmatic chuckle and a wretched, ragged-throating heaving’.
-The L4D2 specials are now genuinely aware of each others’ presences, much as you are in Versus mode, meaning they’ll regularly combine their strategies for maximum destructive effect (ex. a Tank incapacitates a Survivor, and the Spitter covers him with acid).
-The “wandering” Witch aka the daytime Witch, is still happening in Left 4 Dead 2.
-Each melee weapon has its own little secret (ex. Axes are the only melee weapon that can kill a Witch from behind).

It’s early September in Seattle, Washington, and on every television channel, the Republican Party and the health insurance lobby are teaming up to murder the plucky British NHS in wall-to-wall attack adverts. Meanwhile, on a series of HD displays in Valve’s Bellevue offices, Tom Bramwell, Eurogamer editor, and Chet Faliszek (“F as in Frank, A-L-I-S, Z as in Zebra, E-K,” he says with a practiced efficiency), ostensibly a writer at Valve although I suspect he does a lot more besides, are teaming up all by themselves to murder waves of infected, while I wait patiently for my rescue behind a locked door somewhere in the distance, having been covered in bright green acidic goop by a Spitter, and then ridden off a cliff rather abruptly by a Jockey.

Left 4 Dead 2’s new specials don’t disappoint, and they don’t waste much time in thinning the ranks of the survivors. In fact, the whole sorry situation serves as a reminder that, while some rather fundamental changes have been made during Valve’s second zombie apocalypse, many things (me stuck in the closet, Tom toying with whether to let me out again because I’ll probably only cause more damage to my own team) have remained the same.

It was always going to be a tricky job building on Left 4 Dead’s framework. Not only did Valve’s blue-collar splatterhouse get so much right in the first wave of its murderous infection, it did so in such an economical manner: the weapons and enemies were pared down to the most entertaining of bare minimums, while the handful of solid campaigns were designed to be swiftly memorised and then exploited, both by the game’s own fanbase, and the developer’s now legendary AI director, the most charismatic string of code since Nintendo managed to get the fireworks to go off at the end of each Super Mario stage.

Left 4 Dead may have broken its levels up into grindhouse B-movies, and announced the arrival of its set-pieces with brilliantly heavy-handed orchestral swells and squawks, but deep down this wasn’t a game that aspired to cinema as much as it did to the world of sports, as a well-balanced team activity with a grim understanding that real fun is as likely to come from restrictions as it is from freedom. And, after all, sports tend not behave nicely when there are sudden changes to the underlying rules. (I’m not counting Formula One, here.)

So Valve has been canny with its tinkering. As we play through sections of both the Swamp Fever and Dark Carnival campaigns (detailed by Tom in greater detail in his alternative hands-on), besides discovering that Faliszek is a master of the short-form morale booster – typical examples include, “Eugh, I don’t think there’s a lot of hope now,” and “You guys really don’t fill me with confidence,” – we also encounter a game where the pace is as brisk and snappy as it ever was, but which is now also capable of springing delightfully horrible surprises on you at every turn, whether it’s a new weapon to mess about with, or a fresh special infected giggling and moaning in the darkness, itching to do you harm.

And those specials are clearly the standout addition this time around. All three newcomers are distinct and gleefully terrifying, and all three add regular bursts of chaos to the endless waves of the horde, while fitting into the line-up so seamlessly they feel like they could have been there from day one. The Spitter, who lobs pools of bright green acidic gunk around the map, damaging anyone who strays into it, and the Charger, a lop-sided hulk who blasts through at regular intervals, grabbing a team member and then running off, before pounding them endlessly against the ground, have already been revealed, but we’re getting a chance to see the third and final addition, the Jockey, for the very first time. Announcing himself with a sound that hovers uneasily between an asthmatic chuckle and a wretched, ragged-throated heaving, this saggy, balding creep wearing the remains of a shredded Die Hard vest leaps unexpectedly onto a player’s head before steering them off into the distance or over a cliff, seemingly unpredictably.

Except it’s probably not as unpredictable as it initially sounds. One of the more interesting underground tweaks to Left 4 Dead 2 is that the specials are now genuinely aware of each others’ presences, much as you are in Versus mode, meaning they’ll regularly combine their strategies for maximum destructive effect. And so the Jockey becomes the natural ally of the Spitter, waiting until there’s a rich pool of toxic goo nearby before powering you helplessly into it. Or maybe he’ll ride you out of your carefully chosen safe spot and right into a Tank. Or maybe a Tank will knock you down to allow a Spitter to cover you in acid, all the better to take out any team-mate who tries to revive you.

Valve is fairly open about the fact that one of the primary uses for the new specials is to close any remaining strategic loopholes players may have been exploiting – which is why the Spitter is such a powerful anti-camping weapon, and the Charger can bust up highly-organised teams who work too tightly together, pulling them apart, and running off with crucial members – and yet, in the interactions between them all, the development team’s created something much more promising than an underhand balancing patch: they’ve built a far more tactical enemy, with a wealth of new malicious tag-team options open to them. Throw in tweaked behaviours for some of the existing specials – the Witch can now wander around daylight maps, becoming an even more disastrous presence, for example – and you’ve got something fresh and unpredictable at the heart of an otherwise pleasantly familiar experience.

And this time, the specials are joined by what Valve terms, with typical smirking neatness, “uncommon commons”: distinct members of the horde who are a little bit more powerful than most of their flailing one-shot allies. Ranging from riot police officers, who are capable of getting back up after their first knockdown, to the squeaky-shoed clown who alerts the rest of the infected to your location if you leave him alive long enough, and the powerfully unpleasant feral hillbillies of the swamp who skitter about, bent double, and will temporarily blind you with gunk if you let them, they provide a second level of unpredictability to the game, each of them with their own buff – one might be fire-proof, perhaps, or resistant to bullets from a certain angle – waiting to be uncovered and catalogued by the Valve faithful.

The common horde remains, of course, with new damage modelling meaning you can separate heads from necks, lop off arms, donut them through the chest, or even – most satisfyingly – take their legs out as they race towards you, and the inclusion of melee weapons makes them a much more tantalising prospect than before. This more intimate take on combat brings with it a smart risk/reward dynamic all of its own: to use a melee weapon, you’re going to have to let the horde get in close where they can cause real damage.

That in turn requires you to fundamentally alter your tactics from the first game, which was often an arms-out stagger to keep space between you and the enemy. On the plus side, however, melees are so comically rewarding to use, it’s impossible to do so without giggling: often thin on the ground, and replacing the pistols when equipped, the melee options on offer range from the already iconic frying pan, fast on its way to rivalling Freeman’s crowbar as the thinking FPS player’s blunt instrument of choice, to axes, night-sticks, katanas, an electric guitar, and a mean cricket bat.

Sound effects, from the power-chord blast of the guitar to the Warner Brothers-styled hollow clang of the frying pan, double the satisfaction of doing someone a nasty injury, and, like the uncommon common you’ll probably be battering with them, each melee has its own little secret quirk – axes, for example, are the only weapons which will allow you to fell a Witch from behind with one blow – another layer of secrets waiting to be uncovered and exploited. Add to that the changes made by the game’s new day/night cycle, which sees the horde becoming more agitated whenever the sun’s out, and an expanded traditional arsenal, swelled most brilliantly by the grenade launcher – deadly at a distance, absolutely disastrous up-close – and you start to get a picture of just how much even seasoned veterans are going to have to get ready to learn all over again on this outing.

There are other changes which are harder to gauge during a single afternoon’s playthrough, of course, not least increased emphasis on story, which sees all the campaigns stitched together into one blood-soaked road trip across the South, and the fact that the AI director can now muddle specific parts of the level geometry around depending on how well you’re playing, and call in weather effects like sudden summer storms that bring on the horde. But even if you’re starting to tire of putting Francis and Zoey through their paces in the original game, Valve looks to be creating a sequel that balances continuity and complication in a very tempting manner.

In amongst the limb-lopping and the lucky headshots, the grand-slam calibre backchat, and the endless waiting around in closets (that’s just me, generally), it isn’t just the mechanics that are getting a refinement. Two games in, Left 4 Dead’s visual identity is really starting to flourish: with its working class heroes, dungaree-clad infected, and endless bayous, Valve’s sweaty thrill ride is emerging as a wonderful hick melodrama, detailed in everything from the high-school coaches and Fancy Dan conmen of its new character rosters to the white-trash detritus left behind in the wake of the apocalypse – the plastic lawn furniture sprawled around the streets of its cities, and the partially-destroyed clapboard motels and rusty pick-ups lolling in ditches.

And there’s a flexibility to it as well, its world capable of producing moments of eerie prettiness, as the evening light breaks through the grey mists of the swamp, picking out spectral stumps of trees and rotting spars of walkways, or throwing in bursts of over-hyped spectacle whenever the game ramps up for one of its final gauntlets, pitching you into a headlong race towards your escape vehicle, where bridges collapse and fighter jets flash past through the sky, filling the air with flame and smoke as the soundtrack rises to a ridiculous crescendo before lapsing back into creepy silence.

Crescendos and then silence: that was the heartbeat of the original Left 4 Dead, and it’s the heartbeat for the sequel, too. With new tricks, new toys, and tweaks beneath the surface which Valve hopes you won’t even notice, the murderous infected may have headed south for this outing, but there’s no sign yet that they’ve started to go downhill.

Source

When Valve’s zombie shooter Left 4 Dead was originally released in Japan, it was released with edited box art. The iconic hand was too gruesome and needed more flesh.

Left 4 Dead 2 is coming to to Japan November 19 and once again the game’s original cover art appears to be altered. Due to cultural issues like yakuza gangsters ceremoniously cutting off fingers to apologize, Japan is sensitive to things like missing fingers.

Japan wasn’t the only region in which the cover art for the first Left 4 Dead was changed. The German box display art was censored with paper sleeve insert of an edited hand. The actual box art was the same, however.

Source

The Spitter & Katana

Baseball Bat

Carousel Crescendo Event

Major points from the interview:

-The Survivors from Left 4 Dead 1 aren’t dead yet and as Chet says, we will see them again.
-The Jockey will be playable.
-When a Jockey is on a Survivor’s back, the Survivor still has some control. It’s split 70-30, control wise.
-There are more uncommon common infected that have not been revealed yet.
-There will be more information on the new game mode in October 2009.
-Magnum pistol is confirmed and cannot be dual wielded.
-There is not a different movie intro for each campaign.

NMGB: We’re here with Chet Faliszek from Valve Software, and writer of Left 4 Dead 2. So, why do a whole different set of different characters plan to do in Left 4 Dead 2 instead of continuing the story of the first characters?

CF: We’ve always had this bigger vision for Left 4 Dead, this giant world out there with all these things going on and all these peoples’ stories in that world, so we wanted to be able in this case to be able to tell the story of somebody who had a little more distance from the infection. But first of all, we’re right at ground zero, and as you can imagine when you’re right there where it’s happening you don’t really know what’s going on, it’s a confusing event. You know in Left 4 Dead 2 we wanted to be able to have this different perspective, we wanted to start in a city before the infection hits it, and kind of work out from there. Savannah’s just being evacuated, the infection comes, you start out there, and as we go, we actually see how other people handle the infection, and we get to New Orleans, and New Orleans is more like a classic Left 4 Dead 1 city where they’ve dug in and they’re fighting the zombies, and how they’re doing it, how the military’s there. It’s partially to tell the story of the world, and the Left 4 Dead 1 characters aren’t dead yet, they’re still around so we’ll see what happens.

NMGB: Is there any cameos, like cross cameos or anything, or no?

CF: We’ll be talking more and revealing more stuff this fall, how about that?

NMGB: That’s good. And then so, one of my favourite things in the first game, were kind of like these little events and moments, like when the plane crashed in that one level [Dead Air], are there more moments like this? Are there big kind of events where something changes or affects the level or just a moment that you can watch and be like “wow”?

CF: Yeah, we’ve definitely done a bunch more events, people really responded to that, and one of the things as we’re showing our campaigns now, you know we’ve shown a bunch of The Parish, but we haven’t shown it with the file where we’ve actually added a lot of those kind of events, ‘cause it’s a city under siege, and it’s how the military’s handling that, we’ll see a lot of these things happening during the game that you’re playing. You’ll see weather effects that happen in the campaign previous to that. There’s a lot of stuff you know, we’re showing a game where there’s still some stuff happening that we want to hold back. Like if we look over there we can see the beginning of this campaign and in the sheriff’s car, that’s not how this campaign starts! We want to hold some stuff back, we purposely want to keep some things so that when people play it for the first time they’ll have those kind of surprises and excitement.

NMGB: So what are you guys revealing at PAX, or what have you just revealed?

CF: So we’re doing the first two maps of Dark Carnival, it’s the second campaign in Left 4 Dead 2, so you’ve escaped Savannah, not telling you how, it wasn’t in a sheriff’s car, I’ll tell you that. And you’re going through and you see some lights on out there at the Whispering Oaks amusement park and you head that way. And with that we’re also unveiling the Jockey, a brand new special [infected], it’s also playable in Versus and the new game mode we’ll be talking about this fall.

NMGB: Now, while playing the demo we saw this one that spits acid on you.

CF: Yeah, the Spitter. We unveiled the Spitter at Comic-Con. The Spitter and the Jockey are a really lethal combination. So the Spitter spits burning goo in an area that creates a denial effect, and if you go in it it’s exponential damage the longer you’re in it but if you run out of it quickly you’re okay. But the Jockey just loves to jump on someone and walk them into the spit and make them stay in there. The Spitter’s also great, you know traditionally in Left 4 Dead 1, you hear something bad coming, you kind of find a hole, find a room to corner up in and take care of yourself. But now if you hear the Spitter noise you’ve got to get out of that room, you’ve got to move, you can’t just stay there.

NMGB: Do the players have any control over their character when the Jockey’s on them, or is it a half and half thing?

CF: So how it works is, the survivor has some control, the Jockey has more control. I don’t remember the exact split at the top of my head now, but it’s about 70-30. So if you’re trying to go forward as a Jockey, and the survivor’s going to go backwards, well you’ve got 40 percent more going forwards, so you’re going to win. But now if the survivor decides to make you go off one way or the other that’s harder to fight because it’s off the tangent of your motion. A lot of times with the Jockey the first thing he wants to do is get you behind something so he can’t get shot off. But if you try to stop him by getting in the door frame or not getting out of that room, that’s how you can play it there. It takes a bit of getting used to, honestly, most new players when it first happens to them kinda do the, “I want to do the exact opposite of what you’re doing” and that doesn’t work, but if you play with it a little bit, you start to learn, and it’s funny as we get new Jockeys against people that are experienced with Jockeys, the newer people jumping on you are like “Wait a minute, I thought I had total control!” and they find out they don’t and the really experienced people can do it a bit more, so it’s a little skill based game that happens between two players or the AI.

NMGB: So how many special infected have you guys released yet and are there more that you haven’t shown yet?

CF: So there’s three new specials: the Charger, the Spitter and the Jockey. We’re also reskinning and re-modelling some of the originals because the mutation’s changed a little bit and they’re down south, a couple of things are happening there. There’s also a bunch of new uncommon common, we’ve shown some of those, but we haven’t shown all of those yet.

NMGB: Are there any more specials?

CF: Well we’re shipping with the three specials, we wanted to make sure it felt right, and that the game was balanced with those three.

NMGB: And those three each are also playable in Versus?

CF: In Versus and the new game mode we’ll be talking about in October.

NMGB: This game is a lot more gory it looks like, there’s a lot more damage happening on the character models and stuff like that.

CF: So we’ve redone all the common infected and we’ve done a new damage model for them. So you’ll see you can shoot off a section of their stomaches, and you can shoot off their heads or arms or legs. A part of that is you’re in there close now with the melee weapons and you swing and axe you want to see that head lopping off and when you swing a baseball bat you want to send that head soaring you know.

NMGB: So how many melee weapons are there in the game, are there any you haven’t shown?

CF: This is the embarrassing thing, I’ve been out of the office for a little bit, I tried to count it up last night, and I thought there was eight. So with the chainsaw we’ve got Gordon’s favourite weapon, the crowbar, we’ve got a cricket bat, a baseball bat, this is embarrassing, I should be able to just rattle these off but I can’t.

NMGB: A frying pan…

CF: A frying pan, katana, we’ve got a hatchet in there, that’s seven.

NMGB: Is there more than that or no?

CF: At this point I’m not sure we’re gonna have time to balance and work out and to release so I don’t want to go that route. In guns we’re also unveiling the magnum which is a single pistol, you can’t dual wield it, it’s too powerful. It’s a super powerful pistol, and if you noticed we’ve changed how melee works, so melee stays in the pistol slot, so in that secondary slot you can have a melee weapon, dual pistols, single pistol or this magnum now. And so you know it’s just a lot of things like that we’re gonna keep adding. Right now what’s gonna ship, I don’t want to misspeak, I should get the list.

NMGB: Is there more guns now too, that you guys haven’t shown?

CF: So there’s the magnum and we’ve seen, well a lot of people haven’t seen yet, the grenade launcher’s there, the AK-47, we have new machine guns, new shotguns–er, rifles, excuse me. We have the new secondary SMG as well, and people will learn there’s a lot of little differences to them and depending on how they like to play is depending on what weapon they choose and find and use.

NMGB: On the Versus mode, some people had complaints with exploits in level design, like the Smoker could get in an area where you can’t really see him. Did you guys work on that a lot, or was that something for a little more experienced players to find?

CF: Well it’s always fun to have some stuff like this, there’s stuff I’ve seen where really good Hunters can figure out where to get from and do a good 25 point pounce. You know, and there’s definitely combinations of stuff. We test for that, we look at that, we look at what’s a really good play vs the exploits. There’s always a fine line and you want to make sure you’re giving the really good players the opportunity to do good. You never want to make a game where the bad player and the really good player are the same. If you’re a really good player you should be able to beat a really bad player. Obviously the really bad player can get lucky sometimes, they can rise up to the occasion and play well. But when you look at a kind of tournament level in Left 4 Dead, you’ll see consistently there’s some really good teams out there playing really well, and for good reasons they’re really good players.

NMGB: So now it’s a simultaneous release for Xbox and PC at the same exact date?

CF: Yeah it’ll be November 17th, we’ll have more information about the release and what’s going on there, I think we’re going to do something special for ourselves that we’ve never done before.

NMGB: Like a special edition?

CF: No, just how the release happens. There’s always the “exactly what time” thing, the forums like to be abuzz on that, and we’ll try to get some information out there so people can plan on how to spend that evening. Dying or killing people, it’s your choice.

NMGB: So a lot of people have this idea that, because of Left 4 Dead 2 it might split up the communities. You’ll have people playing Left 4 Dead 1, then people playing Left 4 Dead 2. Are you looking into something so that people can play the same maps in the same game or because of all the updates to this one you can’t do that, it’s not possible?

CF: There’s a lot of technical issues involved in what we have to look in there and what that means, and so people smarter than me are looking at it, and working with and we’re talking with Microsoft what that means and we’re working with the Steam guys on what that means and how our systems both work. We don’t have anything announced yet, but before release we will have something to announce, and it’ll probably come from someone smarter than me who’ll explain it better.

NMGB: Did you guys ever think to just remake part one in the part two engine and ship them both together as this giant combo or no?

CF: There’s a lot of, well, you know every variation ever mentioned in the forums have has been specked out to see what that would be and making a trade-off with what that would be. And so again, I’m not really sure what it’s going to be yet.

NMGB: There have been rumours that there have been four or five Left 4 Deads and all of them are going to converge together in the last Left 4 Dead episode. Do you know anything about those rumours, are they founded, unfounded?

CF: Good idea, I’m stealing that. [laughs] No, uh, the Left 4 Dead one characters are not dead, we’ll see them again.

NMGB: Do you guys have a story arc planned out, like spanning a couple sequels or do you guys just see as you go what you want to do next, like maybe we’ll set off from here and then go off of that?

CF: Well we have definitely a world arc, like things we want to talk about and explore, see where we go and what we think would be interesting. And in that are now eight characters all alone. It’s all the same world, all the same places they could possibly go. We’ll see what happens.

NMGB: Do you feel the characters are going to be as loved as the original four? I know some people have hesitations about the new characters but do you think those are unfounded, do you think they’ll all love them like they did Bill, Zoey, etc.?

CF: Well we’ve got the same writers and designers, different actors working obviously, so I would hope we could do that again as well. They’re different, so if you’re a 75 year old white dude and you’ve aligned yourself to Bill, obviously he’s not in this one. But I think each of the ones, I like them both.

NMGB: Do you guys have opening cutscenes for each movie now, is that true, did I hear that somewhere? Like you had the intro in the first one but that was it, do you have an intro to each movie now or no?

CF: One of the more challenges we saw was trying to tell a story in the world in the game, we really wanted to pound on that, to work on that. There will be a movie coming with Left 4 Dead 2, it’s different then Left 4 Dead 1, and I’ll just let people watch that and see. But there isn’t one for each campaign.

NMGB: How many campaigns have you guys revealed and how many do you have left to reveal?

CF: We’ve revealed parts of three. And there’s five total. But even the ones we’ve revealed, people think we’re spoiling it, but we haven’t given away a lot of what happens in them.

NMGB: Thank you so much for your time.

CF: Thank you very much.

NMGB: Were you working on any other Valve games? Can we interview about other Valve games?

CF: Right now we’re just talking about Left 4 Dead and really our comment on any other games, really gonna be, “No comment”. Unless you’re a cheater and you’re crying about your TF2 hat.

NMGB: Where’s Half-Life Episode 3, that’s all I want to know.

CF: We’re not talking about that yet.

NMGB: No worries. Whose decision was it to put the crowbar in there? Was it just a mutual thing?

CF: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone loves the crowbar.

Source