Left 4 Dead 2

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.

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