Left 4 Dead 2

It’s one of the most talked about sequels this year, if not necessarily for the right reasons.

The announcement of Left 4 Dead 2 brought controversy as hardcore fans of developer Valve said it was too soon and the support for Left 4 Dead should have continued long into the next few years.

But what of the game itself? Details have been drowned out by the controversy so we talk to Valve’s Chet Faliszek to find out about the new special zombies, the new director and cats throwing up…

So, tell me about the Spitter.
The spirit was two things. We wanted something where people were advancing really quickly to make them hesitate. So you can spit in the doorways, spit in the upcoming path and force you to have to wait. Any time you have to stay in the level is a chance to get more damage. The longer you stay the harder it is. So the spitter forces you to slow down.

Spitter can also then separate groups. Especially when there’s a Charger and a Boomer. The Splitter comes between them and all of a sudden these two groups are like taking on the whole horde of zombies frome the boomer, rather than a group of all four.

And then the real evil thing in versus, of course, is if someone goes down and they want to go rescue him, you spit on him and it spreads out and they can’t reach him because of the spit.

You can move through it, but what’ll happen is you’ll just take damage as you move through it. It spreads out and stays active for a bit and then shrinks back.

Other good thing is that if people are closet-camping you spit in that closet, they’re going to take damage and you take more damage the longer you say in it. So if you’re sitting in the closet, come in and spit in it, there’s no way they’re staying in that closet. You’re forcing them to move.

When she’s getting ready to shoot there’s a green glow, and you can see her getting ready.

Like a cat throwing up?
Yeah. Actually we should totally include that horrible yelp they make before they do it.

And is there a male version?
No, this is just the female. We wanted to be equal opportunity. Right now we just have the witch, and she’s nasty.

She’s fun to fight against and she’s really fun to play. And it’s one of those things where you don’t realise how much not being able to move forward impacts you when you’ve got to wait.

You’ve kind of got it at the moment when you’ve got a fire in front of you, but normally the fire is taking care of something and there’s nothing behind us. When it’s a third party doing it to you, a lot of times it’s like, oh shit. Is there a tank coming we’re trying to outrun and there’s this goo in front of us…

Does it affect the zombies too?
They’re unaffected by it. It’s special zombie goo. That makes it scary.

Are you putting a number on the number of Specials you’re adding?
We’ll have three Specials for sure that we’ll ship with. There may be four, just because the Spitter ended up quite easy to iterate on. He’s just hanging out there now waiting for the art to be finished. The Charger behaviour actually may change just a little. It’s just a case of seeing as we bring more stuff online how the balance works in what we need to work on. The spitter was originally the “get them out of the closet” thing only, then we realised the movement-slowing side effect ended up being really good, and that changed some his behaviour as well.

So you’ve got the Spitter, the Charger, and one more.
Yes. It’s working, it’s got a name…

The great thing about the Spitter is that you can spit down some goo and the Smoker pulls someone through it. It’s working out those combinations that’s interesting. The third one we’re not talking about is all about combinations and it’s just evil.

One of the things we always judge these things on is if you get a mad cackling laugh if you’re doing it in Versus, it’s a good creature.

Can you play as the uncommon common?
No… you kill a lot of zombies in Left 4 Dead 2 and we wanted to make sure that you have this variety of experience. And you also have to kind of choose your targets differently. While the current implementation you see the hazmat guys doesn’t do that as much, the way they’re going to be implemented will make you say “I will shoot those guys first because the others are less of a threat.” It’s the same with the mudders – I’d much rather be hit by a regular guy than a Mudder because a Mudder’s going to eventually block my view.

And it also just makes you aim differently because they’re lower to the ground. We want each of the uncommon common to have that same effect when you see it as a Special – you think oh, shit, I’ve got to do this.

Is the director maxed out now?
We keep adding stuff to it. There are some different thigns to the way it does health and ammo now. In another swampish area it controls whether or not a storm comes in, there’s some fog stuff as well, it’s mixing that up. That means that when the rains hit you go from being easy to spot stuff in the distance to this claustrophic type of combat. Like in Blood Harvest at the end where you go through the cornfields. You also have that kind of thing dynamically happen to you.

It’s just adding more stuff to the game and seeing how the director could use that. Adding more Specials makes the director more special, because then if you’re playing a certain way the director can then spawn something else against you. It’s got just more creatures in its menagerie.

Source