Left 4 Dead

[Tomahawk720]

I'm yelling at him for saying that I double posted a thread. And spamming is when you write a useless message back to back.

[w00ties]

Wow, you guys need to relax. Who cares if a thread goes a little bit off topic, if something falls into the discussion just let it be for a few posts. Im sure eventually we'll find something new on the game to discuss. And do double posts really burn the eyes out of your skull? Dont be such a tight ass, let things slide its just a forum

[w00ties]

Its looking pretty good, think I might have to get my PC fixed soon...

GameSpy: Left 4 Dead Preview

[JasonVelji]

cant wait for this, playing with 4mates on xbox live will probably be one of the COOLEST things ever. love up zombie films (the good ones :P) hope it pretty difficult and has some length to it and it would be cool if it was quite a large open world so u can choose to like go threw alley ways or go down the main roads or cut threw buildings or use rooftops etc. etc. looking forward to it source engine seems a bit dated and it doesnt look as good as episode 2 yet but early days i guess and well if the game play rocks i dont care! L4D FTW

[Et3rn4l5il3nc3]

I'm looking forward to this and dead island. Also, I'm hoping Dead Rising 2 will come out.

[Diesel]

I watched a video of this the other day & it looked alot of fun. I fancied shooting zombies with a bunch of mates. hehe

[g1nn]

I'll be getting this for PC, I'm still an avid CS:S player as it is.

[w00ties]

Left 4 Dead Preview: My Date with the Witch

Left 4 Dead Preview: My Date with the Witch - Shacknews - PC Games, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and Wii video game news, previews and downloads

Originally Posted by ShackNews

Left 4 Dead Preview: My Date with the Witch
by Aaron Linde Jun 04, 2008 12:40pm CST
In our last batch of first hands-on impressions with Valve and Turtle Rock's cooperative zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, fellow Shacknews editor Chris Faylor and I were introduced to thousands of bloodthirsty new friends. Returning to Valve's offices last week to play the latest build of the game, I finally met the belle of the ball: the witch.

When you first encounter her, Left 4 Dead's fifth and unplayable boss infected is a peculiar sight. The notion of a plainly-dressed and raven-haired young woman sitting in the middle of an urban sidewalk might even be plausible, had the city not been teeming with the hungry dead. But perhaps most unsettling is the quiet weeping; the witch is most often heard before she's seen.

I turned to Valve writer Chet Faliszek, my guide through the latest build of the game. "Even if we're going to die," I asked, "Can I request we take her on anyway?"

Faliszek agreed, perhaps with a bit of trepidation. Even with the witch's inclusion in the game's normal difficulty—previously seen only in hard mode and above—she's no pushover, and the game goes to great lengths to make you aware of the danger she presents. Your companions' spoken dialogue, procedurally prompted by the events unfolding around you, warns you to move quietly and turn off the flashlights. There's a friggin' witch around here somewhere.


"The witch will definitely kill somebody," explained Faliszek. "She's entirely lethal. Whoever sets her off, she'll go after that one person and she will kill them. Other creatures, yeah, you can push them away, you can run, you can do all these different things, but she is single-track. She's going to kill you."

We readied our shotguns and our wits as Chet tossed a Molotov cocktail, setting the witch and her surroundings both ablaze. Immediately we all opened fire, desperate to put her down before she could retaliate, and we were met with success. The tension passed.

Since Faylor and I played the game last January, Left 4 Dead has been more or less completed and is now moving into the test and polish phase of production. The most current build shows marked improvements in lighting and environmental audio, as well as the sort of tweaks that make for a more visceral experience.

But most notable among the changes are the inclusion of so-called "crescendo" events, scenes in most stages that require you to bunker down and defend against large-scale waves of zombies while waiting for some time-sensitive mechanic to complete before you can move on.

"They're essentially mini-finales," Faliszek explained. "But we hate to use the word 'mini'."

During our play of a single scenario, the previously-seen urban stage, we encountered one of these new crescendo events outside of a warehouse, where we had to wait for the slow descent of a elevator down a scaffold before we could continue. Chet hit the switch, and the horde soon followed. The anchored miniguns and sandbag defensive locations made for an obvious last stand locale, but we wouldn't have survived without a bit of strategy.


The addition of the crescendo events—which will appear in most of each scenario's five stages—came about as a result of Valve's trademark extensive testing, in which playtesters told the company that they enjoyed planning and staging assaults with their comrades. Another crescendo event, described but not yet implemented, was an instance in which players must fend off the infected inside of a slowly ascending and fully destructible freight elevator, accompanied by a slow-ticking floor indicator to amp up the tension.

"The feedback from players was always that they liked the testy moments. The ability to set up and look at the situation. So much of the game is on the run, your strategies have to really flow," Faliszek noted

It's a careful balance between scripted events and on-the-fly procedural moments generated by the game's Director AI system, but it functions smoothly and prevents the action from slipping too far in either direction. Faliszek went on to explain that while the Director system is still subject to a great deal of refinement, it's proven immensely successful in Valve's testing phases.


"We're always tweaking [the director], but it always had the good effect of seeing people playing through twice -- they're so trained to think that what happened last time will happen to them this time, and that always comes back and bites them. It's always around the third or fourth time that they realize that you can't really count on the action happening that way. We've actually gone so far, in the newer version, where the director determines what the placement of items are, so they're spread out a little more randomly. It's meant for replayability, so that you can never rely on these sorts of events."

My second playthrough of the urban scenario was most certainly different from our first, and not just because of the engine updates and other additions. Boomers and other boss zombies were appearing in different locations than I had remembered, certain rooms more populated than others had previously been.

But the witch is perhaps the most destructive agent of unpredictability in Left 4 Dead--run too quickly, don't check your corners, and you're bound to stumble upon her in a most unfortunate location. We saw her again, later in the scenario's decrepit, aging hospital level, saddled smack in the middle of a hallway intersection. Chet described it as a "bad spot," as it ensured that we'd have to take her on rather than simply sneaking by.

"On the street we took her out there, pretty good location," he said. "We had a lot of space, we could throw the fire at her. But there are times when you hear her and you're kinda creeping along, and some other action happens and you're running around a corner and all of a sudden there's the witch, and you set her off."

I asked him what exactly "sets off" the witch--knowing full well what she could do, I was in desperate need of information. It would've been a total drag to get us all killed by blinking or speaking aloud or breathing too hard, after all.

"Aggravating her. Getting too close, shooting near her, looking at her with the flash light—you want to make sure your flashlight's off," Faliszek explained. "You pretty much want to leave her the hell alone."


Chet asked Valve level designer Scott Dalton, one of our in-game comrades, to set her off, suggesting that it was fun to watch him die. Dalton hit her point-blank with a shotgun round and was almost immediately mortally wounded in the flurry of attacks that followed. The witch is lightning quick and does a tremendous amount of damage in a short amount of time, perhaps even more than the hulking Tank boss infected.

Valve and Turtle Rock have made a good deal of progress shaping Left 4 Dead into a title worthy of its pedigree, and the prognosis is looking great. It's still some of the most fun time I've spent behind a mouse and keyboard, and even on a second playthrough of a level, the tension and anxious atmosphere were as potent as ever.

Those put off by the recently revealed November release date for the game can rest assured that the time will be well spent. As Faylor and I saw last January, the game's already in a great place. I stick by my first assessment: with some tweaking, testing and a bit of polish, Left 4 Dead could stand as one of the best multiplayer PC efforts seen in years.

EA3 Video Preview:
Gametrailers.com - Left 4 Dead - EA3 Interview

[w00ties]

Valve Interview Part 2: Left 4 Dead Demo Potential, the Evolution of Steam, and More
Valve Interview Part 2: Left 4 Dead Demo Potential, the Evolution of Steam, and More - Shacknews - PC Games, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and Wii video game news, previews and downloads

Originally Posted by ShackNews

Shack: What's the current state of development on Left 4 Dead?

Doug Lombardi: So the game is pretty much playable all the way through right now. And as we've done with most of our games, we get to a point where, it's playable all the way through, there are some [minor] issues that we need to work on, and we try to add more time to the schedule to have as many people as possible play the game, to make sure that it's approachable to players of all skills. We want to make sure that all the game that we've built gets played, not just be like, "Okay, it's complete, let's ship it."


For example, Half-Life 2 was pretty much done in April of 2004, and we spent the rest of that year just looking at pacing, and looking at approachability, and making sure the easy setting was easy enough, etc. So we're in a pretty similar state right now, with it being, what, early May, and we're looking at the same time frame--November--for shipping.

So we're going to be spending a lot of time just bringing it to events like this, taking it to Quakecon and Leipzig, and just getting as many people's hands on it as possible to make sure that it's playing right and that it's fun, and that the group dynamics are showing up and are visible to people.

Shack: It's going to ship simultaneously on the Xbox 360, right?

Doug Lombardi: 360 and PC worldwide in November.

Shack: I heard you might launch it with a free weekend?

Doug Lombardi: We're kicking around a lot of ideas now and nothing's final.

The free weekend has proven to be really, really powerful in terms of promoting sales on Steam, as well as on retail. I think the first one that we did was Day of Defeat back in February of 2006, and it was basically a rip-off of the old cable model. Like HBO used to do it when I was a kid. [laughs] We were like, it'd be cool if we could give somebody a taste of the whole game instead of making a demo, and the Steam guys went off and said, "Okay, we can do this."

And so we tried it with Day of Defeat, and it worked out. We saw this huge sales spike on Steam immediately when it ended, but then also that whole week we saw a spike in retail as well. So we said, okay, we're obviously on to something here. So we've done it with Team Fortress--one of the things we experimented with Team Fortress was doing it regionalized. So we did a Germany-only free weekend, and then recently we did a worldwide one. We're still sort of tinkering with the model and playing with it a little bit, but we'll definitely at some point do a free weekend for Left 4 Dead. It'll be somewhere near the launch. Whether or not it's the first weekend is still sort of to be determined.

Shack: Will there be a demo as well?

Doug Lombardi: I think so, I think so. Whether or not there will be a demo before or after is something we're still talking about. You know, most of the time we've done them afterwards, so we'll see where it falls.

Shack: What else is going on at Valve?

Doug Lombardi: Right now Left 4 Dead is our big game for this year. We'll be making some announcements probably at the end of the year in terms of what's happening beyond Left 4 Dead. But right now, we're going to keep pumping out new content for Team Fortress, and ship Left 4 Dead, and that's basically what's on tap for 2008. We've got some new stuff for Steam as well that we're gonna be announcing at the end of May...

[Note: More info concerning non-L4D-related information at the link]

[Diesel]

It might of been said before, but when you play co-op can you turn into a zombie & start killing your teammates.
It would be cool if you could turn on them. (insert evil laugh) Muh hahahahaha