Left 4 Dead 2

We don’t like to admit it, but Left 4 Dead left some of us momentarily surprised. On paper it sounded, in the words of our esteemed editor, like a half-baked, hair-brained Half-Life mod. Running on an aging engine, based on cheesy Seventies zombie movies with just four virtually plot-less levels and relying on untried AI and scripting, you’d have been forgiven for thinking Valve, masters of narrative-driven gameplay, had made a serious miss-step with this seemingly throwback FPS.

That was until you played it, and its tightly sprung online multiplayer grabbed you by the throat like a leering, hacking Smoker. This was Valve and we should have had more faith. The co-op gameplay, claustrophobic combat and the eerily directed horde combined to transport you into a zombie movie apocalypse. Its flimsy story ceased to matter; L4D had become about the relentless combat, what you and your friends did to survive and the hilarious war stories told afterward – all factors that helped to spawn a huge dedicated community of fans in just a year.

But everything has a cost, including success, and when Valve announced Left 4 Dead 2 this year some of that community questioned the decision to so quickly release the next chapter of the saga as a full game rather than DLC. We covered much of that uproar and Valve’s candid response to it last issue, leaving us free to quiz Chet Faliszek (project lead on L4D2) on the new elements that Valve is bringing to the L4D formula as we got our first impressions of L4D2 at Valve HQ in Seattle.

But we’d have been remiss as PC journalists not to ask the seemingly obvious technical question: it uses the same aging engine, why isn’t this just DLC for L4D? “We shipped Left 4 Dead and then we started looking at what we wanted to do differently and change,” says Faliszek. “It’s a huge system of things, which is hard to explain to people – in L4D2 every system has been rewritten.” Those changes affected everything in the game, including how the AI Director now shifts architecture in certain levels around, creating new routes (and traps), crafts spectacular finales and handles the new infected Valve is adding. “That’s how it became L4D2 instead of DLC; we couldn’t do these kinds of creatures if didn’t rewrite the system and we couldn’t have these kinds of finales. They now work with the Director and we couldn’t change the Director unless we changed the way he spawns infected and we have all these different things coming at once.” Starting a completely new game also allowed expending the technology and art assets. “We’ve always been incrementally upgrading the engine so it can do more.”

A fresh start, claims Faliszek, opened stylistic choices as well as technical ones. “If you think about L4D it was a very static world – every place you went to was at the same level of infection,” he explains. But L4D2 will be a narrative through America’s South set just prior to L4D with four new survivors, Coach, Nick, Rochelle and Ellis, at the zombie infection’s onset.

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