Left 4 Dead Q&A Feature

In Valve's ongoing mission not to be defined by traditional gaming paradigms, the Washington based studio has come up with a survival horror game centred on multiplayer gameplay. With its own co-op campaign for up to four 'survivor' players, as well as the opportunity to plot surprise attacks as 'infected' zombies, Left 4 Dead is Counter-Strike meets a zombie apocalypse. Check out our preview for a detailed overview.

TVG: What can you tell us about Left 4 Dead's multiplayer features?

We have what we call campaign mode which is a 4 player mode where you play as the survivors and you go through the campaigns. The first time you play them there's a specific order where you'll play this one first, then that unlocks this, which unlocks that. They obviously ramp-up in difficulty the first time you play it.

Then we have multiplayer mode, which will allow you to play as a survivor or the boss infected, which are the smoker, hunter, boomer, and tank. The tank is always going to be an AI creature and she rarely shows up, so it's really not worth letting people play as her because they'll be waiting around forever.

When you fire it up you'll see campaign mode and multiplayer mode, and you'll jump in from those points.

TVG: There seems to be a big focus on the multiplayer here, which is likely to be a huge success over Steam. Is Steam your main target with Left 4 Dead or are you also confident that the retail market well respond well to it as well?

Oh yeah, I'm sure we'll sell a lot at retail as well - or I hope we sell a lot at retail as well. We've seen Steam sales grow over time with our titles, and with third party titles as well, but retail is still where the lion's share of where things are sold.

TVG: Getting back to that multiplayer. Is it still team focused and how many players will there be?

It's 4 players on the survivors side, or you can play with 1-4 players (bots will take over the other characters if you just want to play by yourself). You can start up a game on a public server, play it by yourself, and leave the door open for people to jump in to the bot spots at any point in the game.

TVG: Presumably, once you're dead then you can join the infected?

No, that's not how it works. You're always whichever side you choose. There may be some screens showing up right now that are misleading you.

TVG: Okay. So, if you do chose to play as these infected characters, are you then fighting against these 4 player co-op guys on the other side?

Yeah.

TVG: Potentially then, how many players can you have playing in one game map at the same time?

8.

TVG: And they're wildcards, are they? They can just pop up anywhere on the map?

Yeah, the AI Director will schedule where they come in. On the boss infected side you'll be dropped in a little bit ahead of the survivors so that you can set up and plan your attack. It's very much designed as a non-competitive thing. Whereas Team Fortress is one class against the exact same class with the exact same weapons, in this case the boss infected have no weapons; they just have their special abilities. In a way, it's almost like a griefers paradise where, if you're the kind of person who wants to go into a server and be really disruptive, then these are the characters for you because your whole goal is to go in and be as disruptive as you can by slowing them down or stopping them.

TVG: So, there are four scenarios over 20 maps. How does that pan-out exactly?

Each of the campaigns are made up of five maps, so it's just a case of four times five. You start off with a cinematic sequence that will very quickly tell you (in the hospital mission we were playing earlier, for example), 'Okay, you're in this urban environment. You need to find this hospital and get to the roof so that this helicopter can take you away. Go!' You have a certain set of weapons that you start off with; you can pick a few items; you have to make choices on items because you can't carry all of them. Then you cruise along and you'll hit a checkpoint, and at that checkpoint you'll get some stats on how you're doing. You'll also get the chance to take some health and then the server will load the next map.

TVG: I understand this title was originally developed by Turtle Rock, Valve then acquired Turtle Rock, and you've been developing the title since?

Well, we were working together before that. It was always a co-production. They were working on Counter-Strike Source, and before that they did Counter-Strike for the Xbox. We wanted to hire Michael Booth back when we met him at E3 2003 I think it was, and he wouldn't leave Southern California for the rain of Seattle.

So we said, 'Okay, why don't you setup shop down there?' And he's an ex-Westwood guy so he started slowly picking off people from Blizzard South and ex-Westwood people - his old friends - to come and work with him on these projects. And, in the background of developing those Counter-Strike projects, he was sort of prototyping Left 4 Dead and coming up with really rough versions. We would playtest it, give him feedback and eventually it evolved into this. Over time we've had people that got interested up in Seattle who wanted to keep working on it and it just got to a point where we were like, 'You know, we're kind of like one company with two offices. Why don't we just go ahead and make this official?'

TVG: A lot of studios would love to be acquired by Valve. What was it that attracted you to Turtle Rock in this case?

It all began with us wanting to hire Mike and not being able to get him up there. He was hiring really smart people and they came up with a great game design that a bunch of our guys wanted to work on. We're super friendly with Mike. He and I talk all the time, both socially as well as professionally, and it was just one of those things where we were all sitting around going, 'We should just acquire you. This doesn't make sense that we're two separate entities. We're kind of like one family anyway.'

It's very much like that at Valve. We try to hire really smart people, and likeminded people tend to get along. People come to Valve and they're always really surprised by how much people get along and how casual the environment is, and we try to keep turnover down as much as possible. We offer a laundry service for a very small amount of money so people can do their laundry; we take people away on a trip with their families once a year on a company getaway - we just got back from Mexico actually. It's a great recruiting tool but it's also a great thing to eliminate turnover. People are like, 'Where am I going to work where I get treated better than this?' And were like, 'Okay, great! You're the best at what you do and we don't want you to leave.' And if there's a little bit more expense to insuring that, then that's a good spend.

TVG: What will Left 4 Dead bring to the Xbox 360, given that most shooters on the consoles have an extensive single-player campaign and this isn't so prominent in Left 4 Dead?

I think that people can do the single-player co-op thing with the boss, but I also think that we're seeing a lot more interest in the multiplayer stuff. I've heard of one pretty big title from last year on the Xbox 360 that was more popular, at the end of the day, on multiplayer than it was on single-player, and more popular on co-op than it was on single-layer. I think there's a desire out there for people to want to go that way and the Xbox 360 makes sense because it's kind of like a cousin, if you will, of the PC. So, it's really easy for us to have a shared code base and to develop for something that has a 3D chip in it that looks an awful lot like the 3D chips that we've been writing for, and an OS that kind of looks like an OS we've been writing for.

We always wanted to expand to be more than just a PC thing. We love the PC; we're going to keep developing for that, but there's low hanging fruit here in terms of putting the games out on consoles. In the past we'd put the game out on PC and win all these awards, get really hyped and all the console players would be like, 'Well, how many years before Valve brings me this game?' With Orange Box, for the first time, we did something simultaneous and on the Metacritic scores Orange Box is the highest rated PC and Xbox 360 game of all time. For us it was like, 'Cool. We're making progress.' We didn't have to make the compromise of the game being late, or one version being dominantly better than the other.

TVG: Having had some hands-on with Left 4 Dead earlier today, it definitely feels very like a Valve game in terms of little touches like the HUD. It has the PC shooter style that Valve has mastered. I really enjoyed it, but the main reason I really enjoyed it is that when you play a lot of survival horror games, they're often very solitary experiences. However, that can actually detract from the zombie flick feeling of being overrun by an apocalypse of lurching zombies.

When you've got 4 player co-op, on the other hand, you can throw as many zombies at the player as you want (within reason of course). It's that feeling of, 'Oh God, where are they going to come from next?' which I really enjoyed. Has that been one of your main aims during development?

Yeah. In a lot of ways, co-op is this term that is sort of getting a little bit out of date, but we don't have a better one so we'll keep using it for now. But it's basically multiplayer games where people playing as groups have evolved, right? It's a lot easier to find your friends; it's a lot easier to find a good server these days than it was five or ten years ago. That brings up the desire for people to say 'I want to play a more intelligent or deeper, richer experience with my friends.'

The Zombie thing was just something that Mike was really into, and it turns out that it actually really works because it's one thing to scare people when they're in isolation, but if you scare a group of people... When people are playing here, something happens and four people yell at the same time, and that amplifies the experience. Like I told people earlier, we're trying to take co-op to the next level the way Counter-Strike took multiplayer to the next level. Prior to Counter-Strike it was pretty much Deathmatch, and then all of a sudden people were playing team play and there was an objective in it. It wasn't just kill the other guys - there was something else to do. So that's what we're trying to do here.

TVG: Playing through one of the co-op campaigns earlier was just like running through an FPS level and yet, having played through it a number of times, it was noticeable that the AI Director put zombies in totally different places on each playthrough. That adds almost endless replay value to what, on first sight, appears to be a conventional, scripted FPS campaign. What challenges did developing the AI Director throw up, and are you pleased with the end result?

Mike Booth's career passion has been AI. He did the bot on Counter-Strike; he was the Lead on Nox, and he was the Lead on C&C Generals. He's been doing AI programming for 15 years I think. For him, this AI Director was the Holy Grail when he started it (I'm sure he's now dreamt up something that he wants to do next, or he will very soon), but it was all about wanting to expand on something that he started way back when with Nox or what have you: to be able to have this great replay value; to simulate the experience that you had in your best Counter-Strike game with your buddies, and to be able to blend in some of that great single-player stuff like you had in Half-Life or other great single-player games.

Mike knew exactly where he wanted to go in that respect and the challenges of it are many. When you're spawning multiple creatures in different places and stuff like that, there's just a lot of work that has to be done. It's one of those things where it's sort of like the guy behind the curtain who's working things, and there's that suspension of disbelief, and you have to really do a lot of work to keep it feeling dynamic. It doesn't make you feel like, 'Oh yeah, there's a spawn generator over here and a spawn generator over there.'

The old cheap way to do it would've been to say, 'Okay. There's three different possible spawn points in a room.' That would've meant it was replayable three times because you'll come in and go 'Okay, they spawn there. The next time through they spawn over there, and the third time through it's over here.' You come through the next time and go, 'I'm going to check one, then two, and then three,' and you'd be right.

It's sort of like you have to get beyond those parts and in some places we're able to do it a lot better, like you mentioned, because the area is bigger. In a small room there's only four corners of the room so there's only so many choices. In this map [showing at the event] the possibilities are almost limitless, so we're going to be able to pull it off a lot more. Again, that's the suspension of disbelief for hiding the man behind the curtain. In this place it's always going to be really random and it's always going to be really fresh. It's just a matter of working with the designers and the AI guys to have a proper mix between the sets and technology to get it right. At the end of the day, it's all just programming and design, so it's all a matter of how you pull that off and hide what's underneath the hood from the player so that the player just thinks they're having the experience and they aren't watching the code, or spawn generator, or what have you.

TVG: Can you tell us anything about Portal 2 at this point in time?

Not really, other than philosophically we're looking at it as a challenge similar to Half-Life 2. We did Half-Life and a lot of people gave it this crazy place in their gaming history, and we were like 'Holy s**t! When we make a sequel to that, we've really got to live up to that tradition.' We could've done the cheesy thing and just spit-out a sequel and make a bunch of money, but then we would've killed the franchise.

Portal has now been put up in this crazy place in people's minds as a super innovative thing, or as a super fun thing, or whatever. So, we feel like we owe it to the people who bought Portal to do something equally as innovative when we follow it up. We want to blow their minds so that Portal, for them, is like 'Wow! I did this thing in the game that I didn't do before, and it had this crazy story, and I haven't laughed at a game like that or finished a game and had a song that was cool and made me laugh.' So it's like, 'Okay, we've got to live up to that promise.' We could crank out a bunch of levels, write a bunch of one-liners for GLaDOS to say and ship it this Christmas, but that would probably be the end of the Portal franchise. Instead, we're going to take some time and figure out, 'If this was innovative then what's the next thing?'

TVG would like to thank Doug Lombardi, Valve's Director of Marketing, for taking the time to speak with us about Left 4 Dead, which is due out on PC and Xbox 360 this autumn.