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Left 4 Dead 2 screenshot

Amid the raft of exclusive Xbox 360 games announced during Microsoft’s E3 media briefing last week, Left 4 Dead 2 was perhaps the most controversial. With a November 2009 release date, the game is due out only a year after the original, and has sparked an online petition thousands strong. At the show, we tracked down Chet Faliszek, the man responsible for the dialog and writing in some of Valve's greatest games, to not only get the details on what will undoubtedly be one of 2009’s best shooters, but to ask him the question on everyone’s lips: is it too soon for Left 4 Dead 2?

VideoGamer.com: Why are you bringing out L4D2 so soon after L4D?

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Chet Faliszek: One of the cool things at Valve is we all get to work on whatever we want to work on. We had a big team getting L4D done. When we got done with it a lot of people got to take breaks then for a little bit of time. When we all got back together, right before the holidays, we started talking about what we were going to work on next, and everyone was like, you know, we kind of got down L4D there at the end, and some people came on later on the project, and everyone understood it now, and a lot of people had all of these ideas, so we said let’s go into the office, get a whiteboard and figure this out. We put up everything we had. I talked about how I wanted to tell a better-connected story. I didn’t do enough there. Someone else wanted some new characters. Someone else was talking about the swamp setting. We just kept building on that and all these new things we wanted to do now we had the chance. We wanted to have melee weapons, we had to get those in. We wanted to experiment with the idea of having perks, like Incendiary, that you get for a few minutes, you get this little burst of extra killing power and then it goes away. It was just all these ideas and it was really cool. We all were like yeah, that’s it, we’re all of a single mind on this. So at Valve what we get to do is we all get together and then we go to people like Scott Lynch (Chief Operating Officer), and Gabe Newell (Founder/Managing Director), and Doug Lombardi (VP of Marketing), and we get to pitch it to them and say, hey, this is what we wanted to do.

VideoGamer.com: Did you do the pitch?

CF: It was me and Tom Leonard (Software Developer). We were like, yeah this is what we want to do. We want to go do this big cohesive unit. Yeah you can do a map, you can do a singular thing, it’s kind of self-contained, but here we actually had our story, we have our world, we wanted to do something just whole. We came out and didn’t call it L4D2, we just said ‘this big thing’.

VideoGamer.com: A working title? ‘This big thing’?

CF: We were still updating L4D, because we did the Survival Pack and everything else there. OK, this is big enough that, this isn’t DLC, we’re not going to be able to leak it out. It’s a cohesive, single thing. It’s L4D2. So the team itself came up with it and pushed it forward. L4D2, since we have The Director, it’s a lot easier for us to work in that world and create the content. From day one we had some new big patch to get feedback on. That’s what we do. We iterate. And having everybody of the same mind on what they wanted to do as well, this was really quick and powerful and it pulled through, and we started making this content. L4D2 is actually going to have five campaigns, not four. We’re going to have Survival, Versus, real co-op and a new game mode, all available for those.

VideoGamer.com: Are you talking about that game mode today?

CF: No we’re not talking about that game mode today. Today we have the Charger we’re showing. We have more special Infected that we’re going to come out with. We have all new Common for each area that have special kinds of damage where you can shoot off limbs and chests; it’s location specific damage. We’ve got the new melee weapons. Did you get to play?

VideoGamer.com: Yeah.

CF: Did you get a frying pan?

VideoGamer.com: Yeah I got the frying pan and I got the axe.

CF: See I love the frying pan.

VideoGamer.com: I found the axe to be really powerful. It’s a one hit kill.

CF: Each of the melee weapons has some little special ability to it. Those are the kinds of things we don’t like to always explicitly expose, because one of the cool things when we released L4D was watching how the mythology of L4D grew. No, you’ve got to do this or this or that! Putting that in there and letting players figure it out and understand it… people are really smart. We think this is it, and they’ll go test it, they’ll set up an environment and test it and be like, oh no it’s not, we want to go do this. The melee all have that flavour to them. If you used it against a Hunter or Smoker it does a special kill move, like if somebody’s grabbed by the Hunter and you come up over them and stuff. So the animators are ending up doing all this extra cool stuff.

VideoGamer.com: So what are the melee weapons that are going to be in the final game?

CF: Right now we’re just showing some examples. And that’s essentially the axe, which is like swinging the pan, it’s a single-handed one. The baseball bat has a bit of a different grip than the axe. We’ll be doing a bunch more of those kind of things. Last I saw, a shovel, a rake, things you’ll find in the environment. They’ll have different characteristics and abilities. One might be able to deal with more Infected in front of you. One might be able to single kill a Charger or something, that kind of thing.

VideoGamer.com: How will the melee weapons change the tactics players will use?

CF: I’ll give away one of the little sucker moves that we do. We have this campaign, the map after the demo, when you come up out of the sewers into an impound lot full of cars, and all of the cars have alarms. If you have melee weapons you’re good, you’re not going to set them off and you can sneak through it. But what we do is we give you melee weapons all through it, and if you’re smart and you’re hanging on to them, you’re keeping them, you’re good to go. But we also put a shotgun down at the bottom of the sewer. And players will often pick up the shotgun and go, neat shotgun, I’m going with this! And it’s like, yeah suckers! You’re about to learn a valuable lesson. That’s something you’ll do once or twice before you learn what you should be doing. We make it for people to play once through, we make it for people to play 500 times through. It’s a balance of how we do that. The melee weapons in that case, as you become more experienced you realise you should hold on to these at least through that.

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