Left 4 Dead 2 Interview

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?

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.

VideoGamer.com: You’re calling the AI Director Version 2.0 in this game. What makes it 2.0?

CF: We have more special Infected. What that means is you have more choices you can make. The Charger’s great against people who are grouped up together. You want to bash them out of that. The Director’s going to be monitoring that, see that and it’s going to send the Charger at them versus the Hunter. Or if someone’s running ahead the Hunter does it. So it’s a subtle change. We could have made that change in L4D, but without the new special Infected the Director would still be pretty hamstrung in what it can do. Now it can do all these cool things. We also have weather events. It’s like, OK great; it’s raining, big deal. If you’ve ever lived in the south you know thunderstorms come up, especially in summer afternoons, that are just these gigantic downpours for just a few seconds and they go away. It’s just the humidity in the air. So you’re walking through a field and you’re like, oh, this is going to be an easy run, and all of a sudden you hear a clap of thunder and you know you’ve got seconds to find some place to hold up because once that thunderstorm hits, it’s claustrophobic rain. It’s like if you played Blood Harvest in the corn field. You can’t see your guys, there’s no glow and all that. That’s how the thunderstorms hit.

VideoGamer.com: You talked about personally wanting to have a better story. What can you tell me about it?

CF: We start in Savannah and we get to New Orleans. If you’re trying to get out of the Savannah area they would send you to Atlanta, but Atlanta’s already fallen, because the way viruses or sicknesses spread, is really through large populated areas because of how travel works. You start in a world where the infection hasn’t hit. It’s not like in L4D, where you have this city, or even like New Orleans, which is dug in and you’re making your final stand. This is a city that’s just like, hey let’s get on the bus, we’re evacuating. Our CDC/FEMA guys have got their signs out saying wash your hands, you’ll be OK. So the world’s changing as you go. You go from that to this, where the military is actually saying they assign people groups, and you have to go through the fence system to prove that you can walk and you’re not sick. If you’re sick, get the hell out. Whereas at the beginning you’re like, we all love each other. As you go across the south you’re actually going to be in different sections and see how people reacted to it and what choices they’ve made about it. We’re going to talk about the world there.

The characters also have an arc. They meet the minute you start the game. They’ve met for the first time, not like L4D where they’d known each other for a brief period of time. At the same time that you see the Infected, they see the Infected. As you progress across the campaigns you’ll see them change among themselves. One of the things people liked in L4D was the interaction between the characters. We had some of that, but we have even more of that now. We’re still not going to have big cutscenes. We’re still for the guys who don’t care. They just want to jump in and play and they want to play in any order they want. We’re still going to support that. We’re still going to make that happen.

VideoGamer.com: But the dialogue will be there for people who are looking for it?

CF: Yeah. We always wanted to have variation. So we had depth with things that were rare and would only happen every so often. Well now we have that as well as having variation based on which campaign you’re playing as they progress together.

VideoGamer.com: Describe to me the demo on show here at E3.

CF: We have five campaigns. You’re playing the fifth campaign, the first two maps. You start along the Mississippi River and you see the bridge. All you know is the military is operating by this bridge, getting people out on army cruise ships, out onto the Gulf of Mexico. You get there; the river’s been blocked because there’s been so much craziness going on. The military has been active in New Orleans, and they’ve taken an active aggressive role in protecting people. You’ll see that in some of the later maps. But right there when you’re landing at the water, you know you’ve got to get to the bridge and there’s the coach. Unfortunately it’s on the wrong side of the river.

VideoGamer.com: Will L4D2 be heavily supported after release?

CF: Yeah. In fact L4D, we still aren’t done with it. We still have updates coming. We’re going to announce some stuff. Our focus always is on what we’re putting in the box, put as much as we can in the box. Let’s not worry about: let’s save that and not put that in the game. No, let’s put that in. And with the five campaigns, all of them out of the box, playable Versus, co-op, Survival and the new mode, there’s just a ton of content in there.

VideoGamer.com: L4D3 for 2010? It seems like an annual franchise like Madden!

CF: We do it once in a year and everyone’s like, oh my god! Let’s do this one. Let’s worry about this and then we’ll see.

VideoGamer.com: We’re a multiplatform website. Was there ever any thought about doing a PS3 version? Did it even cross anyone’s mind?

CF: If it crossed someone’s mind it wasn’t the focus. The focus was 360 and PC. A) it’s what we develop on. B) it’s the platform we think lends itself to the interaction of our game the best. Microsoft didn’t know about L4D at first. Then they saw it last year and they just started coming to our offices to play. I think it had little to do with actual work, they just wanted to play. And actually we had had them out to come take a look at L4D2 before the announcement and everything. Talking with those guys, their marketing guys, they’re like, oh we play every Friday. And they do. They’re hardcore players. They all knew how to play. I didn’t have to give them any instruction. I thought we’d have to put it on easy for you guys. Let me tell you, you guys are good. This is a really good relationship and they’re really supportive, they’ve been really helpful, super great. I know they’re supposed to be big, bad and evil but that’s not the side we see of them.

VideoGamer.com: Do you think L4D will ever come to a PlayStation console?

CF: Right now it’s PC and 360. That’s definitely what we’re going to do. It’s just the platform that lends itself to it. And Xbox LIVE just makes it an easy thing to do. If you think about it, ten years ago we could have made L4D, but you wouldn’t have been able to hook up to your friends and it just wouldn’t have gained online as it did. And it’s really because of Steam and Xbox LIVE that we can make L4D.

Left 4 Dead 2 will be released exclusively for Xbox 360 and PC on November 17, 2009.