Interviews

Das Interview: Is Left 4 Dead The Straight-To-DVD Counter-Strike?

November 18, 2008

left4deadposters_lead Das Interview: Is Left 4 Dead The Straight-To-DVD Counter-Strike?
Shhh. Be still for a second.

Wait, what’s that moving around in the shadows? A flood of rotting, lifeless bodies sprinting out of a towering office complex, looking utterly devoid of reason and desperate to gnaw on your lower intestine? And their BFF, a graying, morbidly obese chap covered in blisters and waddling about like he just stuffed his belly full of Krystal corn pups? Sweet—it’s just another day in lower Manhattan! Or, perhaps, a round of frantic trigger-masher Left 4 Dead, the ultimate co-op zombie apocalypse, dropping today for PC and Xbox 360.

Designed by Valve, purveyors of fine wares like Half-Life, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike and Portal (and overlords of digital distribution juggernaut Steam), the long-awaited blaster promises to take team-based gunplay to an entirely new level. Especially, that is, when one considers the ability for up to eight to jump right in and enjoy a little B-movie-style bloodshed online as hapless human survivors or members of the “Infected,” a horde of shambling cadavers and their mutant monster pals. Never mind the presence of the title’s hyper-aware artificial intelligence, or AI Director either, which assumes the role of virtual Wes Craven, monitoring your progress and adding or subtracting threats as needed on the fly to ratchet up tension.

Recently, we caught up with writer Chet Faliszek and VP of marketing Doug Lombardi to find out whether shooter and survival horror memes can really mix. Trick or treat? Who gives a severed head or shorn scrotum – either way, the game promises to be bloody good fun. Consider yourself warned: This one’s for mature audiences—and Fangoria-loving teens—only…

Das Gamer: Oooo, zombies—very original. What brought this one on: Studio boss Gabe Newell finally shake off his case of head crabs?

Chet Faliszek: We’ve always been horror movie fans, and zombie films in particular, for some time. If you look in Half-Life 2, we’ve got the fast and slow-moving zombies there, so it’s about time we made the full-on zombie uprising. The head crabs were just the start.

Das Gamer: Maybe so, but it’s not like the concept’s new—we’ve had titles like the abysmal Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green before. What’s to make us think this one won’t stink like year-old cadavers?

Doug Lombardi: The big standout features here are co-op play and serious replayability, which is driven by what we’re calling the AI Director. Whether you play in single-player or four-person co-op or eight-person versus mode, each game experience is different and built around tracking a number of variables to make sure each player is having a challenging and well-paced experience that leads to a fun conclusion. Most games are fun for a while until they become too difficult and then you quit; this one constantly evolves for every player as they play it.

Das Gamer: Since you brought it up, who is this “AI Director” character anyhow, and why should we be convinced he’s more George Romero than Uwe Boll?

Chet Faliszek: So, in our games right now, like Episodes 1 and 2, we do a lot with pacing. It might not always be apparent to players, but we’ll know when you’ve just experienced a lot of combat and slow things down with a puzzle or some kind of other break. The AI Director does this on the fly. It’s slightly detached from the action, and it monitors what’s happening at any given moment, like if someone dies in front of you, how much damage you’re taking and how many enemies are charging. It builds up the intensity for you, then eases you down, let you catch your breath—only in real-time.

It does that great horror film thing where you never know when tragedy might strike. You might play one time, and as you go through the subway, horrific zombie hordes come at you from all sides. And the next time you make your way through there, you’re just waiting for the action to explode, and it doesn’t, or does so at a different time or place.

Das Gamer: You’ve structured the game around the concept of “mini-movies,” or small, self-contained scenarios: How’s that work? Why is there no underlying story? And are any based on Brighton Beach Memoirs?

Chet Faliszek: Well, to answer your last question, we don’t quite go there. But in our first scenario, called No Mercy, you see a helicopter go by, letting you know he’s going and picking up people off Mercy Hospital’s landing pad. You get to the roof of the hospital, he’ll come get you—it’s as simple as that. So you’re essentially just fighting your way through the city to get to the hospital. That scenario’s all about close combat, lots of corners, small spaces… it’s kind of claustrophobic, involves a lot of battles.

As for the next scenario, Dead Air, you’re in a different city where you’re attempting to traverse rooftops and wide open spaces, which introduces a navigational problem in terms of falling off the side of buildings. Each scenario creates a different challenge for you, and as far as the storyline goes, they’re kind of all connected, but we don’t go too deep into that. The idea being that when a natural disaster happens, and you’re just the guy on the street, you don’t know the big background story or exactly what’s happening.

Doug Lombardi: Part of the idea is that each one of these scenarios can live as a standalone vignette or movie campaign. And what we try to do is give the player just enough back story so that each one has a context and gives people enough background to foster their own experience. The big idea is that while you’re playing with people, you yell and scream more than in other games, and afterwards, you recount what happened with them more than in other titles. The goal was sort of to take your best Counter-Strike experience you had with buddies and recreate that, whether in single-player or co-op, in Left 4 Dead. With these types of titles, the best stories usually come after you’ve played the game.

Story-wise, we wanted to give people a general context. In Counter-Strike, it’s very immediate: Terrorists vs. counter-terrorists. Left 4 Dead is similar: You’re a human survivor, there’s a bunch of zombies running at you. Then there are things a level below that, like in Portal—writing on the wall, character dialogue that gives you clues to what might’ve happened. We very much left it open-ended so that the community can build up a fiction or collective bit of speculation as to what happened. That’s part of the fun: We leave a lot up to the imagination.

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