"Having a language to describe these things in makes it a lot easier," he explained. There is even a Left 4 Dead dictionary with different terms for areas and infected that describe how the Director will handle things in that area. "Not only are we telling the story of these characters, but we're telling the story of this world, we're seeing how things fall apart, and a new way of interacting with the infection." Faliszek confirmed that there is a notebook somewhere deep in the bowels of Valve with the story of Left 4 Dead, detailing the world and why things are the way they are. Left 4 Dead 2 will also include some more storytelling than what we're used to from the series.
The point is that this isn't a new coat of paint and a new level or two this is a full sequel. "We're not talking about that yet," I'm told. The game will ship with five new campaigns, new weapons, new characters, new Special Infected, updated Common Infected, melee weapons. It's something Valve wants to do, but they're not sure when it will be accomplished. While he claims it's not an insurmountable amount of work, mixing old and new content would require new dialog to be recorded for the situations with the new enemies and weapons, as well as new animations.
As for playing old maps with old characters but new creatures and melee? "We have some additional work to do there, we're talking about how to do that. Also, all the maps created with the SDK will work on the sequel. The SDK will be coming out of beta in the next week or so, and Faliszek points to that to prove that Left 4 Dead will still be updated. "To Gabe's credit, and he's a great guy to work for, he said if this is what you want to do, if this is what you're excited about, go do it." A true sequel According to Faliszek, he expressed his doubts, and claimed this move was against the character of the company. So the team brought their concepts and ideas to create a sequel to Gabe Newell, and even he was skeptical about the idea. The Common Infected-now there is destruction in different parts of their body, to ship all the new Common Infected, even with an update, would be a huge thing." too much stuff was tied together with too many other things.
"It just became very clear that this was a cohesive, singular statement we wanted to make, not a more slow update thing. Imagine a tank that comes straight at you, but is slightly easier to kill. If you're being too defensive, if you're grouped together too tightly, the Director may send the bull-like Charger to bum rush your party, knocking the team apart. I had just gotten done playing the game, and the Charger is indeed a nasty critter. For example, the Charger that we see today." Advertisement "We wanted the Director to be smarter, but to be smarter it needed more special infected in its stable. The team wanted better storytelling, they wanted swamps, and they wanted to include New Orleans. "We had some meetings about it, and we all talked about our ideas, and everyone was pretty focused and thoughtful, a lot of the same ideas were happening," Faliszek told me. That's rare: in most cases development teams are scaled back after the product is released.
It's not nearly that easy with Left 4 Dead, where one change affects nearly everything else.īesides, why inch along with an update or content pack every now and again? Everyone on the team was excited about working on more Left 4 Dead, and in fact, the team behind the game has increased slightly in size since launch. "Team Fortress gets to do these nice little discrete units of content, they get to do a map, there's an internal consistency and an internal world that happens." He described the content updates as "clean little things." Bite-sized updates that add to the game, and over time change things. Faliszek knew that he had to do some damage control he told Ars he was texting prominent map makers from the community minutes after the announcement to let them know that their work would not be affected negatively by the sequel.
Left 4 Dead received the Survival Pack, and now there is a sequel coming to the PC and 360 this year. This is a company that has reinvented Team Fortress 2 since its release, and every update was free.
I've been getting e-mails, texts, phone calls, and tweets from readers and friends enraged over Valve releasing a sequel to Left 4 Dead so quickly. We have officially gotten the formalities out of the way. He told me how much he enjoys Ars Technica. I was sitting with my arms crossed, and I told him how much I love Left 4 Dead. He was one of the project leads on Left 4 Dead. Sitting across the table from me was Chet Faliszek.