We have killed so many zombies in a single day that it seems improbable, even impossible: over 11,000. We are, of course, playing Left 4 Dead. Beneath the cut we have the first-impressions of each of the four RPS editors. It’s been a long, noisy day of gaming. When we close our eyes, all we can see are burning zombies.
John: One of the most important features of Left 4 Dead is the necessity that it be interesting to play repeated times. Despite a single play through of all four campaigns lasting about as long as the average console shooter, that’s not how it’s intended to be played. You’re meant to keep coming back, charging through each zombie-infested level again and again, in the company of your buddies.
So having had the chance to play through Blood Harvest and No Mercy before, going back to them gave me an important perspective. Despite there being certain key moments in each level, it wasn’t the same game again. And playing with different people (and in the case of playing with RPS, very different people) makes it a very different time.
I think that was possibly my big concern with Left 4 Dead, and it seems to have been taken care of. The Director, the omniscient controller of what happens in the game, seems genuinely capable of mixing things up in such a way that you can’t make cohesive plans. Which is exactly how it should be – this is a zombie apocalypse, and being able to predict events would spoil it. Not knowing if crossing a certain bridge spells certain doom, or a casual walk through the pretty countryside, amps up the tension.
There’s still those bottleneck moments when you can not only expect a brutal attack, but form rudimentary plans for dealing with them. Turning the difficulty up on Blood Harvest, the rural campaign setting finishing with a terrifying enslaught on a farmhouse, we struggled big time. With repeated attempts, we formulated multiple plans to get through it, which went from simple variations such as how to arrange ourselves on the lower floor of the building and when to retreat to upstairs (imagine a building with the frighteningly fast undead coming in through every door and window, climbing the sides of the building, attacking you from every angle), all the way to hiding in the large barn on the farm grounds, in the hope it might be easier to defend. (It wasn’t).
What stands out the strongest for me, and I think is even more significant than the variation the Director offers, is the people you play with. I know Kieron, Jim and Alec pretty well. We spend an improbable amount of time in each other’s company. We know each other well enough to insult each other’s mothers while looking out for each other. It’s ideal company for such a game. You really can’t do anything on your own, and the moment you do, you’re screwed. I became quite frustrated with Jim at one point for charging off on his own, and then having to shoot Hunters off him after he got himself pinned down before everyone was finished healing up, or whatever. (I’ll add here that I’m far more irritating to play with than Jim, for all manner of reasons). Later on, after a few more hours of play, Jim said, “I’m starting to get anxiety whenever I’m away from the group!” That’s really it. You’re a team of four, and you must think that way.
Three of the “special” zombies – the Boomer (giant fatty who vomits on you, and explodes when shot), the Hunter (incredibly fast and vicious, able to leap huge distances and pin you to the ground), and the Smoker (his metres-long tongue snatches you from the pack and drags you away) – all emphasise the necessity for only teamwork. Each incapacitates you, rendering you helpless, utterly dependent upon your team. None are difficult to kill when not being attacked by them, so you must constantly look out for each other, having each other’s backs.
Blimey, it’s a lot of fun. And we’ve yet to touch the Versus mode. Last night, as soon as I shut my eyes, I saw dozens of zombies clambering over fences, up buildings, and rushing toward me. I dreamt exclusively of zombies. And today I’ll be mostly fighting zombies. Zombies. Brain gone. Zombies.
Jim: I’ve always been keen to place multiplayer games above single player games. For every compelling, isolated drama I experience with solo-gaming, it seems like I have a dozen more anecdote-worthy incidents when other human brains are involved in the ludic mix. Those pink apes that live all around us are excellent allies and opponents in our imaginary exploits. However, and I’ve yammered unwholesomely about this elsewhere, it’s often great to be able to share co-operative adventures with your chums, and Left4Dead is one such playground for partnership. The entire game is bent on co-operation: you must save your chums, and stay close, so that they might save you. Alone, you die. That alone sets it apart and, for me at least, pops it on a little pedestal. It’s doing the kind of stuff I really value in gaming.
My main concern for L4D is that people still don’t seem to quite know what the game is about. You assume you know what a zombie game means, and then you play this… The demo should abolish that, of course, and I expect there to be a clamouring of exploded expectations in its wake. Left 4 Dead is remarkably immediate and familiar, and yet distinctly unlike other games. There’s a whiff of Half-Life’s greatest mods to it, which I guess is hardly surprising when you see the people that Valve now employ. That whiff is a taste of the meme-pool of experienced PC gamers who are building the kinds of games that extrapolate from our FPS heritage. I know it works a blinder on Xbox too, but this feels and smells like a profoundly PC game.
That said, I’m finding it tough to draw useful parallels with other game experiences. It is, of course, nothing like any other classic zombie game out there. It’s survival horror without being anything like other games that are so toe-tagged. And the replayed, randomised nature of the four hour-or-so maps mean that it’s also nothing like other FPS games. It’s reminding me, ever so faintly, of Hired Guns – that proto-FPS of the Dungeon Master ilk – four characters against the horrors. Only I never managed to get more than two people around a game of that. This time we are faced with the absolute ideal situation of having the four RPS editors all playing together in the same room. John really does squeal when the badguys come.
The most enjoyable aspect of all this, so far, has been the capacity for the game to go terrifyinglu wayward. You think you’re handling the zombie horde and then suddenly a molotov is thrown, or a cannister explodes, and everything is swathed in flame. Or someone is caught by the lasso-tongued smoker zombie and dragged off to their doom as the survivors flail about in panic. Or a witch is startled and sent screaming towards us. Or… well, you’ll get the idea soon enough.
Kieron: Stupid things first: It was only when the game was starting did I realise the “4” in Left 4 dead wasn’t just Nothing Compares 2 U-isms, but a reference to the four players. One of the smartest voices in games journalism, me.
More stupid things second: BAMBAMBAMBAM!
That’s the thing with Left 4 Dead. There really is a lot of shooting. I mean, you play most of the four-player co-op things that are around, and it’s really just the standard modern approach to the genre. As in, the fights are about 2:1 odds in their favour at the best, and it’s based around choosing your shots and similar.
Left 4 Dead isn’t like that. The thing I’d immediately reach for is the original Doom – as in, it’s a horror action game with the tension interrupted with moments of ludicrous intensity. Or – more accurately – the ludicrous intensity interrupted with moments of tension. Alec’s response to the game – re-naming his character BAMBAMBAMBAM! is the correct and measured response.
It’s also like Doom in other ways bar its sheer aggression – it’s based around a small yet iconic cast of characters. Within the first hour, we’d got a handle on all of the bad guys and learned the correct response – in my case, swearing profusely when half of them even slightly appear and calling the Boomers Fatties much to John’s disgust. But there’s more subtlety going on than you may expect – when you get the scores at the end of each section, I tended to top the amount of damage to Tanks by a large margin. That’s because I think I’ve worked out a way to actually hurt them which others haven’t quite got yet… but I’m not going to spoil you. Yet, anyway.
(The Tanks provide some of the game’s most hilarious elements of Drama. Alec lobbing a Molotov cocktail at one when he’s in a small room with us, leading to in a fiery deathtrap with eight tons of angry muscle. Similarly later, when I’m last man standing, with a single health point and trying to take one down with a pistol. And then there’s the Witches and…)
Okay – the way which it isn’t like Doom is what pleases me most. That it’s not a Doom Tribute – it’s a thoroughly modern game. When I first played Left 4 Dead almost two years back, I was the person least impressed I knew – I thought it felt kind of retro. Elements like climbing ladders didn’t seem to have proper animation on them and it was basically just people running at you.
Not true anymore. Or, at least, not true any more in any way which matters. The standard infected run is totally a next-generation futurist run. There’s a sense of momentum to them which I haven’t seen in the medium before – it’s best shown when they manage to flank you, and a half dozen burst from the tree-line en masse. Their run animation is particularly a marvel – catching one when they run in a parabolic arc, curving towards you is totally convincing. Seeing them clamber. Seeing them – best of all – get shot, with you catching a limb and them tumbling, their mass and speed carrying them onwards.
(Note to all: At least on normal, you can’t beat the autoshotgun.)
But the key element which makes this more progressive than you think is the Director, which – especially as you amp up the difficulty – manages to capture in a fluid way essential parts of the genre. Over breakfast yesterday – before playing – we were talking about different takes on the zombie game that we’d like to see. One which didn’t come up is one which Left 4 Dead grasps completely – its inherent perverseness. Now, it’s a constant internet thing to discuss what you’d do in a Zombie Invasion, the implication being that you’re smarter than anyone else. Which is fine… but that’s not how the genre works. The genre is based on that response, and proving it to be hubris. So doing really sensible yet boring actions is going to get you killed. Push on to reach the next safe room at all costs. Because frankly, going back at any time is just going to get the director angry with you. One section when we found ourselves stuck, we sent on one person ahead to gather a mob, with all three of us on a high place where they won’t be able to reach us easily.
This is when the Director decides to send the wave of undead from behind us.
Which isn’t saying there isn’t any way to play well. But your plans will go wrong drastically, and you’ll be forced to improvise – by which I mean screaming BAMBAMBAMBAM! a lot while running around. At least at this initial play, anyway.
So – very excited by it. Looking forward to going back and playing Versus mode and seeing how it holds up single player today.
(I’m thinking the other comparison I’d make to it is actually old Bitmap’s classic The Chaos Engine – when a player drops out, the seamless taking over by the computer works terrbly well. When I did , the rest of RPS decided they’d rather have the computer along rather than me. The Bast!)
You will also spend more than your usual your time swearing at friends. As is only right. It is a Zombie game, after all.
Alec: It began with jokes and with songs. There have been a lot of songs during our time in Seattle, the manic result of too little sleep and too much booze. But, y’know, we really shouldn’t have been singing in the midst of a zombie invasion.
The singing stopped when we pushed the difficulty up a notch, convinced that we were absolute masters of Normal Mode. Despite Director’s uncanny magic, I’d been a little concerned as to L4D’s replayability. The difficulty is as important to squeezing new (un)life out of familiar maps as is the random-o-matic element. Suddenly, we weren’t The Disharmonious Beatles stumbling through zany adventures with a smile on our faces and a song in our heart, but we were the self-interested, short-tempered cast of Night of The Living Dead and so many of its successors. That is to say, we weren’t friendly. We didn’t trust each other, we swore at each other, we blamed one another for everything from getting in the way to using a less appropriate weapon to stealing health packs. We were working together out of necessity, not amicability. No singing, and not even much BAMBAMBAMBAM.
The thing with the difficulty isn’t so much that it drops more zombies onto you – I’m not even sure it does – or even that their hitpoints go up, but more that the Special enemies are far more frequent. L4D has, outside of common or garden high-speed deaders:
Fat Blokes – Boomers, explodey and vomity meatsacks. Players caught in the blast/vomit radius become a great big beacon for a huge, bonus of wave of zombies
Tongue Blokes – Smokers, whose enormous mouth-snakes can grab a player from a good forty metres away, rendering him helpless until his mates save him
Fast Blokes (the hyper-fast, pouncing Hunters, who’ll pin a player to the ground, again until a chum intervenes
Creepy Singing Ladies – Witches, who remain motionless until disturbed by light, noise or an errant gunshot. Their eerie song and simultaneous sobbing are by far the most terrifying thing in the game. Upon waking up, they’re a whirling dervish of destruction. Fight every instinct to shoot the apparently frail things and sneak around them.
C*nts – the enormous, heavily armoured Tanks, who you can hear stomping towards you from about half a mile away. On Normal, they’ll fall over before they do too much damage. On Advanced, their hitpoints are such that we’d always be three men down and the last backed into a corner desperately letting off pistol shots within moments of encountering one. A Tank is the shortest route to an endgame situation.
Well, apart from one thing. In Normal you tend to encounter only one of these a time, and they weren’t too harrowing. In Advanced, we’d regularly hit situations such as someone being dragged off by a Tongue Bloke, his theoretical rescuer finding himself floored by a Fast Bloke, and the other two fending off 60 zombies that had just turned up as a result of a Fat Bloke being sick on them. Facing multiple specials at once is high trauma and a monstrous challenge – and one, interestingly, that I think can only be mastered to a certain extent. Being a master of the headshot is one thing, but the tactical thinking, reflex and pure luck necessary to stay alive in the face of genuinely overwhelming odds is another.
There is another difficulty level yet. And that’s my challenge for, probably, the rest of the year. Right now, I can’t even imagine beating it. Dear God but I intend to try, however.
Related Stories:
Wnat.
Want so bad.
Glad I only paid £20 for it :) (not because that’s all I think it’s worth, just, you know, because cheap is good)
Great article, save for one part. Kieron’s review was nearly impossible to read. It felt like it had been translated to English, poorly, from some other language.
Haha yeah I play co-op Metal Slug with my nephew [the credit munching little tyke].
I can’t believe that its not 4 player split screen on the 360.
Cod4 [our current game of choice] is 4 way split screen; there is no way I’m picking this up then.
Maybe when it hits budget price I’ll consider it but only 2 player split screen for a 4 player game [at full price] is a bit shit.
But how well does it run? I need to know if my fairly old computer can run it. Is it more system-intensive than, say, TF2?
@abject: Really?
I pre-ordered this game back when it first became available on Amazon (poor choice in hindsight given the demo’ing, but whatever) and I have to say it’s looking more and more like one of those gaming experiences where your expectations are not just met but surpassed and profoundly altered.
Like SEAL Team.
so question… what is the server/client set up for this?
Dedicated servers? for 4 players? can a server run 4-6 simultaneous games for 4 people each?
As if this is peer to peer I am really going to regret plonking money down on this – especially considering how expensive it is
More a poor choice for Amazon’s notorious shittiness regarding delivering games on release dates – they generally miss the date by a few days.
Strange thing is, they only seem to have this problem with games, not with DVDs or CDs or whatever.
@Fat Zombie
It is more intensive than TF2 according to the required system specs on the game’s Steam page.
They are running official dedicated servers for the 360 (which is rare) and also releasing the dedicated server prior to launch for the PC version, as with all their games, they have noted that the AI requires more server CPU usage than most games.
How fun is this going to be when you have to team up with random Angry Internet Men online because you only have a group of two or three, or are just running solo?
I also fear trying to find a good group of people to play with. It’s going to be so easy for someone to grief 3 others.
Do they plan on having some sort of reporting/matchmaking system? if it’s just the old Source join-a-server system you’re going to spend a lot of time failing with idiots.
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if Valve were secretly joining some beta coop games as Super Zombies in order to balance the Versus mode! :)
Steam is getting a new matchmaking lobby system for Left 4 Dead which includes awards and ratings based on your performance, including ways to spot persistent greifers.
i guess i’ll have to keep waiting for a single player review of this before knowing whether its worth the money.
From the little evidence we have (i.e. we know that the AI takes care of verbal notifications, chit-chat and shooting, and anecdotally, that the RPS guys kinda preferred an AI to one of the guys when he dropped out) the computer players will probably be very adequate.
I shan’t even think about buying this until at least one person I know has bought and is playing it.
I don’t see it being as much fun with all strangers.
Ian,
Alot of these Zombie survival situations are made of total strangers. You come together by shooting the rest of the populace in the head. Kick back, have a few beers, cap the occassional G that makes it’s way up the fire escape. Good times, man. Good times.
My only worry is that I’ll be stuck playing with some randoms, and they’ll ruin everything with their randomness. At the moment, my cousin (who I live with) is getting the game, and I know one other person who is really excited about it. The three of us plus AI might be better than the three of us plus a twelve year old Russian.
I reckon Valve should check their sales numbers and see whether there was a spike after this article went up. Anyway, what about custom maps, are they going to be possible from day one? I want a shopping mall for sure.
Cigol: They’ve confirmed that there’ll be an SDK launching alongside the game, and unless I’ve read things completely wrong, it should actually be really easy to convert any Source-engine map to L4D. You just need to add start, end and checkpoint areas (along with standard weapon/ammo spawns, perhaps), and the director will handle the action. Might not make for the greatest map, but it’s just an example.
My anticipatory bloodlust is reaching dangerous levels. There’d better not be any delays on the demo release or I’ll be forced to… like… give dead legs to my housemates or something.
RAWR
@Dom: You… you must be joking… no… it couldn’t possibly be. That’s the most awesome thing I’ve heard all day, apart from a whole bunch of states being called for a particular candidate whose ideals I espouse.
Seriously. My candidate doing well and the SDK release you’ve just mentioned are currently vying for top spot in my list of “yay dance!” reasons.
@everyone whos worried about having to play with randoms:
Surely this is why we have the RPS group on steam, you, yes you can play with your own choice of Angry Internet Man.
Because let’s face it, this game is not a good way to meet girls…
Oh, and what’s your zombie survival plan? Me? I’m heading to Tewkesbury barracks for a tank…
Also, the SDK excites me. The only thing better than struggling through zombie holocaust is creating the places in which others will meet their hideous doom under waves of your zombies (I assume ownership of any roaming undead in areas I create, obviously). Maybe this game will finally give me something I care about enough to devote the mapsing time to… haven’t had that since CS 1.6.
If only I had real life friends who played videogames.
Now I’ll have to play with you people ;)
I can’t imagine playing with random people will be so bad with only a max of 4 guys. That would kinda force people to use their heads more, and to care more.
Also the matchmaking system keeps track of your overall skill at the game, so if you see yourself in a game with 3 guys who aren’t very good, you’ll know well before hand.
I’m sure there’ll be anti-griefing mechanics in the game, like a vote-ban system. I don’t really foresee any griefing here, cause it’s not fun killing the other guys, then everyone leaving, and then getting pummeled by zombies.
With 4 player games, there’ll always be a non-griefed game ready – unlike TF2 where someone can grief a hotspot of 24 people, here he can grief a max of 3.
And by my last read up, at the end of missions you are scored by what kindsof things you did right and wrong, probably tied to achievements – so I think everyone [99%] will be playing on the same side.
The quality of playing with strangers varies. I think this will have more of a mature audience than a lot of shooters, just because success requires teamwork and strategic thinking.
+Plus, it’s easy to deal with that one guy by way of “whoops I didn’t see you get dragged way from the group there, sorry”..
Good point, D. I love how everyone forgets about the zombies when they talk about griefers.
On the other hand, griefers can sic Witches on the whole team.
Heh. Cigol, can’t believe how little attention this has recieved… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atuZvbEPsAg
Other than in Garrys Mod, I never see grieffers on my videogames. You guys have really bad luck.
There is a single player option where both team and infected are handled by AI. It is very, very impressive, but it is still not equivalent to playing with people.
If you are intended to play this as a single player game then no, it will not be worth the money. It is a multiplayer game.
Also, there are tens of thousands of RPS readers who are clearly not demented griefer freaks. It cannot be too hard to use our Steam group system to create teams of four people to play this game among likeminded gamers.
http://www.hylobatidae.org/minerva/blogsheep.php?action=articleinfo&id=84
Not related to the article, but – pure awesomeness :-D
@ People who suggested using the RPS steam group to find groups: I guess that makes sense to be honest, but I’d need to make sure I don’t team with anybody who’ll throw a hissy fit when I inevitably suck and die.
Only other mediocre gamers need apply.
@Ian: Exactly. I count myself among those who fail miserably at twitch-gaming, yet are lured to on-line games by a faint promise of camaraderie and good, forgiving souls who will not hate me for spending most of the game by lying in a puddle of blood and making silly jokes. Shall we lie together, Ian? :D
@ Sartoris: Assuming you mean in some sort of zombie-shootery kind of way then that sounds absolutely splendid. =)
I won’t be getting the game just yet anyway but when I do I shall enter the RPS chat rooms and boldly announce my desire to find fellow halfwits to get slaughtered with me. :D
How does matchmaking work? If you want to play a game with 4 of your friends do you have to find or host a public server like CS/TF2? Or is there an easier way to find games akin to what you’d find on the 360 version?
I hope you guys get something from Valve for spreading the virus. This might be what I have waited for since the times when we were playing Doom in coop mode. I want this game, and I want my friends to have this game!
Steam’s latest update supports the L4D pairing system. I think we can expect being able to ban individual players from our peering lists. But, really, will it come to that? Griefers need a crowd to thrive — that gives them semi-anonymity and the power to annoy lots of people. L4D doesn’t give them the crowd. They also need the spare moments to set up the griefing. Ain’t no grass grows on a racetrack.
I wouldn’t worry about pro-twitch players hanging around the RPS Steam group. On the other hand, they are a scary bunch of people. Contrary to what the “RPS 4″ may think, they don’t spend their time stalking the blog authors. They spend it stalking each other.
AWESOMEGAM! :D
Only hours to go…
“How does matchmaking work? If you want to play a game with 4 of your friends do you have to find or host a public server like CS/TF2? Or is there an easier way to find games akin to what you’d find on the 360 version?”
Good question… I don’t think I’ve seen matchmaking discussed in any articles so far. It would be nice to get a rundown on how the UI holds up, as well as the gameplay (which I feel has been pretty well covered already).
This game looks amazing. Seriously. My perfect FPS.
@Dath
24hours,yes. Maybe more
Great article RPS.
Just wondering whether I should take a day off on Friday….
“Just wondering whether I should take a day off on Friday…”
Probably not. It’s only a game. Try using your holiday time constructively. Maybe spend some time with family and friends instead. There are always going to be rainy weekends and late nights for games.
Grandstone, if I recall correctly Witches typically kill only the people that set them off, then go back to moaning in a corner. The main reason they kill entire teams is because entire teams make noise – probably from the reflex of “CRAPKILLKILLKILL!” when the Witch is provoked.
I wish I had more than my netbook here at Uni.
I’ll presume it was Kieron who went by the tag “Mrs Violent Trevor” in those L4D screenshots?
Looks great, although I am surprised by how fast those zombies move in gameplay videos, this sounds really intense when they can get in your face so quickly.
Also @ Ian, I’d imagine playing with a hardcore twitcher wouldn’t be so bad, as you could just follow them and let them do all the hard work. If they start whining that the rest of the team isn’t 100% perfect, I’d just leave them to rot. I’ll happily join you and not shout at you or anyone else, no matter if we all sucked and died in 12 seconds.
I’ve got this preordered on the 360, because I know at least I’ll be able to play it there. I can’t wait to give the demo a try though, to see if my rickety old Pentium 4 can handle it.
That was a great article, it has made me more excited for the game than I was already.
Incredibly, prior to this article I have not thought about encountering more than one of the special zombies at once. I just got a whole lot more excitied.
@ Smee: Me either, and then I wondered why I was surprised.