By John Walker on November 18th, 2008 at 11:48 am.
This is an ode to a strange, huddled creature. A crying, singing, tangle of ragged limbs and ferocious eyes. Terrifyingly deadly, and yet so distressingly vulnerable. Left 4 Dead’s Witch is unparalleled for me amongst all of gaming’s enemies, more frightening and fascinating than any before. She is pure fear.
I feel little more is necessary to demonstrate this than to recount a typical encounter. It inevitably works something like this:
The four of you are in the middle of a fray. Perhaps walking down a railway track in the open air. The game has chosen to spring hordes of Infected on you from three sides, and you stand together, huddled, protecting each other from the constant waves of crazed undead. The music is swelling to accompany the onslaught, and concentration on any one aspect is constantly torn away by the surprise pouncing of a Hunter, or one of your team being drawn away by the tongue of a Smoker. It’s intense, and you think about nothing other than simply surviving, hoping for a pause and time to recover. But then someone says, their voice slightly halted, “Can anyone hear a Witch?”
You strain to listen, trying to pick out someone other than the cacophony of music and screams and frothing gurgles of zombie attackers. And somewhere amongst it all, just about, you can perhaps hear the tail of that terrible song.
It changes the mood immediately. Before it was simply a case of shoot everything that wasn’t a teammate. Suddenly bullets can no longer go stray. Cars alarms cannot be triggered. Explosions cannot be caused. Somewhere near you is a Witch, and you’ve no idea where. Panic begins.
As the battle begins to wane, the song becomes more clear. And then the sobbing is heard. In the relative calm you can begin to work out whereabouts she might be, her aimless wail coming from a specific place. She’s somewhere down the tracks, sitting beside a derailed container, her back toward you. She’s staring down the tracks you need to follow. Rocking and staring.
The order is inevitably shouted by one player. “Switch off your torch!” One person who has yet to spot where she sits ignores it, swinging the beam around wildly. The other three scream together, “TURN OFF YOUR TORCH!” Then a plan is formulated.
“Okay, look. If we go behind the container, we don’t need to go anywhere near her. We can stick to the far left of the tracks and just keep going. No one hesitate, no one turn around.”
Then the scene plays out in two ways.
1) Everyone backs up, moves to the left, and hurries past the container, past the Witch, and far farther down the track than she could ever see, before relaxing, her song finally too distant to be heard.
2) Someone in your group says it will be easier just to kill her. There’s no changing their mind, and you’re forced to stick together. To carry on would be to leave them to die alone, and you need them with you. So you relent, and two people agree to offer back up, while a third stays back to pick off any oncoming Infected. With their shotgun they sneak up behind the Witch. It ends two ways.
a) They fire a series of rounds directly into her back. She screams, flails out, but collapses dead. This is rarely true.
b) In a moment of fear, the would-be attacker hesitates for a split second. It’s too long. The Witch springs up from her haunches, whirling around with her claw-hands immediately sunk into the player’s flesh, as everyone begins frantically emptying their ammo into her. She screeches and tears, lashing and lashing and lashing, until the player is dead. The others finish her off, and stare at the two dead bodies lying on the floor as the next wave of Infected pour in.
The Witch is to be avoided. That’s incredible alone. Who designs a character for gamers to never go near? Who spends the time to create the most terrifying creature imaginable, and doesn’t impose it on players? Well, clearly Valve. The temptation to have her be aggravated from great distances, to force her to attack when encountered, must have been there. But then she’d have lost her power. Her power comes from just sitting there. It’s that benign, ragged, vulnerable form. It’s the combination of singing and crying. Oh God, the singing and crying.
I asked Valve’s Chet Faliszek about this. He told me,
“It has been odd to make a character that we wanted to look scary, threatening and cool; but that you should avoid looking at. I think this is where her audio becomes so important. Once you know her voice, that moaning and wailing build her up more than even seeing her. Hearing players in the demo whisper when they hear the witch but don’t yet see here let’s us know it must be working.”
Crying is so evocative. It’s a familiar tactic in horror. A sound of fear and innocence perverted. It’s a distress signal, and our response should be to look for who is in trouble. To help them. BioShock teaches us to help the crying children. Life teaches us that. Our biology instructs us to do it. And here we’re reeling in fear at the sound. We back away from it, reroute to avoid it. It’s already just wrong.
Then that song. A far more simple reaction: it’s a fearful melody, attacking with its minor key. Haunting, and floating, and too near. Hiding it behind the ruckus, making it something we have to strain to pick out, trains us to constantly worry it might be there right now and we’ve yet to notice it. It becomes a tune we can start to imagine, picking out a note from the white noise and filling in the gaps with our imagination. It can be heard outside of the game, in any muffled noise.
Thief 3’s zombie guards within The Cradle had previously been the gaming enemy of which I was most scared. Their fractured walk, contorted masks, and gross parody of a mental patient was a horrible sight. I remember my reaction to them: just running. They were too terrible to do anything else. A flash bomb might keep them off you, but that would mean looking right at them as they stumbled toward you, and my visceral response was too powerful to contend with that. Out of revulsion I would spin the mouse and run through the barred rooms, any attempts at subtlety and sneaking in shadows abandoned.
The Witch holds the same power. She is an enemy I have no intention of fighting. But she scares me more by simply sitting still. The Cradle’s inhabitants made their threat apparent. The Witch sits and stares, her brown/gold eyes piercing. That look, when I’m trying to find her, and I stumble upon the room in which she’s sat, and her head turns toward me and I see those eyes… it’s just ridiculous panic. I have to get a hold of myself and remember how to operate a mouse before I can pull myself away from the glare.
She casts no spells. She possesses no apparent magic powers. She does not cackle, and she certainly does not wear a pointed hat. No cats surround her. She throws no runes. She shuffles no bones. But she is a Witch. The most terrifying form imaginable. For God’s sake, turn off your flashlight, stop firing toward those cars, and just walk past. And whatever you do, don’t turn around to look.
18/11/2008 at 11:57 Ian says:
And yet… I always find myself moving closer, just to have a better look at her.
It seldom ends well.
18/11/2008 at 11:57 Mark-P says:
She’s a great monster, and her music que is awesome.
Unfortunately, since the game respawns players after a short period and she only seemed to kill one player before scampering (hilariously) off, her impact is rather lessened.
She wasn’t too frightening in the demo on expert, especially compared to ‘Oh S**t – TANK! RUN!’. Is she more of a danger in the full version?
18/11/2008 at 11:58 cullnean says:
random dude
“wft dont be a gay ill kil it lol”
rest of team
“We can do it with 3? cant we?”
18/11/2008 at 12:00 Ian says:
Crying is so evocative. It’s a familiar tactic in horror. A sound of fear and innocence perverted. It’s a distress signal, and our response should be to look for who is in trouble. To help them.
Dead right. I was just saying about this in one of the Fallout threads. I was in one of the maintenance sections underground in a train station when I hear a baby crying. I spot a pram and my first reaction was to wonder what kind of monster could leave a baby in such an environment. Of course I ran around to the open end of the pram and saw no baby, but got a face full of bomb and out came the stimpacks. I was impressed that the game had lured me into that without making me even think about what I was doing.
But yeah….
The witch is horrible. Even in normal mode I’d pull up short of the witch, though luckily I’ve yet to catch the brunt of her wrath, with me not having disturbed her. Yet.
The worst was when my group were running through the train station and you get to the part where (I think) you can ONLY go through the carriage. Regardless, that’s the way we were going and there she is. On the carriage floor, unavoidable. Sobbing quietly to herself.
18/11/2008 at 12:03 Ginger Yellow says:
“BioShock teaches us to help the crying children”
That or kill them and harvest their precious, precious Adam.
18/11/2008 at 12:09 jay says:
great article
18/11/2008 at 12:12 mister slim says:
It’s an interesting co-opting of our survival instincts that something in a videogame, which we know on an intellectual level cannot hurt us, can still trigger such a strong automatic reaction.
Anyway, yeah, that cry freaks me out.
18/11/2008 at 12:12 Kan3da says:
Just finished the first campaign with friends. This if definately my game of the year. Just getting ready to tackle the second one. We still got one slot free so if any of you guys wants to join add me: E.E. Kan3da. Im in the group. Were all about the teamplay and got a dedicated server. Having a witch and a tank at the same time just gave us 3 heart attacks. Back to the slaughter. Oh and if you thought expert is easy. Think again. We decided to enjoy the campaigns in advanced first.
18/11/2008 at 12:19 Lu-Tze says:
Witch in front of the Safe Room door = Director hates me.
18/11/2008 at 12:19 tackle says:
Yet I still fear the tank more.
The witch can be killed with strategy and tactics.
So can the tank, but you need so much more of it, and even more so you need luck. And a molotov.
18/11/2008 at 12:22 The Colonel says:
This game seems to be much much better if one approaches it with a bit of imagination and treats it as if you were really attempting to survive a zombie infestation. It is sadly too easy to play it as any other FPS, especially an online FPS and then the game loses all of its edge and horror. I found the witch to be a magnificent idea and truely inspired me to fear the first time I encountered her, but as Mark-P pointed out, even on Expert there isn’t really enough of an incentive to avoid her completely. Hopefully the higher difficulties will be more challenging in the real game. It would be nice to see melee attacks never kill a zombie on the higher dif levels. The frantic panic of bitchslapping zombies with the butt of your gun while you shove cartridges into your shotgun is unsurpassed, until you have reloaded your gun and discover that the hoarde you were apparently only just holding off is all dead on the floor around you because your melee is pretty much as effective as a bullet. There are sections of the game which are in fact easier to do with melee rather than guns, bosses aside. These aside, the game is going to be amazing by the looks of it.
18/11/2008 at 12:22 Feet says:
I must say the witch has a greater psychological impact on me than any other zombie in L4D, what with the stolen glances towards the huddled shape in the half-light of a corner, and the reaction to the music and distant weeping.
However, since I know she’s usually reasonably easily avoidable (unless the bastard Director sticks her infront of a doorway you need to go through), I find I have a far greater SHIT FUCKING RUUUUN reaction to the appearance of the Tank which can kill everyone.
Also the Witch will tend to kill the one person who startled it and then scarper without attacking anyone else, even if you chase it.
Tank > Witch for inducing genuine fear for me.
18/11/2008 at 12:28 phil says:
The first leadhead in Bioshock, the one crying over a pram which contains her blood stained revolver and the silent plaster covered splicers pretending to be manniquins in the flooded hanger, are pretty unsettling. The scissorman in Clocktower deserves an honorable mention too.
18/11/2008 at 12:28 phuzz says:
In the demo the witch kept ending up next to the minigun, except one time when she was upstairs in front of the safe house door. I decided that I could probably lob a moltov over my friends heads, onto the witch and still have time to run away laughing as she tore into them.
Nope.
I was on the floor having chunks ripped out of me in seconds, and funnily my mates didn’t want to help much…
I can imagine she’s even more scary in badly lit sections.
18/11/2008 at 12:30 toni says:
rps seems too easily impressed by one of the most UN-scary and most EASY opponents of this game. during a fight avoid it, when having time and she sits in the way: shoot her.
I played L4d on expert and the only 2 really hard things are: zombie waves together with at least 3 special zombies AND the tank. the witch is just like a boobytrap you already know to avoid and gets boring quick.
18/11/2008 at 12:31 Tei says:
Thats not totally new.
There was a mod for Quake1 with a character like that. The mod is terrible obscure, because only a few Inside3D players got it and played it.
The mod was like that:
A dark room. A small figure (strange daisy shape?) looking somewhere. You go near that figure, If you disturbe it, he or she looks at you cryiing loudly and killing you.
“Not to be disturbed monster” is a freaking cool monster, and is colllosally right on a coop game. Is a genius to reinvent that monster, and is a genius to reinvent that monster for a coop game.
18/11/2008 at 12:33 Meat Circus says:
John is a big girl’s blouse.
The worst thing about Witches is the creepy music. On Normal they’re really not especially hard work to down.
Perhaps they’re a *little* tougher on higher difficulties.
18/11/2008 at 12:40 Neuromante says:
There’s a problem with that monster.
It’s not the concept, wich it’s just awesome, but the same gameplay. Of course, a witch near an “action” zone must be feared and avoided, of course when she appears everybody gets scared, and of course the ambientation -music, lights, etc- it’s just awesome for that feared moment, but if you have a hunting rifle and enough space between she and you, there are no major problem. Also, if your team members are fine on health and nobody does nothing stupid, the Witch it’s dead meat in few seconds with the other weapons.
She eats a lot of bullets, but ammunnition doesn’t looks like a major problem with the “all-ammo-you-can-get-free” tables, she can kill you with a touch, but she don’t relly “kill” you, just left you in the floor, shooting the pistols.
I agree with those who say “Tank > Witch”, just because a Tank involves a REAL danger, a BIG -literally- problem for your team, and the fact that you have to deal with it.
The witch makes better ambientation -and I prefeer it to the killing zombiefest that it’s left 4 dead-, but the tank makes you say “Oh shit, tank, shit, shit, shit, shit”.
18/11/2008 at 12:47 karthik says:
Playing the demo online wasn’t exactly conducive to witch-avoidance.
I would either get coupled with Korean players who don’t speak English, or folks who would take the time to type “witch lol”, shine their flashlights at it and run away, leaving me as their sacrifice. L4D was my first multiplayer game in a long time; griefing ruined the experience. What does one do when one does not know three other sane, sportive non-jerks who own the game?
Even in the rare sessions where some semblance of team work existed, the Tank was a much more panic inducing foe than the wailing booby trap. Heck, a Tank once tore through the safe-room door, causing mass hysteria.
18/11/2008 at 12:48 Ian says:
The tank is scary in as much as it’s the most likely to splatter your entire team and things get brilliantly hectic when you’re trying to stop it from doing so. But it doesn’t weird me out or bother me in the way that the witch does at times. After all, it’s not like other FPSes haven’t ever had nigh-invulnerable damage sponges.
I would say the tank is better gameplay was because it’s obviously more of a challenge, but a well-placed witch can entirely change the mood of a scene for me.
Of course all this could change once I get my greasy paws on the full game. :)
18/11/2008 at 12:53 Catastrophe says:
Anyone yet came across a Tank player? I’m at work so haven’t got to play the full version yet and was wondering how effective a Tank player are.
Infact, I’d generally like to know how Versus matches play-out.
18/11/2008 at 12:56 Ian says:
@ Catastrophe: Me too. I expect RPS will write something about it in the near future.
18/11/2008 at 13:02 Dinger says:
The tank doesn’t change how you go about playing the game; it changes the game (on the full version, do all the other zombies still disappear when the tank shows up?). Your team gives up a lot of ground in defending, or it dies.
The witch isn’t hard to “defeat” — if everything’s calm and nobody’s an idiot, nobody’s going to die. But things have a habit of not staying calm. The best way of surviving the witch — no flashlights, no explosions, no firing wildly — also happens to be the worst way to survive a zombie rush. And when you’ve got a ton of common infected charging you, the last thing you want is that thing screaming through the pack, causing out-of-body experiences.
18/11/2008 at 13:07 kert says:
Ok, so how does it stack up against playing System Shock 2 alone in the dark hall ?
18/11/2008 at 13:08 John Walker says:
I hope Catastrophe and Ian are being sarcastic.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/05/the-livid-dead-l4d-versus-mode/
18/11/2008 at 13:09 Meat Circus says:
@kert:
Less jibbly-jibbly, more hummus.
18/11/2008 at 13:10 Meat Circus says:
@John:
Since you only get to play the Tank randomly and itermittently, I think they were asking “has anyone been accosted by a human-controlled tank yet, and were they shit?”
Which seems a fair enough question.
18/11/2008 at 13:14 Magic says:
Im with the general Tank > Witch.
The difference is, fighting a Witch is a game of not loosing the control, fighting the Tank on the other hand is all about get in control.
The average Team can kill a Tank without problems if they manage to get in control. And a witch can be avoided. Sometimes.
So concluding from that a tank is harder to kill because it is a defensive situation whereas a witch is a offensive situation.
Hm… I may not be that important whatsoever. The Director is the enemy I fear.
18/11/2008 at 13:22 Hermit says:
@karthik
Join the PCG steam chat. There’s a bunch of us who are (relatively) sportive, non-jerks who own the game. We’ve got 3 or 4 private servers up and running too, so no randoms.
Can’t help you on the sane part, I’m afraid.
18/11/2008 at 13:22 Meat Circus says:
The AI director is like GLaDOS only less lovable. And with no way to kill the psychotic fuck.
18/11/2008 at 13:26 Paul Moloney says:
“but if you have a hunting rifle…”
I’ve never picked up the rifle as it seems to me that L4D is not a game condusive to standing off at a distance, sniping. Can this actually be done??
I’m a shotgun man meself.
P.
18/11/2008 at 13:27 Heliocentric says:
Eyes email inbox for amazon dispatch.
I’ve yet to play this on anything even resembeling a gaming pc, hope its pretty.
18/11/2008 at 13:27 Dante says:
“Heck, a Tank once tore through the safe-room door, causing mass hysteria.”
That. Is. Brilliant.
18/11/2008 at 13:32 Dante says:
@ Paul
I’ve used the rifle a bit in the demo, firing from the hip is reasonably effective against a crowd of zombies. It strikes me as being something with a lot of use in a well disciplined team, with one man using it to pick off special zombies from a distance while the rest of the team unload on anything close.
18/11/2008 at 13:35 Flint says:
Paul: the rifle’s not really a sniper weapon though you can use it for that. It shoots as fast as you can click the mouse and being nicely powerful, it’s a pretty good way to keep yourself alive.
18/11/2008 at 13:45 Malagate says:
Hmm, whilst the scoped rifle can be used in that way, to use it like that is a waste when you could be using the M16 or the auto-shotty.
Everytime I’ve seen the team take up up scoped rifles they’ve ended in tragedy, and indeed the one time I picked one up it was only bad news for my team mates. I remember the moaning about newbies with shotguns in a previous RPS thread, to me the scoped rifle is the true anti-newbie weapon.
Certainly something that potentially could work brilliantly within a well co-ordinated team, in most random mis-mashes of players it’s nigh on suicidal, as to use the scope you’ll really need covering fire for anything that flanks and to not use it with the scope you may as well be taking the M16.
18/11/2008 at 14:01 Nameykins says:
The hunting rifle also seems to kill all regular zombies with one hit anywhere, unscoped. A good twitch-aiming player can probably kill more zombies with it than any other weapon. (Or at least in the demo, haven’t yet bought the release version.)
18/11/2008 at 14:03 Kieron Gillen says:
The Sniper-rifle is basically the rail-gun.
KG
18/11/2008 at 14:15 Ian says:
@ John (W): I won’t lie, I’d forgotten that for that you’d been playing with all the levels, etc. But I was also interested in the answer to the tank question.
18/11/2008 at 14:28 Pags says:
Witches are pure comedy when you set them on fire. If having a screaming sack o’ bones with a terrible manicure flapping it’s hands wildly at you isn’t enough, having that sack o’ bones come at you engulfed in flames will do it for you.
18/11/2008 at 14:29 solomun says:
Eh, it’s just a landmine in excellently designed clothing. Scary at first but I’ve killed half a dozen in the demo now. Knowledge conquers fear.
18/11/2008 at 14:29 StormTec says:
Random asides, as it doesn’t seem like everyone’s aware:
The witch kills instantly on expert mode. That is kills, as opposed to downs. That is regardless of your health/death strike status.
The sniper rifle is one-hit kill on normal zombies (seems to do high damage per shot, I guess?). It also has a high penetration factor, i.e. it shoots through walls (or at least some of them), from what I can tell. This also counts for zombies. I killed at least 3 zombies in a line (they were bunched up inside the train, running down the car towards me) with a single shot. Now tell me the M16 is better =P
18/11/2008 at 14:30 Pags says:
I also let a witch into the safe room once. I damn near busted a lung laughing, watching her bump into walls and flailing wildly while we all rushed around the table trying to get away.
18/11/2008 at 14:37 Magic Toast says:
“Her power comes from just sitting there. It’s that benign, ragged, vulnerable form. It’s the combination of singing and crying. Oh God, the singing and crying”.
So very true. Great article
18/11/2008 at 14:39 Ginger Yellow says:
“There are sections of the game which are in fact easier to do with melee rather than guns, bosses aside”
To be fair, this is canon. According to the Zombie Survival Guide, the single best anti-zombie weapon is a trench spike, followed closely by a monk’s spade.
18/11/2008 at 14:45 John Walker says:
Being the Tank is tremendous fun. It’s a special treat when the message appears on screen. The delivery is fairly simple. Beat on the Survivors until they take you down. I think anything more subtle undoes the amount of damage you can deliver, which is what it’s all about.
But they’re still a Tank, so the tactics to defeat them are much the same. Shoot until they fall.
18/11/2008 at 14:49 Ian says:
I take it you can still punch out pillars and such as the AI ones do (or I think I saw a tank do so in the demo)? Not that it would spoil the fun of smacking people right in their stupid puny heads, but if there was stuff you can destroy to add to the effect as you thunder towards them. :D
18/11/2008 at 14:51 Saul says:
I played a tank tonight. It was kind of awkward, the first time, but it was satisfying when I laid out a survivor. Even more when I picked up a huge hunk of rock and hurled it.
18/11/2008 at 15:04 Dave says:
The tank may be more dangerous than the witch, but not more scary. You can beat the witch if prepared, though it is smarter to just avoid her and not use up your resources. But you are never prepared for the tank.
The witch just adds that bit of emotion to the game. I wonder what she is mourning; is it a child, her own condition, the entire tragedy of the zombie apocalypse, or is it just crocodile tears meant to unsettle you or lure you in?
18/11/2008 at 15:05 muscrat says:
….and its articles like this that make RPS AWESOME ;)
18/11/2008 at 15:08 Strelok says:
Tanks in coop seem to take forever to get down (at least on expert). Is there any difference in HP between versus and coop?
In comparison, the witch is rarely anything to write home about. In the worst case she will kill a player (in addition to not disturbing her, focus fire often prevents that), while a tank appearing in a bad moment can wipe the whole team.
18/11/2008 at 15:11 sbs says:
Stormtec: That’s her “special attack”, the victim of which will usually be the idiot who startled her. She can’t use that all the time, though.
I highly doubt thatit’s like this in expert only.
18/11/2008 at 15:15 Fox1 says:
“To be fair, this is canon. According to the Zombie Survival Guide…”
Brooks is “canon” now? How the heck did that happen? I admit that the man put a decent amount of thought into his little read-it-on-the-can pamphlet, but I’m not ready to elect him president of the undead genre.
18/11/2008 at 15:17 Deadpan says:
When I played Demo the witch wasn’t that bad. Just, like someone already said, a well-dressed landmine. The Tank is more of an active threat.
Pro Tip: BURN THE WITCH!
18/11/2008 at 15:18 cyrenic says:
We encountered a witch last night that was sitting on top of one of the ambulances right outside of Mercy Hospital. It would have been more comical had it not been right outside the doorway we needed to use.
18/11/2008 at 15:20 shon says:
“Brooks is “canon” now? How the heck did that happen? I admit that the man put a decent amount of thought into his little read-it-on-the-can pamphlet, but I’m not ready to elect him president of the undead genre.”
Well, that World War Z established himself further in the genre. It’s a pretty nice book with some great stories.
Back on topic, the Witch killed Bill this morning. The poor Vet accidentally hit her when he was trying to shoot the Smoker that had me.
18/11/2008 at 15:26 Irish Al says:
Singing? Crying? More your banshee than witch I would have thought.
18/11/2008 at 15:40 Paul Moloney says:
I assumed that as well; Irish minds think alike I guess. I figured she’s a banshee crying for your demise…
P.
18/11/2008 at 15:42 Pags says:
@Fox1: You aren’t serious, are you? Because I’m pretty sure Ginger Yellow wasn’t being serious…
18/11/2008 at 15:46 hydra9 says:
I’m always hoping for a monster in the safe room. I know when it happens, I’m going to dirty myself.
18/11/2008 at 15:50 hydra9 says:
One of the things I like about the Witch is the thought I get when I see her out of the corner of my eye: “Ah, I’ll be okay. *I’m* not going to startle her.” But bad things can happen – A stray bullet during a zombie onslaught… or just a mad Witch in a confined space. She managed to take all of us out on one memorable occasion, running up and down inside a train, flailing madly, knocking us to the ground. We were all panicking at that point.
18/11/2008 at 15:55 A Delicate Balance says:
Re: comments like “in the worst case she will kill a player” – sure that might make her less dangerous on face value, but you’ll get one tank per scenario (AFAIK) whereas a Witch could occur anywhere, at any time and, on expert, at least while we get to know the game, we’ll probably regularly find we already didn’t have all 4 players, even before one of the team fails to notice the Witch!
18/11/2008 at 15:59 Pags says:
Also, as fantastic as the team AI is, it has an alarming tendency of witch-startling. Leading to cursewords I never thought I’d even hear myself utter, and I’m cruder than oil.
18/11/2008 at 16:02 Redford says:
On advanced, maybe. On expert, you ARE going to sneak around the witch because she can take thousands and thousands of damage and kills you instantly in one hit without a down.
Speaking of eluding witches, one time a survivor managed to cause a witch to go into “flee mode” by slamming a door in her face. This was on normal, and I am not brave enough to try myself though.
18/11/2008 at 16:06 Nik Daum says:
I want to play this game so bad. Too bad I’m overseas for a while without a capable computer.
18/11/2008 at 16:06 LionsPhil says:
Sounds like Nethack’s Random Number Gods. Except that they will fatten you up with tasty loot, before handing you a tiny of cockatrice meat and saying “eat up”.
18/11/2008 at 16:24 karthik says:
@hydra9: “I’m always hoping for a monster in the safe room. I know when it happens, I’m going to dirty myself.”
We ran back into the safe room on encountering a Tank early in the level, breathing sighs of relief. The Tank promptly broke through the safe room door and proceeded to annihilate us all. Close enough? (This is easily the scariest, most panicky moment I’ve experienced in L4D)
18/11/2008 at 16:31 karthik says:
@Hermit: “Join the PCG steam chat. There’s a bunch of us who are (relatively) sportive, non-jerks who own the game. We’ve got 3 or 4 private servers up and running too, so no randoms.”
Aha! Thank you. I always wondered why I run into fourteen year old foul mouths with the IQ of a penguin and the twitch skills of, well, fourteen year olds who’ve been playing too much Quake 3. (In short, where do the RPS commenters play?)
18/11/2008 at 16:39 Ian says:
@ karthik: There’s an RPS Steam group too.
18/11/2008 at 16:40 El_MUERkO says:
the hunting rifle is my weapon of choice as soon as i can get it, 15 rounds semi automatic that one shot kills 90% of the time and pushes enemies backwards, stand behind a kneeling person with your back to a solid object and open a can of hurt :D
i am excited in my pants at the thought of getting home to some four player coop :D
18/11/2008 at 16:42 Cooper42 says:
I hate the witch. I hate how she knocks you around on her bee-line to the one that disturbed here. I hate how, when you empty clips into her, your probably just hitting your team mate half the time. I hate the curiosity that makes you want to get closer. I hate her crying. Her singing. I hate the people who forget to turn off their torches.
Most of all, I hate it when you cant avoid her.
I too have had a witch sit, hunched in the underground train in the demo. There’s no other way through. You have to pass through that train. You have to walk right where she is sitting.
A boomer had just startled a couple of us, and it was particularly frantic. In the aftermath, we all start hearing sobbing.
‘Is that a witch?’
‘Where?’
‘Flashlights off’
‘Where is she’
‘I can’t see her’
‘Flashlights off!’
‘Is that…’
‘Where?’
‘Oh shit’
…
‘Fuck, oh shit…’
‘What?’
‘She’s. She’s in the car.’
‘She’s in the fucking train!’
‘Crap’
‘Is there another way around?’
‘No, I don’t think so’
‘Maybe that hole in the wall’
‘No, that just leads back’
So, we’re standing there, milling around, not sure what to do, when the zombies come from behind.
A minute later, another zombie horde and she’s still there.
In the train. Sobbing. Crying.
We all know one of us will have to go first. Someone will have to bait her.
So we’re standing there, looking at the witch, at each other.
I fucking hate the witch.
18/11/2008 at 16:45 manintheshack says:
I’d say the witch has her scary moments, but I certainly can’t relate to the abhorrent creepiness referred to in this article. In my experience, the worst witch encounters are in which you miss all of the audio cues.
Example: After surviving a particularly nasty horde attack and hurriedly turning a corner, I lit up her face with my torch from about a foot away. She was just sitting there staring directly into my eyes. At the point that I saw her begin to rise I knew I was already dead so I just stood there and took it, like any good character from a horror movie would when they know the game’s up.
18/11/2008 at 16:46 Chris Evans says:
DuBBle has some freaky thoughts on The Witch here.
Personally I am still downloading the full game, damn uni work is keeping me away from the PC :(
18/11/2008 at 16:48 Fitzmogwai says:
Roll on 5.30 when I can get the hell out of this office and go home.
18/11/2008 at 16:55 Pags says:
DuBBle just ruined playing as Zoey for me :|
18/11/2008 at 16:59 jonfitt says:
We had a couple of moments last night where people really thought they heard a witch, but there wasn’t one. That’s how under your skin it gets.
She’s a great enemy, but I have a little problem with the model. It’s good sat down, or slashing at you, but when she’s running around with that big adult diaper on, she just looks ridiculous. They could have given her a nightgown or something, it just doesn’t work.
I guess they didn’t want to go for skin-tight underwear as that would have been pervy, but what the hell is she wearing?!
18/11/2008 at 17:10 LionsPhil says:
Left 4 Dead Rule 34 already? The Internet moves quickly and takes no prisoners.
18/11/2008 at 17:13 Ginger Yellow says:
“I admit that the man put a decent amount of thought into his little read-it-on-the-can pamphlet, but I’m not ready to elect him president of the undead genre.”
He was just one source. The latest issue of Walking Dead, for instance, emphasises that melee weapons are better than firearms in most cases to avoid attracting herds. That said, I’d be pretty happy to vote for Brooks as zombie president, assuming Romero didn’t want the job. World War Z is a damn good book.
But no, I wasn’t being serious. I find zombie snobbery asinine – if it works dramatically, it’s fine – and anyway, L4D clearly breaches canon on any number of questions.
18/11/2008 at 17:21 Paul Moloney says:
I found the Zombie Survival Guide underwhelming, but World War Z is great. Hopefully some smart people can mod L4D to create World War Z the Game.
P.
18/11/2008 at 17:36 Deadpan says:
Well. Mowing down Classic Romero “slow” zombies all day would get boring fast. I’ll allow concessions where, for the first couple of weeks, the metabolic rate could be jacked up allowing them to run, climb, and mutate into strange beasts of inordinate size and strength.
If we used Old School Zombies, it would be like this….
Francis: Screw this, we can just outwalk these things. Here, I’ll just hotwire this car here and we’ll be out of this mess in no time.
Bill: Good plan! I’ll just hold off these slow bastards with my bare hands, just like in Nam!
THE END *queue dramatic music, credits, teaser for Left4Dead: Zombie 2 Zombie
18/11/2008 at 17:44 Fumarole says:
I believe all of the weapons can penetrate interior walls, not just the hunting rifle. The Uzi for sure can penetrate brick walls as well. Last night playing Dead Air a teammate of mine was pounced on by a Hunter in the apartment directly above me. I fired through the ceiling with my shotty and killed the Hunter.
This game has many such Crowning Moments of Awesome.
18/11/2008 at 17:59 Alan Au says:
In one playthrough of the No Mercy demo, I found the Witch sitting out in front of the end-of-demo minigun. The choice was obvious…
18/11/2008 at 18:01 Ginger Yellow says:
“Mowing down Classic Romero “slow” zombies all day would get boring fast.”
Not necessarily, but it would be a very different game. Namely Dead Rising.
18/11/2008 at 18:03 RichPowers says:
L4D definitely needs more Nam jokes involving Bill.
18/11/2008 at 18:21 Smee says:
If there’s a Witch and I’m the lowest health on the team, I always set her off. It’s the Gentlemanly thing to do.
I saw the Braindead lawnmower scene reference in Blood Harvest today. Whee!
18/11/2008 at 18:21 Gorgeras says:
“Watch out for Charlie! They’re in the trees!”
“We’re in a subway Bill. There are no trees. By Charlie do you mean Boomer, Tank, Hunter or what?”
“Ok I know what to do. You pay her a few dollars and she gives sucky-sucky, but not to Louis because he’s black and she says black guys are ‘too big’. Sorry Louis. ”
“Er Bill, it’s a witch, not a Vietnamese prostitute and you’re getting this from Apocalypse Now. Stay away from the witch!”
“Ok Mei Ling, open wide…”
“NO!”
“RAWRAARGH-gulp” *choking*
18/11/2008 at 18:39 Chris R says:
1. There is an achievement to kill the witch with a head-shot… My friends and I killed all witches we came across last night on advanced difficulty, but I still haven’t gotten this achievement. We DID get the achievement to kill a witch without her hurting any of us though.
2. The hunting rifle is actually very, very, very useful as a non-scoped weapon. As some have already mentioned, it shoots through most objects, not to mention the infected. I was usually top of the list for kills because in the right conditions I could kill 3+ zombies with one hit (if they were coming at us through a hallway for example). The hunting-rifle is my weapon of choice, and I hardly ever use the scope for sniping. It reminds me of the un-scoped K98 from Day of Defeat actually… one hit kills anywhere on the body, and rapid rate of fire.
18/11/2008 at 18:42 Blinky Bill says:
Am I missing something? I play on expert only (demo only so far too) and all I do is shoot her so she goes mental, then just step out of her way. She invariably runs off down the tracks and gets stuck going back and forth between two points, at WITCH POINT (ahaha… no) you can either waste 200 odd rounds killing her or just walk on feeling non-plussed.
18/11/2008 at 19:13 Fitzmogwai says:
*cough*
Full Metal Jacket
18/11/2008 at 19:36 SightseeMC says:
Fitz,
His “jokes” didn’t work anyway, so no need to bother.
18/11/2008 at 19:42 Deadpan says:
I’ll be happy when I get me a Lobotomizer from WWZ.
For those who haven’t read it yet, a Lobo is a combination Shovel and Two-Handed Axe.
18/11/2008 at 19:44 PHeMoX says:
It is sadly too easy to play it as any other FPS
That’s the main reason why I won’t buy the full game… at least for now. It’s WAY too easy. Totally utterly easy. On the default setting you can win with eyes closed, what kind of game is that?
It totally lacks challenge, it totally ruined my first impressions of the game and especially ruined my hopes for a challenging game on higher difficulties. So sad.
18/11/2008 at 19:54 Don says:
>in the demo the witch kept ending up next to the minigun
Or if you’re lucky, as I was once, by the switch for the exit nicely in line for the minigun. Since my colleagues didn’t seem keen I manned the gun and got it spinning. She made a couple of yards before retiring from the fight. It seemed a bit too easy, perhaps Valve should give her Tank style hitpoints until, say, 10 seconds after being disturbed so that she’s always got a good chance to get her fingernails into whoever vexed her regardless of whatever cunning plans the survivors cook up.
18/11/2008 at 19:56 Zyrusticae says:
@PHeMoX
Wait… what?
Did you just say that you never bothered to try the higher difficulties because the normal difficulty is too easy? What? Why would it ruin your hopes for a challenge in higher difficulties? What exactly are you saying?
18/11/2008 at 19:58 Leeks! says:
My experience with witches is almost always the same: We hear the sound, and three of the four of us turn off our flashlights. And then the last idiot intentionally provokes her, she kills him and at least one more of us, and then the ensuing wave of common/special infected wipes us out. Though I’ve found the playbase of L4D to be full of, for the most part, completely tolerable people, I’ve yet to play on a team without at least one person who doesn’t grasp how to play the game properly.
18/11/2008 at 20:07 cyrenic says:
@Don
I’m pretty sure that’s how it works on expert. My team has never been able to take down a witch on expert without her killing at least one person.
18/11/2008 at 20:14 SightseeMC says:
@PHeMox,
Um….ok. So, the fact that Normal is pretty dang easy (admitted) means you didn’t try the harder ones because you assumed they would be easy?
Tell you what. Go online and pop into an Expert game. If the beatdown you experience is not to your liking, I’ll cut off my hand and attach a chainsaw.
@Leeks,
So far, I have lucked into 3 really good teams, 2 on demo, 1 last night on my first real semi-run through. The satisfaction of 4 strangers playing like a symphony (of fire arms) was supreme. And having played with a couple of complete dumbasses, I look forward to leaving them to their deaths while we wander on, then not rescuing them until they quit the server and we let the AI take over.
18/11/2008 at 20:18 Deadpan says:
Myself having played with a couple of teams of dumbasses, after the second or third complete takedown I bid them farewell with shotgun blasts to the head.
Or… setting off the car alarm, running into the subway, firebombing the exit path, and winning the round being the only survivor.
18/11/2008 at 20:39 Nick says:
The full version is a lot harder than the demo.. in normal you’ll survive, higher up.. a lot less likely, even if you could get through the demo on expert easily enough.
18/11/2008 at 20:46 Satsuz says:
I like to use the noclip-like mode after I die (press space a few times, and you’ll get it) to scout ahead for my team. It’s kinda cool seeing the exact time and place the director decides “OH. I’ve got an idea. You guys are gonna love this…” and spawns his evil plan into existence.
Disembodied soul that I am, I still use the traditional paths of movement, to keep from losing my bearings. So I turn a corner into the side-room at the end of the line, before the stairs. To my surprise, the first thing a see is the witch. I yelped a little and instinctually tried to turn and run; before I realized she couldn’t hurt me. I got scared by a game I wasn’t even playing at the moment, really.
After I calmed down, my morbid fascination had me examining her, getting a good look at the details of the model. She’s still every bit as freaky in appearance as she is in sound, or in your imagination. A truly horrible creature.
18/11/2008 at 20:54 Corbeaubm says:
The tank generates a much greater “oh shi-!” reaction than the witch, but the latter is far more unsettling. The reason is that the witch can be avoided. Unlike the tank, there are multiple valid reactions to your fight or flight instinct. Because you can (often) sneak past her, the game encourages uncertainty when confronting a witch instead of the comforting gaming strategy of shooting anything that moves. You can kill a witch without taking casualties (been there, done that), but it’s often not the optimal approach. The witch changes your style of play, and thus enhances her emotional impact, in a way that the tank simply can’t accomplish.
18/11/2008 at 21:12 Down Rodeo says:
I just played No Mercy on normal to see how it “ended” – it was quite tough, I found. For instance tanks scare me now though, oddly, not as much as witches. I have to say being an achievement whore (dirty, dirty whore, it’s OK, I was playing offline) I was trying to headshot the witch with the hunting rifle. It never worked. The rifle is really good though… I like popping heads. Dunno how it is against the tank, though; I unloaded shots into it as quickly as I could and it just got angrier. But I am so glad I bought this game. I’ve had to stop myself already, I have exams in three weeks. Bad timing
ValveEdinburgh University.18/11/2008 at 21:20 sammy says:
I’ve been thinking a lot about this game (I don’t own it yet, but I played the demo about 15 times). I love it–don’t get me wrong–but I’ve always thought it was missing something. It feels more “action” than “horror.”
Then, I realized the issue: the root of the fear in the great zombie flick is not necessarily the zombies ripping you to shreds. that fear, alone, is great for shocking moments and initial feelings of dread, but it’s rarely enough to sustain full film in a satisfactory way. It’s the tension and paranoia that build up between the characters in the film. Ultimately, zombies don’t kill the characters–they tear each other apart. When I play “Left 4 Dead,” I worry about the zombies, not my teammates (save, of course, the occasional griefer).
I don’t just mean contagious zombieness (although that would be a nice touch). I’m talking about infighting over limited resources, plans of attacks, etc. I know this might seem weird, but something akin to the mechanics of the Zelda: 4 Swords series might be interesting. A bit of tit-for-tat style game theory: sure, if everybody works together, everybody benefits. But a properly timed double-cross could increase the benefit for one (at the cost of the others). Such a dynamic could change the entire tone of the game.
All this is a long way of saying that that’s what makes the witch so great. In a perfect world, most witches are easily avoidable. You shut off your lights, find her, and move around her. The tension comes from the fact that you’re trusting three people you don’t fully know to do the right thing as well.
18/11/2008 at 21:24 PHeMoX says:
@PHeMox,
Um….ok. So, the fact that Normal is pretty dang easy (admitted) means you didn’t try the harder ones because you assumed they would be easy?
Tell you what. Go online and pop into an Expert game. If the beatdown you experience is not to your liking, I’ll cut off my hand and attach a chainsaw.
Better start cutting… I obviously DID try out the harder levels of difficulty as well.
18/11/2008 at 21:37 John Walker says:
I’m really loving the people saying that the entire game is too easy, based on the first level and a half of a campaign. Tee hee.
Here’s a sentence that’s going to be typed a lot tonight:
“Um, guys? Can we… er… vote the difficulty down now?”
18/11/2008 at 21:46 Cigol says:
I’ve not tried expert yet, but normal and advanced are pretty straightforward when it comes to the witch. Lets say expert mode is exceptionally different (and by all accounts; it is) there’s still a valid complaint that the witch (touted as the most dangerous creature by Valve themselves) is something of a misnomer on the lower difficulty levels.
@Sammy; right on. Agreed. Left 4 Dead is just the beginning I suppose.
18/11/2008 at 21:54 clovus says:
Did the difficulty change a bit sometime yesterday? I know a change went through where rescued players only have the handgun, but it seemed like the hardest difficulty level got a lot worse last night. Maybe I was just unlucky, and my team sucked, but we were getting raped by 3 boss zombies at a time repeatedly. I had generally been able to muddle my way through the demo before.
I’m all for the game being super difficult. This is one of the few FPSs I’ve ever played that is fun to lose. Just as long as the director occasionally throws you a bone instead of another tank once in awhile.
18/11/2008 at 22:06 Pags says:
Too much arguing over the difficulty worries me; it makes me think that I’m going to have trouble finding games where people aren’t adamant to prove how macho they are by going through on Expert when Advanced might be preferable.
“Pfft, advanced is too easy, tanks aren’t that hard *die* hey, why didn’t you have my back, man?”
Shudder.
18/11/2008 at 22:20 Cashii says:
There actually seems to be only a single way to kill a witch with a single headshot – and that is sneaking up on her and giving out a shotgun blast to the neck. I tried to do it with a grenade, with a minigun, with the sniper and with various kinds of fire. Apart from the shotgun, nothing was enough.
It’s pretty easy to do if she’s sitting next to the minigun in the subways, as you can hide behind the nearby steel girders.
For reference, she has 1000 health on advanced. A tank has 8000.
18/11/2008 at 22:25 Stense says:
I’m a fan of the Witch, such a good idea for a game element. Sure the Tank is a harder foe, thats its role, but the Witch is complete wildcard in the game. She could be easy to take down no problem, but equally she could tear through your team in a second and leave you that extra bit vulnerable to the horde, if not kill you all outright. Its that element of uncertainty with the Witch that, for me, makes her such a good, creepy monster.
18/11/2008 at 22:38 Aftershock says:
Witches (know as Bitches in every team i’ve played on) and Tanks are both really scary, but different types. The witch means we have to go slow and careful, and watch our shooting. Tanks are less of a “alright… careful… lets go around..” and much more of a “Uh.. that sounds like a tank…. yes. yes its a tankSHIT TANK BACK UP BACK UP SHIT TANK TANK TANK!!!!!”
@sammy, thats a good point, the fear of the witch comes mainly from the fact that you don’t know if your teammates are going to alert the witch, or be of any help if it is necessary to do so.
I also found that the main problem behind the witch was less the witch herself, but the fact that when disturbed a wave of common infected suddenly comes. Does it actually do this? because on Advanced in the demo, thats how it always seemed to happen with me..
18/11/2008 at 22:43 Deadpan says:
Yes. The Witch is not so much a threat in herself, not more than the Hunter or Smoker. She is more like a landmine. Only instead of a facefull or shrapnel. You get a facefull of angry banshee and a assfull of zombies.
18/11/2008 at 22:45 PHeMoX says:
I’m really loving the people saying that the entire game is too easy, based on the first level and a half of a campaign. Tee hee.
Here’s a sentence that’s going to be typed a lot tonight:
“Um, guys? Can we… er… vote the difficulty down now?”
Yeah funny guy, I’m sure the full game is a totally different experience. In that case it’s a bad demo as it’s not representative. I do enjoy shooting up zombies, so I might as well go ahead and grab me a copy.
18/11/2008 at 22:45 Unrein says:
I don’t find the game scary at all, which is kind of strange since I shit my pants just playing F.E.A.R.. Though it does get your heart racing more than enough, especially when you’re alone against a tank when all others have died…
18/11/2008 at 23:26 Y3k-Bug says:
God people can complain about ANYTHING.
The demo is too easy? Jesus christ.
18/11/2008 at 23:32 Deadpan says:
I didn’t realize it was unlocked yesterday.
I took a sickday too, I could have been mowing down zombies like I was mowing down an inordinate number of criminals in City of Heroes. (You’d think they’d have street crime wrapped up already.)
This error WILL be rectified.
As for mods, I wouldn’t mind playing Portal with three friends and an assload of Zombies.
19/11/2008 at 02:53 hydra9 says:
@clovus:
Glad you mentioned that about the difficulty going up last night. It certainly seemed that way. I know the demo updated, and after that we actually couldn’t get through on Expert. Plus it did seem there were more boss enemies around. I’ll certainly be starting off on advanced (or maybe even normal) when I get the full game.
19/11/2008 at 02:58 Demikaze says:
My favourite thing about the game so far, having only played the demo many times, is that I don’t play it like I used to seriously with Quake 2 and the like. We’re talking years ago but it used to be all about hit boxes and console commands to make the water transparent so you could shoot your foe :). My point is that unlike every multi-player game I’ve played recently, I’m tending to get involved with each scenario in this. As in I’m role-playing a little, I’ll peak around a corner knowing full well that it might be the end of me. I act like I’m in the apocalypse and it’s wonderful. I’m not twitch shooting (well, I am in context) – instead, I’m shuffling around, checking angles on door ways, and the like, constantly calling ‘Bill’ like a love-sick puppy. I’m just not playing it like some cynical gamer and I love it for that. The only thing that I shouldn’t be concerned about, being the avid gamer I am, is the versus mode – will it undermine everything I’m loving about i?
19/11/2008 at 03:43 Ishy says:
Hah, O Fortuna was playing while reading this. Just great combo.
I don’t quite understand the flashlight hate with witches. I haven’t messed about much in the full version, but in the demo at least it didn’t seem to make a great deal of difference if you’re aren’t an idiot.
19/11/2008 at 04:30 Erlam says:
To give it (my) perspective – I beat the demo on advanced, where the most damage I ever took got me to 33%, and that was at the very, very end.
On the hardest, however, I haven’t beat the demo. Granted, I’m going with the A.I., which as far as I can tell has no fucking idea what it’s doing.
19/11/2008 at 08:12 Stromko says:
If there’s one complaint I have with Left 4 Dead, it’s that in Versus the team that’s behind tends to lose members and never get them back, with no apparent way to rectify this. I’ve had trouble even joining a versus server to fill the gaps, myself, it’s as if the matchmaking and browser system are conspiring to make these things peter out 9 times out of 10.
The survivor AI is buggedly incapable of handling Versus mode, I’ve seen them just stand and stare, from 3 feet away, while a Hunter was wailing on my face. All it had to do was tap the melee key and it failed, had to wait for another player to shoot the thing off me.
The worst part is that the AI has no initiative, so if it’s the empty team’s turn to play survivors they never leave the safe house and the game just hangs in limbo.
I’ve been on a dedicated server where the infected all left, nobody came to replace them, we got rescued, but we couldn’t finish the campaign because there was nobody on the other team. We waited about 5 minutes during peak hours and nobody came so we just gave up and quit.
19/11/2008 at 09:34 left 4 dead enthusiast says:
PRetty fucking cool game, only played the demo, will buy the final game.
Too easy? Ridicolous. Expert is superb, a very hard but doable challenge. And I’m talking about the first two levels in the demo, I suppose the game gets tougher later on.
19/11/2008 at 09:57 The Apologist says:
The thing I love about the Witch is, as John’s article points out, it just changes the mood immediately. I was playing a level where she was placed right in the middle of a tunnel we had to go through.
It went from frenetic action to completely still immediately. We all just stood there, knowing we had to disturb the witch.
It took a good 2 silent minutes before anyone said, ‘Right, we’d better do this…’
19/11/2008 at 11:43 PHeMoX says:
I know the demo updated, and after that we actually couldn’t get through on Expert.
I’m pretty sure it did not get updated as I have played until the last few minutes before the demo got locked (apparently for everyone).
19/11/2008 at 12:05 TheDeadlyShoe says:
The sniper rifle is really better than any other weapon, except that it’s not worth shit on the move. So its pretty good at finales and holdouts, but otherwise mediocre.
19/11/2008 at 13:28 clovus says:
@Phemox
No, it did update, I just don’t know if it affected the difficulty. I don’t have my computer on all the time, and I manually start steam. I played the day before, and when I went to play the next day I had to wait for it to update.
Did you notice the change where rescued players lose their main weapon? Probably not since you’re so 1337 you never died. If the difficulty did go up a bit you probably wouldn’t notice that either for the same reason.
It’s quite possible that my team just sucked or something too. Perhaps I’m terrible at the game and only ever got through Expert by randomly ending up on a decent team.
Anyway, I’m sad that the demo is gone. I still can’t stomach paying $45 for this. When the Orange Box came out I got it for $25 on “Black Friday” (crazy day after Thanksgiving shopping; don’t know if this is a US only thing). I don’t think that will happen this year though…
19/11/2008 at 15:19 cyrenic says:
Regarding difficulty:
Initially last night I was playing with 2 friends with which I had coasted through expert on the demo many times. We had to turn it down to advanced to beat the full second level of the first campaign. I can’t imagine how hard a climax on expert is going to be (but I can’t wait to try).
19/11/2008 at 16:23 SightseeMC says:
@PHeMox,
Didn’t mean to sound too harsh; hoped the Evil Dead reference would get across the “not so serious” aspect of the post. Sorry.
Anyway, first climax last night, on the top of Mercy Hospital. Good team, with 1 very experienced player (for a 1-day old game), 1 other demo repeater like myself, and a decently talented newbie. We lasted all of 5 – 7 minutes…3 times. Rarely have I been so satisfied with an asskicking by a game.
19/11/2008 at 16:59 Broseph says:
I just had my creepiest run-in with the witch last night. Usually games with enemies like that are black and white. The enemy is asleep, you bump them, they wake up, you shoot them in the face. A witch was blocking our path and I decided to test the breaking point and try and slowwwly hug the wall and slip around her. As I got close she raised her head and looked up at me with those OH SO CREEPY EYES and that “don’t test me, bitch” look. I conceded, and slowly backed off, witch still staring at me with raised shoulders, but right about when I thought I was clear it was like she suddenly made her mind up and charged me. Leaving me, of course, turning around to my teammates down the hallway running and yelling AHH SHE GOT PISSSED, SHOOT HER, SHOOT HER!
19/11/2008 at 17:23 Larington says:
Playing single player earlier and got to a point where had to take on the witch. For the first time ever, after emptying the first clip of my assault rifle into her, I abandoned further firepower, panicked and just started to leg it the other way.
Fortunately the AI is pretty reliable as far as taking out the witch is concerned. Except twice during this run through of death toll where one of the AI managed to upset two witches somehow.
19/11/2008 at 17:32 Quirk says:
At some point the demo changed on Expert. It wasn’t an utter bastard every time on Expert, but every so often a Director would turn psychotic, and when it did, it stayed that way. I’ve been on teams which simply gave up after being hammered by wave on wave of zombies and specials coming from all directions every time we stirred beyond the saferoom door. I successfully managed to get through a psycho Director run – but that featured the surviving two of us who were already almost dead from early on being pursued halfway through the level by a Tank before finally dropping it, having to kill three special infected (Smoker-Hunter-Boomer) in quick succession by myself on one flight of steps while on one health, finally rescuing the others and successfully strategising our way through the minigun section to escape.
I’m really quite sceptical about those people claiming to have nothing but easy runs on Expert. If nothing else, you should have at least taken an accidental shotgun blast in the back from a teammate in panic mode even when not facing the psycho director – and on Expert, that drops you really fast. Maybe all your teammates were super-cautious in their firing habits, but mine certainly haven’t been.
20/11/2008 at 03:13 Daniel Purvis says:
Whoever said it earlier, Witch in front of safe room door = bollicks.
Worst encounter we had was some idiot in our team attracting the horde, everyone low on ammo sprinting for the safe room door, where there’s a FUCKIN’ WITCH sitting in front. Someone lobbed a pipebomb. Someone volunteered to sacrifice. We made it to the saferoom alive, minus a player, who was resurrected anyways.
20/11/2008 at 18:29 Ixtab says:
I’m with the crowd that fears the tank more than a witch. Although I still scream at players that wont turn off their flashlights.
When the music starts up and the grounds starts shaking then it’s real panic. I like to recall the time on the finale of No Mercy before reaching the actual rooftop when I was on point so I was closer to the tank so I got the music and shaking first and said “Uh guys… tank” and the response was “You’re joking!”.
Once we thought we were laughing when a tank appeared right next to the safe room, we just went back inside and slammed the door and jeered at him… then he smashed right through the door as if it wasn’t there…
A tank isn’t too bad on its own if you’re in an open space and can keep ahead of it and lead it on a merry chase but if you combine it with anything else or face it in a cramped corridor it’s deadly.
20/11/2008 at 22:21 Davik says:
I was more moved by the lone woman I heard crying, in BioShock. Moving slowly around one of the more deserted areas, I heard this weeping. The wall to the right of my was made of just wooden panels, some of which were splintered, allowing one to peek through to the dimly lit room on the other side. There was a woman, bent double over a coffin, which as far as I could tell, housed the corpse of her deceased husband. It was a shocking moment – in this underwater hell was a mortified woman, mourning the man she loved. My first instinct – and that which I prayed the game would let me do – was to walk around and comfort her, to give her a shoulder to cry on. As I tried to do this, she heard me walking up behind her, and span around. Of course, she wasn’t just a woman anymore, but a splicer – corrupted by this once-utopian world into something far more disturbing. It was such a depressing moment to realise there was nothing I could do for this poor woman, yet I couldn’t hurt her. I literally stood there whilst she tore at me with her claw-like hands and let her kill me, or come as close to death as BioShock allows. I then reloaded to a previous save file, and decided to leave her alone, to let her be.
24/11/2008 at 08:42 Yokomoko says:
She isnt that scary the really scary thing in L4D is a Tank on expert becuase everyone is like OH F**k forget about everything else and unload your ammo on the tank and then you full team is dead if the tank isnt on fire.
26/11/2008 at 01:53 Nehr says:
Can’t say I find anything about Left 4 Dead even remotely scary or creepy, no matter the difficulty setting.
26/11/2008 at 01:54 Nehr says:
And I doubt it was supposed to be.
26/11/2008 at 01:58 Nehr says:
The Witch could perhaps have been a little creepy for me, if when huddled and crying she looked like a little baby instead, and when you got close she morphed into what she looks like now. The action in the game would also have to be turned down about 50 notches, because running around pumping out 500 rounds a minute, I just don’t find anything scary. You won’t have that type of immersion then, well, at least I don’t.
Games that are creepy for me are the Silent Hill type, which is slow moving, and a bit skimpy on the action. Gives more time for a different type of immersion.
I enjoy L4D though, great blastfest. But I’ve gone through the campaigns now, played about 12 hours, and that’s enough for me. I might go back and play some good user levels or new official content though.
27/11/2008 at 07:34 Nehr says:
The Witch is also REAL EASY to kill. You just throw a molotov on her before you start shooting.
27/11/2008 at 10:03 The Colonel says:
@Nehr: totally agree.
After playing through all the campaigns I’ve found that there have been few times when encountering the witch actually alters the gameplay. Sometimes she’ll bit sitting on the ladder/door/tunnel you need to go down, and at those points (assuming there isn’t a hoarde attacking) one needs to stop for a moment and consider the plan for killing her. But mostly a molotov renders her pretty shit and you can just run backwards shooting. It’s actually pretty rare than anyone dies from her. I think the game would be a lot better if it was programmed so that she never actually completely blocked your path, but if you did ever disturb her it would be by accident and she could wipe almost all of you out before you could touch her. Maybe resistant to fire, and able to run along the ceiling and freaky things. She just isn’t ever hard to beat, even on Expert. For her to work she needs to be stronger and the game needs to vary the tempo even more. Having played a fair bit on versus, you realise how difficult it is to actually die, and when you do, the penalty is waiting for a few minutes until the next cupboard/safe-room is found. If the witch knocked you out for the rest of the level and could always kill in one or two hits, maybe she’d be scary.
28/11/2008 at 19:59 Axon says:
The most irritating about a Witch is that she’s always in the wrong places. Example: Me and my team have around 20HP each, playing ‘No Mercy’ on Expert, safe house nearby and then there’s a Witch in front of it. I throw a molotov at her, and she attacks me like a madman (on fire!). She hits me and I’m dead because I already got incapacitated two times. The team goes on and I can continue to play in the next level (2: The Subway). Oh boy, safe house ahead! But then we heard crying again, we (well, two of us since the others were dead) just killed a f*cking Tank and then there’s another WITCH! We tried to avoid her, but she was on the stairwell just outside the safehouse. I have 1HP because I bled to ‘death’ after one incapacity. My mate had around 80 HP still, so he got to startle the Witch to clear the path and he did. SLICE! My friend is incapacitated and WHACK there’s a Hunter, punted me, incapacitated and we had to start over again.
I’m not saying the Witch was a bad idea, it’s a great idea. I only get frustrating because she’s on ALL vital spots where we HAVE to kill her because otherwise we can’t proceed.
29/11/2008 at 05:49 Cnopro says:
Generally most of the time I run into one it’s followed by cursing, shiting myself, running, and shooting. Personally I feel witch= a little tank and most of the fear can be dumped on: Not knowing where she is and who is around her, and to make you think, to not shoot randomly, to stick together and not split up in simple words No Heroes, Teamwork.
On another note sometimes she could spawn in better places.
We walk into the subway, one of us made a joke “Hey I know you, your a tank.” not knowing there was one. I walk pass the rubble next to the flipped train and get punch across the room in to a load of zombies. We break for it and the tank tosses a piece of wall a hits? A damn witch right in front of us she kills two of us as we are forced back to the tank, me and the other guy split. Then mic gets filled with screams and static (a classic, and horrible horror movie trick) and then the guy gets tossed right pass me into a horde. I make it to the ammo stash and Blam the witch runs into me, then a smoker grabs me , a horde gang me, a hunter rips me, and the tanks kicks my ass.
01/12/2008 at 03:22 chipp says:
Oh, very nice. She mostly reminds me of one of the bosses from Clive Barker’s Undying, I think it was Lizbeth or Aaron or a combination of them 2 created by my powerful mind.
03/12/2008 at 07:51 Robert says:
So I have the best Witch story ever. The other day I was playing and there was a Witch right in front of an escalator I needed to go up. So I creeeeeeped up and tried to go around. She looked up at me and snarled and I backed up real quick. So then I used some debris to climb up onto the escalator from the side. But when I got to the top of the escalator there was a Boomer, which I shot and was promptly covered in goo. So as I’m (blinded, keep in mind) fighting off the Hoard, one of my teammates disturbs the Witch, probably by hitting her with a stray bullet. So now, there’s a pissed off Witch I can hear screaming up a storm, a ton of infected, and I still can’t see ‘cuz I’m covered in Boomer goo. It was very hectic.
20/12/2008 at 04:05 Avisioncame says:
The first time I saw her it was really frightening. But I think this article, while well written, overblows her a bit.
24/12/2008 at 07:12 Andrew says:
The first time I saw her it was a quick shot to the head with the hunting rifle. Unfortunately this gave me a false sense of security…
24/12/2008 at 12:40 Reaper says:
First time playing my friends told me about her just as we heard the crying, me wanting confirmation if it was her I saw I fired a round at her just as I said, “Is this her?”. Let me just tell you I almost fell of my chair.
Still think its too bad you can’t play as her when you play horde, but nothing is better when your playing a full game and you spawn as the tank. Can’t help but shout “Its clawbering time!” as I swat my enemies away like flys on a corps.
11/05/2009 at 03:33 steve says:
and yet, on my first round ever of L4D, i got the witch hunter achievement. (kill the witch without any part of your team taking damage) maybe im just lucky…..
11/11/2010 at 23:16 phenom_x8 says:
This article made me remembered the first time I played this game and being watched by all my friends in College, they’re very surprised when I waS CHASED by her till death because of pointing at my flashlight accidentally!
Then they were aware that this isn’t usual FPS they’ve been played all this time, especially when I showed them the joy of splitscreen multiplayer using my “made in china” usb cotroller.
What a moment!