Ah, look to the streets. Hordes shambling the streets, looking for last minute bargains. Why, it’s almost enough to make you want to write some kind of satire where the consumers become monsters of some kind. But what kind of monsters?
For the eleventh game of Christmas, my true blog gave to me…
Eleven Zombies eating your braiiiiiiiiinnnnnn!
John: Here’s a problem with all the games coming out at the end of the year. When it’s time for the end-of-year round-ups, it hasn’t been nearly long enough since you last wrote thousands of words about the game. But there is so very much to celebrate about L4D.
There’s the pacing. We’re all intimate friends with the Director now, and are aware quite how significant a step forward in game design he is. Apply the concept to single player games, and imagine the stories you could swap, and imagine how much more tempted you’d be to play the game again. Apply the concept to an MMO, and imagine how it could relieve the tedium. It’s rather brilliant that an idea developed to try and recreate the ebb and flow that could be scripted into a single player game might end up giving back more than it ever reflected.
There’s the storytelling. Obviously anyone who’s played is familiar with the way you find your own story as you play, because it’s four people working together against changing odds. Retelling that afterward is the cosily modern equivalent of the frightening posh group returning from the hunt. Except where the fox killed three of them, and the last one nearly fell out a helicopter. But there’s also a lot more storytelling going on within the game that many are giving it credit for. I think people take writing on the wall for granted. It’s hard to remember that most games have utter gibberish spammed on their walls, the same miserable comments repeated with the texture brush. Here unique and cunningly placed insight into a barely enunciated background story hint at horrors others have faced, and the potential of safety somewhere further along. They give you both hope and ill-portent. And of course there’s hundreds of lines of dialogue. Often it’s drowned out by voice chat, but ludicrously specific lines are written for ludicrously specific situations, that you’ll likely only hear once in all the time you play. It all contributes to giving you enough pieces of the history to imagine your own informed version of events.
There’s the speed. People like to argue about the speed zombies are supposed to move at, and I’m sure it would have been an interesting game (interesting mod?) for a much larger number of zombies who shuffle, but L4D’s terror comes from the fluctuating speed. The downtime offered by the Director is only interesting because of the uptime between it. The terrifying speed of everything within means you are rarely able to catch your breath, and are so relieved on the odd occasion when you can.
There’s the gore. This is an incredibly violent game. Like nothing Valve have made. The blood splatters in HL2 were always gross, but were somehow displayed with decorum. You wouldn’t be afraid of your gran seeing you play HL2. Then the pharmaceutical cleanliness of Portal, and the Pixary-cuteness of TF2 (again, diluting the gore within), betray nothing of the all-out schlockfest Valve had planned for L4D. Heads and arms flying off, blood filling the floors and walls, bits exploding, screaming, bleeding corpses on fire… Marvellous stuff.
Oh, and there’s the Witch.
Jim: What a fine game this turned out to be. Both a solid shooter, and an innovative one: it makes me wonder who will go on to copy and improve on this model, and how they will do it. I still don’t think the lobby system works, but hey, Left 4 Dead provided me with more guffaws and giggles than any other game this year. It’s a game that has a solid sense of crisis, not just in the setting, but in the mechanics: when things go to the wall, you really know it. The cascading panic of a collapsing survivor team is one of the finest things in gaming, and clawing it back from the brink feels better than almost any other gaming happenstance I can think of. Few games leave you feeling genuinely so beleaguered. And that feeds into the awesome zombie experience. I get a huge kick out of giving the survivors a really hard time. Focused griefing, if you will.
A few years ago I was absolutely wrapped up in Quake 3 Arena, and at the time I felt like multiplayer gaming in small teams like that would be around forever. Ultimately though I found myself growing bored and the scene growing stale. Perhaps it was because there simply weren’t enough inventive games, or perhaps it because everyone seemed to gravitate towards Battlefield and Counter-Strike, two games I never really got on with. In the past year though, my unhappiness with the state of shooty multiplayer has been exploded, first with Team Fortress and then with Left 4 Dead. It’s all down to a single company. Thanks, Valve. (We’ll have a chat about Steam pricing malarkies in the New Year, eh?)
Kieron: It’s odd to feel this one settle down into a space in my head. As in, I’ve got my one-line description – Gauntlet Meets Doom – which is both a fairly accurate description of the game and as strong a compliment as Splendid Orgasms meets Awesome Orgasms. But I don’t feel the need to think about it more than that. Probably because I haven’t played for a few weeks.
For me the key thing about Left 4 Dead is surprise. Not the shock of being pounced by some creature of the night and finding a couple of hundred pounds of flesh and claws tearing at your face, or the jerk as you’re pulled back, wondering what’s going on before realising that a coiled muscle tongue has wrapped around your extremities and is dragging away, or even that moment where you realise the woman in rags who’s howling her heart out is starting to turn around… but actually the surprise that it was as compelling as it was. Co-op game with zombies? Yeah, the sort of thing you may get excited about. If you were 15. What price the future of games, yaddadyaddayadda.
But no. It’s awesome, and not just because the spray of brains from a skull is one of the most beautiful things in the world. Valve’s persistence that the linear first-person shooter can lead to fundamentally enormously divulging experiences is increasingly inspiring. Where others are pushing the genre towards what others have been doing elsewhere – Stalker and Far Cry 2, for example – Valve rather ask what else you can do within what may appear a limiting remit. And with every game, they’ve managed to show a new way to make corridors and pointing a weapon at people sing. TF2. Portal. Left 4 Dead. Some people get excited about the next Half-life – and that’s understandable and great. What most excites me about Valve is the next thing I don’t know about yet.
And the Witch. Yes.
Alec: Multiplayer games are still teetering on the brink of voice communication being necessary. Anyone who’s even slightly hardcore will have considered it absolutely mandatory for a good decade or so of course, but I mean the average player who stumbles onto a random server. Left 4 Dead is the point it became necessary. Part of that is the planning – by the time you’ve typed OMG SMOKR you’ve been choked to death – but part of it is the mood.
L4D’s greatest achievement is that it truly does realise the sort of dynamics we’d like to think we’d have in the event of a zombie invasion. Clearly, the reaction we would have is hiding in a corner, painting our pants brown and crying, but we like to think the absolute panic would reach such a crescendo that it clicked into some sort of adrenalised survival instinct. The Dawn of the Dead effect, essentially – we’re all suddenly expert gunsmiths, but we’re bickering like children and twitching in fear as we gun ‘em down. That’s where the voice comms really come in – half the messages that come through from your fellow survivors barely make any sense. “Oh god it’s a oh there he get him where get hunter yeah thanksshit. Okay, who needs health?” The incoherency and the panic, but the simultaneous need to make everyone aware of what’s happening to you is absolutely crucial to the atmosphere. It’s nominally a co-op game, but in reality it’s a survival game – and those gabbled half-sentences reveal that it’s an incredibly successful one. The hands do the shooting, the mouth does the talking – and it’s the two together that put us in a zombie apocalypse, rather than simply a shooting gallery.
In contrast to Team Fortress 2, which works because of the mechanics and the characterfulness of the class designs, L4D is in many ways a blank slate – a game that works so well thanks to the people in it. In what other multiplayer game, for instance, would a total dick joining your group add to the experience? He’s not just an idiot or a griefer – he’s some asshat that happens to have survived the end of the world, and you’re forced to find a way to work with him. You might hate him to the pit of your soul – but isn’t that pure zombie movie stuff?
Related Stories:
Game of the year, and decade.
The infected don’t need a counter to turtling/hiding in closets. The only goal of the infected is to prevent the survivors from reaching the safe-room. If they’re hiding in a closet, they’re not moving towards the safe-room. Just wait.
I would argue that the infected get more useful info on what is going on. The information the survivors get it more detailed, but the information the infected get (i.e. the location of everyone) is more useful.
“It’s not meant to be evenly matched though. Vs. is a test to see who is better at playing SURVIVOR. Infected scoring isn’t factored into the en result at all. The winner is the team that got the most survivors through safely and with the most health. Nothing else. The infected are merely a stumbling block used to get in the other team’s way. In other words, griefing.”
a) You can’t seperate the two like that though, as your performace as the infected will lhave a direct impact on the other teams performance as survivors. i.e it’s a test to see which team is better at playing both sides – the difference being, when you’re playing infected, you’re tyring to prevent your opponents from scoring, rather than going after points yourself.
b) That isn’t griefing.
I liked Zoey’s line when approaching a staircase, something like “Ooh look, Bill, stairs! Your favourite!”
@Anonononomous “Perhaps; I don’t know how much of the actual work was done by Valve vs Turtle Rock/Valve South. I’m annoyed, though, that if I want to look for games made by the L4D team I might not be able to since all of Valve is called Valve.”
If you notice in all Valve’s credits, all names of Valve staff are shown in alphabetical order and without titles. I do not know of any company that does this. There are no egos in the company. There are no Cliff “Cliffy ‘Dude Huge’ B” Blezinsky, rockstart game designer who gets credit for the awesomeness of a game. There are no “We are the Turtlerock, creators of the Left 4 Dead game” team. They say that in Valve, when somebody working in TF2 gets bored of what they’re doing, they can come over to another “Cabal” to help out on whatever they can contribute. They’re the only company I know that lets you choose what you want to do. For Left 4 Dead, they brought in as many talents as they can onboard when needed. Do not underestimate the Valve testing and polish put on their games. Valve’s greatest strength is listening. To Indies, Modders, Gamers and every person in their company. Under them, Crysis would have been shelved, Mirror’s Edge would have been given substance, and most FPS RPGs would have had more people play them till the end. But don’t flame me for that. It’s just speculation.\\
My favorite quote is from Zoey as you look into a writing on the wall at Dead Air. She goes “Oh no, Zombies killed God!” at a writing that says “God is Dead”. She’s an adorable clueless teenager.
So did Valve finally make the demo available again? And if so, where can I find it? I’ve heard it’s a good game, but just have the urge to try the demo before plunking down $50 on a multiplayer game.
Anonononomous, your claims are a bit silly.
To take Portal as an example. A small team of students created the game Narbacular Drop as their final year project. Valve saw the game at a display of student work by Digipen, and recognised the talent of the students who made it, so offered them full time jobs. They then nurtured these new developers, and had them work with other employees spread across the whole company, to create the Valve game, Portal. The idea that it is not a Valve game because they hired new staff is bewildering.
Re Left 4 Dead. (Nevermind that Valve is Valve is Valve whether formerly Turtle Rock or not.) Along with Booth, Chet Faliszek was the nominal “project lead” on the game based in Seattle, and it was created by staff across Valve in both locations. If it helps, one of the lead developers on it was one of the original Portal team hired from Digipen.
It seems like you’ve decided you want to hate them, but haven’t found the right reason yet. Perhaps wait until you know of something terrible they’ve done, other than hire talented modders and give them amazing jobs and piles of money, to launch your ire? Er, hate them for the European pricing?
I heard Valve was really the Grey Fox.
Valve killed my parents and blew up my dog and then knocked my ice cream cone in the dirt for good measure. Grrrr what an awful company.
I know I’m eventually going to buy it and fall in love with it and sing its praises like with almost every other game Valve has ever released, but there’s just too much on my plate right now.
I guess the best compliment I can give is that it’s the only co-op game I’ve played where I didn’t instantly throw away all immersion.
I’m surprised how well the online multiplayer is working out (beyond the really random matchmaking anyway); I thought good games would be near impossible outside of LAN type instances or tons of voice comm, but the vast majority of the servers I’ve joined have played just fine without any of it (outside of expert, which seems to only really be possible with a truly great team unless you get lucky).
Well, then I guess I don’t ahve any good explanation for why I dislike the Half-Life games but not the ones that seem to come from outside groups.
Also, all of you saying that the infected always see the outlines and the my comment about playing stealthily is BS need to play the game more. The infected to not get outlines around survivors unless they are running, shooting, meleeing or talking. I know that hiding in a corner and not doing anything while the tank is out, for example, will leave him clueless. If the survivors plan it they can just walk and not speak and the infected will not see their outlines.
Left 4 Dead is the best multiplayer game I have ever played. It’s pretty easy to say that now :).
Not that that’s exactly a feasible plan for walking though a whole campaign, but, like I said, when fighting a tank the stealth can be useful if you have no molotovs and want to do hit and run attacks.
A customer was playing this at work the other night. Closing time came, and it was time to kick him out… so before quitting, he dropped his molotov in the middle of the survivors. The resulting voice chatter was hillarious.
Yes, the one thing I’ll agree with Anono is this: If you stand perfectly still and don’t make a noise (shooting, chatting) then you are almost invisible to computer-controlled zombies. (In Expert, when accidentally cut off from the other survivors, this has actually saved my skin more times than I would be comfortable admitting) Player-controlled infected won’t see your outlines but they might get lucky and find you anyway–usually, however, they tend to run straight towards the outlined people when there’s action afoot. And if you get puked on your outline will remain until the Boomerjuice wears off.
I recall one group that actually stood perfectly still during a tank attack and waited the tank out. I don’t think it works for last stands before a rescue, but the tank actually wandered off and the warning-cue music died down.
Outlines are, for zombies anyway, a game representation of a survivor’s “sound” level. The more noise a survivor makes the easier he is to find; quiet survivors are almost undetectable. It’s more subtle than just “walk, don’t run, near the Witch” or “don’t shoot cars with alarms” and it’s a brilliant way to represent the concept of “sound attracts zombies.”
ITS SNOWING.
But not here in Australia. It’s fucking hot.
I wanted to like Left 4 Dead. I did. All the gushing previews and subsequently reviews, the cool new tech being talked about, the four player cooperative play focus (except now everyone’s telling me the game’s really about the competitive Versus mode. bleh.)…and of course, zombies.
Then I played the demo, and it was really simplistic and one-note. “Okay”, I said to myself. “That was kind of fun in multiplayer, but I can’t see paying $50 for that experience. Still, maybe with the full five levels of No Mercy and the three other campaigns, it’ll be more exciting. So I’ll rent the 360 version and see.” And I did. And no, it really was pretty much the same thing, only dragged out to the point of punishment. I fiddled around some more, played three of the four campaigns through and went through commentary mode. My initial “well, this is kind of fun with four people” turned into a realization that I was looking at a fresh campaign run as an ordeal to be gotten over with, any pleasure at completion being more relief that it’s over than any sort of joy in the actual play. So I sent it back.
Just not for me.
Note: I’m sure the PC version is the one to get unless your friends are all on 360, but I will say that I don’t believe my negative experience to have been colored by any inherent property of the 360 version. The controls worked fine, there weren’t any noticeable glitches or anything like that, and I wasn’t dealing with the denizens of the wider Xbox Live community, only friends and friends of friends. And voice chat is a lot easier over Live.
So awesome.
Now release the SDK please valve, it would be the best Christmas gift of all.
Left 4 Dead is definitely my game of the year. I’ve always loved co-op multiplayer games, but there are very few decent ones on the PC – and even the decent ones don’t really manage to encourage teamwork well enough to make for a really good game with random people.
What I really like about L4D is how it’s whole design philosophy encourages, even requires team play. If you’re a griefer or a loner then you don’t last 5 minutes.
The intro movie is the best intro/tutorial I’ve ever seen. It teaches you how to play without you even realising it, which is exactly how it should be.
This is also the first game where I’ve actively used the Steam friend’s features and voice chat. I’ve had several people add me to their friends lists after playing especially good games with them, and they now invite me into their games when I go online. So it’s great from an ego boosting point of view too. :-)
And the best thing it was only £20 from Amazon. Best £20 I’ve spent all year.
I absolutely love this game, from it’s basic, solid shooter feel to all the other elements; flawless coperation mechanics, an actually challenging difficulty level (expert. If you think it is too hard and at the same time you think there is not enough cooperation with other players, the problem is how you are cooperating, not the game), an incredible director ai system, interesting enemies (from the hordes smashing through walls, climbing obstacles, and dying in a great variety of death animations- oh, I missed those – to the actually sneaking monsters like the hunter and the smoker. Think about it, not many games have enemies following you around before finding the right moment to attack). THen the plot, the way it doesn’t get in the way, the way it is narrated by small details and occasional random bits of dialogue among the main characters (for example, in dead air I once learned that the military bombed the airport to preven the infection from spreading)
Versus mode is fantastic and there is nothing like coordinating an attack with (or against) your friends and annihilate the enemy team.
For anonomous: Valve made all those game. Do you really think portal was made single handedly by those college kids they hired? Others, more mature developers from valve worked on it. The same for left 4 dead. Started at turtle rock, then it was moved in and designed internally by both valve and ex turtle rock studios people
Valve screwed up with the demo I feel, only letting you do a week so people after that week can’t really see if they like the game. Doing a level which doesn’t really show The Director at its best. It turned me off the game.
I also hate having voice comms needed, one because my computer has decided to hate every microphone I have and I’m scared of buying a new one in case it doesn’t work. And two I’m not very good at speaking, I like text or just being a silent good guy who just gets on with the job. And socialising with the text speak.
IvanHoeHo, I’m fairly sure that the placement of tier two guns is always the same between teams. I didn’t think so myself, but when it was pointed out to be I started noticing it. All your other points are completely true, of course. Left 4 Dead will never be a competitively played game in its current form.
Though I don’t play competitively, and hadn’t really planned on it, I would like it if the score system could be a bit more fair. And that’s coming from someone who’s seldomly on the losing side (and not only because I think I’m better than most, which I do (though not all), but also because I usually play with my cousin, and our the team with two cooperating players to that degree will usually win anyway).
Day 12 hath no Skaven.
L4D can work competitively: the tank spawns and witch locations are close for both sides, but not identical. As it is now, a match would need to play a campaign twice, so each team “goes first” once through. Feature a 30-min halftime, and it’d work.
Although final level should only give 33% distance for making it to the radio. 67% for surviving the first tank. 100% for the second.
“I’m fairly sure that the placement of tier two guns is always the same between teams. I didn’t think so myself, but when it was pointed out to be I started noticing it. All your other points are completely true, of course. Left 4 Dead will never be a competitively played game in its current form.”
They aren’t placed in the same place. If I have one major complaint about VS it’s that it’s too random. I fully understand the argument that, if things were the same, the second team would have a huge advantage in knowing how the level would play, but it’s really not fair for one team o get a tank in the first 10% of the map and then other to only get one that has time to chase the survivors as they run the last 10 feet to the safehouse. The number of medpacks is also never the same and can really screw teams over. Even if you’re not playing for points, it seems like it could definitely lead to ragequitting if a player feels that his opponents are constantly being coddled with medpacks and witches that are out of the way.
Are you sure about that placement? I thought the same, but after it was pointed out to me I didn’t notice in any game that it wasn’t the same. That’s the only thing that stays the same, but I do think it does. It might just have been a very big fluke, I guess.
Sadly, I find myself unable to resist…
Yeah, you *could* walk through a whole level and not talk. Or sit in a closet the whole game. Both of which don’t work. Infected reappear near Survivors, and/or can run through the whole level at super speed and find slowwwwww walking Survivors before respawning. So that doesn’t work.
Closeting is great to avoid a rush of horde, and hiding from the tank is quite effective (usually, under a staircase, but it’s considered cheap by a lot of players); set the tank on fire and/or go full autoshotty rampage (with 3 or 4) on him for about 20 seconds. But eventually you have to show your face and get moving again. Again…not a successful strategy to win the game in the end, just a way to grab some peace. And a good team will hit you with their other Infected about the time the tank rounds the corner.
Now yes there are strategies. Yes, you can closet the hospital rooftop, which I haven’t seen on a Versus game since the first week of release, because most quality players seem to think it too is cheap to do against human Infected (perfectly fine for regular co-op). Teams defend the roof because it’s an actual challenge. And if you think any decent team I’m on will let you get away with walking a level, or moving more than 30 meters from your teammates, then feel free to find me online: I’m the same name in the RPS Steam group as here. :)
In the spirit of Hanukwanzmas, I will rescind my comment that you are a troll. I will just say that you’ve apparently been playing against 1-armed 5 year olds.
Oh and I always think of kids who only play as Infected and drop the second they either appear as Survivors in the lobby or when it’s their turn in the maps as the new griefers. Prats.
The gun placement is a mix of random and fixed. There are some locations where there are always guns (e.g. on a table next to one of the underground trains), and there are some locations where there are sometimes guns, sometimes not.
It’s true that a game can be randomly unfair on one team (I’ve been in games where one team got 1 tank thrown at them, the other got 3). But as it’s random in evens out in the end – sometimes you’ll be on the lucky team, sometimes on the unlucky team. I prefer it this way as it means you never know how the level will play.
Eh, I’m fairly sure there are no guaranteed spots to find tier 2 guns. If you’re thinking about the spot I think you’re thinking of, you’re wrong. You could be thinking of somewhere else, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen no guns at one point in all the spots I’ve seen guns.
I never said walking through a level was a viable strategy. I was just refuting that people were saying that the infected always see the green. Hiding is most effective against tanks since once you light them on fire they die in 40 seconds. There is no benefit towards the fire timer to shooting them so it is best to light them and run/hide. You can also shoot them but the damage from weapons and from fire are completely separate, for some reason. You can’t use the closet on No Mercy in VS because it doesn’t exist. It’s one of the examples of how maps are slightly changed for VS. Another would be that the air conditioner shorcut at the start of No Mercy does not exist in VS. A bunch of closets are removed in VS in general. The only “closet” area I know od in the NM finale is hiding under the ramp. I’ve never experienced it but I’ve heard of people doing it. I play against and with plenty of good people.
I’m not in the RPS group since I always play with SA goons, though. My Steam handle is Anonononomous if you care to look me up, though. Mayhaps a challenge between Steam groups.
What, like Turtle Rock and Valve? Duh dum dum *drum falls over*
Under the ramp is irritating, I’ve done it a few times but it’s basically unstoppable, even when the tank comes, a normal closet will get you killed then but if you all focus fire the tank from the ramp he doesn’t stand a chance.
There’s also a very irritating glitch whereby the infected team can end up with hundreds of AI special infected. I once got to the safe room of No Mercy stage 4 only to find it absolutely full of AI hunters that pounced the entire team. The same glitch can also cause tanks not to spawn which is very very irritating in the finale as the transport will never arrive because the director constantly waiting for you to kill the tank that doesn’t exist.
It’s not the game glitching out. It’s infected with hunters going to a location and entering spectator mode. The hunter will remain and then they will respawn as another hunter and repeat ad infinitum. It does screw them out of getting a tank, though. It’s not as effective against a speedrun, which is how VS should be played, but it is amusing.
Hey Anono, please stop talking.
Ah ’should’…. It sounds a little like shed, maybe shovel, but contains none of their earthy realism, but simply the connotations of an attempt to impose unreasoned limitations. And a safe room being full of an infected that appears (in the normal course of play) individually isn’t a glitch? Say wha’?
I was differentiating between the game causing the glitch and players intentionally abusing the glitch.
Also, when I played and people were abusing it, it kept the infected from getting a tank within the level, but once the finale standoff came, both tanks arrived normally.
http://kotaku.com/5118863/chet-faliszek-talks-left-4-deads-future
11 minutes in, Chet Faliszek says that Left 4 Dead was not a Valve game.
This explains a lot.
No game before Left 4 Dead ever made me so worried when nothing was happening.
That glitch might explain why we were stuck on the last level of a VS game of Blood Harvest, with no transport. In the end three of us held out against the infected team for a good 10-15 mins, really irritating them into the process, whilst switching between holdouts in the barn and the house.
Next up it was our go and we killed all of them in the first section, causing all four to rage quit.
good times :)