Feature: Interview: Left 4 Dead - Official Xbox 360 Magazine

interview: Left 4 Dead
15-May-2008 We talk to Valve's Doug Lombardi about the up and coming co-op survival horror...
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If we had to bet our money one sleeper hit that's sneaking up on unsuspecting Xbox 360 audience this year, it's Left 4 Dead.

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Which is ironic because sneaking is the last thing it does. Despite featuring zombies and being loosely thrown into the survival-horror genre alongside flat-footed compadres Silent Hill and Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead is one of the fastest, craziest games you will ever play.

With a speed more in line with classic PC shooters like Quake or Unreal, zombies relentlessly charge at you from all angles as you have to fight for survival, praying that last shotgun blast wasn't your last before you have to reload and healing injured team-mates while they fend off the advancing horde. It's chaotic, it's messy and its unwavering sense of fun will make you feel giddy and giggly.

At the recent EA Games Showcase event, we caught up with Valve's Doug Lombardi while games journalists in the background whoop, holler and screech their way through the latest level being shown off.

What's It About?

Doug, tell us about Left 4 Dead.
So, Left 4 Dead is a new game from Valve. It's a survival horror themed game that's attempting to take co-operative gameplay to the next level, sort of hinged on this notion of an AI director, which is the commander if you will of all the AIs that's running in the game. Primarily it's there to try and keep the game dynamic, so each time you play the game it's a little bit different, you won't be able to predict where the zombies are going to be each time you enter a given room.

It's also there to help monitor pacing. We have this thing that we call battle fatigue, that a lot of action games are guilty of where it's non-stop being barraged with combat. We actually think there's a bit of a benefit for having moments of calm, to give players a break from that non-stop battle stuff. To also create eerie moments, so that when the battles do come up, they feel much more like higher experiences.

The last thing the AI director is doing is keeping an eye on the team. While the game has three difficulty settings like any other game, because it's a co-operative game, the team's skill set may change during the course of the game. So if you starting acting as a unit more efficiently, the AI director will recognise that and maybe crank up the difficulty a little bit. Conversely, if you guys aren't doing so well and a couple of players go down, the AI director will back off a little bit and recognise that you're down a couple of men, just to make sure that it's fun.

We have a really strong belief that we should spend our time making games that people are going to play rather than building a bunch of content that people will never get to. So we want to make sure it's never too much of a challenge that you just give up in frustration. We've all played games that we've quit before we got to the end.

On console, what games do you think Left 4 Dead will be going up against?
I don't know. There's a lot of good games coming this year. I mean, Gears Of War 2 is obviously a big one coming out, we're not coming out until November so we're pretty clear of Grand Theft Auto [laughs]. But for us, it's really just about nailing our project. It's really easy to get distracted by worrying about other titles and looking at press releases and screenshots and making yourself mental over that.

For us, we just want to make sure we're paying attention to what we're doing. We're bringing play testers all the time, we watch them play, we interview them afterwards and once we get a consistent level of feedback that's positive across different skill sets of players, then we feel like we've nailed our product and we hope for the best at that point.

Versus Gears

You mentioned earlier that some co-op games suffer from second time fatigue, when people learn what to do. Yet regardless of that, games like Gears Of War have been a tremendous success. So what is it about co-op that works?
I think the thing with co-op is that you're getting to a point now on PC where console gamers have kind of been for years, where you play together on the living room couch on consoles. I think there has been more development on the console side paying attention to that, whereas on the PC side, we've only recently gotten to a point where we can count on people getting together with their friends and finding a server that they like with a good connection and all of those things.

In the past, it's always been a bit of a hunting pack exercise to find a good server that you wanted to play on and then as soon as you left that server, you were no better off when you came back. You didn't have any equity in the stake of what have you, so with things like Steam and Xbox Live, you're able to create your friends list and play with your friends on good servers.

So I think the evolution of multiplayer gaming because we don't have a better word for it is co-op, which is basically 'I know I'm going to play with my friends tonight and I don't want to deathmatch because that's kind of mindless, I want something that's more intelligent and more advanced than that'. I think that's what Left 4 Dead is attempting to do and what games like Gears and other games of this nature are trying to get after is say okay, you want to have that dramatic, exciting experience in the single player games in a multiplayer environment now and we're actually able to count on players who are of the same skillset and of the same mindset playing those games, so the opportunity presents itself.

Do you think it will be a bigger success on 360 or PC?
We'll see! Orange Box did a lot better on the 360 than we thought it would and I think we're getting better at making games for both platforms. So it's possible, we'll see what happens at the end of the day, we still sell a lot of games on PC both at retail and via Steam. I would be happily surprised if it sells more on the console. If it sells more on the PC or exactly the same, that's fine, as long as it sells [laughs]

Going back to Gears Of War which has really set the standard for co-op on 360, how does Left 4 Dead stand apart from that?
I think aside from them being co-op, they're pretty much completely different. We're going after a game that's set in a survival horror theme, which is different right off the bat. I think our character design is pretty unique in that addition to the common zombies, we have five of what we're calling the boss infected, or the mega infected, that have these unique abilities.

The boomer is this big chubby guy who has a belly full of gas and he's sort of like a walking hand grenade. If you shoot him from too close, he'll blow you up as well as himself. He can also vomit blood on you that summons hordes of the zombies on you, which creates a completely different game experience.

I don't think that folks have seen as many fast moving creatures on the screen as what we're doing in Left 4 Dead, so I think there's a lot of things that we're doing that are unique.

Having a lot of good co-op games out there is a good thing. I don't think we're at a point where people are competing head-to-head for the great co-op experience and I don't think it's one of those things that people can really get enough of. Having a great game to play with your friends is something people want, so having multiples of them is a good thing.

I think the worst thing is if one of them is really bad and it happens to come out first and leaves a bad taste in gamers' mouths because the next time they go to think about it, they'll be like "the last time I bought a co-op game, it was kind of ****ty, so I'm not sure I want to buy that again". The pressure is actually on for both of us to make a good game and we'll benefit from that.

No Early Demo

Will there be a Left 4 Dead demo?
In Valve tradition, there will probably be a demo after release. We tend to focus on getting the game out and not pausing the release date of the full product so we can create a demo. It is something you have to schedule and it is another release, so you have to make the choice there between completing the game by a certain date and getting it out to folks who want the full game or trying to create more demand by doing a demo.

We've always taken the risk that there will be big enough demand at launch and then we can create more demand post-launch with the demo.

I guess the question then is, given the unique strengths of Left 4 Dead that's hard to understand unless you've played it, how will Valve convey those strengths?
I think we're already doing that. I don't think we've ever showed any of our other games in public and let people play them as much in public. Certainly not Half-Life 2 and Counter-strike just appeared through the modscene. But we've taken this to QuakeCon, we've taken it to World Cyber Games, we'll be taking it to Leipzig, we're just taking it out and letting people get their hands on it, take it for a test drive. Like you say, it's one thing to hear about it but then once you play it, it's kind of a different experience, so we have to take it out to the masses and let people get their hands on it.

Reaction So Far

What's feedback been like?
It's been really consistent. It's one of those things that I was surprised by because I thought we had a good game and then once we first started showing it to people, their reaction was so much more positive and enthusiastic than what I thought it would be, that it was like, okay, clearly that's why we're taking it out so much, clearly there's something to letting people getting their hands on it and we shouldn't be afraid of revealing too much like it's actually the bad thing to do in this case.

It must be great to hear the noise the guys behind us are making while they're playing.
That's the confirmation that we're doing something right. It's always a bit nerve-wracking when you bring titles out like that because press like to be poker-faced. A long time ago in a former life, I was a press person in the games industry as well. I know you come in and tend to be a little guarded with your feedback and stuff but when people really like something, they have an emotional reaction to it and you can't hide that, so it's super encouraging.

Is there any DLC planned?
Oh sure. Like any Valve game, post launch, we plan to support it with new stuff. Counterstrike has had probably hundreds of releases since it first came out years ago. Team Fortress 2 has already had a number of them and the game's only been out four or five months. We just see that as a staple to how we do business. You put the games out and then people want more stuff, so we try to put it out there for them and try to do so in as easily an accessible way as possible without trying to charge too much of a tax for that.

Achievements

What about the achievements?
We got a lot of great feedback from the achievements we put into Orange Box, some of them were there to encourage people to expose some of their gameplay styles and turn them on to some of the things we put into the game that may not have been obvious and a lot of them were just in there to be completely silly and over-the-top and just for fun. So I think we'll do a similar variety where there will be some silly things like the garden gnome you had to send into space in Episode 2 and there will be some things teaching you the game or turning you onto some of the things that are in the game.

Will there be 99 achievements again?
No, we only got away with that because there were five games in one box.

98 achievements confirmed, then.
[laughs] I don't know if we'll have as compelling an argument for Microsoft as we did last time. To their credit, they pushed back a little bit but then they listened to the argument and they let us do that. It was a special exception because I think we had a special exception of a product last time. We all got on the same page at the end of the day and sort of describing to them these really are different games in one box. Here it's one game in a multiplayer mode, so I don't think we'll even ask!

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Nice find, some interesting info in there

I like the way he talks about co-op gaming.

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Veiled Duality