Left 4 Dead is a co-operative, survival horror, first-person shooter video game. It was developed by Turtle Rock Studios, which was purchased by the Valve Corporation part-way into development. The game uses the Source game engine, and is available for Windows-based personal computers and the Xbox 360.

The game pits four Survivors of an apocalyptic pandemic against hordes of aggressive zombies. There are two game modes: a four-player, co-op Campaign mode, and an eight-player Versus mode. In both modes, an AI, dubbed “The Director”, controls level pacing and item spawns, in an attempt to create a dynamic experience and increase replay value.

The game went gold on November 13, 2008, and was released on November 18, 2008 in the United States; and on November 21, 2008 in Europe to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the release of Half-Life. A five-minute trailer was released on Halloween. A playable demo was made available on November 6 for pre-purchasers and on November 11 for the general public, and was closed on November 18, 2008. The demo contained the majority of the first two chapters in the “No Mercy” campaign, and was playable in both single and multi-player co-op.

Left 4 Dead was well received with an aggregate score of 88% on Game Rankings and 89% on Metacritic upon its release, with praise given for its replay value, focus on cooperative play, and movie-like experience. Similar to Team Fortress 2, Valve intends to support the game with downloadable content.

Gameplay

Left 4 Dead is a first-person shooter but makes use of the third-person perspective during certain events or player actions. In Campaign and Single-player mode, the player takes control of one of the Survivors; if four human players are not available, then the remaining Survivors are AI-controlled bots. They play through the levels fighting off the “Infected”—living humans who have been infected with a mutated rabies virus to which the Survivors are immune.

The game is focused on cooperation and team play; colored outlines of teammates are visible through walls to help players stick together and coordinate their movement. If a Survivor falls off a ledge, then they may automatically hang onto it and can only be helped up by another Survivor. If a Survivor’s health is depleted, then they become incapacitated and can only be revived by another Survivor, at which point they continue playing with a low amount of health that decreases over time. If a Survivor has been incapacitated and revived twice without tending to their wounds, then they will experience distorted black-and-white vision, and the next incapacitation will kill the player. If a Survivor incurs enough damage while incapacitated, or is not eventually helped up by teammates, then the incapacitated player will die. If a Survivor is killed, then they will respawn in a closet or other enclosed space after a period of time (except during key points in the scenario or in Versus mode), but must be freed by another Survivor to rejoin the team. Otherwise, the player must wait until the next level. Survivors can share first-aid kits and pain pills and help each other heal. Left 4 Dead has friendly fire that cannot be disabled, increasing the need for caution around other Survivors. On the Easy difficulty level, friendly fire does not harm teammates but still registers as having occurred.

The Survivors communicate by voice commands that are accessed by quick menus, and some sound off automatically when performing actions such as reloading or spotting Infected. Over 1000 unique lines have been recorded for each Survivor. Additional communication of player actions is conveyed through character lights. Also, weapon-mounted flashlights and muzzle flashes help the players in determining whether their companions are shooting, performing melee attacks, reloading or moving. Due to control issues and the likelihood of players using a LIVE headset, the Xbox 360 version of Left 4 Dead omits the quick phrases feature.

The game is experienced through four campaigns that take place in various urban and rural locales. Multiple visual in-game hints, including license plates, park signs, and markings on airport equipment, imply that these locations are in Pennsylvania. Each campaign is divided into several chapters marked by safe rooms, which are checkpoints where players can heal, re-arm, and revive players who were killed. Specifically, the four campaigns are: “No Mercy”, an urban setting; “Death Toll”, a small-town and countryside setting; “Dead Air”, an airport setting; and “Blood Harvest”, a woodland and farm setting. The levels are essentially linear, with distinct beginnings and ends, but there are a number of alternate routes to follow with more supplies, helping to create a sense of non-linearity. In the final chapter of each campaign, the players must defend a position from an onslaught of Infected until rescue arrives. Each campaign typically lasts between 45 and 75 minutes depending on the difficulty level.

Survivor characters

There are four playable human characters in the game: Francis (voiced by Vince Valenzuela), a tattoo-covered biker; Zoey (voiced by Jen Taylor), a college student and horror movie enthusiast; Louis (voiced by Earl Alexander), a Junior Systems Analyst in his company’s IT department; and Bill (voiced by Jim French), a former Green Beret and a Vietnam veteran. Early plans were for players to be randomly assigned to characters but in the final release, players can choose any character—provided that the character has not already been selected—or be randomly assigned an unselected character.

Survivors are armed with various firearms. Each player starts the game with a M1911 pistol. It has unlimited ammo and is the only weapon that the Survivor can use when they are incapacitated. When a second pistol is found, the player can dual wield them. Regardless of what weapon a player is using, a melee attack can be used. At the beginning of each campaign, the player can choose between an Uzi submachine gun and a pump-action shotgun. As the Survivors progress through a campaign, more powerful weapons can be found: the M16A3 assault rifle, Benelli M4 Super 90 combat shotgun, and Ruger Mini-14 rifle. In addition to firearms, a player can also carry three other items in their inventory: improvised grenades (either a Molotov cocktail to create a wall of fire or a modified pipe bomb designed to attract the Infected to it, with a blinking light and alarm attached to it); a first-aid kit, which heals the Survivor on which it is used; and pain pills, which provide temporary health and can be handed to teammates for later use. Also available are environmental weapons, such as gasoline cans, oxygen cylinders, and LPG tanks, that explode when shot. These can be picked up and moved by the survivors, however while carrying an object they cannot use their pistols or primary weapons.

Infected characters

The “Infected” are the Survivors’ foes in Left 4 Dead, and they appear to be partly inspired by the infected from several modern films, including 28 Days Later. The Common Infected encountered during the game are fast and agile, weak individually, but may be overwhelming in numbers. They occasionally attack en masse, referred to in game as a “Horde”. In addition to the Common Infected, there are five “Special Infected” whose mutations grant them special attacks that make them much more dangerous: the Hunter, an agile Infected that can pounce on Survivors from a great distance; the Smoker, an Infected that ensnares Survivors with its long tongue at a distance and, upon death, releases a cloud of smoke; the Boomer, a bloated Infected whose vomit and bile (which may be released at will or upon death) blind the player and attract the Horde; the Tank, a huge, muscular Infected that is the most powerful and difficult to kill; and the Witch, a passive female Infected that, when provoked by a loud sound, light, gunshots, or a Survivor approaching too close to her, will attack her provoker. The victims of some of these attacks require assistance from a teammate before they can regain control. Each of the Special Infected, as well as approaching Hordes, have a distinctive sound or a timely musical cue, making their presence easily recognizable by players.

More Information

• Developer(s)  Valve Corporation, Certain Affinity (Xbox 360 version)
• Publisher(s)  Valve Corporation
• Distributor(s)  Electronic Arts (retail), Steam (online)
• Designer(s)  Mike Booth (director)
• Writer(s)  Chet Faliszek
• Composer(s)  Mike Morasky
• Engine  Source
• Platform(s)  Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360
• Genre(s)  Survival horror
• First-person shooter
• Mode(s)  4 player Cooperative multiplayer, 4 vs 4 Versus multiplayer

Links

• Left 4 Dead official website
• Left 4 Dead on Steam

Battlefield Heroes: Better than Team Fortress 2?

Work continues on Battlefield Heroes despite the recent closure of the game’s beta, and producer Aleksander Grondal recently talked it up with Gamasutra. Grondal isn’t a Battlefield developer veteran, instead having previously worked on Anarchy Online and Dreamfall at Funcom. As such, he brings a different mentality to the team working on Heroes, which he claims is a mixture of half newcomers to the series and half previous Battlefield developers.

The different mentality is largely an MMO mentality – which is most immediately apparent in the game’s new third-person camera which has been one of the main attention-getters ever since Heroes was first shown. Grondal said of the new view:

• The main thing about the third person: It’s about seeing your character. I don’t think many people are interested in investing in their physical, visual appearance of the characters when they never can see them.
• Seeing your character, and seeing that the new item that you have is actually on your character, adds a feeling of attachment to him, from a visual standpoint.
• The other thing is, we tried to make this more accessible, and I think that seeing your character in the world next to a barrel makes him more connected to the world.
• For new players, it might be more accessible, seeing your character – if I run up to something, and suddenly it stops in first-person, it’s, “Oh! I need to look down; there’s something there!” But when you’re in third-person, you actually see a bit more of the world, and your character’s relation to the world.
• Initially there, were some concerns, with Heroes, that third-person was wrong for a Battlefield game, but I think that once you actually try to play around with it, it feels pretty much the same. Once you actually get the hang of it, it won’t be such an issue anymore.

Another of the major changes to the game’s formula is the focus on individual goals rather than previous Battlefield’s focus on working as a team towards a singular goal. While the one current game mode in Heroes does involve capping points as a team and eliminating enemies, that’s pushed towards the wayside by the mission system, which is ever so faintly reminiscent of Quake Wars. You now select goals before you start playing and then set out to accomplish them by the end of that game. Goals range from getting a certain number of kills on a particular class or running over a certain number of enemies. Grondal explained, “It’s like, ‘Why is this guy always trying to drive over people?’ So I think that creates cool moments that aren’t just getting the best kill-to-death ratio; I think it’s about cool experiences.”

Following the delay that was announced in November, Heroes is now expected to have a proper release in 2009. We’ll see then if Electronic Arts’ gamble will have been worth it.

Team Fortress fans who have been getting their fix via the PlayStation 3 version of The Orange Box are in for a shock: The updates coming to the PC and Xbox 360 versions of TF2 won’t be landing on Sony’s console, reports 1up.

Additionally, the monolithic console is unlikely to ever see any updates from Valve. “We don’t have PlayStation developers,” said Valve marketing head Doug Lombardi.

“They’re not doing ongoing development on The Orange Box for the PS3.”

It doesn’t seem to be a matter of disdain for the PlayStation 3, so much as a lack of resources that’s preventing Valve from showing Sony’s console the same affection they offer to Microsoft’s.

When asked about the Xbox 360 exclusive zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, Valve founder Gabe Newell told 1up that the decision to make the game an exclusive came down to a matter of not having the “bandwidth” to port the title.

“For The Orange Box, EA did the PS3 version. They’re interested in getting a PS3 version done. We just have to figure out where the resources can come from. We don’t have the bandwidth. We’re doing the 360 and PC version ourselves,” Newell said, adding that he would like to craft a PS3 version, but that will only be possible as their “bandwidth allows.”

Valve: No Updates for Team Fortress 2 PS3 | Game | Life from Wired.com