Valve Provides Details On Left 4 Dead Survival Pack DLC

A post on the Left 4 Dead blog shares details of the Survival Pack downloadable content due out next week. It will be free, and available for both the PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game. "Our goals for Survival Mode are to deliver a mode of play distinct from Campaign or Versus, have games that regularly last under ten minutes, and emphasize competition with team play through leaderboards. Survival Mode draws on the planning and communication aspects of a successful Finale or Crescendo event, while taking it to another level. It rapidly hits a fever pitch that only a well coordinated team will be able to successfully survive. ... Given the extreme pace of Survival Mode, the number of zombies killed in a single round often outnumbers an entire campaign."

Comments

Re:Bad content:dollar

[NemosomeN]

I'm not sure what you want..... You say you don't want it to be DLC, but how do you want them to get it to you? It's already free. I'm not sure what you mean by MORE unless you are angry about having to pay your ISP. Anyway, $50 for a game is... kinda standard. I mean, it's more than the average on Steam, but off Steam, it's pretty normal. I'm not sure what you want. Maybe content that you already have that is only unlocked after some period of time? Because that's the only way around download it. Giving it to you and not letting you use it. You are a very strange consumer, and I don't think it's worth targeting you.

Re:Bad content:dollar

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Its free. You wont have to pay anything extra. You got your wish.

Re:Bad content:dollar

[Nihixul]

This is free content, right? I don't see where they are wanting you to pay "MORE". Then again, my contacts should have come out about 30 hours ago, so I might just be misreading something....

Re:Bad content:dollar

[Goldberg's Pants]

What a ridiculous comment. I agree that L4D is overpriced, but they're giving you this content, for free, just like all the TF2 content.

IT WILL BE FREE... Even the summary says that.

As trolls go, you didn't even try. Either that or you're a moron.

Can't wait for this content. Hoping Survival is playable in single player mode. A lot of people whine and say L4D is crap in single player mode, but I like taking it at my own pace. If I want to dash straight for the safe room and to hell with my partners, I can. If I want to shoot them in the head, I can. If I want to stand in one spot and just wait for waves to spawn, I can.

Online is fun, but I like firing up single player and doing speed runs through No Mercy. (I find the rooftop finale so damn easy now...)

Excellent!

[A Nun Must Cow Herd]

Having played multiplayer online FPS games since Quake 1, L4D is the first one that really felt like a different game to me. Part of that is the intense teamwork required - much more so than other 'team' games like the BattleField series. I'm not really into the whole zombie theme, but the gameplay and design are so well done that I can't help but love playing it anyway.

Thanks Valve for making a fantastic and innovative game better, and giving away the new content for free!

Re:Excellent!

[shutdown -p now]

I'm not really into the whole zombie theme, but the gameplay and design are so well done that I can't help but love playing it anyway.

It's actually interesting that the game is in many ways a parody on the zombie theme itself - in many things, from fast zombies (remember Zoey? "I can't get over how fast they all are, it's not even fair. I'm calling zombie bullshit on that, you know? *nervous chuckle* ... they're not allowed to be so fast") to occasional character comments (Zoey again, upon seeing an abandoned shack in the middle of the trees: "I know how this movie ends") to all the scribblings on the walls. It really takes some time to find all those little pearls, and it's enjoyable in and of itself. It certainly doesn't have much of your classic zombie movie atmosphere, but it has heaps of its own.

What's also interesting is that the individual elements in the game aren't really all that innovative by themselves; it's the combined result that truly stands out. It's also worth noting that it is one of the few games today that competes entirely on gameplay, and not on the "ooh, shiny!" factor - the graphics is somewhat dated (HL2 engine isn't brand new anymore). On the other hand, it's actually good, because you can play it even on old hardware with good settings (or you can play it on the latest-gen with everything maxed out and 16x FSAA).

Re:Excellent!

[Fallingcow]

If you listen to the developer commentary, they say that they came up with the idea when they found themselves regularly firing up a Counterstrike game with a few human players on one team and a whole bunch of knife-only bots on the other, and loving it.

My friends and I have been doing similar things since the N64. We'd play Perfect Dark against a bunch of melee-only bots, or play three players vs. one raptor in Turok: Rage Wars (we'd have played vs. a dozen stupid raptors, but that game only let you have four players no matter what, so we just had to set its AI to max). On the PC, we'd play one of the AvP games (I can't recall whether it was the first or second one) as marines vs. as many Alien bots as the game would allow, and just play to survive.

I'm sure many, many others have done similar things. For us, this is one of those "dream games" that we've always wanted; maybe we've even imagined it in our heads in some detail. I fired up the demo for this game, played a level, and was blown away because it was so close to what I'd wanted for years. I'll occasionally play a game like that, though usually it's some kind of RTS for whatever reason (Hearts of Iron II, Rome: TW, and Sins of a Solar Empire all come to mind, as does the Hoth level of SW: Battlefront). Every time it happens, it's like being a kid on Christmas morning, times ten.

L4D was one of those sorts of games. The Versus mode has proven to be where its long-term value lies for me, but the campaign is the part I'm in love with. That's the game I've wanted for the better part of a decade, and Valve read my mind and made it.

Re:Excellent!

[TheLink]

Actually the glowing of enemies in L4D reminded me of AvP2.

I think the AvP franchise still has potential as a game. Imagine using the crysis tech for AvP. Maybe the player controlled marines (as opposed to cannonfodder NPC ones) could have nanosuits, or maybe not :).

Re:Excellent!

[rossjudson]

You blew your chance to say that Valve read your mind, and ate it.

Shorter rounds

[skavenger]

It'll be nice to have an option to hop into a game for a little bit without committing to an hour+ long campaign or versus match. One of the main reasons I don't play very much is that I can rarely sit down for a couple hours and get a full round in.

no new maps?

[sentientbrendan]

The gameplay of versus is great... we don't need another game mode, we need *MAPS*. I can't believe they've been wasting their time on this. If they'd actually talked to anyone who *PLAYS* their game, they would know that people want new maps.

Everyone is tired of playing mercy hospital for the trillionth time... A new game mode isn't going to make mercy more exciting.

Re:no new maps?

[Fallingcow]

I'd feel like Valve had done right by their customers if they'd give us the two existing non-VS campaigns as VS--which they say they will do, but goddamnit Valve, that should have been done at launch or a couple weeks after--and at least two more official campaigns (for both VS and Coop). A new game mode is fine, but more maps are what I really want.

I'm less upset by the small number of campaigns than many are, I think, as it seems to me like 20 maps is quite a few for a multiplayer-only game, but given the nature of this one it just feels like there should be 6-8 official campaigns rather than 4. I'm sure we'll get some great community content, but Valve is just so damn good at what they do that I want more of it straight from them.

Maybe part of the reason it bothers me at all is that the game was so clearly rushed. The fact that only two of the four campaigns were ready for Vs. play was one sign, but others abound in the interface and menu system. Hell, it still (AFAIK) kicks you back to the menu if it tries to connect to a server during a server search and fails, rather than just re-trying with the same search terms which is what pretty much everyone expects it to do. They clearly tossed the game out to the public before it was polished on even such a basic level, so I find it hard to believe that they didn't cut some planned content for the same reason. That's what I want--the stuff they cut to ship it faster.

Re:no new maps?

[SCPRedMage]

Uh, both the remaining campaigns WILL be introduced to Versus mode as part of the Survival Pack...

Re:no new maps?

[SCPRedMage]

Also, they're supposed to release the L4D SDK at the same time as the Survival Pack, which will let people make their own custom campaigns "discoverable via L4D's matchmaking system.

So, new maps are DEFINITELY on the way.

Re:no new maps?

[anomnomnomymous]

One new map especially catering to the Survival mode, is released (called "Lighthouse"). Other than that, they also make the other two campaigns available to be played in Versus.

Other than that, you should really have a look for the multitude of custom maps/campaigns already available: Definitely with the SDK going to be released, this is only going to grow.

Re:Bad content:dollar

[derfy]

It easily needed 10 more story campaigns or a much longer well thought out scenario. Perhaps 4 "movies" all sequential to each other, each film featuring newer "zombies" with different features than the movie before it.

According to the ingame commentary, this and many more interesting features were scrapped due to playtesters feedback. You can blame them for the lack of sequence between chapters, the removal of the demerit system, and others. The pilot coming to the rescue in No Mercy was originally going to succumb to an infected wound he suffered doing a pickup before you (hence his line, "I just had a...an accident").

Survival mode?

[joocemann]

Bring it on! As if there was anything else to do as a survivor!

Re:Bad content:dollar

[Anonymous Coward]

It's free. "DLC" refers to a specific distribution system on the Xbox 360 - the downloads menu. Those are optional downloads, show up as game data in memory management, are priced to the developers whims (or released for free), and you can release as much DLC as you want as big as you want (subject to the whole certification process, of course).

Alternatively, you can release a "title update". This is that little window that pops up when you launch a game telling you that you have to update or disconnect from Xbox Live. It's a required download, can only be done 3 times a year, is mandated free, and gets stored in the hidden 8GB system partition that the console memory manager doesn't tell you about. I'm not sure what happens if patches fill up the update memory. Most likely, old patches get trashed and re-downloaded as needed, and there's probably a really restrictive size limit.

In short, calling it DLC is a consequence of Microsoft having two different pathways to deliver content through Xbox Live.

Additionally, I believe that the TF2 guys stated that the 360 update has been delayed so long just because they happen to be running up against memory limits on the 360.

Re:Bad content:dollar

[pharm]

Right now, L4D is 15 UKP in the UK from Asda online (It's been a tad cheaper elsewhere, but the rest of the online distributors have put their prices back up).

In the US, Amazon are selling it for $27.

Anyone who pays sticker price for games these days just isn't looking hard enough.