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Valve Explains Quick Left 4 Dead Sequel
Valve's announcement that Left 4 Dead 2 would be released only a year after the first game has generated a great deal of controversy among fans of the game. There are concerns that Left 4 Dead will not get any additional content, the community will be divided, and that the quick development cycle won't do justice to the sequel. Now, Valve devs and execs are going out of their way to address those concerns. Left 4 Dead project lead Chet Faliszek said, "It just became very clear that this was a cohesive, singular statement we wanted to make, not a more slow update thing... too much stuff was tied together with too many other things." Developer Tom Leonard was quick to point out that work wouldn't cease for the first game: "We are doing updates across the summer, adding new matchmaking features, and new features to facilitate user maps after the SDK is out. ... Additionally, those maps can be transported into Left 4 Dead 2." Doug Lombardi said simply, "Trust us a little bit," explaining that Gabe Newell is "always talking about providing entertainment as a service — it's not about making a game any more."
"Gabe Newell is "always talking about providing entertainment as a service â" it's not about making a game any more." " Which is why most games suck now.
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Valve intends to support hotly anticipated zombie survival shooter Left 4 Dead post-release with new characters, new maps, new achievements and new weapons in order to grow the community, Gabe Newell has revealed.
Speaking to VideoGamer.com at Leipzig Games Convention, the Valve co-founder and managing director said the developer intended to follow a similar downloadable content policy as it has with Team Fortress 2.
Left 4 Dead, set for release on PC and Xbox 360 on November 21 in Europe, is primarily a four-player cooperative game that sees a group of Survivors battle through four 'Movies' and against 28 Days Later-style zombies called The Infected.
Newell said that Valve's support of the game post-launch will be essential for growing the community.
He said: "One of the things that we're doing is we seem to be in a transition between games as a package product and games more of a service. So if you look at Team Fortress 2, one of things that's really helped grow the community is the continuous updates, where we release new maps, new character classes, new unlockables, new weapons. And we tell the stories about the characters, like the meet the sniper, or meet the sandwich. And that ongoing delivery of content really seems to grow the community.
"So each time we've released one of those for Team Fortress 2 we've seen about a 20% increase in the number of people who are playing online. And that number is really important because it determines how many community created maps there are, how many servers are running, and so on. So we'll do the same thing with Left 4 Dead where we'll have the initial release and then we'll release more movies, more characters, more weapons, unlockables, achievements, because that's the way you continue to grow a community over time."
Remember, people were buying the game with this in mind. The game shipped incomplete at full price, with only two of the four campaigns available for use in Versus mode (pretty much the main mode). This was only recently corrected.
Besides bugfixes the only thing they added was survival mode and one very small map for it. There were no new weapons, characters, movies or unlockables.
I don't share the outrage that seems to be commonplace right now, but at the same time I'm not particularly enthusiastic about a sequel and I can see why people would be annoyed in light of what Valve promised.
I'm not wishing to be rude, but I think you kind of missed the point about L4D: it's all about the execution and not the content. Hell, I played CS constantly for more than half a decade over maybe, 4/5 maps, at most. Getting the game to play and flow so well was their goal, including 27 variants of weapons was not. I'd far rather have 5 excellent monsters than 10 ok ones. It seems they spent their development schedule on testing and perfecting the gameplay, so people talk about the mad tactics they can pull in VS mode and create their own little stories, all as a result of the fluidity of the gameplay. I reckon there will be loads of content over the next year.