Left 4 Dead Hands-on Preview - Survivor Side
LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES
Left 4 Dead's health and death system is also unique. When your health goes down to 0, you fall on the ground. This is called the "bleed out" stage - while you're laying on the ground with your pistol(s) out and firing, you get a new set of temporary health that ticks down quickly, and when that runs out, you are dead and kicked to spectator mode. The special part of it is that while you're bleeding out, a survivor can come over, hold their use key while pointing at you and help you up. This doesn't take too long, but long enough (maybe 4-5 seconds) that it presents some interesting situations where you'll have a new horde of zombies charging right at you and you're just dying for them to hurry and get up, and you have to decide whether to help your teammate or save yourself. It's not just a timing thing, there's actually a nice animation showing your fallen comrade slowly getting up along with varying voice conversations.
When you're bleeding out, it doesn't mean you still can't get hurt. If you're getting attacked by a huge mob and get knocked down, they still attack. If a teammate of yours doesn't help soon you'll die fast. Infected bosses not only can see that you're down visually, but on their scoreboard they can see if a survivor is "down" or "dead". Also with this system, if all four of you are down, you lose because there's nobody to help anyone get up.
You can be revived (helped back up) two times and be just fine, but on your "third strike", when you get helped up you get only 25 temporary health that slowly ticks down. The screen changes to black and white and you hear a loud and intense sound of your heart beating. If you get knocked down in this state, you will die.
One way to remedy this, as with all bumps and bruises, are health kits. These are found at the beginning of the level and scattered throughout and in checkpoints. At this point you can only use a health kit on yourself, which takes some time. You equip it just like a weapon (press 4), then press the trigger button and an animation occurs showing you bandaging yourself. If you move while healing yourself, it stops automatically. Health kits heal a percentage of your health, it seemed to me to be around 75 or 80%, meaning the lower on health you are, the more benefit it gives you.
Health kits give you permanent health, but there are also pain pills that you can pick up that heal you with only temporary health. Temporary health is pretty self explanatory - over time it ticks away. A side effect of the boss infected Smoker's tongue choke is that depending on how long you are choked, the more of your health will have been poisoned and turned into temporary health.
Left 4 Dead is a co-op game, and what would a co-op game be without being able to help your friends out? If you see that a teammate is low on health, and needs it more than you do, you can equip your health kit or pain pills, and give them to your friend. You will be rewarded with a nice green award that goes on your permanent record. On the UI next to your teammates health you can see whether they currently have a health kit or pills, and also you can visibly see kits on the backs of survivors. In our experience this proved to be a very interesting team dynamic. A certain somebody on the development team (cough Chet) was very.. how should I say.. conservative with handing out his health kits and pills. There would be three of us with less than half health without any kits or pills, and there Chet would be with almost full health and a kit and pills. You'll be able to see what types of players people are by how willing they are to part with their sacred kits. I must note that although we joked a few times about how he always held the kits, it was Chet that was alive most of the time at the end of the map, and more than a couple times he was able to save me because he was in such good shape.
An important part of health that I just can't get over loving is how it affects your run speed. If you have 100% health, you run just fine and perfectly. With 1% health, though, you run a whole lot slower and visibly have a bad limp. This does a few things: one, if your team wants you to be helping them, they're encouraged to keep your health up because otherwise you'll slow them down. Secondly, boss infected can see you limping! Seeing a survivor limping behind the rest of the group is an exciting thing indeed for the infected. I wasn't really able to observe exactly how the speed/health system works, but I do know that a good tactic for a Tank was to throw a huge rock at a survivor, injure them (and slow them down), and then go in for the big melee hits.
Pictured below is a picture that Mike took of us playing (more pictures on the next page). In this one you can see what it looks like to be bleeding out.. down on the ground, view tilted, blood around with your pistol out. I was already dead at that point (in first person spectator mode).
After you do get killed and booted to spectator, there are a couple ways you may respawn. Usually the remaining survivors reach a checkpoint, which means you're back in business (with half health). The other way is that scattered throughout the maps are closets. You are not actually controlling yourself in these closets, but the survivors can hear you screaming for help and see your body banging up against the door wanting out. All somebody has to do is open the door and you are spawned back into the game, alive and well. When more than one person is dead, whoever died first gets out of the closet first, and each closet only allows one person to come back.
NEXT: Locating your team and first part wrap-up >>
