Left 4 Dead Showdown LAN Aftermath Analysis
The Showdown LAN in San Jose is now over and fortunately for us there were some attendees nice enough to take some pictures of the Left 4 Dead booth (bottom of page, BIG thanks to omega552003 and Auzner). Mike Booth (CEO), Chris Ashton (senior environment artist) and Chet Faliszek (Mr.Awesome) are the employees I recognize from the pictures. Nice banner, and the setup looked cool with players playing on Samsung 320P 32″ widescreen monitors (running at 1366×768). Some people who had the chance to play have voiced their opinions on forums:
“FRICKIN AWESOME. i’m buying it the day it comes out.”
-iMax, pdxlan forums
“L4D was sick! The 4 player coop is fantastically done and the zombie controls are great. This game will shake up the FPS world as you currently know it.
My favorite moment in the game was when one of the players was vomited upon and targeted. He ran up some stairs where the rest of his team was waiting with guns in hand and were blazing away down at all the zombies running up the stairs toward the targeted guy. Great stuff.”
-vandalous, pdxlan forums
“Left 4 Dead is RIDICULOUSLY fun. No trailer I saw of it beforehand even REMOTELY did it justice. I can’t WAIT for this baby to come out. Lemme tell you from firsthand experience… addictive. I can see this thing becoming VERY popular. Not only has the world been at a loss for a real CO-OP game for a while now, but this thing does CO-OP better than I’ve ever seen it done.”
-Lennox
“Game play…..Its all about team work…sadly I’m a Individual Glory kinda guy myself…a bit of a loner that can play well with a group but likes to be apart, when I know that the something that’s coming up behind me is something I should shoot and not a teammate…..So I wasn’t a fan of…WORK AS A TEAM OR DIE!….thats almost a quote…they designed the Zombie A.I. to know when a person is on their own and they made special attacks so the Zombies can kill someone much MUCH easier in that case…..bottom line…you can’t play as an individual.”
-Swagger, l4d411 forums
Left 4 Dead Video Footage thanks to Lennox
A Showdown LAN attendee took a lot of great footage of the event and has posted a video including Left 4 Dead gameplay (from 3:15 to 5:22). A million thanks to Lennox! Below is the L4D portion of the video thanks to Kjeldoran from the forums:
Update: There has been some comments made about the poor quality of fire in the video, but we have gotten confirmation by Mike that it IS placeholder, and that they’ve been working on new fire that they’ll put in soon. The following is what Lennox had to say about the game (in the description section of the video):
“Some folks have been sending me messages about what my gameplay experiences were like.
Well, first off, let me mention that we had the developers hovering over our shoulders while we were playing- both to give the occasional gameplay tip, as well as to observe any useful player feedback. One guy mentioned to my brother that the pipe-bombs and molotov cocktails were extremely useful for clearing out large groups of zombies. I believe my brother failed to hear the follow-up comment, which was “Just make sure you don’t use them indoors”. Now, my brother jumps out of his skin and screams regularly when playing doom 3, so he’s easily shake-able. At the start of our first run, as soon as 4-5 zombies rush at us, he decides that this constitutes a huge crowd, and lets a molotov cocktail fly. Unfortunately this ignites the entire fucking apartment that we’re trying to make our way through, burning us all to death. (At least the zombies didn’t get the satisfaction of eating us, I guess.) This was immediately followed by us beating his ass in real life, and racous laughter erupting from the large crowd behind us.
I got several more chances to play over the weekend. If I had to emphasize one thing about the gameplay it’d be how absolutely paramount teamwork and cohesion appears to be. The developers tried to emphasize this on their presentation onstage, and boy is it true. If you try to run off and pull a john-rambo in this game, you quickly turn to zombie-food. You really have to cover one another’s backs. If a teammate is overwhelmed by zombies, he gets knocked to the floor, where he tries to stave them off with pistols, as you see in the video. A teammate must “help you back to your feet” when you’re in this state.
Another cool touch is that if you are killed, it is possible for you to rejoin the action later in the campaign. What’s left of your party can come across an isolated survivor somewhere else in the city, barricaded in a corner or locked in a closet. If they find & release him, you’re back in the game. (Albeit with only a pistol to fight with, but as soon as you find a weapons cache, you’re back in business.)
The witch boss-character is especially fucking frightening looking.
The hunter boss-character is one of the playable zombies, and the developers did a good job controlling these guys. Oftentimes we’d look behind us to see the silouette of this hunter zombie stalking us by jumping from rooftop-to-rooftop-to-balcony. Very disconcerting.
Getting puked on by the methane-filled, “Boomer” zombie makes all zombies in the area go nuts and focus their attacks on you solely.
Some doors are lockable, so it looks like fortifying areas is an important gameplay element.
A full campaign takes about an hourish to complete, and it’s split into 3-4 (I believe) segments.
When injured badly, your movement speed drops and you gimp around. Animation is very, very well done. It is also incredibly satisfying to see the zombies drop when you shoot em. I don’t ever recall seeing a repeated death animation for any of em. I’m sure repeat animations are used, but I saw hundreds of zombies die, and it’s done well enough that it all looks very dynamic.
The AI Director that the devs talk about works like a charm. I wouldnt’ve noticed it, but the swells/lulls of gameplay keep things very interesting. Nobody was bored playtesting this game, but nobody was overwhelmed either. You form a really quick camraderie with your other party members.”
A big thanks to Lennox again.
The pictures that Auzner and others took show some pretty cool developments in L4D, mainly the UI. First, let’s look at the Survivor side UI:
In the first picture we can see the entire bottom part of the screen. On the far left, there’s a health bar/number with icons indicating whether you are currently carrying a health kit or pills. On the far right it shows in green your ammo (in other pictures they show the M16 with a clip size of 50 and the auto shotgun at least 7). The middle is where it gets cool. In the middle of the screen (easier to see in the second picture) they have made a very nice looking bar to show your teammates name, health, what character they’re playing and also whether they’re currently carrying health kits/pills.
The three players in that screenshot are Dan, Norm, and a PCG writer (can’t wait for their write-up on the event). There’s at least three stages of health, being green for when it’s close to full, orange for around mid-health and lastly red, for low health. Also, you can see on the PCG character’s bar it’s orange with a little blue – that should be what “temporary” health looks like (not positive), like after you take a pill or after a Smoker pulls you in and poisons your health. On top of the useful information, they have nice looking portraits of the characters so you never have a problem identifying who’s who.
Most of the pictures are of players playing infected side. The infected side has the same health bar (they show the Smoker and Hunter having 250 health, we can say that when we played we remember the Tank having over 3000) on the left and in the middle the teammate bar (but with infected portraits instead of Survivors). In the pictures we’ve seen, to the right of the middle bar is a box with the name of what infected you’re playing, but we’re not sure if that was just temporary for the event or if that’s a permanent thing.
This screenshot has the most going on from the ones we’ve seen. It’s from the view of the Smoker in the act of choking a Survivor. You can see from the mid-right of the screen the tongue stretching outward, around the railing and down to the poor player below. Smart Smoker, got the player in the back and at this moment looks like the others don’t notice. The red line you see on the floor made up of very narrow red arrows is a tool that the infected players have at their disposal, it shows which path the Survivors must take to move forward on their mission and in this picture it was exactly right.
On the bottom of the screen right above the Boomer portrait there is a fairly large icon. Each of the boss infected have these and they are all unique, and serve an important purpose – they’re the visual cue you have to when your special attacks can be launched and also act as a timer. When they’re fully brightly lit, you can do your special (in this case, you can see the icon is a squiggly Smoker tongue) and immediately afterwards it goes dark (like you can see in this picture), and over time it’ll fill up so when it’s bright again you know you can do more damage. The Boomer has a really cool looking icon visible in the next picture:
The Boomer icon is a big disgusting stomach which is for the Boomer’s vomit attack. Right under it you can see “Vomit Hit = Mob of 30 Infected”. We’re not sure exactly why that’s up there and if that’s going to be in the final game, but that’s the first exact number we’ve gotten for what the vomit does. Another added bonus of these pictures is that you can see the Hunter portrait. One thing strange about this picture is that the portraits look more faded than some other screenshots, so there might be something with different levels of transparency. If you look through the different pictures there are some real great shots so you can see what the hands look like. One strange thing is the “special attack icon” on the Hunters.. from the couple pictures that have them, it looks like just a plain grey arrow, and hopefully that’ll get fixed before release.
Pictured above is the Hospital mission starting area with the table holding all the weapons/ammo/health kits. What makes this picture worth mentioning is how the Survivors are standing. They’re not in the typical CS weapon-out stance, which I don’t remember seeing before. It’s an added graphical detail and it’s cool that Turtle Rock is doing everything it can to make the game more realistic and more enjoyable.
Now for what I’ve been wanting to get to, the most significant change that we can tell from the pictures – the auras! Holy crap, they’re 1000x better looking than when we played. These are the first things I noticed and wow, I can’t get over how good they are. They ARE “just” auras, but you have to realize as an infected player you’ll be looking at them almost all of the time so it’s great that Turtle Rock fixed them up real nice.
Note: what follows is not confirmed, I’m just going from what I can see in the pictures.
Ok, so in the picture above I’ve included some scenes from different pictures. The middle shows the icons that are visible in almost all of the infected screenshots, this just shows the clearest view. It shows the four survivors being green and orange, so we assume this is showing the health of the survivors. Cool. The top left is from the first Smoker view we looked at. Blue auras around the players. In that screenshot, all of the players were healthy. Cool.
Now, for the interesting part.. the part that is VERY cool, look at the right which is part of a shot from a Hunter’s point of view. If you look at the icons (hard to make out), two of the survivors are shown with very little health (one red and one orange), and the other two look like little red skulls which should mean that player is dead. Now look below. The auras are red. Given this information, we believe (although not confirmed) that the auras at all times show the current health condition of each Survivor. Blue for healthy, red for not so much. If this is true it’d be an amazingly cool (yet simple) feature that would allow the auras to not only help you locate Survivors, but also be able to tell which are the weakest and therefore which you should attack! Awesome.
As more pictures become available and we see things worth mentioning we’ll post them. If you have pictures, please post them on our forum. If you played the game and want to share your opinion, post on our forum. Again, we thank those that did play and shared their experience, and especially a big thanks to those that took pictures for those that weren’t fortunate enough to go.
Left 4 Dead Showdown LAN Pictures – thanks to Auzner and omega552003
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