Left 4 Dead 1UP Video Preview Analysis
The 1UP Show posted a video preview of Left 4 Dead on April 20th. It is 8:28 minutes long with plenty of new gameplay footage and commentary.
You can either watch it at 320x180 from the gamevideos.com website, or click "Watch larger format" or "download" on the right side of the page to watch or download a much better 640x360 version.
Following is a transcript of what previewers Ryan O'Donnell, Kathleen Sanders, and creator Mike Booth have to say about Left 4 Dead. Also, a timeline of important events in the video is at the bottom of the page.
TRANSCRIPT
KATHLEEN: You know it's my belief, and it's been a long-standing belief of mine that zombies make everything better.
RYAN: 28 Days Later plus co-op play and.. that's all you need to know. It's like you shooting zombies and it's hella fun. But the execution of every little piece of game design is so smart
MIKE: It goes way back to when I very first started working directly with Valve on the Counter-Strike bot. I would have the Valve guys, who are very good at Counter-Strike, play against my bots and we discovered that two or three people armed to the teeth on the counter-terrorist side against like 20 or 30 terrorist bots limited to knives was a lot of fun. We decided that this is a lot of fun and we need to do this and the obvious thing to do is zombies. They are going to kill you if you don't kill them, so grab a gun and go.
KATHLEEN: The whole world is infected with this incredibly virulent, powerful strain of the rabies virus and you're naturally immune. You're one of this group of four people who are just trying to get from point A to point B, that's what pretty much every level is. It's pretty clear where you need to go, and then zombies get in your way.
RYAN: The gameplay is simple. It's a first person shooter, you can hold two weapons and a grenade or what they have is pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails and also a medpack at any given time. The only other move you have is a melee push to push zombies away from you when they approach you. You can hand items to people and there's context-sensitive looking and voicechat..
KATHLEEN: Yeah, you're looking at pain pills and it says "pain pills" over here. It's a passive thing where you're reloading and your character shouts "reloading" and you know, "oh, that guy is reloading, I need to watch out for him." We started out and we were kind of running around like chickens with our heads cut off - we were playing it like a first person shooter. Like going in, we'd see something to shoot and we'd shoot it. We weren't communicating.. we were sitting right next to each other, but we weren't really communicating with each other, and we were dying.. a lot. What you figure out is, as soon as I start to move away from this group, I get ruined. And it doesn't make you feel weak, it makes you feel like I really am part of a team. And that's because the AI is so incredible. It's not cheap the way Doom 3 was, where you're using your flashlight and then there's a monster in a closet behind you and there's no way of knowing.
RYAN: That's because of what you were talking about, the AI Director.
MIKE: [The AI Director] populates the world in a procedural way and one of the reasons we have it is it controls the drama of the experience. If everything is always the same, then it's boring. If there's not much going on, it's boring. If it's always crazy and intense, then you get burned out and you're done.. so drama is having a series of high points and low points and the Director does that. What it does is it monitors each Survivors' experience individually and estimates their tension level, and if they're getting really overworked and things are really crazy, the Director steps in and kind of backs things off a bit. And then after a certain amount of time, okay, it's time to ramp things back up and it brings the drama up and so you get this series of peaks and valleys that really creates a long term dramatic experience. And keeps the game infinitely replayable. It's different every time you do it.
We actually experimented early on with human placed triggers and generators and whatnot, even to the point where each map would have 3 or 4 sets of triggers and generators trying to mix it up. But people are really good pattern recognizers. They would know sometimes the generator spawns THERE! Ok, nothing.. So when I actually took the effort to design out this system that totally algorithmically did it, the change was amazing. I would watch our guys playtest and I would watch them fake towards where generators used to be, and then a few seconds later get totally slammed from some other place that they had no idea of. So I still have fun playing the game, because it's a challenge. It's like a sport, it's like "can I make it?" Can I work with my team to survive this onslaught?
RYAN: If it was scripted, if you knew that every time I go out this door and around the corner zombies are going to appear, that's no fun. There are four different boss monsters. One's a giant tank that can break shit really easily. There's one that's like the alien in Alien vs. Predator that's really mobile and can jump up buildings and move all around. There's one that has a giant tongue that can lash you and grab you in..
KATHLEEN: Yeah, grab you in and strangle you essentially and pull you up.
MIKE: The two sides of the game are completely different. The Survivor experience is very accessible, you get in, grab your guns, survive with your friends and shoot the infected. The infected side, you spawn in waves but the infected themselves each have very unique methods of playing. Like, for instance, the Boomer. Big, fat, slow moving guy, explodes when you shoot him, and can vomit.. if his vomit hits a guy then the mob attacks him..
KATHLEEN: ..and then you become like zombie crack and the zombies just run for you, and you use that a couple times [talking to Ryan], like when you were infected with that, we moved you behind us. There was two of us and I think one of them was actually one of the guys at Valve who was playing as him, and the other one was a computer controlled AI and I didn't even realize it. I thought they were both dudes at Valve, that's how smart it was. And we just sat there in the hallway, and you stood behind us and these zombies came flying up through this door and we just brought them down. Just mowed them right down and it was amazing. It was so fun.
MIKE: I expect people, when they first play the game, they'll come in as Survivors, they'll have a great time surviving with their friends. You could play that game forever. If you want to try something a little different, then you can try your hand on the infected side. I expect the learning curve is a little steeper but the rewards are very good and they're very different.
RYAN: I think it's unfortunate that we didn't get to play as any of the boss monsters because that is where the main difference from standard FPS games is going to come from.
MIKE: Fundamentally this is a co-op game. You don't see "Joe Schmoe bit you" or "So-and-so pounced you" or anything like that because that immediately made people combative and adversarial.. like "I'm gonna get that guy!".. and we didn't want you to think about that. We wanted you to think about your team and playing cooperatively. The other thing is that this is a challenge for me to construct AI behaviors that you can't tell whether these guys are run by bots or by people.
KATHLEEN: We get all the way to the top of this hospital, we have to signal this helicopter to come and get us, and now we're waiting for the helicopter. So of course zombies are attacking, and two Tanks show up which are really hard to bring down. One of them comes over and just smashes the shit out of you and you were dead. And then I get to the ramp that leads up to the helicopter and I get knocked down because this Tank throws debris.. he threw some piece of the roof at my head, and I'm down. I'm calling out for help and the other two survivors are trying to get to me but between me and them is one of the Tanks. I'm down on the ground, shooting from the ground, we're all screaming at this point "Just stay alive! Just shoot everything you can!" And then I can see over here one of the doors to the roof breaks open and zombies just start streaming out and I'm like, "OH SHIT!" I'm lying there on the ground and zombies are coming and swarming over me and I'm like "NO!! NOO!!" and I died. "Oh no I'm dead!" The helicopter lands behind me and I'm on the ramp to the helicopter, there is my destroyed corpse being mauled by zombies. They shoot the zombies off of me, but no, go on! Be free, name a school after me when you get to wherever the survivors are.
RYAN: How many "oh shit" moments are there in this game? I mean, that's what's so amazing about it.
KATHLEEN: This is the game that I've been wanting to play forever.
RYAN: After we played it I think we both agreed that it was one of the most awesome co-op experiences that we've ever had.. and the Valve polish is there, it shows. At this point there's no other co-op game that I'm looking forward to more than Left 4 Dead and I just can't wait for it to come out.
TIMELINE
0:10 First outdoor area after apartments
0:22 Bottom of apartments, into alleyway
0:40 Alleyway
1:09 Outdoor area after apartments, Horde running at you
1:25 Teaser trailer footage
1:50 Melee attack against zombie
2:19 Inside apartments
2:24 Survivor on ground in alley (bleeding out)
3:14 Top of apartments (first spawn in Hospital campaign)
3:17 Zombie crawling up fence (outside apartments)
3:34 Using pump shotgun at alleyways outside of apartments
3:40 Subway with M16 fighting a Hunter
3:42 Hunter is attacking a Survivor
4:24 Outside apartments with Uzi and Horde
4:28 Zombies climbing over car
4:39 Boomer inside exploding
4:50 Hunter leaps away outside
5:13 Hunter crawling on building
5:18 Boomer running outside
5:27 Boomer exploding again
6:24 Flythrough of apartments
6:58 Teaser video footage
7:16 View of bleeding out
7:25 Bleeding out Survivor getting stomped
7:45 Teaser video footage
8:20 Horde coming
UPDATE 4/22/07: Concerning Run Speed
There's been a lot of comments worrying about what looks like really fast run speed on the video. I understand the worry. You just have to look at it from the perspective of what they were trying to do: show the game. If you watch in the parts where they're going really fast (like at 3:32), they're alone. They just wanted to make it look cool with having all the zombies chase you.
Reasons that doesn't happen much when you play:
- Running backwards means running backwards into shit you don't want to, like walls, boss infected, more Horde (more often than not more Horde)
- Watch in the video. They're not hitting anything. I said in the preview and it's true that moving has a huge effect on your accuracy, so if you're running backwards like that you're usually not hitting many things.
- It's impossible to do in closed quarters.
- And one of the most important factors, is that the zombies don't just pick one person and charge. If they're running at you and you're just running as fast as you can to get away, they'll realize that and go for somebody else that's closer.
- Those people in the video had full health. When you get lower on health (most your time), your run speed is slowed.
