L4D Interview with Chet - 4/28/08

Joe Martin over at bit-tech.net was able to corner Chet Faliszek into an interview on Left 4 Dead at the recent Electronic Arts event.

BT: And I'm guessing that the goal of each campaign is to escape and get to safety?

CF: Yeah, it's classic zombie movie stuff. The whole get to safety thing, we really wanted to play into all that. There's also a setup for people who just want to jump in and play a scenario and go through and play a quick game too.

True, there's less of a story that way, but even the story mode is made to be replayable, so we don't have any of these big scenes and we don't stop for anything. There are no pauses where we have a voice come in and say "and now what's happening is". It's far more natural and fluid than all of that. Instead, as you're running and gunning and building tension through these down periods you kind of build the story around you.

This is the first time we've heard of there being separate gameplay modes, a story mode and a regular mode. More on how the story mode might work:

BT: What puzzles me then is that you're the writer, but you said there wasn't any specific narrative or dialogue handed to the player? How've you helped to build that mood then?

CF: Oh, no, there is a narrative, but it's a running one. Lots of smaller pieces. We have a system which we use, which…it's like in Episode Two where Alyx makes some cracks about something and what she does is also remember those cracks and does stuff like commenting on your driving. You smash right into something and she's all "Hey Gordon, nice driving". Or whatever.

One thing we try to do is, when the player thinks they should be saying something then we try to have them say something.

Chet mentions that they've been experimenting with friendly fire - for example, if somebody is pinned down by zombies and you're trying to shoot the zombies off of them, you can't shoot your friend. Chet says running the four campaigns from start to finish will probably be about "six to eight hours of gameplay". He also says that they've been having outside people come in and playtest the game, including clans. We hope to hear more about the story mode and maybe how the Xbox 360 version might have played into that decision, but for now, head on over and read the interview.