Four More L4D Videos - 5/14/08

IGN was present at the recent EA event held in San Francisco and has posted four new L4D videos for your viewing pleasure. For more on the event and other impressions, please check out our previous news post.

The IGN videos show yet another example of Louis being destroyed, this time by the Hunter. The Hunter gore is looking great and the Smoker tongue has some texture now and looks a lot more like a tongue should. In the fourth video, Molotov cocktails are flying all over the place and there have definitely been major improvements in the fire effects. Flashlight effects look like they have been smoothed out like we've seen in recent screenshots and the addition of actual flashlights to the end of gun barrels is a nice touch, especially cool when mixed with reloading. Gore is everywhere and another new touch is the visibility of bullets. The flashy bullets stand out but it allows players to easily see where their teammates are shooting.

The above image takes place in the fourth video and is the first reality check for the recent Boomer changes. In the picture, a Boomer has just been shot about a foot away from Francis. The explosion looks great, but you'll notice in the video that Francis' health doesn't go down at all. We haven't been able to play the game with this mechanic, and we haven't heard negative reactions to it from people who have, but it's still a sad moment - maybe rename him to Popper?

Another thing that has been pointed out by several community members is the underwhelming aggression that the infected showed throughout the videos. It seemed to look more like a shooting gallery than battling for survival - the player would walk into a room with a bunch of zombies standing around and end up shooting down most of them before one or maybe two became aware and started running at the player. Although this is more realistic and is reminiscent of some of the more tense moments of "I Am Legend", it actually made the game look kind of boring (marking the first time that word is used in the same sentence as L4D). We really, really hope that this issue is looked at or is possibly just a temporary feature on that particular build/the fact that it's on the lowest difficulty.

A brand new gameplay mechanic that was hinted at in Kotaku's hands-on is shown off in the fourth video. The generator room in the Hospital mission has been reworked and now features a table full of Molotov's along with a button that is pressed on the far wall. If you watch the video you'll see that pressing the button starts a sort of mini-finale.. the lights and generators turn on, attracting the attention of a ton of infected and subsequently amping up the music just like the real finale. We hope to get more details and explanation on this as soon as possible, but from the looks of things there are now "mini-finales" which is a fantastic idea.

A few more Left 4 Dead bits include a preview by Joystiq which says that L4D could be the "Next Big Thing" on Xbox Live and PC and also a two-part interview with Doug Lombardi by PCGH that talks about Source technology. Thanks to IGN for the great videos which you can find along with every other Left 4 Dead video in our video section.