Video Interview and More Previews - 5/14/08

GameTrailers has released a video interview with Doug Lombardi showing some new Left 4 Dead gameplay footage and talking about the two different modes in the game, and some more L4D impressions are available from GameSpy, GamePro, and Game Informer. The GameSpy preview by Will Tuttle was very positive, stressing the intensity and importance of co-op gameplay:

To say that Left 4 Dead's particular brand of action is intense would be a bit of an understatement, as there are moments that could threaten even the most hardcore gamer's bowels. The sequences in the abandoned subway were particularly harrowing, as zombies came flying out of the darkness (damn those weak flashlights!) and grabbed players by the shoulders while chomping away at their faces. The only way to break loose from their powerful grip was to get some assistance from one of your buddies, preferably one that wasn't too far away.

The spiffy for Left 4 Dead was "Intense, terrifying action; impressive visuals; strong emphasis on teamwork" while the iffy was "How varied will the levels be and how many will we get?". The GamePro preview stresses the difficulty and fun, and mentions that "Left 4 Dead on the Xbox 360 has been MIA since it was first announced. According to an inside source, however, the media will see and play the Xbox 360 version within the next couple months. Sounds like E3 will be the hot spot." The Game Informer piece says nothing new except that the zombie apocalypse is "now in its second week" in the game.

The most interesting news comes from the new Doug Lombardi interview posted on GameTrailers. There is some new footage, including the new effect shown above with blood covering and dripping off of Zoey who is in the process of shooting down zombies. Awesome. Different modes were mentioned in a previous preview, but Lombardi explains it in some detail:

There's two modes in the game. One is sort of the Survivor campaign which is where one to four players can play as the human Survivors who are immune to the virus that has broken out and turned everyone into zombies. That'll go through four sprawling campaigns - you can start a campaign with three bots playing as the other human slots and other players can join in at any point in the campaign. Meanwhile, on the other side, we have what we're calling a deathmatch mode where one to four players can take over the human Survivors role and one to four players can take over the boss Infected roles. What's interesting about that is in most deathmatch games the two sides are identical. They're in different colored clothing, but they basically have the same firearms and items available to them. In Left 4 Dead's deathmatch mode, the boss Infected have no weapons whatsoever. All they have is their super mutant abilities, so the Smoker has his 50 foot tongue that he can grab and lasso people with, the Boomer has his big belly full of gas that he can act as a big grenade and come at you and if you shoot him he'll blow you up as well as himself. What's interesting about that is that class, the boss Infected, are sort of like a griefer's paradise. If you play Counter-Strike or any other action multiplayer game there's a lot of servers where people are just trying to be disruptive and doing something counter to the base objective. In Left 4 Dead, we've sort of built the game mode for them in playing as the boss Infected.

This is a strange development. We're not really sure what to say about it, because we don't know what the differences are between campaign mode and deathmatch mode played with all AI bots. We don't even know if they'll be played on the same maps. Again, this is pretty strange so we'll try to get more information on it as soon as possible. If you haven't, check out our two previous news posts from the EA event to catch up on all the newness here and here.