Left 4 Dead 2 Interview

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Valve's picked up some surprising controversy with the announcement of its quickfire Left 4 Dead sequel, sparking more than 30,000 fans to take to the internet with pitch forks and picket signs over "abandoning" the original shooter.

We sat down with Valve's Doug Lombardi this afternoon to talk about the outcry, its reaction to the sale of id Software and plans for the sequel.

So... that was a quick turnaround?

Lombardi: Well we never make games the same way twice, right? We're completely schizophrenic in that regard so we thought why not try to put out a quick sequel, or do a sequel in a short amount of time.

The idea for that really came from the team after they had finished had a bunch of ideas for what they wanted to do; melee weapons, new characters, new game modes etc. Then when the game had shipped they saw a bunch of behaviours in the wild once thousands, hundreds of thousands and then millions of people had played the game.

Folks just basically got together and put everything that they wanted to do on a white board. The tradition at Valve is to look at things in an inside-out way and say, "what do we want to do?" and then figure out the best way to get those things out to customers.

That's kind of what happened. There was a white board exercise and there were a class of things that felt like they'd be a sequel and there were a class of things that felt like they'd be good for DLC.

We plan to keep supporting Left 4 Dead 1. There will be some announcements coming before summer's out about what's coming there, and then we haven't shown everything that's in Left 4 Dead 2 yet.

I think 8, 9 months from now once everything's been out for a while and everyone's had time to see the complete product of Left 4 Dead 2 and see continued support for Left 4 Dead 1, they may sort of see what we were up to and what the method of our madness was there.

The AI director too is another thing that makes us think that we can do this this quickly, to have it playable and up and running this quickly in new campaigns.

And there's been some chat over E3 about how the two games are going to interlock, with backwards compatibility and such. Have you decided how that's going to work yet?

Lombardi: Some of that is out there already. The authoring tools that we've put out - what folks do there they'll be able to run on Left 4 Dead 1 and Left 4 Dead 2.

We're still looking at other ways to make the community cohesive in an elegant fashion, but we haven't nailed down all the final details on that just yet.

The boycott. Did they change your plans for L4D 1 DLC at all?

Lombardi: It really didn't change our plans at all. As I mentioned we had plans to keep releasing stuff. We put the Survival Pack out for free which I thought was pretty cool on 360 as well as PC - it's sort of uncommon to be able to get new stuff out that way.

We're already released the authoring tools and the matchmaking to get that content out to people, because the problem with mods and stuff like that is people make great stuff but then it doesn't really get propagated to the whole community properly.

So we're doing that. And then there's more new content that we're working on that we'll be announcing as I mentioned at the end of the summer.

I think there was just some confusion. When you go to E3 and make a big splash on a new product you're trying to get the retailer's attention and the press attention.

It's not really the venue for announcing DLC and whatnot. I think folks took our announcement as a sign that we were dropping Left 4 Dead 1 and that's just not the case.

Any other game from any other company probably wouldn't have sparked the kind of negative reaction that Left 4 Dead 2 did. In that, do you think you've spoilt your fans with so much free content?

Lombardi: (Laughs) Oh I don't think they're spoilt, I think that they're getting their money's worth, right?

We always look at it as, if we were a customer what would we want from stuff? How would we want to be treated as customers? I think as I mentioned with Left 4 Dead so far we've done a pretty good job with the Survival Pack, the authoring tools and there's more stuff coming.

You obviously can't do that forever, both technically and financially there's reasons why at some point you have to move on to the sequel.

But with Half-Life 1 folks got Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and bunches of other stuff that was free for a long time.

With Half-Life 2 that got Deathmatch right away, Counter-Strike: Source came with it. Orange Box we thought was pretty good value and we're trying to make Left 4 Dead 1 feel like it's really great value and we'll try to do the same thing with Left 4 Dead 2.

And of course you're still snubbing PS3 on the Left 4 Dead front. Surely this has to come down to your preference as a company now, rather than any sort of technical limitation?

Lombardi: I think I'd use a little bit of the same answers. We look at it as if we were customers of this product, how would we want to be treated and what sort of product would we want out of it?

We've run a couple of experiments over the years of PlayStation in general; we did Half-Life on PS2 with an outside company and then we did Orange Box PS3 with an outside company. We weren't able to deliver the same type of product on PS3 and PS2 for that matter that we were on the 360 and PC.

If you look at it as a matter of Valve doing it, Valve did the 360 and the PC version of the Orange Box and they both go 96 on Metacritic - The PS3 version was nowhere close to that. Left 4 Dead got a 89 or a 90 on 360 and PC. We're really, really proud of the fact that whatever platform you play the game on you're getting the same experience, you're getting the same Metacritic score. And with Left 4 Dead, you're getting the same DLC with the survival pack and some of the stuff that we have coming.

Until we have the ability to get a PS3 team together, until we find the people who want to come to Valve or who are at Valve who want to work on that, I don't really see us moving to that platform.

We've kind of learned a lesson in that again, if we were customers of that product on PlayStation, we'd feel like we sort of got the stepchild version of the product while the guys on the PC and the 360 got the sweet version of it.

You've come up with a lot of new ideas for the sequel in dismemberment, dynamic weather etc, but were there any things in Left 4 Dead 1 you wanted to cut or change in the sequel?

Lombardi: The first thing that comes to mind is changing the finales at the way they work. That wasn't on the original list, it was something that came from watching people play the game in mass after launch.

We saw a lot of people in finales 'gaming' the game, backing up to the wall and waiting for zombies to come to them to make it much easier.

So we've change the ways the finales work now. The best way to describe it is we'll 'put you on the run'. The finales don't end until you get from point A to point B and if you try to back up against the wall you're just going to get smothered. They're going to keep coming and you're going to run out of ammo and run out of health.

So we're trying to push people to play the game a little more in the way it's intended rather than 'gaming' the game.

I'm sure that in the ideas that we come up with to counter that folks will find another seam and we'll come up with another idea to counter that.

That's one of the cool things about developing stuff and having the ability to iterate on the design really quickly: we're able to change things up and watch what happens.

Whenever we've spoke to [Valve CEO] Gabe Newell he's mentioned this theory where you can track almost every game developer back to id Software. Of course it's no longer an independent company now... what was your reaction to id getting bought out?

Lombardi: In the old days Details Magazine used to do a feature that was sort of their music issue and they had this big fold-out where all music led back to like James Brown, Elvis, The Beatles and they went all the way down to every band like Nervana and back up.

I think you could do that same thing with gaming and sort of push stuff back to Miyamoto, push stuff back to id, push stuff back to some guys who were doing stuff back in the Atari days. Looking Glass would probably be on that list as well.

Not only are they one of the iconic, true innovators who sort of formed the industry, they were also one of the last great independent houses around. There's virtues to that, there's also benefits to being partnered with bigger companies. I haven't spoken to those guys since it happened - it took us by surprise - but we wish them the best of luck with that.

I'm assuming because they're really smart guys, they didn't have to give up their independence and that they did it for a reason.

Do you think Bethesda was a good choice for id?

Lombardi: Bethesda has really become quite a different company over the last five or six years. They have a goal to become a publishing force and not just a developer and that's a powerful way to weigh up your portfolio - by picking up id. You're getting a huge back catalogue, you're getting powerful technology as well as games that are in development now.

We'll see where it goes. Zenimax, Bethesda, id; there's a lot of talent and a lot of money between those three, though I guess they're all technically one entity now. We'll see what happens.

We're curious to know what you thought of Call of Duty's zombie mode? Any influence there?

Lombardi: We were out making Left 4 Dead 1 when we saw that one. There have been a lot of different zombie-themed games; Resident Evil and a lot of other games continue to go on.

Zombies are just in fashion right now - they're hot. It's just a popular theme like World War II was a popular theme for a while, the alien space marine theme was big for a while too.

Andy Robinson