Valve's Chet Faliszek Part 1

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After just a year in development Valve's speediest release ever, Left 4 Dead 2, hits the shops in a few short weeks' time.

The game's project lead Chet Faliszek recently dropped by the CVG offices ahead of the big release. Here's part one of what we could get out of him.

First of all, congratulations on winning your Golden Joystick for Online Game of the Year.

Faliszek: It was great. It's a great event and it's great knowing that the fans vote for you and everything. I was a bit confused over the difference between Online Game of the Year and Multiplayer Game of the Year... but it's cool. It was a surprise.

I got to meet the guys from Rockstar and Jagex, who're like the quiet guys of the industry who have just 104 million players.

The Left 4 Dead 2 demo's just been released. What's the fan feedback been like for that?

Faliszek: It's been really positive. I think the gore system has probably made the biggest impact.

We purposefully wanted to deliver something really short, just like a taste. We wanted to tease a little so we didn't give you any other game modes - we didn't give you Scavenge or anything else - and we wanted to give you one of the cool new crescendo events which is the bus station area.

How significant is the melee system to the sequel?

Faliszek: It's a learning thing. Sometimes when we have people come in and play they still want to stick with the pistols because that's what they're used to. I prefer a melee weapon because it means when I'm getting swarmed I can turn to it and just kill everything around, which really helps when you're getting Boomer-ed or whatever.

I imagine we're going to see a progression there where people do things that we do around the office; some people still like the dual pistols, some people like the magnum and some people like to go with one of the melee weapons.

There are three new special infected in the game; the Spitter, the Charger and the Jockey. How have you made sure the new guys have clearly defined roles in gameplay, like the original boss characters?

Faliszek: Well what we did when we were building them is look at the problems we had and wanted to solve. Some of those problems can be attacked in multiple ways and not just with a special infected.

One of the things was people holding up in a corner during crescendo events, so the Spitter was the perfect solution for that. If you spit in that room where they're holding up, they have to leave. If you move and you get out of it you're not going to take that much damage, but if you just sit in it you're probably going to get incapacitated.

The Charger is a reaction to watching people play as a really tight group. If you play versus there'll be these groups that you just can't break up - even if you Boomer on them.

The Charger grabs a guy, then runs through the crowd and deposits them really far away and starts banging on them. You have to scatter for a minute.

When people are running ahead or lagging behind the Hunter is a really good creature for that, but the Jockey adds a twist. It can take you all the way back to the safe room and park you in there. That's really demeaning, he's a funny character to play.

How do the new specials compliment the old ones? The Boomer and Smoker were a good combination in the first game...

Faliszek: They'll do the same thing: look for the worst place to put somebody. So the Spitter will spit down and then the Jockey will run somebody into it. It's a classic move and the AI does it as well as humans.

A couple of good combinations that I've seen lately are the Smoker and the Charger. We have some maps in tall buildings with windows and if you hit the survivors with a Charger they'll go flying out the window and they're dead. It's hard to line it up but the Smoker can just grab someone and pull them over there.

You've mentioned the dozens of iterations and rejected ideas it took to nail down the four new survivors. Was that the case with the special infected as well?

Faliszek: Oh yes. If you just look at how the Charger was at E3 as opposed to how he is now, there's a radical difference.

Originally he would just send someone flying and then you'd have to go find the guy you knocked down. That became this hard thing of, 'I did this cool thing and now the guy's so far I can't find him' - because you used to really be able to send a guy flying and he took damage when he landed.

So we changed that so that you can hold on to the guy. You can still send everyone else flying but he at least has one guy at the end of that run he can start pounding on.

What can you tell us about the final two campaigns, Dead Center and Hard Rain?

Faliszek: Hard Rain we've started talking about a little bit. The survivors go on an easy run to a gas station across the road but it doesn't go well.

What happens is you have to go through the town and through a sugar mill where you find out that Witches happen to be attracted to sugar - so you'll have multiple Witches. Then you get the gas cans and you have to come back.

The problem is when you come back the rain's started in the very first map, then in the second it's raining pretty hard and by the time you start to return you'll see storms come up. The storms are controlled by the AI director so you'll be going along and then all of a sudden you'll hear a crack of lightning, the winds start picking up and you'll have to find shelter - not necessarily from the rain but all your vision is obscured and it gets really claustrophobic and tight.

You're actually going back to the same map but the problem is it's flooded now so routes you previously took are now really slow and bad. But equally, as you go back we've made it so you'll notice ladders to get up and things to get on that aren't really available to you coming.

So even though they're the same maps you kind of traverse them in entirely different ways. It ends up being this kind of cool thing where you have to learn the maps twice.

We're really not talking about the first one, Dead Center. You do go through a mall and... take it from there. The four characters have just met eachother, they know something's going on in this city but they're trying to deny what's really happening. As they're on the rooftop they come to this realisation of what's going on and what they're going to have to do.

The sequel's obviously a lot more dynamic with multiple routes and the upgraded AI director. Can you give us some examples of how a campaign can vary from one playthrough to another?

Faliszek: In Heavy Rain you'll notice that the multiple Witches will really mix it up. The Witches on the way in are wondering - because it's daylight still. So you'll think 'this Witch is blocking our path so we'll let her wonder' and she'll wonder up the only ramp you can take.

And then the storms that come up on the way back will end up being a really big event. If you get one when you're going through the cane fields it's like hell upon hell. If someone gets Smoker-ed off or pulled off it just becomes this chaotic mess. You'll see that people wait on the edge to see if a storm is going to come, start going through the field and then 'shit, it's a storm'. The AI director is also able to throw a lot more creatures at you, a lot more combinations to mix it up. Before you'd be like, 'I killed the Smoker so I killed the thing that can attack me from a distance' but now with the different combinations you're not sure. Occasionally you'll see doubles of Smokers or something like that.

When the Left 4 Dead 2 was first announced there was a lot of talk from you guys about investigating how to link the communities of the first and second games together. Did you ever work anything out there with stuff like putting the new special infected in the old campaigns?

Faliszek: One of the things is direct connection doesn't really work because there's just been so much work done with the underlying systems. We've radically changed what the game is.

In Left 4 Dead we started with two programmers, then we had three, five and at the very end it ballooned. With Left 4 Dead 2 we started with six programmer out of the gate because we wanted to redesign the systems; redesign how creators work, redesign how weapons work, redesign how the AI director works with the maps and the level designs.

So these underlying systems really radically changed the game and we can't simply put something back in the old. But if you're online playing Left 4 Dead 2 you can actually see your friends playing Left 4 Dead and on the PC it's seamless - if you own it you can just press start and join a game with them. On the 360 you'll have to put the disc in.

How will Left 4 Dead 1 user mods work with the sequel?

Faliszek: One of the things we're going to do - and this might change slightly, so don't shoot me on this - is we're either going to include on the PC disc all of the assets from Left 4 Dead 1. If not we're just going to make it so that you can download the add-on assets and all of the previous add-on maps would just work.

So if somebody's working on a Left 4 Dead 1 map now, they'll be able to move it over to Left 4 Dead 2. We've been talking to a lot of those guys, explaining to them how the system's going to work, why they might want to stay in Left 4 Dead 1, why they might want to move to Left 4 Dead 2. Some of the things we've done for the modders in Left 4 Dead 2 is expand how you can control the AI director and other things.

We're just trying to make sure the path is really clear for them and they can do this really easily. As players you'll be able to see any map and it should work.

Are you guys still committed to supporting Left 4 Dead 1?

Faliszek: Oh yeah. We still have updates coming out. I thought an update was coming out this weekend, it didn't. So there's an update coming out very shotly... any minute now.

I think it's going to have the 4-vs-4 matchmaking and I'm not sure what else to be honest. We talked about a bunch of stuff before we left.

Look for part two of our interview on CVG shortly.

Andy Robinson