Coming off a successful Left 4 Dead release on the PC and Xbox 360, Valve decided to go back to the drawing board and push out Left 4 Dead 2, a fully-fledged sequel that will be released in November.
Gabe Newell Interview June 2009
G4: So, I guess the big surprise or not so surprising - because it got leaked - is Left 4 Dead 2. Why did you guys decide to go back and fire off a sequel right away?
Gabe Newell: Well, there are a couple reasons for that. One was when we were shipping the game, a bunch of the people who were working on it had all the stuff that they wanted to do right away. It really grew out of the fact that we all played Left 4 Dead pretty religiously and so people said, “You know, we don’t really want to stop. There’s too much fun stuff to go and do here.”
From a customer’s perspective, we think that given the sort of insane popularity of Left 4 Dead, that people are going to be super excited about getting a sequel to that. We’re going to continue to do Left 4 Dead updates and release more content for Left 4 Dead, and then also have Left 4 Dead 2 coming out as well. So, those two things were what made us say, “Okay let’s go ahead and ship something relatively quickly.” A bunch of people wanted to work on it, and Tom wanted to take a stab at proving on a larger scale one-year length project that it would have more manageable and predictable characteristics that we’ve gotten sort of used to out of Valve time and some of our larger-scale projects.
G4: You guys are known for episodic content and a lot DLC and things like that. Why not just put some of these things in DLC instead?
Newell: Well we’re going to continue to do DLC for Left 4 Dead. That hasn’t stopped at all. We’re continuing to do updates for Left 4 Dead even after Left 4 Dead 2 ships. So, that hasn’t changed. We’re just doing Left 4 Dead 2 - different settings, different characters, and continuing to push the technology forward. If the AI director 2.0 and stuff like that makes more sense to do where you’ve got new geometries and can take advantage of that rather than trying to take advantage of that in pre-existing maps and build new monsters and take advantage of it as well. So, we’re going to continue to do DLC for Left 4 Dead and continue to support that product. And then, also do Left 4 Dead 2.
G4: So do you think you might try to test some of the new weaponry in Left 4 Dead 1? Such as bring in chainsaws and some other things like that?
Newell: We’re always going look at what makes sense to do and how to manage that transition. You have these complicated situations and on PC it’s not so bad. On the Xbox it’s a lot more complicated because you can’t guarantee that people have all of the right content given their DLC model, where some people might have some content and others not, which makes it end of up with this weird, complicated thing where this person has this, and this person has this. Where as on the PC we can assume that people have everything. So, we’re trying to get that fixed because they’re sort of cramping our ability to push more free content into customer’s hands when we aren’t sure which free content they have right? And the stuff that you’re allowed to require customer’s to have on the Xbox, it’s only 8MB. That’s the maximum size you can ever change. So, we do that with the first minor update that we do. We’re trying to figure out how to manage that.
So, those are the things we’re sort of struggling with. These constraints on the Xbox. We can release new content on the PC and know that 100% of the customers have it so we don’t have to worry about splitting up our user base into those people who have this weapon and those people who don’t. On the Xbox you don’t have that luxury, where some people could have half the weapons, but not the other weapons. And you don’t know. Every person can be unique. So what we’d really like to do on the Xbox is work with Microsoft so that we can do exactly the same thing that we do with PC users and say hey, everything’s free and everybody always has that. The one problem would be the people who don’t have hard drives and what we would do with them is just orphan them to the first initial release and they can play against all those other people who don’t have hard drives. Everybody who has a hard drive will be up-to-date all the time, the same way they are on the PC side, and that, I think, would help us enormously to have that consistent model across the PC and Xbox.
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The demo takes place in the first two parts of the parish campaign. Leaving a boat, arriving on the dock, everything is similar to the original. Jumping straight in with a silenced MP5 and a Machete I’m ready to slay some zombies. The first thing you notice is how different it is to fight in the daylight, this means that you can really see what’s going on, sounds better? Yes it is, but it also heightens the panic as you can see what’s trying to eat you.
