There’s an alarming caterwaul emanating from one corner of EA’s recent European showcase, the usually reserved legion of UK games journalists in attendance reduced to panicked shrills and booming battle cries as they work together to conquer one of zombie shooter Left 4 Dead’s survivor campaigns. With it’s emphasis on delicately paced dramatic encounters and legions of undead, it looks like the generation raised on Romero’s Dead films will finally get the zombie game they deserve. We spoke to Valve’s Chet Faliszek about one of the most intriguing first-person shooters of the year.
IGN: How did Valve’s involvement with Left 4 Dead begin?
Chet Faliszek: We had worked with Turtle Rock for a long time with the Counter Strike games, and they were always trying out and pitching ideas. The core guys from Turtle Rock had created this dynamic director thing, and we learnt a lot from them and are still learning. They came to us with this and instantly everyone was on board. My involvement was getting to play it and tell Gabe [Newell] about it, and the next day Gabe sent me an email expressing his interest.
IGN: We repeatedly got slaughtered in our play-through, but at least we got to see the dynamic direction in effect with events playing out differently each time we played. Tell us a little more about it.
Chet Faliszek: That’s part of the core of the game, and it does a couple of things. First of all it makes it different each time - that’s really important to make this game playable. It also has this idea that you want to do the things you normally do in a single-player game, like for example in Episode 2 you’re in combat in an arena then there might be a scene you interact with or a puzzle to work out and we’re mixing them up and it’s part of the pacing of the game. What the guys down at Turtle Rock were able to do was solve that problem and do it in a dynamic way where it’s procedural, so these encounters and these peaks and valleys are handled by the director instead of having a level and saying ’at this point this will happen, and at this point there will be a puzzle’. The director does it dynamically, so the intensity ramps up and you have these really intense combat experiences and then you have these creepy moments - it’s all the directors doing.
IGN: Since taking Left 4 Dead on board what has Valve brought to the project?
Chet Faliszek: The Source engine is getting updated to handle some of the new stuff, we’ve done the writing side and we’ve brought some more animators on board. Essentially we’ve helped amplify everything that they have there, as well as take over some of our expertise as well. We know the Source engine really well, we know how to help performance, we know how to make maps well. We also just have a lot more people, so we’ve brought on artists, and there are a lot of things that they wanted to do that they didn’t have resources for.
These zombies aren’t lurching Romero types, and take their cues from 28 Days Later.
IGN: It’s going to be launching at the same time on both the PC and 360 - after a similar situation with the Orange Box, are simultaneous releases something we’ll continue to see from Valve?
Chet Faliszek: At the end of Orange Box we started doing the 360 and the PC versions in sync, and we made a decision that we always want to do this from now on. We develop on the 360 and the PC version almost simultaneously, and there’s a whole team working on each one with the different performance issues and different control issues. From now on that’s the way we’ll be doing it.
IGN: Does working across two platforms affect development at all?
Chet Faliszek: We want both to be the same core experience and we don’t want to have to rebalance the game. But there are differences in how you interact with how you move, so the controls are the biggest thing. But if you’re playing the PC or the 360, you’re playing the same game.
