One of the surprise announcements to come out of E3 so far, to me at least, is Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2. Shipping Nov. 17 — just a day off of a year since the first game launched. From the comments I’ve seen on various gaming sites the fans seem to be pretty mixed up about it. I was too, at first. Reading IGN’s hands-on helped a bit though, with the lack of information.
From what I can gather, from the hands-on and from what the devs talked about in the first L4D (the in-game dev talks), it seems like the first L4D was tightly budgeted and was more of a ‘test’ for a possible franchise/game type. Since it was well received what we’re getting now is a more… ‘complete’ or ‘polished’? version. There’s a minute of gameplay in the hands-on to show off some of the game, and I think it looks quite good. I’m not sure about the new cast, I got rather attached to the previous group, but this does open up some more game play experiences down the road (think, 8 survivors versus 8 special infected?). Melee weapons are something I love and am glad to see them added — taking the place of your primary weapon is a bit extreme, they’ll have to be quite good to make that move. You can see there’s a bit greater variation in regular infected, looks-wise, and it seems they’re tougher — both excellent. The talk of infected wearing haz mat suits and being immune to fire is also nice. One part of the original game that felt off to me was the difficulty, much of the game was quite easy — especially if you were with all human players. It seems the devs have learned quite a bit from their work before, though, and are changing this. Improved director AI is yet another bonus. Another 5 campaigns, other new or changed weapons, daylight maps that can change the behavior of infected… all quite nice.
I can see much of the fuss with this sequal when you take Valve stating that they’d support the original, and it seems they will, but we’re used to them supporting the games over a longer period before a sequal pops up. Much of what L4D2 offers, when taken piece-meal, could easily be used for patched content. In fact, I’m betting they could get a good 2 years out of this single sequal. But as a whole it’s obviously worth being a stand alone; interestingly, it seems if there’s a big enough cry for it Valve will include the campaigns and such from the first L4D into the sequal, essentially getting both for the same price — if they add in enhancements to those campaigns, I’d easily be sold over it.
With all the outcry, I think people are missing one thing. This is Valve. They know game development, they do it quite well. There was quite the outcry when L4D originally launched as well, what with the limited amount of guns and such — it’s nothing really new. Just give them a bit, let more details surface, perhaps a playable demo for the masses — we’ll see when the time comes.
