Games I Want: Left 4 Dead 2
Zombies are tired, and cliché, and so 2008. Forget about the zombies, though. Left 4 Dead 2 is not about zombies, it’s about teamwork. Left 4 Dead was the first cooperative shooter that went beyond ‘you can revive a fallen teammate,’ and encouraged players to work together by aligning team and personal gain. Left 4 Dead 2 looks to build and improve upon this foundation.
Left 4 Dead 2 is essentially more of the same, with added content and gameplay refinement, and I can’t wait. New weapons, new special infected, new scenarios and new characters will all add depth to the experience. Most importantly, this is the first game that allows me fulfill my fantasy of killing zombies with a cricket bat. Wicked googly!
For those people complaining that the sequel is coming out too soon after the original, that’s like saying ‘even if you like ice cream, you can’t eat it every day!’ Yes you can. Ice cream is delicious.
Cooperative competition
How do you get teammates to work together in an online game? That is a question that developers have struggled with for years, and even the most popular online games didn’t try to tackle the problem. In Counterstrike, the closest teammates come to cooperation is letting your teammate rush in first so he takes the bullets and you get the kills.
The reason for which there was no incentive to work together in CS is because success is measured solely by kills and deaths. Most players would prefer to have a great record even if their team is losing; the server will still regard them as ‘the best player.’ Left 4 Dead’s most significant innovation is that there is little direct competition among teammates or between teams outside of the overall binary success/failure result.
The special infected are relatively weak and expected to die, so it’s not a big deal to sacrifice your life if it’s going to benefit the team. Not only is there little correlation between ‘kills’ of survivors and playing ability, but you can be a great player with many of the infected and have few kills.
Likewise, disadvantaging a fellow survivor does you no good, as a hunter or smoker can quickly incapacitate even the best players without help from teammates. The only bragging metric in Left 4 Dead is whether you made it to the safe house, or whether you stopped the survivors. What happened in-between is irrelevant. Left 4 Dead 2 will offer even more of this experience, one which has yet to be replicated.
Hit for 6!
Don’t relax for a second
Very few shooters have the pacing found in Left 4 Dead games. In most FPS games, a full health team must be whittled down slowly and while you can be killed unexpectedly, it’s unusual for a whole team to be instantly wiped out. In Left 4 Dead, on the other hand, you can’t relax for an instant.
Because the infected can incapacitate even a full health survivor, a well coordinated infected team can incapacitate multiple players instantly. Unlike most games where a single member of a four player team being killed proportionally decreases performance, in Left 4 Dead losing a teammate triggers an exponential decline in effectiveness. A three man team is significantly less safe than a full team, and once you’re down to two it’s essentially over.
Zombies don't like 2 things: Fire, and fat sports coaches
Add in the pressure filled moments when you know a tank or a horde of zombies is approaching, and Left 4 Dead games can keep you on the edge of your seat in ways that few other games can.
The few anticlimactic situations in Left 4 Dead, such as cheaply killing a zombie horde by finding a convenient safe spot in which to hide the entire team, have been eliminated in the sequel. Many of the large events cannot simply be endured, you have to progress to a target point. The frenetic mobile gameplay will be more prevalent. Not only does this up the ante for the survivors, but it means there will be far more opportunities for the infected to incapacitate a straggler and thin the opposition.
Content is king
When people ask for a Call of Duty sequel, what do they want? More guns, more maps, more scenarios, and more multiplayer perks. Why, then, when Left 4 Dead 2 offers all of those things, do players lash out against it? What would constitute a true ‘sequel?’ How many new weapons? How many new infected?
Part of the allure of Left 4 Dead scenarios is experiencing the same content multiple times and seeing the stunning number of gameplay permutations that emerge from the same setup. It seems that the only acceptable bar for the community is entirely new gameplay, but I know that’s not what I want. Don’t mess with a good thing. Improve on it slightly.
Zombies are fireproof now? Ok, just give up. We're all dead
The new infected will add fun new challenges. Players have mastered fighting off boomers and hunters, but what will the jockey, charger and spitter add to the equation? How will daytime affect infected strategy? Will the personalities of the new survivor team be as charming and memorable as those in Left 4 Dead? Knowing Valve and their commitment to polish, I have to assume the answer will be ‘yes.’
Left 4 Dead was one of the most entertaining cooperative first person online experiences in recent memory. It revolutionized how people approached cooperative gameplay, and did for first person shooter genre what a game like Starcraft did for RTS games: demonstrated that opposing teams can be both different and perfectly balanced.
Fun gameplay mechanics should be developed, not redone from the ground up, and I for one am happy that Left 4 Dead 2 is taking the successful formula from the first and building on it. If you’re as excited as I am to have a go at the Tank with a katana, then mark November 17th on your calendar. Left 4 Dead 2 is coming, and this time it all goes south.
