Left 4 Dead - Long Interview

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At a recent Electronic Arts event we got a chance to see Valve's latest shooter – the four-player co-operative FPS with a zombie survival theme, Left4Dead.

Well, OK, to say just that we 'got a chance to see Valve' makes it sound a little bit too casual. The reality is that we hung around the demo unit for the game all day, biding our time until we saw the Valve's Chet Faliszek was unguarded and idle for more than ten seconds. Then as soon as Chet's guard was down, we pounced. Very quickly we managed to corner the writer for Left4Dead and bombard him with questions.

Either way, the result was that we ended up sat across from one Valve's core writing team – the rest of the team made up with Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw and Portal scripter Erik Wolpaw.

Here's what Chet had to say to us as we questioned him on Left4Dead, Valve's playtesting strategies and how he intends to survive the inevitable zombie apocalypse...

bit-tech: So, we’re looking at Left4Dead right now. Can you tell us a little bit about the game and how the levels work?

Chet Faliszek: Yeah, so the core experience is that players move through a campaign made of five levels. At the very beginning of each level you’re set up with your primary goal then you play through to that and all the levels in a campaign are interconnected and linked.

BT: And I’m guessing that the goal of each campaign is to escape and get to safety?

CF: Yeah, it’s classic zombie movie stuff. The whole get to safety thing, we really wanted to play into all that. There’s also a setup for people who just want to jump in and play a scenario and go through and play a quick game too.

True, there’s less of a story that way, but even the story mode is made to be replayable, so we don’t have any of these big scenes and we don’t stop for anything. There are no pauses where we have a voice come in and say “and now what’s happening is”. It’s far more natural and fluid than all of that. Instead, as you’re running and gunning and building tension through these down periods you kind of build the story around you.

Excuse me a minute…

Chet jumps up, runs over to the demo set-up and fiddles with a crashed computer

BT: Everything alright?

CF: Well, yeah. There’s supposed to be another guy here helping me and the game is kind of in beta and I’m the only one here who knows how to work the interface...It’s no problem though.

BT: So, what can you tell us about the zombies in the game?

CF: Well, there are different types. There are the Common Hordes, who are kind of the frontline people you keep fighting. There is the Hunter who are the stronger ones who can pounce on you and jump really far. There is also the Smoker, but we're not talking about them right now. There is the Tank; the big burly guy who smashes through things and throws bits of earth at you. There’s the Witch – the only zombie you can’t play as.

BT: And all the others are playable?

CF: Yeah, you can play as all the zombies except her. Then there’s the Boomer – a big guy who explodes blood everywhere and vomits on you.

BT: And the Horde zombies – what type are they? Classic Romero zombies, 28 Days Later Fast zombies?

CF: Fast. They’re infected and they’re super-hyper kinetic and filled with energy. Hang on, I just need to get the game running again for this guy.

BT: And they just want to kill you and eat your brains?

CF: Eh, the idea is more that they just hate you. You’re alive and they have hate humanity and they just want to destroy you.

BT: And—this is an important point—killing them has to be a headshot, or can you just pump them full of lead?

CF: No, they are wholly alive until they’re dead. Obviously. They aren’t actually undead, but they have no humanity left. That part of them is gone and that’s why they hate you. So, you can hit them a couple of times with bullets but if you don’t do some major damage then they’re going to keep coming at you. Anything that would normally kill a person, that’ll kill them.

BT: Is the game designed completely for online play then and for co-op?

CF: Well, you can actually play singleplayer with bots too. Or you can mix those numbers together however you want and have two people and a bot – or three people and a bot like they’re playing over there. The core game though and the best game experience you’ll have though will be with four of your buddies.

BT: But what sort of mood are you trying to build in the game? Is it scare the crap out of people horror, or just pure adrenaline excitement, or what?

CF: There’s some scary to it, but there’s tenseness too. We have this AI Director running that will ramp up and scale down the game differently every time and gives us a randomisation which essentially makes sure it’s not the same game twice because of where the zombies are and what they do.

That works both ways though, and the Director will also work to create these nice quiet moments like you can see on some of the games running here. Nothing is happening here this time, but it’ll ramp up in a little bit. That’s very different to the games before it. That all helps to come together and create a mixed mood – sometimes scary, sometimes frantic, sometimes tense. It’s all in a more serious vein that something like Dead Rising though.

BT: What puzzles me then is that you’re the writer, but you said there wasn’t any specific narrative or dialogue handed to the player? How’ve you helped to build that mood then?

CF: Oh, no, there is a narrative, but it’s a running one. Lots of smaller pieces. We have a system which we use, which…it’s like in Episode Two where Alyx makes some cracks about something and what she does is also remember those cracks and does stuff like commenting on your driving. You smash right into something and she’s all “Hey Gordon, nice driving”. Or whatever.

One thing we try to do is, when the player thinks they should be saying something then we try to have them say something.

BT: So the characters are vocal, not like Gordon Freeman?

CF: Exactly, they’re talking to each other all the time and that helps build the feeling of being in the movie, right? We can just watch people build these experiences.

Chet gets up, wanders back to the demo units without saying anything. I think the interview is suddenly over and turn off my Dictaphone. He then dashes back suddenly and starts talking before I can press the record button again. It strikes me that this kind of thing happens a lot around Chet.

CF: … which is good. But I mean, I’m the writer, right? But I still constantly feel like less is more. With this game people are going to be playing it multiple times and are going to get sick of hearing things too many times, so we try to subtly weave in a lot of the pieces over time. One of the things we did was, at the first recording session, just getting a lot of the reloading lines and now we’re going back for each character and adding in more personality so that they can all have some interaction with each other. The characters will be able to kind of play within each other as time is going on and that’s where the core of the story is going to come from.

BT: Valve’s famous for play testing things to death – were there any parts of Left4Dead that you thought would be a great idea at the time, but you then cut out completely?

CF: Yeah, we do that kind of stuff all the time. We always joke about these companies which have these design documents full of great ideas, and there are loads of things that sound really great on paper. They sound like The Winner, but then you go to test it and it’s like – oh my God, nobody knows what the hell they’re doing, what’s going on, it’s horrible.

In fact, right now there are some things on these demo machines we’re testing and we’ll be getting feedback on and cutting and whatever. It’s been interesting to watch some of these things with people who are good gamers too. Watching people who game at a higher level and seeing how they interact with things and what they do with it is always interesting.

BT: So, when you playtest are your testers not always hardcore gamers then?

CF: We try to get as wide a range as possible. If you’ve just got hardcore gamers then you’re going to get a really small percentage of your audience, right? So we have a cross-section and we use an internal wiki page where people can just add their names and email addresses and I’m actually the person to go through and contact them.

The real problem with play testing Left4Dead though is that we need four people at a time to test anything, unlike Half-Life where we just have one person in one game at a time. It makes everything slower. We even have clans come in sometimes to see how they interact with the game. We have different scenarios too; sometimes people are in the same room, sometimes separate. We want to test a whole load of things.

We kind of joke that when you get to a certain point in the game then all your work is just driven solely off of play testing.

BT: So, do you –

CF: And the thing that really got me, when I first joined the company and when I first saw this was ‘Where do we get all these stupid people from? How can’t they figure these things out?’ After a while though you realise that actually you’re the one who’s not so bright because everybody does the same thing.

Like, everyone wants to kill their buddy and we wanted to fiddle with that, but we had problems with the interface, so we thought we’ll take out friendly fire. But then, even with the problems, we’re not smarter than our customers.

BT: Do you think the accessibility provided by constant streamlining is one of the big appeals of Valve games then?

CF: I think that’s one of the things we’ve got, yeah. If you just throw features in and don’t give people a way to discover them then or train them on it, then they won’t use it. Then they’ll start asking why you didn’t put it in.

I mean, yes, there are things in there for higher-level players and especially for a game like this where you’ll play multiple times, but we always want to make sure that these things aren’t required for people to have a good experience.

BT: Do you think there are some things you just can’t do or just can’t communicate in a game though?

CF: Pfft. Look at Portal – we made people fall in love with a box. If you told someone that a videogame could do that then you’d be called an idiot because people think that they can’t. We spend all this time trying to get people to connect to human characters – which is sometimes less successful than others, but here there’s this inanimate box that people have fallen in love with. Portal is a great example of us being able to communicate any emotion or feeling with players.

BT: Did you work on Portal at all?

CF: I worked on it in the very beginning, then all my stuff was cut and it’s all Erik Wolpaw.

BT: And you knew Erik from way back on Old Man Murray, right?

CF: Yeah, I’ve known Erik for many, many years. <sigh>

BT: We touched on friendly fire before, but is it impossible to turn that off?

CF: We’re still experimenting with that. There are little ways we’ve been smart with it though. Like, if your buddy is pinned down by a zombie and you’re trying to shoot the zombie off then you can’t shoot your friend. You always do less damage than you think you do anyway.

The characters will interact too and tell you if you’ve shot them and so on. That way, even if you aren’t actually doing damage then you still get the ‘Ha, I shot my buddy’ thing.

BT: Why is it that people always do that anyway? First thing in every team game is find your friends on your team and shoot them. You must see that in play testing, right?

CF: If they know each other, yeah we see that. If they don’t then it’s kind of a boundary they don’t want to cross. Some weird formality. You’ll only shoot your friends.

BT: And one thing I’ve just noticed on the demo stands is the viewpoint. Is it a third-person model with a first person camera in it?

CF: We do some trickery there. If you look down you can see your legs and all that. It’s actually the first time we’ve done that in a game too.

BT: Why did you choose to try that then if you hadn’t done it before?

CF: It’s something that Turtle Rock had started doing before we were even on the project actually. Personally, I like it because we pop you out of first person a lot so you can see your own actions as you bandage yourself or whatever. When you’re hanging off a ledge and waiting for someone to come lift you to safety then you see yourself dangling. We don’t normally see that in games, but here the game really lends itself to it.

BT: Don’t you worry it might break the flow of the narrative?

CF: It’s weird. In first-person you always have to compensate for all the senses you really can’t use, like peripheral vision and so on. If you asked most players if there was any third person in this game then they’d say no because they don’t even recognise that they are seeing themselves. They know that they are in the game, but it never registers as a separate person.

BT: Now, I meant to ask this earlier, but what sort of range you cover in the maps. They mostly seem to be at night.

CF: This is the darkest game that Valve has ever done. It’s why we’re working on better shadows, better lighting, better darkness. The idea though is that the infected are basically human and they have the same basic abilities that humans have for the most part. They can’t see as well at night. If you came out in the day you’d get swarmed all the time, so by coming out during the night you can have some safety.

BT: And how many levels are there? There are four campaigns and my maths is rubbish by the way.

CF: Four campaigns with five maps. If you just ran it from start to finish then it’s probably about six to eight hours of gameplay. It varies wildly, but that’s about the average I think. The levels are made to just be played again and again and again though. How long is de_dust?

BT: And from what I gather the AI Director kind of moves zombies around and makes the levels endlessly replayable.

CF: Exactly. You’ll enter into some spaces and just have entirely different experiences each time. It really works. I know. We play it everyday and I’ve done that for two years.

BT: Now, here’s one final question that I’ve got to ask – what will you do when the Zombie Apocalypse does happen?

CF: See, this is the great thing – I can actually practice now, it’s good! But, yeah, I’d probably be a holing up kind of guy. Shut myself up somewhere in the country with some canned food. We actually have some country maps in the game that’d be a good test for things like that. Those levels are really hard though so I don’t know if I’d survive like that or not.
Source: http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2008/04/28/left4dead-interview-chet-faliszek/1
 
whereswarren (King_Vegeta)
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This will be more fun than gta4.
 

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