1 UP's Left 4 dead Xbox 360 Preview. This isnt new but is information nonetheless and its very scarce!
Rabies is a nasty disease. If contracted by a human (generally through an animal bite), it can be virtually undetectable for up to three months. Once symptoms start manifesting themselves--such as aggression and hallucinations--it's generally too late; death almost invariably follows in as little as two days from the first manifestation of symptoms.
In our world of SARS and West Nile and bird flu, where affordable air travel transports disease with a speed and breadth never before seen, the idea of a drug-resistant, fast-spreading rabies virus is frighteningly plausible. Frightening enough, certainly, to serve as the premise of a survival-horror game.
METH ZOMBIES
Enter Left 4 Dead, a multiplayerfocused shooter from Turtle Rock, a studio best known for its work with Valve's tremendously successful Counter-Strike (which is still a big deal in the PC gaming community). Stemming from a Counter-Strike experiment featuring a handful of human players against a swarm of bots equipped with hand-to-hand weapons, Left 4 Dead is essentially a zombie game--but it's a far cry from the plodding, Resident Evil.derived survival-horror norm. It sets a very different pace, dispensing with the shambling, Romero-esque zombie formula in favor of vast mobs of fast, agile, and powerful Infected.
"My favorite zombie movie is 28 Days Later," says Turtle Rock founder Michael Booth. "It took the whole mythical undead genre and turned it upside down, making the whole situation disturbingly plausible." If you're familiar with the film, it should be no surprise that the Left 4 Dead team favored the fast-moving zombie type. But it's not a mere homage to good cinema: "From our very early prototypes," Booth continues, "we just loved the intensity and chaos of a running mob attack. Trying to survive a screaming, raging mob running full-out at your team is visceral and intense, and just never gets old."
UNITED WE STAND
Note the reference to "your team." This is one of the primary features of Left 4 Dead: a fully fleshed-out, carefully constructed online co-op mode. While players can choose to take the role of an Infected, the main focus of the game is the conflict between a tiny squad of human players and swarms of A.I.-controlled Infected. This idea presents two serious challenges: First, how do you design a co-op game that forces true cooperation without relying on cheap gimmicks? And second, how do you create an A.I. enemy that actually poses a challenge to human players working together?
"The reason more games don't support co-op, or don't do it well," says Booth, "is because co-op is hard to do. Allowing two or more people to play your game together is not enough; the game itself must be designed from the ground up with coop in mind. We've explicitly focused on things like sharing items, reviving downed friends, rescuing trapped friends, helping them up ledges, and so on. [We also focus on] communications, an award system to highlight helpful teammates as well as teammates who are causing problems, and a voting system to allow the group to police itself."
GAME, PROGRAM THYSELF
For the often-problematic A.I. issue, Turtle Rock is taking a novel approach, building in routines to allow the game to generate enemies on its own--but to do so in a carefully directed way. "Each and every Infected, whether part of the common horde or a boss, is placed in the world by our A.I. director algorithms," Booth says. "There are no triggers, generators, special flags, or other humanplaced information to determine where these enemies are placed. As a result, the Survivor team cannot predict when or where they will encounter anything."
And enemy placement and numbers won't be the only factors driving the challenge here; individual Infected will be powered by Turtle Rock's celebrated A.I., the tech that drives Counter- Strike's surprisingly intelligent bots.
The result, Booth says, will be a game that's almost infinitely replayable. "A primary design goal," he says, "is to make each campaign playable hundreds of times." And perhaps more important for the game's longevity, it should create an experience that's easily transferred to new maps and scenarios
(Turtle Rock is still figuring out whether this 360 game will support user-created content like in the PC edition).
Are we talking about a revolution in the crowded survival-horror genre? Probably not. But with its premise of a handful of humans working together against near-insurmountable odds, Left 4 Dead has the potential to recreate that classic zombie-flick atmosphere with an accuracy no game has yet managed.
So what have we learned from this interview? That User created content has not entirely been ruled out from the console version.
