Left 4 Dead Xbox 360

DanTehMan · February 4th, 2008, 04:29 PM

This is the New Thread for Left for Dead on the 360!
Starting off Here is some news on the 360 version Which has been released from The Official Xbox magazine . This Months issue has L4D cover art and a feature on the game.

In the article it states that they were not allowed to play the 360 version, or the boss infected.

But they did see an early version of the 360 code in action and they said it looked pretty close to the pc graphics. Mike Booth assured them it would be just as good if not better when launch comes around.

And for the whole co op stuff Mike Booth said they really want to have splitscreen. But he said that four is just way too many, and with Left4Dead that would be hectic. Says they really want to implement 2 person splitscreen... they're not sure about guests on xboxlive though.

Ther's also some good screens in HD of cornfield and Hospital(some old some new) and some fun facts and things about development. Mike said they had been playing for ages when suddenly the zombies could start climbimg. They were like WTF!!! so yeah its a good article a little short but sweet.

So theres a description of the feature, fingers crossed for the split screen.

DanTehMan · February 4th, 2008, 08:13 PM

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.

Anibux · February 4th, 2008, 08:28 PM

2+2=22?

Autumn Jake · February 4th, 2008, 09:09 PM

Yeah I'll be getting the 360 version for sure. Splitscreen would be wicked, even though I wouldn't use it much (online is where it's at). It would just be amazing fun to play at a party...

MyNameDidntFit · February 5th, 2008, 12:10 PM

Pft, 360 ftl

DanTehMan · February 8th, 2008, 01:30 PM

Originally Posted by MyNameDidntFit

Pft, 360 ftl

Aaaw Shaddap

MyNameDidntFit · February 9th, 2008, 07:06 AM

>:|

Grr.

DanTehMan · February 9th, 2008, 09:10 AM

*cough* Gears of war, *cough* Halo 3 * ***EXCLUSIVES*** COOOOUGHHH!

MyNameDidntFit · February 9th, 2008, 11:40 AM

*cough* Halo 3 *cough* shit *cough*

Anyway, we have a console war thread somewhere... Keep these posts to that eh?

DanTehMan · February 9th, 2008, 01:25 PM

Teh Gears Of War Powns All your silly Pc First person shooters.call of duty? More like Cock Of doody!

DanTehMan · February 18th, 2008, 10:18 PM

Left 4 Dead Xbox 360 Revealed! - 2/17/08

The March 2008 issue of the Official Xbox Magazine features Left 4 Dead on its cover, revealing the Xbox 360 version for the first time. OXM visited Valve where they played the Hospital and Cornfield scenarios on the PC and they also had the chance to see Cornfield running on Xbox 360 development hardware. This is the first time that the press has been able to see the Xbox 360 version, which still has some ways to go to match the PC: "Valve didn't let us play the 360 edition of Left 4 Dead because it was too early and unbalanced - apparently, the zombies were so overpowered that humans stood no chance." And about the graphics, "'The 360 look is almost to where the PC is, and we'll get it up to the PC look before we ship,' promises Faliszek."
Left 4 Dead Xbox 360 Official Xbox Magazine Cover March 2008

The five page article contains about 8 new screenshots along with some others we've seen before, with some nice lighting going on. The multiplayer capabilities of the Xbox 360 were discussed with Doug Lombardi:

Left 4 Dead will feature four-player co-op and eight-player, 4-on-4 Versus matches via Xbox Live or System Link. What about a split screen mode? "That's the most relevant question that we can't answer for you today," replies Valve's Doug Lombardi with a laugh. "It's a good thing to want. Being able to play two people split-screen ... four player would be even better, but I don't think four- would happen. But for us, the idea of having two people play split-screen, playing co-op on the couch and letting the NPC's fill out the rest ... it's a pretty big feature for us to chase. But right now, we're not ready to say if it's in or it's out."

The other big news from this article is that a separate game company named Certain Affinity is handling the Xbox 360 version. Certain Affinity is a small game developer founded in November 2006 based in Austin, Texas with about 16 employees. Their first product was Halo 2's Blastacular Map Pack for Bungie and Microsoft. Certain Affinity is led by Max Hoberman, a 10-year Bungie veteran who was multiplayer lead for both Halo 2 and Halo 3. OXM explained how the work is divided between the three (now two, since Turtle Rock Studios has been absorbed by Valve):

Left 4 Dead is the work of three companies - Valve Software, Turtle Rock Studios, and Certain Affinity. As the creators of The Orange Box and the Source engine, Valve is handling the games core software functionality. Certain Affinity (the Texas company created by ex-Bungie veteran Max Hoberman) was brought on to handle 360-specific elements like matchmaking, Live support, console customization, and 360 gameplay tweaks. Turtle Rock - developer of Counter-Strike for the original Xbox and the Pc's more recent Counter-Strike: Source - owns Left 4 Dead's design. Monsters, level work, weapons, and especially the game's A.I. all fall to the Turtle Rock crew.

Max Hoberman was in charge of the entire online system for Halo 2 and 3, including matchmaking and the party system. Having that experience behind the Xbox 360 version of Left 4 Dead is very exciting - as I understand it, Halo 2 and 3 did pretty well in the online arena! Some other things of note in the OXM article: The escape vehicle on Cornfield is a "heavily armed flatbed" truck. They played with NPC teammates that "behaved impressively like human players", which is the first time we've seen Survivor AI mentioned.

OXM states the following: "EXCLUSIVE: The PC and 360 versions of Left 4 Dead will ship simultaneously, but there will be no PS3 edition." No quote is given, so until we hear it straight from the mouth of Lombardi or Booth, we're not certain. Thanks to OXM for its great coverage of Left 4 Dead, and we wish luck to Certain Affinity on its task of taming the 360 version of Left 4 Dead!