![]() Those that end up feeling random haven't tended to last long. It's been what separates the good or great L4D-likes from the forgettable ones. Finding that balance of exciting but not impossible pacing is the task every studio making games like it has to find for itself. I've played and reviewed a lot of games like Left 4 Dead, and in my experience, they can live or die on this single aspect. The pacing of Left 4 Dead has always been one of its strongest suits. There's a lot going on under the hood, but on the surface, it manifests as simplistic and endlessly entertaining, but most importantly, it feels fair. If you're limping to the safe room, maybe the game would give you a breather-assuming your teammates were there to clear the last few zombies off your back. If you're breezing through a level, you might be met with the intimidating Tank zombie. It would even slightly alter some paths through levels, which would catch seasoned vets off-guard at times. ![]() With just a few roughly one-hour campaigns in the game, Left 4 Dead wouldn't mean much to anybody if it was over after just one time through the game, but the exceptional AI Director ensured it would live on for years to come by choosing how enemies spawn, where they spawn, and when to let up or stifle the player team all based on data the game would take in with every level. The AI Director was Valve's name for the procedurally generated portions of each level. ![]() AI, animation and level design needs to work very well together to make sure that these sequences look like scenes in the movie." Zombies need to behave like a real crowd you cannot achieve that just by increasing numbers. "Adding more zombies sounds simple on paper, but our zombie swarm system is incredibly complex. This was a problem that grew in scope for the team, as it had to authentically capture the look of its source material, including the mountainous swarms of undead that far outnumber the horde sizes in Left 4 Dead. Somewhere in the middle of the development after another playtest we sat down together as a team and said, 'Okay, our game is beginning to look a lot like L4D.''' Grigorenko said the team began to study how Left 4 Dead's famous AI Director behaved so that Saber could implement something similar. "Funny thing is, when you make a co-op shooter game about zombies, there aren’t many ways that you can go. "Initially was supposed to be a completely different game that didn’t have any resemblance to L4D," Saber Lead Game Designer Dmitry Grigorenko told me. In my interviews with the five studios, each team repeatedly cited two assets that Left 4 Dead maintains to this day: simplicity and replayability. His response was not uncommon among the group of devs I spoke to. Around the world, games like Systemic Reaction's Second Extinction, Saber Interactive's World War Z, Fatshark's Warhammer: Vermintide and Darktide, and Ghost Ship Games' Deep Rock Galactic have roots that trail back to Left 4 Dead, some more than others, but all of them are undeniably inspired by it. Left 4 Dead gets out of the way and lets you jump into the game and have some fun."įaliszek was addressing a question I posed to his and four other teams, each of them having worked on games that can reasonably be called Left 4 Dead descendents. "I still see games that greet you with confusing interfaces or a forced tutorial that gets in the way of inviting a friend who is new into your game. The co-op shooter places a lot of the foundational L4D gameplay in a sci-fi setting akin to the original Star Trek. ![]() Faliszek worked on both Left 4 Dead games at Valve, and spends these days at his new studio, Stray Bombay, building a new L4D-inspired game: The Anacrusis. "It keeps the right things simple," Chet Faliszek told me earlier this month about Left 4 Dead. More importantly, I wanted to hear it from the teams that have taken the baton from Valve and carried it in different directions, adding their own touches to the time-tested formula but always nodding back to that landmark original game. Sensing there's no end in sight to games inspired by Valve's seminal co-op horde shooter, even as Left 4 Dead 3 doesn't appear to be likely itself, I wanted to find out what makes Left 4 Dead such a milestone. I love Left 4 Dead, and I tend to enjoy many of the games it's clearly inspired over the years-and there are a lot. Now Playing: The Most Important Zombie Movies In History By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's
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