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Absolute Zero

A new pair of videos is out, this time show­cas­ing an an­cient tomb in Soul's Ab­solute Zero cam­paign for Left 4 Dead. The area's de­sign draws from a lot of an­cient civ­i­liza­tions to cre­ate a unique yet fa­mil­iar look that makes you imag­ine what it was like in its orig­i­nal state. Even though it's not done yet, the ar­chi­tec­ture still looks pretty awe­some!

Dur­ing the mak­ing of the video we couldn't stop play­ing around as hunters. The area quickly re­minded me of some of the freestyle trick maps for Quake where there is no par­tic­u­lar goal, only at lot of stuff to play with. We began mak­ing tricks more and more com­plex and were hav­ing so much fun that I recorded a few of them for the start of the video. De­spite con­sist­ing of a mere three pounces, the mid­dle jump was by far the hard­est to pull off, re­quir­ing snap aim, tim­ing, and air con­trol all within a quick few sec­onds.

Valve's orig­i­nal idea for Left 4 Dead was to make it a game of who sur­vived the longest, not who sur­vived. They didn't go through with that idea, but it's one that we've al­ways liked. One of the first de­ci­sions Soul made when cre­at­ing this cam­paign is that it would be much harder than Valve's cam­paigns. Even ex­pe­ri­enced teams shouldn't ex­pect to sur­vive with­out some re­ally ex­cel­lent strat­egy and team­work. I know a lot of play­ers seem to think that fun means win­ning and win­ning means never dying and fin­ish­ing with a score of 8000 to 300, so this map might not ap­peal to all crowds. For peo­ple who enjoy a real chal­lenge, I think this cam­paign will have a lot to offer.

If any map­pers, mod­el­ers, or tex­ture artists are out there, Soul could use your help! He's cho­sen such a dif­fer­ent art de­sign that most of Left 4 Dead's pre-made stuff isn't going to work.

The first level of the map can cur­rently be down­loaded from L4Dmaps. This sec­ond level is about 80% of the way to­ward a basic beta ver­sion.

Posted on October 19, 2009 in Absolute Zero, Gaming, Left 4 Dead

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