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Left 4 Dead

Absolute Zero gets a blog

I fi­nally con­vinced Soul that Ab­solute Zero needs a web­site, and we've been spend­ing the past cou­ple days fill­ing it with con­tent. If you've been in­ter­ested at all in my past posts on the Left 4 Dead cam­paign, the web­site will have a lot more stuff in­clud­ing in­side in­for­ma­tion, con­cept art, screen­shots, and a new HD video we shot to show the progress of the map. I should be writ­ing there for the cam­paign pretty reg­u­larly, so check it out!

Come play Absolute Zero

Over the past cou­ple months, a friend of mine has been cre­at­ing a fun Left 4 Dead cam­paign called Ab­solute Zero. The first map is done, and the sec­ond map is com­ing along nicely. We cre­ated some nice HD videos to show it off to every­body:

• Map 1—Mil­i­tary Base Walk­through Part 1
• Map 1—Mil­i­tary Base Walk­through Part 2
• Map 2—Ice Cav­erns Progress Up­date

If you want to playtest map 1 with us, down­load the beta and come join the cam­paign's Steam group.

More Ice Caverns updates

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.

Valve's Double Entendre

Today's the big launch day of Valve's much an­tic­i­pated Left 4 Dead up­date in­clud­ing the two-level cam­paign Crash Course… sigh.

I re­ally won­der if Valve has a QA de­part­ment. It seems to break in one of three ways—ei­ther it silently launches a local server (de­spite lobby set­tings), puts the server you con­nect to into a live­lock re­quir­ing a man­ual restart, or makes each player con­nect to their own local IP. It's not an iso­lated prob­lem, with their fo­rums being full of com­plaints. It makes me yearn for the days when patches weren't forced down your throat by some crap like Steam.

It ac­tu­ally works in sin­gle-player, so I tried the new cam­paign there. It uses a Death Toll theme, look­ing a lot like the level where you start in the church. In what seems to be a stor­age area, you jump from room to room or walk down the al­leys con­nect­ing the rooms. Each level is un­in­ven­tive, look­ing like one big area in­stead of smaller ones that vary to keep it fresh. Every room and alley looks the same, just a ran­dom scat­ter­ing of boxes and cars.

Re­ally, there's not much to left say about Crash Course. Given how short it is and how un­fin­ished and mo­not­o­nous it looks, I can't imag­ine my­self play­ing it much in ver­sus. Much rather be play­ing Ab­solute Zero or Death Aboard. If ver­sus ac­tu­ally worked, that is.

Left 4 Dead…2?

Se­ri­ously—what the fuck?

De­spite promises to make enough new con­tent to make Left 4 Dead worth the $50 we paid for it, 8 months later it is still with­out con­tent, buggy as hell, full of map ex­ploits, and with ter­ri­ble match­mak­ing. Poor game de­sign has made being on a los­ing team in­cred­i­bly frus­trat­ing, mak­ing it so the only re­ward you get for win­ning is half or more of the other team ruins your game, ei­ther by quit­ting or by child­ishly killing them­selves to ruin your in­fected round— every sin­gle time.

Valve stopped car­ing about Left 4 Dead a while ago, and now we know why—Left 4 Dead 2 is com­ing out with all the con­tent that was promised for the first one. I don't think I'll be giv­ing them any money for this one.