Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Valve announce Left 4 Dead 2

Talk about rapid development

Surely sales of the first Left 4 Dead would still be going well only a year after release? It seems like Valve are shooting themselves in the foot a bit with this - or are they?

Actually, I think this must have been their plan all along. Think about it, they had a bunch of experimental stuff they wanted to test:

- Mass market appeal of zombie apocalypse
- AI director algorithms
- Co-op gameplay where any one person gets completely disabled without their team mates
- PvP where the 2 teams are completely different and have different objectives
- Level of interest for mini updates i.e. new maps/achievements/survival mode

So they make a relatively cheap game (only a few maps, no real story, they already had the engine developed) to test this stuff out. Now that they know it all works well, they can give us a 'bigger game' as they describe it with all these ideas fleshed out.

In summary: Valve's idea-test games are better than everybody else's *actual* games.

GG.

5 comments:

mbp said...

I certainly hope this is the case and that we aren't just seeing the birth of a new never ending game series (L4D/3, L4D/4 ....)

unwize said...

I paid €50 for Valve's little test project. Let's hope L4D2 is a more justifiable investment!

Isey said...

I still play L4D on a semi regular basis, and have had it since release. I definitely got my money's worth.

It sounds like the changes made here will result in even higher replayability. I'll buy it, they did such a great job on 1 I'll support 2.

If 2 isn't much but a shiny upgrade from 1, I'll skip versions 3-10.

Crimson Starfire said...

I actually thought L4D was one of the best co-op/pvp FPS games ever made. Valve are the ninjas of FPS and so the news of a new L4D was a welcomed one. The only thing that worried me was that L4D is still really new. It probably would have been easier to just make an expansion and charge $20 for it. I guarantee that L4D2 will still be using the same engine as L4D, but with a few extra features. Perhaps an extra year's worth of content would have been beneficial?

I guess I can't complain too much. I've definitely had my money's worth out of L4D. Everything valve touches turns to gold, so L4D2 will most likely blow us all away. Looking forward to it.

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