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Setting out to do for co-op gaming what Counter-Strike did for team combat, Left 4 Dead is an ambitious survival horror game. Running on the Source engine, Left 4 Dead leaves four armed survivors of a world overrun with zombies, and they must fight their way out to escape the outbreak.
Designed for co-op play, the four players must work together to finish each stage of the game, lending each other artillery support, sharing ammo and rescuing each other when zombies are on top of them. In addition to the standard four players as humans, another four players can be amongst the masses of assaulting zombies, seeking to take down the other players. Zombie players might even find themselves become one of the four mutant "boss" zombies, who have unique powers that can be used to devastate, injure, tie up, mark and track, confuse, or even humiliate the gun-toting human survivors.

Kikizo: You're not doing a PS3 version of Left 4 Dead. We all know the PS3 version of Orange Box was a bit ropey - did you just decide this time you couldn't be doing with all that again this time?

Lombardi: [laughs] You know, we didn't shop the PS3 Orange Box; EA came to us and said, "you're making this new Half-Life thing, can we make it multi platform?", and we said "sure". If somebody came to us and said, "can we do a platform extension of Left 4 Dead?", then we'd have a conversation with them. I think part of the reason folks came to us on that one [Orange Box for PS3] was because it was a Half-Life property and they knew it was money in the bank. Left 4 Dead is kind of a risky proposition, and it's an unproven IP. So I think if this one hits, you'll probably see someone saying: "Can we quickly put this out on another platform?!", or, "when you guys do a sequel, can we do it on another platform?" You know, people kind of assess the risk of the investment - and anything related to Half-Life or Half-Life 2, the risk is a lot lower than, "hey, new franchise! Trying to do new gameplay!"

Kikizo: Sure, it's a unique angle with the pure co-op focus - but you can play singleplayer as well, right? I am thinking of console players who maybe don't have Live yet.

Lombardi: The way it's set up is there's campaign mode, which is the four survivors going through the four campaigns, made up of five maps each, and that can be played [with] one to four players - but there will always be four players on the team, so it could be single player co-op, or two players plus two bots. It scales up like that, so it's designed to always have four of the survivors moving forwards, and whether they're humans or bots is up to the individual player to decide. So that would be the closest thing to a single player experience that's offered.

Kikizo: One of the things I've noticed about playing it with three other people is that everyone seems to naturally stay close together rather than straying away, which helps the gameplay flow. And yet the maps are big. How do you keep people close?

Lombardi: Yeah, firstly, I think when you creep people out in a scary environment, they tend to stay close together naturally! Secondly, if you don't do that, we're going to punish you and beat you into submission! So I mean, just as Counter-Strike was sort of unapologetic that if you got shot in the first minute of the five-minute match, you'd be out until that match was over - that was a huge risk that those guys took when they designed that mod, and it never would have gotten green-lit by a publisher multi-player only if you could be sitting for as long as four minutes - you wouldn't even have gotten a meeting! [laughs]. But it's turned out to be the winning formula for like, nine years now. So in the same way, Left 4 Dead is being unapologetic about the fact that it's a co-op game. You're supposed to play together - and if you don't you're gonna die! Or at least, the chances are like 95 per cent - you know, unless you're this amazing 'Thresh' or 'Fatal1ty' style player - you're not going to make it.

Kikizo: The game influenced the acquisition of Turtle Rock Studios by Valve. Can you talk us through how that came about?

Lombardi: So going back to E3 2003, Michael Booth had left Westwood and he was looking for something new to do. His life-long - or career-long - passion has been AI; he did Nox and C&C Generals when he was at Westwood. We wanted to hire him, and we wanted to bring him up to Valve to work on Half-Life 2 and make the AI even better that it was. And he said: "I really want to work with you guys, but there's no effing way I'm moving to Seattle - I live in Southern California, and I don't like the rain!" So we said "OK, why don't you make a bot for Counter-Strike, we'll put it in Condition Zero, and we can use that in the Xbox version of Counter-Strike". Then we started doing Counter-Strike Source, and we needed some help because we were all heads-down doing Half-Life 2, and he was like, "I've got a couple of people we can hire and we can do Counter-Strike Source in collaboration with you guys." So we did that!

And then 2005, after all that stuff had shipped, he said "I have this idea for a zombie game." And it was co-op, pretty different - the high concept is the same as what you've seen, but it wasn't exactly like it. So we have a couple of people at Valve work with him on the iteration of the R&D on that - and by that time it wasn't just Mike any more, it was probably six or eight people. They R&D'd it, prototyped it... there were probably about three noticeable iterations of it worked on through the course of the year.

So at some point in late 2005, early 2006, everyone was starting to feel we had the right thing. And by that point, he had grown Turtle Rock to be eight or nine people, or whatever it was at the time - he'd sort of recruited people from Valve to be working on the team - [laughs] - so we were like, we'll co-develop this thing together, and we'll stick it through our publishing agreement with EA, we'll stick it on Steam, and all that kind of stuff.

And then it started really gaining momentum! More and more people at Valve wanted to work on it, we started showing it to the press... we started saying, "wait - this thing's got real big potential." We're basically acting as one unit, but we're two different companies - why don't we just officially make it one company, but with two different offices? And Mike was really open to it.

Kikizo: Well, who would turn down the chance to be part of Valve, right?

Lombardi: Well he did, originally! [laughs] He got his cake and got to eat it too. So for him, the cake was not a lie!

Kikizo: [laughs] That is funny Doug. That brings me to the sense of humour in Left 4 Dead. I mean, in other zombie games you might associate with survival horror, you don't really see that... at least, it's not intentional humour!

Lombardi: [laughs] Yeah, we've done that!

Kikizo: But it's like, how can you have a zombie thing without humour of some kind? Look at all the zombie movies. Zombies are funny.

Lombardi: Yeah. Well I mean, there are also ones like 28 Days which is intentionally serious; I mean, the first one was really good. But for us, we look at a lot of the other classic zombie fiction, whether it's games or comic books or movies, and there's always been this nice balance; they scare you and then they make you laugh and they don't take themselves too seriously. And I think that [is important] in any game... Half-Life 1 had some great moments in it, even though it was really scary and had some good gameplay and all that kind of stuff... there's that moment where you're going to hit the elevator and the two scientists go shooting down and scream - you know, that was funny! It's just good to have some comic relief in the game, just like it's good to have some quiet points that complement the big combat moments.

Kikizo: Is there any way you'd be able to get like a PC-like frame rate performance on the Xbox 360 in this release, as this wasn't achieved in Orange Box?

Lombardi: You know, I think once you get up to about 30 frames per second it's darn playable, and the average person doesn't notice it, and I think that's something we as an industry get caught up in, like, "it must be 60 frames per second". I'm sorry but most people can't tell the difference between 30 and 60. You can clearly tell the difference between 20 and 30 though, and that's unacceptable, in our opinion. Beyond a certain point, it's a case of how much time do we want to spend working on performance, versus moving onto the next game. So you're right, at the top end on the PC you're going to have higher frame rates, higher resolution textures, all the usual stuff, but for the average gamer it's going to be virtually identical - the same geometry, the same monsters, the same campaign.

Kikizo: You've got this "AI Director" - does it introduce dynamic difficulty as well?

Lombardi: Yeah, the AI Director is trying to do three things. I mean you have this sort of concept of where a multiplayer game meets a singleplayer game. So in the singleplayer game you have AI, and it's like, the Combine guys in Half-Life 2 - they know where they can go, and what they can do. But we basically say there's going to be four or five or six of these guys in this room based on your difficulty setting, and they can find one of a number of places that's not identical, but, after a while you kind of learn where things are if you play the game a hundred times. Certainly we see that, where people can play the game and there's speed runs and all that kind of stuff you can see online. But here we want it to be more dynamic than that. So the AI Director comes in and says, "I know what all these guys can do, and I know I can place them anywhere I want, and I'm going to do that to keep it fresh so that it's not the same two times, and I'm also going to keep an eye on pacing, so that there are common moments and peak moments". And then finally in the singleplayer game, you have Easy, Medium, Difficult, and you start running up a [difficulty] ramp.

I'm sort of a Medium difficulty guy - not really great, not really terrible, I hope [laughs] - anyway, I start going up the ramp that the game has built for me; I'm not magically going to become a great player half way through the game; I may get better at this particular game as hopefully it's teaching me some of its mechanics, but I'm not going to inherently become a better FPS player. But, if you put four Medium players together, and say you're now a unit, your skill set may change throughout the game: two of you may get killed, therefore you're not as good as you were when you started! So if you start the game on Hard and two of you get killed, it's not going to be a fun an experience at all... but the AI Director is watching that, and saying, "let's crank things down a little bit to match their firepower right now." Conversely, if there are four Medium players, and they want to work together and be a good team, even though they're Medium players, if they're functioning like a well-oiled machine, their skill set is going to go up after 15-20 minutes once they get used to playing together... at that same time, the AI Director is saying, "I'm going to turn things up!".

Kikizo: Well the AI was obviously already very good in Half-Life 2 and more so in Episode Two, so this is like a natural evolution, to be developing your AI technology further?

Lombardi: It's interesting, because you have a company that's been developing Counter-Strike for a bunch of years, that was actually founded on putting AI into first-person games, and then they meet this guy whose passion is AI, and we make him work on multiplayer stuff for a while! So it's kind of funny how you put these things in a blender and hopefully at the end of the day, once you let it sit and chill for a while, we should get something good that falls in the middle between this great multiplayer and singleplayer experiences.

Kikizo: Cool. With Half-Life 2: Episode One, you originally noted that quite a lot of players got stuck and didn't finish it. What was the trend on Episode Two?

Lombardi: Well, firstly, Portal seemed to steal the spotlight away from TF2 and Episode 2! Which was sort of an interesting side effect of doing the Orange Box, and something that we didn't see. But with Episode Two specifically, I haven't looked at the stats recently to see what the completion ratio was, but the feedback I heard from most people was that they did make it to the end - and that they 'hated' us for what we did at the end by taking away the one character that went away! [laughs] So I think overall, what that was telling us was that people liked the story. I personally agree with the feedback - and I'm not just making up feedback that is my opinion - that especially in the last hour or two of the game, we hit the story harder than we had in any other prior Half-Life games. And then a main character of that story got killed! So that was kind of a bummer!

Kikizo: Well, sh-- happens though, and you had warned me in our last interview to expect that someone wouldn't be continuing with us on the journey by the end of the game and... I was like, who's it going to be?!

Lombardi: Yeah, we teased enough so that we would hopefully get you to the end, and then you could find out! But the other thing that played into a lot more people finishing it - my hunch is that more people finished Ep2 than Ep1 -was because we got back to the variety of gameplay that was in Half-Life 2. I heard from folks who felt like Half-Life 2 was like three or four games in one, and we did that intentionally; there were five specific places where we said in this place you're going to do this, in this place you're going to airboat, a lot of gravity gun in this place, in this place you're going to fight a lot of striders... and then at the end we're just going to send things over the top. And I think Ep2 went back to that winning formula, whereas Ep1 was kind of you and Alyx fighting in the city streets the whole time. I don't want to piss all over Episode One and say it was a one-note thing, but it wasn't as varied in the gameplay as Ep2 was, and I think that's one of the things that keeps people going, is that variety.

Kikizo: When are we going to start to hear about Episode Three? Because the gaps seem to be quite long based on the first couple of episodes.

Lombardi: Yeah, the next time you play as Gordon will be longer than the distance between HL2 to Ep1, and Ep1 to Ep2.

Kikizo: Won't you announce or show anything on Episode 3 this year?

Lombardi: We may at the very end of the year.

Kikizo: What do you think about the distance between the episodes, though? Is there a benefit to having a longer wait?

Lombardi: I think our philosophy was that, we spent six years on Half-Life 2 and upwards of $40 million, and basically 80% of the company ended working up on it for a good chunk of that time. And that was just too much; nobody wanted to do that again. There was this trajectory with Half-Life 1 costing a lot less than that, and taking two years or whatever it took. HL2 was six years and a lot more money, so if we were to keep going down that path it was going to get more expensive, and take even longer. And what we wanted was an alternative to that. We wanted to deliver the games more quickly, and we didn't want to be taking the risk of $40 million or $50 million to make the thing, because at that point you're like, "oh my god we have to sell 2 million copies or else we're fucked", right? [laughs]

So I think we were successful in that it's been less than four years since Half-Life 2, and we've gotten two episodes out; each of them had new technology, each of them had new gameplay - arguably Ep2 had more new gameplay than Ep1, but I think that we were successful in giving players more time with Freeman, more time with Alyx, giving them new experiences, telling them more of the story, in a much quicker fashion. I mean, "episodic" conjures up this notion of television where it comes once a week for 12 weeks or whatever, and so maybe there's a better word for what we're doing! You know what I mean? But I think the goal is to get away from that 'half a lifetime, mountains of money' to produce the next thing, and we've succeeded in that - and maybe we could have chosen a better word to describe what we were doing.

Kikizo: In fairness though, these episodes are kind of five to ten hours each, depending on how bad you are...

Lombardi: And I mean to be truthful, games that aren't calling themselves "episodes" are kind of getting around the same [length]!

Kikizo: Exactly.

Lombardi: So I think while we maybe didn't choose the right word, our intentions were... we were trying to be honest, and saying we're not giving you the fifteen plus hours that we gave you in Half-Life 2; we're giving you a little less and we're going to give it at a more rapid pace, and we're going to move the price to be more according.

Kikizo: I think people are happy with that. Well, we could talk all day, because you know I'm a fan, but we'll leave it there. Thanks for your time Doug.

Left 4 Dead is out on Steam on November 18. A retail release is out on the same day in North America, and on November 21 in Europe. Half-Life 2: Episode Three will hopefully start to show more of itself before the end of the year, Doug mentioned in this chat. Find our last interview with Doug here, and last year's interview with Valve boss Gabe Newell here.

CRITICS CORNER:

95Official Xbox Magazine
Left 4 Dead's simplicity offers purity of gameplay - the same reason that gamers keep returning to classic arcade games. Come to think of it, with a handful of levels and unpredictable events happening within them, Left 4 Dead has more in common with "Ms. Pac-Man" than just the eating. It's the same thing over and over - but when simple ingredients are perfectly prepared, what could be a mere snack becomes a feast. This one just happens to be on human flesh. [Holiday 2008, p.32]

88 GameGuideDog
"Zombie killing with class! Nice valve style interface controls and interaction. Game can be a bit tricky and fun at the same time."

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Extended Zombie killing in a hospital. Nice.

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