E3 2008: 2 Hands-On with Left 4 Dead

Wed, Jul 16, 2008

GameCyte had the opportunity to stop by Valve Software's booth at E3 2008, and escape the humid hellscape of Los Angeles long enough to enter the rotting hellscape of Left 4 Dead. We got some hands-on play experience with Valve's upcoming co-op horror game, and spent the better part of half an hour trying desperately to convince zombies that our faces were not, in fact, delicious. (I don't think they bought it.) Join us for our impressions, inside.

Left 4 Dead, for the uninitiated, pits you and three other players in a cooperative bid for survival in an environment crawling with flesh-hungry undead. Players will need to depend on eachother for defense and aid as they traverse dangerous ground, blasting and fleeing their way though various first-person environments, all of which are swarming with zombies -- and not the slow, shambling, let's-just-throw-things-at-them-from-over-here zombies. No, these are the fast, snarling, sprint-over-and-tear-your-eyes-out zombies, and there's like a zillion of them. There are zombie games like Dead Rising or Resident Evil, which leave you with the sense that you could probably handle a zombie outbreak if it came up. Left 4 Dead, on the other hand, constantly keeps you wondering how the hell you're still alive.

For my demo, I stepped into the blood-caked shoes of an angry-looking gentleman with a collared shirt and necktie. After a brief weapons selection sequence, my three comrades and I appeared on the roof of a building, with a helicopter nearby. The pilot spewed some cowardly nonsense about how he couldn't pick us up from there and we'd have to get clear across town to a better evacuation point, and took off. This was to be merely the first of many in-game vocal cues that help to drive the objectives in L4D. Although Valve employees were on hand to offer directions and instructions when they were needed, I noted that all of the characters, on multiple occasions, would call out to one another when a new direction was called for, or when a warning was required. Similar to Team Fortress 2's chattering characters who are glad to let you know when they're on fire or need a dispenser here, the L4D survivors helpfully take the time to fill in the gaps, which I can foresee being incredibly handy if you happen to be playing with someone too cheap to spring for a headset.

Some of the cues were obvious; the characters would always speak up if they were injured, or in the process of reloading, or being chewed on by ravenous corpses. But, I also noted a few occasions where a character would offer new directions ("I think it's just on the other side of this warehouse!"), a feature which definitely proved useful for those of us who had never navigated the level before. Obviously there is no substitute for an actual intelligent teammate, but in a co-op game where the characters are utterly dependent upon one another to succeed, L4D has the decency to take you halfway to effective communication, all on its own.

L4D also works towards solving the problem of losing track of your teammates, since sticking together is fairly essential. Unlike other co-op FPS titles which tend to devolve into "Where did you go? You went down the stairs? Where are the stairs?" L4D has the decency to provide you with a glowing outline of your teammates if they happen to be in another room. This is a great way to see if someone has decided to take off on his own, or to see if they've then gotten into trouble -- the outlines form real-time silhouettes of the characters, so if one of your outlined teammates falls to the floor and looks to be flailing and convulsing, you'll probably want to get over to them quickly.

L4D Ammo Making our way off of the roof and into the streets, we shortly found ourselves neck-deep in zombies. The enemies came from every direction, assaulting us in sparse groups, and later in unyielding hordes. L4D's "AI Director" claims to be able to adjust the game's difficultly and pacing based on the group's performance. I guess our group must have been awesome, because the zombies were freaking everywhere. Leaping from rooftops, scrambling up walls when we were on rooftops, breaking down doors and flooding alleyways, the world of L4D is roughly 10% contemporary architecture and 90% solid mass of zombies. If L4D managed to convey one thing, it was a persistent sense of urgency, causing me to feel that I was three heartbeats away from death at any given moment -- even during the rare moments when there weren't zombies in the immediate area.

Once we had a good grip on the mechanics, my group started to fall into a natural rhythm with one another. Every moment's respite from the overwhelming zombie throngs became an opportunity to check up on ammo and health. In L4D, you see, basic caretaking is not an instantaneous process, nor can one typically take the time to do it while in a firefight. Reloading a weapon takes at least a few seconds, and applying medical attention is a fairly long affair which prevents the involved parties from doing anything else. So, at every break, we quickly learned to reload our weapons, and verify whether anyone needed healing -- and to see if we had the supplies to do so. Each character can carry one single-use medpack, which can be used on themself or on anyone else. Thus began the co-op mechanics -- and that was the tamest example.

One of my favorite elements of a well-designed co-op game is the feeling that every member of the group can make individual accomplishments -- little moments of triumph in which each player can feel that the group might have failed if not for their efforts. L4D provides plenty of these -- literal moments where a member of your group will be killed if you don't stay on your toes. While navigating an abandoned warehouse, I found myself bringing up the rear, which left me first in line to get attacked by a bloody monstrosity with a 20-foot tongue. The beast wrapped its slimy appendage around my neck, and began to drag me off to my death, and my character became suddenly helpless, leaving my teammates only moments to fight the creature off before I was killed. Other occasions saw massive zombies pinning group members down until teammates knocked them away, and more than once we had to pull fallen characters to their feet in order to keep moving. L4D will constantly force you to watch your teammates' backs, and as such, the sense of cameraderie grows quite fast.

Successfully helping your teammates and wading through opponents will reward you with a high performance rating at each in-game checkpoint, which presents you with TF2-style quick stats on things like the number of teammates healed or zombies killed. This, too, is a good indicator of how team-oriented you've been -- and what you probably ought to work on for the next section.

Before I knew it, my half-hour was up, and I would never see the helicopter evac point. Still, I had started the game with no idea how the co-op mechanics would work, and by the time I left, I had fallen into sync with three complete strangers, shouting warnings, offering aid, and saving their lives easily as many times as they saved my own. Graphically excellent, heart-poundingly paced, excellently geared to encourage swift and easy co-op play, and loaded completely full of goddamned zombies, I'm looking eagerly forward to Left 4 Dead's November launch.

E3, E3 2008, FPS, Hands-On, Horror, Left 4 Dead, PC, Preview, Survival Horror, Valve, zombies

This post was written by:

Jesse Henning - who has written 474 posts on GameCyte.

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3 Comments For This Post

Sean Says:
July 16th, 2008 at 8:37 am
While we are talking about Zombies, Kotaku released pictures of a Japanese magazine reporting Dead Rising being ported to Wii. (kotaku.com/5025707/dead-risingfor-wii) If memory serves, capcom said a few years ago that ONLY the 360 had the processing power to handle that zombie horde, and a port would be impossible, so this is interesting news.

While you folks are at the conference, please poke around and see if you can uncover any more information about this.

...not too much time though, new games over ports, i say.
Saphar Says:
July 16th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Sorry to hijack this comment section, but I work for a game publisher and would like to contact GameCyte and provide you with information, assets, and beta access for our latest title. Unfortunately, the editor@gamecyte.com address listed under the About section doesn't seem to actually exist.

Please get in contact with me if you're interested.
Seaniccus Says:
July 16th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Hot Dog! A scoop! (As a reader, I declare myself interested in that persons comment. Please let us know if it goes anywhere.)

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