Left 4 Dead

[Moriya]

I am doing a 2 hour test run of this at Valve's headquarters on the 24th. I don't really know much about the game. Myself and two of my friends are going, we are going to try and get slotted together so we can do co-op together. They were specifically looking for non PC gamers, so that's why I volunteered.

I'm just excited to see the magical innards of Valve. Should be fun.

[jp]

Fuckin' AWESOME dude.


Left 4 Dead looks like its going to be really good. I can't wait for it. Ya lucky bastard! :p

[Moriya]

Just a lil perk of living in this area. I'll definitely give a full report after I get back.

[lordsnarf]

Please do, the game looks sweet.

[Conjoshus]

I look forward to hearing more! Thanks for the heads up :)

[Advocate]

yeah ... awesome.

[Moriya]

Well I cant go. I have a meeting I can't get out of. But I passed my invite to some friends, I think one of them will go. If so, I'll see what they think of the game.

[Conjoshus]

They need to be very detailed with their impressions :)

[Newport420]

I am really looking forward to this game. Any details you can pass on City would be appreciated! :)

[Moriya]

I'm supposed to be there at 1pm, but I now have meetings all day today, so I can't go. I did tell the guy I can come tomorrow or next week, but so far no reply.

If I do get a chance to go, I'll definitely post here.

[Moriya]

Sweet!!

So I couldn't make the L4D testing because work suddenly because insane. But I just got an email from Valve and they want me to come in and it looks like do usability testing for Steam.

Not nearly as exciting as L4D, but still, get to go into Valve headquarters. And this time I get free stuff for my efforts.

[Moriya]

Ok so I am now doing the L4D playtest tomorrow. Doesn't look like anything work related is going to prevent me, so I should make it.

[Newport420]

Updates will be expected. Excuses will not be tolerated! ;)

[Luminous]

I am definitely looking forward to some impressions.

[jp]

Updates will be expected. Excuses will not be tolerated! ;)

:goodpost:

[Moriya]

Just got back, here's the scoop...

Valve's office is very nice. They are on the 10th floor of a building in downtown Bellevue and pretty much every single room had a gorgeous view of the city. The front reception area was a HL2 otakan's wet dream come true. They even had a full size item wooden crate with a real crowbar sitting on top of it. They also had crowbars mounted on the wall, life size Gordons everywhere, awards galore, and even a can of HL2 chili which was "certified headcrab free" It was a lot of fun checking out all the stuff while we waited.

Then we went in and watched the opening movie for the game. It's not done yet, so in areas it was pretty rough. In particular no facial animation so when people talked their face didn't change at all. The movie is pretty long. They said it would play as the game installed on Xbox's that had hard drives. One part of the movie featured a tank (see below) and that was really awesome, made me want to play the game.

Then they took us to four rooms, each with an xbox setup. It was me, my friend and two other guys. I chose to be the girl, but it made me be the black guy. They noted that is a bug. But we also found who you picked didn't matter, they all play the same.

The game is pretty much a first person, co-op Resident Evil. There are tons of zombies everywhere, and the game cycles between a handful trickling in and hundreds rushing in all at once. I thought that was kinda awkward. You'd go into a room and you could sneak around and find zombies in an idle state, even pick off a few, then something would cause the trigger to hit and *bam* there are just f'ing zombies everywhere. Quite often you were just swarmed by zombies with little you can really do but try and fight your way out. Seems there are situations where you are just plain going to lose a lot of life and that's all there is to it.

On the flipside to that, it seems the zombies are programmed to go after the bulk of the team. There was one room in particular where we went in up above in the rafters. I went down on the ground by myself. The trigger occured, zombies rush in, and they are all climbing up into the rafters, completely ignoring me. I just sat there and picked off dozens of them as they ran past me, oblivious to my presence.

Everything randomly spawns. Everything. Each time through a level, weapons, items, ammo would all spawn in different areas. Even enemies spawn and trigger randomly each time through. They said this was to try and improve replay value, but I didn't really like it. I think it hampers the gameplay. Instead of finely crafted and placed enemies, you just get random swarms and so it ends up being kind of mindless.

Here are the enemies we saw:

standard zombies: by the bucket load. Cannonfodder, nothing special.

Hunters: Much like the fast zombies in HL2, they attack you relentlessly, and knock you down. Once knocked down you are fucked, zombies will swarm the hell out of you. You can still attack, but you cannot get up again. Instead a teammate has to help you up by holding down X for a while. Once a teammate is in trouble, the game alerts everyone else.

boomers: big huge guys that explode when you kill them, we commented they are like the big guys in SmashTV. All in all they didn't impress me or really influence gameplay much. We only saw a couple. When they explode they would leave behind a gas making it hard to see.

witches: They hang out and cry. When a witch is around all the characters tell each other to turn off their flashlights. Awaking the witch by shooting it, or shining your light on it, or whatever, causes it to scream relentlessly, triggering hundreds of zombies to swarm in. The game will indicate which player woke it up, which is a nice touch. Afterwards we talked to one of the devs and he said that you are basically supposed to sneak around them as attempting to kill them will always cause them to scream, but he did agree you can probably sneak up on them and kill them with one nice headshot.

smokers: These guys were very cool, but also problematic. They have long tongues (think Toad from XMen) and they hook you on it and draw you into them. At that point you are trapped and aid from teammates is the only way out. This really sucked though because so many times you just can't see where the smoker is! Your teammate is glowing red to indicate he is in trouble, but finding the smoker was often very difficult. We said the tongue should glow brightly to lead you to the smoker, or something like that. Many times we died to smokers because of this.

At one point a smoker had spawned inside a rock. Around the rock had spawned weapons and health packs. That goddamn smoker killed three of us! One of us would go for a medpack and get hit by the tongue and then that was it, we couldn't kill the smoker. Haha. Bug #2.

tanks: big, huge, fast zombies that are just like the Hulk in the recent movie. We only saw one and I dunno, it didn't impress me or make me think it was stupid. It was just sort of there. The tank segment in the movie was really cool. the actual gameplay did not live up to it. I told them that afterwards when the movie guy wanted to make sure the movie didn't make any false promises.



Graphics were good. Classic Source engine in full effect here. Looked just like Half-Life 2 really. The menus and the beep to indicate there is nothing to do, etc were all different though.


We played through three levels, but halfway through they lowered the difficulty to easy because we just couldn't do it on normal. This game requires teamwork, and well four random guys off the street aren't necessarily going to do that very well.

One nice touch : after you die, you sit out and watch everyone else. But eventually they will come to a place where innocent survivors are trapped. When you free them, whoever is dead can play again.

All in all it was enjoyable. I had a good time, and there were times when we were genuinely laughing at what was happening on screen. But...I have no plans to buy it. It didn't wow me. To me, this game is not Valve quality. A great game, sure, but nowhere near the calibur of HL or Team Fortress or Portal or what have you. I have serious doubts as to replay value and how long people will really play this. The randomness they put in it killed it for me. I think it just forces the battles to be rather dumbed down.

[DarthArcturus]

that sucks..I don't really like randomness in games either esp constant spawns...

[Moriya]

My friend who got me in on this playtest has a roommate who works for Valve (he's actually one of the Portal devs), that's how we heard about this playtest.

They are having a party this Friday and it sounds like a decent number of Valve employees will be there. I might be able to start planting some seeds to get a job at Valve. I'm, unfortunately, not really a game dev -- no real experience with DirectX or Source is basically what that boils down to. But I don't think that's as hampering as it may seem. How sweet would it be to work for Valve?

[jp]

My friend who got me in on this playtest has a roommate who works for Valve (he's actually one of the Portal devs), that's how we heard about this playtest.

They are having a party this Friday and it sounds like a decent number of Valve employees will be there. I might be able to start planting some seeds to get a job at Valve. I'm, unfortunately, not really a game dev -- no real experience with DirectX or Source is basically what that boils down to. But I don't think that's as hampering as it may seem. How sweet would it be to work for Valve?

That would be the shit dude!

[Luminous]

Thanks for the impressions, City and now that game has dropped low on my priority list. I still want to play it, but I will wait a little longer. I will need a lot of positive reviews from gamers as well as the gaming press before I buy this one.

Again, thanks.

[Newport420]

Yeah thanks fo rthe impressions man. Like Luminous this game dropped a bit on my list but I will definitely be keeping an eye on it to see how the final product is received.

[Moriya]

Thanks for the impressions, City and now that game has dropped low on my priority list. I still want to play it, but I will wait a little longer. I will need a lot of positive reviews from gamers as well as the gaming press before I buy this one.

Again, thanks.

For what it's worth, my friend who came with me totally disagrees with me. I basically said the game is a B- to B game, where I want a Valve game to be A+. He thinks the game accomplishes what it's trying to very well and he is very excited to pick it up.

He also really liked the randomness and gave one good example: We ended up doing this one level over and over because, well, we suck :) There was one room that had a door in front of you, the door you came in, and a vent in the ceiling. The game tells you to open the door and be prepared for mayhem. Each time you do this, the zombies would swarm in totally differently through the three entrances, and basically your team must communicate and indicate what's going on, who's convering what, etc to survive. The first time through you might have only had a few regular zombies come in through the back, but the next time you might get 6 hunters coming in that way and if you don't adapt to that, forget it.

[Newport420]

Seeing as I am game buying whore and that I know a few people who will pick this up day one..... I just may end up doing the same.

What can I say..... I have problems. :)

[Luminous]

I do love a great co-op experience where communication is absolutely key.

Damn.....what to do, what to do.

[Moriya]

Just thought I'd drop a note here, not really thread worthy or anything.

I went to that party last night. None of the Valve guys were there but there was 2 Bungie employees and a Nintendo guy who does dev support (if a third party dev has a Wii API question, he's the one they contact). Then just about everyone else was a digipen student, it was a "welcome to the new school year" party. It was quite possibly the geekiest night of drinking ever :)

The host of the party was one of the Bungie guys. He was trashed, and everyone was trying to get any kind of Halo and/or new Bungie news out of him, which was pretty funny. Not me, I was just enjoying myself, I'm not going to be a dick like that. He was a good employee, no morsel dropped :) (and EDIT, I want to clarify I'd be a dick since I just met the guy and everyone else. The people hounding him were his good friends, different story)

It was a fun night for sure.