Can you talk us through the DLC?
It’s a campaign called Crash Course, continuing from when No Mercy ends up until when Death Toll begins – we give you the intermediate story. It has the co-op Campaign, and also has Survival, but the focus is Versus. One of the problems with Versus – well, perhaps it’s not quite a ‘problem’ because there are actually equal player minutes between Versus and co-op – but it’s a two hour game. And we look at our statistics and we see that players ideally want to play between 20 and 30 minutes. So we wanted to create a Versus campaign which you could play through in 30 minutes – a quick competitive thing that slots in between TV shows. It’s a two map campaign with a finale, so it’s almost a three map campaign. Obviously if the teams are bad and get wiped quicker then it goes quicker. We’ve also added some things – you can now see your teammates’ statuses and their recharge timers. The world also stays exactly the same between team changes, so there are no complaints about it being imbalanced any more. We’ve actually been working on this a bit, but we’re finally close enough that we’re comfortable to talk about it.
So this will hopefully put paid to the moaning minnies and their petitions?
Honestly, I think that as more and more people have seen L4D2 they’ve begun to understand what’s going on. And as this update comes out – I think I’ve realised that talking to people doesn’t really answer anything; they want to see stuff. I could say a million words and I’m still just some dude talking. Now I can just go: any questions?
Is this DLC going to be playable by owners of L4D2 as well?
We’re still struggling with how interoperability is going to work, right now. When we talk about L4D, the story stuff – there’s actually a lot of character dialogue that’s based in each map.
So you can’t just play it with another set of characters?
No. We’d have to duplicate that, which we’re not against doing. But there’s this thing of the world – these characters wouldn’t be here – how much does that matter? We have a world sketched out and we have an understanding of where everything is and what’s going on, you know, so story-wise it wouldn’t make much sense. But equally there’s a whole group of the fans who don’t care. So we could put new characters in old places and old characters in new places.
Would you really need to use the characters from each game – wouldn’t just loading a map dictate the characters you were playing with?
That’s one of the routes we’ve talked about going, and maybe adding the new creatures, or whatever. There’s a lot of back-and-forth. We haven’t fixed on what we’re doing yet, so we don’t want to talk about it and make people think something is going to happen when we don’t know ourselves.
Do you foresee L4D evolving into a platform rather than a series of discrete games?
There’s something about that that makes sense for this world. But I think people don’t understand that, L4D2 versus L4D – we redid so many systems. When you look at why the authoring tools took so long, it’s because it wasn’t a simple Source game, like Team Fortress or Episode Two where we use the exact same tools. We used new tools here, we used a new file system, new dependencies – and we had to redesign all these things to work in this new world. But now we’ve got this base so that in the future everything will work with that.
It’s hard to predict what the future of the franchise will be, because we don’t really think that way. You’d think that we’d have a big room where we map these things out in a scientific way, but it’s more about what the team wants to do, what the community’s like, the feedback we get. I mean, early on updates for L4D were about making the game that you had actually worked the way people were playing it. The changes we made, like the melee fatigue, were based on watching people play and community feedback. We’re going to keep doing that with L4D2.
The reason we say ‘platform’ is it seems to make sense from a modding perspective. There are few other games which have the same instant appeal – people naturally want to launch a zombie apocalypse upon their homes and workplaces.
Exactly. When we getting ready to release, it reminded us of Doom, where everyone went off and made their school and business, because you wanted to see imps and demons running through there. That’s why we’re trying to make sure that the L4D level designers are able to import what they make into L4D2. A lot of these guys have a vision and have undergone no small pain to carry out that vision, so we want to make sure they’re covered too.
Many people have drawn all sorts of parallels between L4D2’s New Orleans setting with the floods, along with some extensions into race issues. Have these surprised you?
The weird racism charge is the crazy part. Of all the things we thought might be problematic going into it, that wasn’t even on the list. The bad thing there is though, that turns the discussion into people on the forums going, "Oh, racism doesn’t exist, it’s just these people spouting off". And, well, that’s not true either. There’s a discussion to be had here, but he [Houston Chronicle writer Willie Jefferson] just chose a really poor point to make it on. I think he’s sorry he said it – he’s probably getting a lot of hate mail.