Video Games
‘Left 4 Dead’ Lead Explains Why Valve Released the Sequel So Soon After the Original Game
So, we all know that Left 4 Dead is one of the greatest games ever, and the sequel only improved upon that greatness. You might also remember the backlash Valve faced for moving on to the sequel so soon after Left 4 Dead’s release. Well, in a new interview with Chet Faliszek, who was the lead writer on Left 4 Dead, there’s a good reason for why Valve went that route.
In an interview with Game Developer on the making of Left 4 Dead, Faliszek, who ended up taking on more of a leadership position for the project than his actual writing credit lets on, recalled how despite the team’s impressive work on getting Left 4 Dead optimized for weaker PCs and the Xbox 360, the game was still “broken”, due to the game using the Source Engine.
“I don’t think outside people can appreciate how broken the Left 4 Dead engine was but still shipped,” according to Faliszek. “It loaded each map two or three times in the background.” Efforts to try and fix this issue only caused more problems. One engineer’s attempts to fix the issue caused a survivor to disappear each time.
“Left 4 Dead was such a broken thing that nobody wanted to touch it,” Faliszek says. “That game iterated so quickly that if it meant breaking something horrible, where you had to load a map [two] or three times but you could playtest it today, we did it.”
As a result, while the game shipped and received plenty of acclaim, according to Faliszek, “you had to pay for that debt” if there was going to be any additional support. “There was no way you were going to support mods for Left 4 Dead in the same way we did for Left 4 Dead 2 without a big reset.”
That of course led Valve to make Left 4 Dead 2 a standalone sequel.
As to the question of why Valve didn’t communicate this issue more clearly when people asked about the reason behind the sequel being announced so soon, Faliszek had this to say: “When people kill themselves to ship a game, you don’t really want to say that there were problems with it. It was a lot of patching and Bondo-ing to get it through the door. To be appreciative of that, I’d rather just have somebody mad at me because they thought it was my idea.”
Currently, both Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 feature hefty discounts during Steam’s Autumn Sale, which is on now until November 28.
Remember back in 2022 when developer Survios had announced that they were teaming up with 20th Century Games to develop a new Alien title? Well seeing as it’s Alien Day, Survios has announced their brand-new VR title, Alien: Rogue Incursion. Coming “Holiday 2024” to the PlayStation VR2, SteamVR, and Quest 3, Rogue Incursion will feature an original story that “fully surrounds players within the terrors of the Alien universe”.
Details on the game are light at the moment, but the official site describes the upcoming title as being “designed by Alien fans for Alien fans”, with Survios aiming to craft a “technically advanced, and frightfully immersive Alien virtual reality game.”
Seeing as Alien: Isolation never got official VR support when it was released, this is obviously a welcome announcement. In the meantime, if you’re keen to experience an Alien game in VR, you can always check out the fan-made mod for Alien: Isolation by Nibre_, which allows both the Steam and Epic Games Store version of Alien: Isolation to be played using the Oculus.
And speaking of Alien: Isolation, as you might expect, it’s got a hefty 80% discount going on at the moment on Steam until May 1. So if you still haven’t grabbed it after all these years, this is as good a time as any.
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