I hate sequels
Guest writer Ian Edhouse talks about Valve Software and the sequel to their 2008 hit Left 4 Dead.
I’m Valve’s bitch. It’s OK, I’m cool with it – after the initial shock when one of their gang bent me over in the showers and did what came naturally (it was Team Fortress 2, but I didn’t catch the name until later), I got used to the benefits. Sure I have to install their Steam software on my PC, and purchase digital content at higher than market price with no resale value, but I get the most well-crafted and well-supported games of this generation – and, hey, at least I don’t have to put the disc in the drive, right? Right?
So last year, when I found out about a new co-operative online game from the Valve boys and their new pals Turtle Rock Studios, I was excited to say the least. I mean, I’d briefly hung out with the Counter-Strike gang, but they already had too many gimps under their wing, so the opportunity to branch out from TF2 into Left 4 Dead’s horde-infested alleyways was enticing. The game seemed to be just around the corner for longer than necessary, but Valve kept me sweet with periodic hype – the game would feature a procedurally-driven A.I. ‘Director’, which would generate fresh new and exciting experiences every time it was played. It would be built on the concept of a small group of players supporting each other (bitch as I am, I don’t appreciate being reminded of it every 20 seconds by the mic-spamming homophobes online gaming communities attract) and would run on an enhanced Source engine. I was content – I could hang out with TF2 for the time being and then jump ship when my new Sugar Daddy was released.
When it finally was, the reviews were… cautionary. Reviewers noted a dearth of content backing up the impressive technology, and warned that, polished and immersive as the experience was, it was short. Very short. Like, 4 missions short. Not that this stopped me (and hordes of others) from diving in head-first, of course. So it was short – so what? I suppose I knew, somewhere, in the back of my mind, what was going on, but I ignored my niggling concerns and reassured myself that Valve would look out for me. They always had, I mean, Team Fortress was being supported up the arse, so to speak, and besides, the A.I. Director would keep things fresh across the maps by mixing things up, changing things around and putting the second pistol on a different car bonnet every now and then, right? It was a full-price game with limited content, this I knew, but the experience was going to be about matey replayability, not single-player grind – an FPS Mario Kart for the Halo generation, if you like.
So I bought 4 copies. Yeah, like I said, me and Valve, we have a special relationship. I bought one for me, one for my girlfriend, and another for a mate so we could play it as intended with another pimped-out pal of mine who’d already invested. I even bought a copy for the 360 so I could play it with as many people as possible. Things were great – OK, I was pretty much working to support Gabe Newell, I’d started to not recognise my girlfriend without her grey beard and beret, and I was deep in the red to Xbox Live but, God, I mean, if you’ve never played it… I can’t describe the buzz it gives you… the way that the second pistol would be on a different car every now and again, or, sometimes, the same car… it takes your breath away. Besides, I had no worries – they’d given me that ‘Survivor’ mode for free, hadn’t they? I mean, I never played it – it’s pointless. But it was free, so that at least showed Valve’s willingness to support my investment, right?
Wrong. Turns out Valve had their eyes on fresh meat all along, and Left 4 Dead 2 is coming out this week – only one year after the release of the original. What gets me is, they didn’t even call – I had to find out from a live twitter feed from reporters attending the Microsoft speech at E3. OK, so by now there’ve been numerous reports on the game from various sources (including from representatives of the rather vocal ‘boycott L4D’ group on Steam) but I’m hurt, Gabe, I genuinely am.
So, setting the prison rape analogy aside, for me this whole thing has been one of those moments – like when that Nokia ringtone pissed all over the corpse of Gene Roddenberry in the opening scenes of the recent Star Trek film – when souls like myself, forced, day-in and day-out to defend our much-derided cultural preferences at work and at home, are presented with a stark reminder that for all our bleating to the contrary, we are not appreciators of art, we are consumers of product.
I wish I could tell you that I’ll fight the good fight and leave the next instalment alone, but this is no fairy-tale world – I’m going to lube up my wallet for a fresh buggering just as soon as I finish this. I mean, from what I’m reading, the A.I. Director in the new game is able to control the game’s environment in new and exciting ways… my mind boggles as to where the second pistol will end up, this time.
Ian Edhouse is reloading.
Ian, I’d be interested to hear what you think of the game now you’ve played it (because when we play together all I can hear is girlish screaming). I’m tremendously disappointed. The new Special Infected are OK, suppose, if your definition of progress is being more irritated than before, but the main problem for me with L4D2 is that the difficulty is now absurdly high.
The first game I could happily play on Advanced (sometimes I even chanced my arm at Expert, although I never finished a campaign). But on L4D2, even Normal is becoming a marathon balls-ache. The ‘set pieces’, where you start an alarm going then have to run for it through a horde of slavering zombies to turn it off, are just too hard. You HAVE to stay together to survive, and that’s simply impossible when the AI director chucks a Smoker and a Jockey at you along with the normal horde. Several times I’ve given up in frustration after repeated attempts to do the rollercoaster bit in Dark Carnival were stymied by the arrival of a Charger and a Hunter literally feet away from the checkpoint.
In fact, things have got so bad that most games I drop out for those bits and let the AI get on with it. My blood pressure just doesn’t need that type of punishment.
Of course, none of this would matter if it were fun. But it’s just not any more…
It’s definitely got that ‘unfair’ feel creeping in – like once I got to the ‘safe’ house only to find a Spitter inside it, which promptly incapacitated me by spitting sort of backwards and down at the floor (are these things constrained by any sort of trajectory or does the AI Director just paint the map with acid, wherever it feels like it?) and caused a lot of undue stress at the end of an already difficult level. What’s worse is: I was on my own, that day, and my AI companions were so flummoxed by this turn of events that they let me bleed to death where I’d fallen behind a pillar.
When a death in Left 4 Dead feels ‘unfair’ (I once got punched off the roof by a tank in the finale to the first game’s ‘No Mercy’ level) I feel demoralised and less inclined to ‘do over’ what I feel I just did perfectly well (until I was Chargered into Spitter goo).
They need to work on this, especially now that the safe houses are few and far between and the set-pieces more frequent. Racing games have at long last acknowledged that screwing up a corner after, say, 40 laps, and exploding in a ball of flames is actually rather frustrating, and various recent examples (Race Driver: GRID, Dead Colin McRae: Dirt 2, Forza 3) have implemented a ‘rewind’ button, which allows you to ‘do over’ in small sections without the usual restart hassle.
Perhaps, if Valve won’t patch the AI Director, they need to consider smoothing out the checkpoint system? It seems to be the new mid-stage set-pieces that really screw things up; why not allow you to restart from when you pressed the ‘kill me now’ button at the start of these bits?
Of course, that one new feature, plus, I dunno, a golf club melee weapon, would be too difficult to release as DLC and would have to be a whole new game…
Oh yeah, here’s a good one. The other day I was playing alone, fending off all sorts of zombies while waiting for a ferry to cross a river to carry us to safety. After clearing The Horde, as the ferry was nearing our side of the bank, I fell off the jetty into the gap between the bank and the ferry and was promptly crushed to death, my AI colleagues being unable to pull me free in time.
It was tragic, but it’s just reminded me of that brilliant episode of ‘Homicide: Life on the Streets’ with the Subway train, so it’s not all bad.
It is massively more frustrating now. Even on easy. Easy makes you incredibly hard to kill from normal zombie attacks… and that’s about it. You’re still up against just as many special infected – all of which can take you out of the running completely very quickly.
And this is entirely down to the new special infected being what you might call ‘compounders’. So the jockey will drag you into danger – towards a witch, the midst of a hoard etc.; the charger will push you into danger, then slam you up and down in it; and the spitter will goo everywhere, providing an area of danger. For them to wield these interesting strategies, there have to be more than one of them around at a time. But instead of this being a rare, exciting experience, it happens all the time. The special, new or old, always appear in pairs or more, so you’re always facing a situation that could potentially take out everyone on your team when they appear.
They appear a lot. As do the hoard.
And that makes it much harder yes – but that’s not the worst of it. It also ruins the pacing. And thus both the emergent storyline and the fear factor. The best things about the first game. The things that made it an amazing, collaborative experience to survive with your friends.
Where in the first game two special infected plus a hoard at a time was a big, big deal. Hell, a hoard on its own was a high point all of its own. And that plus a tank was reserved for the finales. You get hoards and/or special infected pairs every 20 paces or so. Where the first game was sometimes punctuated, here and there, by several minutes of no real danger at all, just creepy noises, one or two lumbering zombies to dispatch, there’s now none of that. No down time – no breath between the fights. Just a constant wall of relentless unchanging challenge.
The first game was at times a wonderful experience, but one that emerged from the delicate pacing, the deft touch of a responsive AI that pitched the difficulty within your just grasp, and knew how to freak you out with a hunter that followed you across half the level, screaming. In its place we have fancy locations, pretty guns and a more varied array of monsters – and an AI director that doesn’t know how to use them. One that seems confused and overwhelmed by all the new toys it has to throw at you, so just throws all of them at you, all the time.
Still, the first game’s always there to go back to. I am remembering awfully fondly all of a sudden!
Sorry, clearly I can’t spell. I don’t mean that this is a game where you are assailed upon all sides by great stores of lost treasure.
‘Horde’, dammit.
I’m still giving it a chance – hard as it is, it hasn’t made me hate it enough to ditch it. I mean, the first one was sometimes tricky when you didn’t know the levels. This is essentially a track-based FPS, so I’m clinging to the hope it’ll even out once I get the hang of the courses. And while I’ve had stupendously difficult runs, I’ve also had pretty tame ones.
I thought about this, this morning, in Bank tube station. It, like the AI Director-driven maps in Left 4 Dead 2, seems to subtly rearrange itself on every ‘play-through’ (but this does not make it fun).