Valve / Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott Changed Nothing
Published by wes213 on Friday, July 03, 2009
Tagged: Xbox 360,
Looks like Valve's Doug Lombardi has set down with CVG and spilled his guts on all things Left 4 Dead, so i will do my best to sum up as much of what was said for the guys out there like me that just want to know the major points and not read over a bunch of pointless banter to get to the facts.
To start with CVG asked about the boycott and what effect it had on there plans for L4D and L4D2 just to find out it had no effect at all,
Lombardi said: It really didn't change our plans at all. As I mentioned we had plans to keep releasing stuff. We put the Survival Pack out for free which I thought was pretty cool on 360 as well as PC - it's sort of uncommon to be able to get new stuff out that way.
We're already released the authoring tools and the matchmaking to get that content out to people, because the problem with mods and stuff like that is people make great stuff but then it doesn't really get propagated to the whole community properly.
So we're doing that. And then there's more new content that we're working on that we'll be announcing as I mentioned at the end of the summer.
I think there was just some confusion. When you go to E3 and make a big splash on a new product you're trying to get the retailer's attention and the press attention.
It's not really the venue for announcing DLC and whatnot. I think folks took our announcement as a sign that we were dropping Left 4 Dead 1 and that's just not the case.
Lombardi went on to say: Oh I don't think the fans are spoilt, I think that they're getting their money's worth, right?
We always look at it as, if we were a customer what would we want from stuff? How would we want to be treated as customers? I think as I mentioned with Left 4 Dead so far we've done a pretty good job with the Survival Pack, the authoring tools and there's more stuff coming.
You obviously can't do that forever, both technically and financially there's reasons why at some point you have to move on to the sequel.
But with Half-Life 1 folks got Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and bunches of other stuff that was free for a long time.
With Half-Life 2 that got Deathmatch right away, Counter-Strike: Source came with it. Orange Box we thought was pretty good value and we're trying to make Left 4 Dead 1 feel like it's really great value and we'll try to do the same thing with Left 4 Dead 2.
For the PS3 fans out there who want to know what they can look foreword to i am sorry to say you will get nothing in this case, looks like the PS3 slips again.
When asked about the PS3 cut of L4D2 Lombardi said: The first thing that comes to mind is changing the finales at the way they work. That wasn't on the original list, it was something that came from watching people play the game in mass after launch.
We saw a lot of people in finales 'gaming' the game, backing up to the wall and waiting for zombies to come to them to make it much easier.
So we've change the ways the finales work now. The best way to describe it is we'll 'put you on the run'. The finales don't end until you get from point A to point B and if you try to back up against the wall you're just going to get smothered. They're going to keep coming and you're going to run out of ammo and run out of health.
So we're trying to push people to play the game a little more in the way it's intended rather than 'gaming' the game.
I'm sure that in the ideas that we come up with to counter that folks will find another seam and we'll come up with another idea to counter that.
That's one of the cool things about developing stuff and having the ability to iterate on the design really quickly: we're able to change things up and watch what happens.
I guess that will wrap up my key notes for this one and if you would like to read the full interview with Lombardi be sure to hit the news source link at the bottom.
360-Hq Game Database:
Left 4 Dead 2
News-Source:
computerandvideogames.com
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