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[IbizaPocholo]

Like Counter-Strike before it, Valve’s and Turtle Rock Studios’s Left 4 Dead altered the course of multiplayer video games. Its advent in the late 2000s laid the foundation for modern cooperative shooters, placing teamwork at the forefront of a zombie-centric experience that penalized individualistic thinking. Notably, four unique Survivors acted as player avatars teaming up in a world overrun with infected humans, a welcome change of pace at a time when friends had become accustomed to fighting against one another in online shooters.

The original Left 4 Dead stumbled out of the gate in some respects, plagued with server-side issues and technical errors on PC and console. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for the development crew to address these shortcomings in post-launch patches. DLC increased the co-op title’s staying power, too, ensuring users often had a reason to revisit the undead-infested world.

And while Left 4 Dead spawned a sequel that further elevated the cooperative horror genre, the spirit of the franchise would ultimately live on in IP that followed in its footsteps—including the Paydays, World War Zs, and Back 4 Bloods of the world. In fact, Left 4 Dead’s influence grew so prevalent that it became synonymous with zombie fiction in the interactive medium, resulting in brand crossovers with the likes of Dead by Daylight, Dying Light, and Zombie Army 4: Dead War. Given Left 4 Dead’s continued dominance, it’s hard to believe there existed a time when the groundbreaking property wasn’t even meant to see the light of day.

This is the history of Left 4 Dead.

Best coop game for me

 

[IbizaPocholo]

Faliszek recently spoke with YouTube channel Kiwi Talkz, where he spoke about a variety of topics, including his work on Portal, The Anacrusis, and more. Most notably, host Reece Reilly asked Faliszek about the work he did on Left 4 Dead, in particular how zombie stories can often have a number of clichés and there's little room for something original sometimes. Which led to Newell pushing the team away from zombies, initially.



"At the time, once I went to dinner with Gabe and he was like 'if you look at zombie movies, Night Of The Living Dead is about racism, Dawn Of The Dead is about consumerism'" said Faliszek. As part of the conversation in trying to understand the core concept of what Left 4 Dead might be, Newell asked "what is your game about?"

"And I'm like well it's about working together, it's the game itself, it's a reflection of the game," Faliszek continued. "We'd kind of get pushed more and more because I remember [Newell] said 'well let's not do zombies, zombies are just cheesy.' At the time you did not have The Walking Dead TV series and all of this, so it was very cheesy."

Faliszek explained how he watched a lot of these classic horror films when he was younger, not realising how some of them are a bit cheesy, so in turn made the decision to make the characters more conscious of the environment they're in.

"So I was just like why don’t we just take the characters and the world, and make some of the characters in the world aware that they’re in a zombie movie essentially. Zoe and Lewis understand that like 'oh my god this is the thing from movies,' but they play it seriously."

 

[Killer8]

I'll say up front there should've been no boycott controversy over L4D2's announcement. Gamers are just schizophrenics who don't know what they want and will complain while consuming yearly identical sports titles. The game was an amazing sequel, which the whiners all caved and bought anyway.

 

[ksdixon]

I'll say up front there should've been no boycott controversy over L4D2's announcement. Gamers are just schizophrenics who don't know what they want and will complain while consuming yearly identical sports titles. The game was an amazing sequel, which the whiners all caved and bought anyway.

That porting all the L4D1 maps/characters into L4D2 was the best shit I ever saw. I wish all MP sequels did this and moved playerbases upwards through games without losing modes etc. Pseudo GAAS.