As featured in ButtonMasher Podcast #4 here is a transcript of some of my chat with Mike Booth from Valve.
With the game being so heavily aimed at the co-op experience is there going to be a single player campaign?
There isn’t explicitly a single player mode, it’s more of a scalable experience. You play by your self and the other three characters will be A.I controlled, and what is really cool about that is that friends can then later join and take over from the bots mid-game. Vice versa say that something comes up and your friend needs to leave, as soon as he disconnects a bot takes over and the game continues.
Left 4 Dead has a fairly frantic pace and people always say that a Mouse and Keyboard is better for speed and accuracy where as the controllers for the consoles are a little bit more sluggish. Is the game going to be the same speed on PC and the consoles?
It’s a challenging problem! The fact of the matter is you can aim more accurately and quickly with a mouse, but at the same time its nice to see people kicking back and relaxing with the controllers. But there is that fundamental limitation in how fast you can turn around. In the game you can see if you are getting hit from behind, so you need to be able to turn around quickly, but you don’t need to be able to aim super accurately most of the time, you just need to put bullets over there. The play tests with the 360 controllers on the Xbox have been going very well.
Are there any changes that you have made given the different ways of controlling? Bumpers for fast turns etc?
We’re still experimenting with the best solution for all of the buttons on the controller. One thing we have been experimenting with is a thumb-click to do a 180 degree turn. Cause it happens a lot that you are fighting the infected and you get hit from behind. You really want to be able to flip around and shove that guy back.
You guys love LAN right? How is that going to work?
With the 360 we are doing Split Screen so you can play with someone on the same console. Whether you can play system link or not? I don’t have that information.
With the Splitscreen, will you be able to take both people online and play or is it just local?
The plan is for the two people to go online and play with other people as well.
In the demonstration at the EA Press conference they showed us what the Gas Station encounter might be like if your not playing very well versus what might happen if you are playing as a cohesive team, in which case there was a huge explosion and a tonne of zombies. How is that going to play out in the game?
That’s the A.I director. There are a couple of things that it does, the first thing it does is procedurally populate the world so you never know where anything is coming from. Bosses will be in different places and the hoard attacks in different places. That was key to keeping the suspense.
I noticed that in one point when playing there was a door with a Zombie behind it and the next time there was nothing.
It’s different each time, we were experimenting with designer placed triggers and we quickly find that within a week skilled players know where they are. It keeps the game re-playable.
What the director is doing there is it is now adjusting difficulty, it is adjusting drama. We have no shortage of opportunities to keep the game intense. We can throw zombies at you or a tank, but if it’s intense for too long it is just stressful and it’s not fun. So what the director does is, we have heuristics that we measure the stress levels in each of the survivors, if they get too high for too long then the Director says, OK, time to back off, let’s not throw in so many mobs lets turn the wanderers down. It enforces a lull in the action, the idea there is to make sure we have the high peaks of excitement and lows of the calms, so we get the roller coaster effect. The case that Gabe showed us would happen if the survivors were hurting after fighting a bunch of zombies just before the gas station.
Do you think we’ll see a Demo on the 360?
I think a demo for the Xbox if quite likely, I don’t know the specifics of it, but it is quite likely.
What about DLC?
As you’ve seen with Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2, we plan to continue to create content. How that will work out on the 360, with Microsofts process, remains to be seen.
Tags: Games, Interviews