GDC 2009: Valve Lectures Co-Op Gameplay With Left 4 Dead

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GDC 2009: Valve Lectures Co-Op Gameplay With Left 4 Dead

Post by Steve Farrelly @ 06:08pm 27/03/09 | 12 Comments

As part of our continued coverage of all the cool stuff coming out of GDC 2009, Trog managed to sneak his way into a lecture from Valve's Michael Booth about the challenges faced with creating games with longevity and replayability, and the tools they used when designing Left 4 Dead that have made that game a massive critical and commercial success.

You can read the full insight of the lecture from our man on the ground right here, and for those of you still not fully up to Left 4 Dead speed, you can check out our full review here, and AusGamers game page here.

Tags: Left 4 Dead / GDC 2009 / Valve

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Winston
Posted 07:13pm 27/3/09

Good article.

I found I was nodding my head as I read most of this.

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trog
Posted 05:49am 28/3/09

Yeh, a lot of it sounds really obvious, but - how come noone else did it? It's the careful integration of everything that makes L4D so much awesome fun to play. I actually still prefer playing the campaign co-op stylez than versus (I find half the people that play versus too elitist to play with because I'm still a noob)

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fpot
Posted 07:00am 28/3/09

I am glad valve are on the case.

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DeePer
Posted 12:48am 29/3/09

why do you say critical success?

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HyperJ
Posted 01:55am 29/3/09

critical success = game has zombies and coop - everybody loves zombies and coop - game must be good.
commercial success = game has zombies and coop - everybody loves zombies and coop - game must be good , i'll buy it
failure success = the majority of people stop playing the game after a month because they realise how limited the gameplay is

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DM
Posted 02:53am 29/3/09

What I love about L4D is while it is a tad limited in the amount of levels there are you can play, the fact that it was a game based on co-op and how unpredictable it is makes it a winner. It's a great mix of diabloesque randomness and fps fun. Only thing that would make it better is if the levels themselves were random or at least selected from 1 of say 3 or 4 different maps for each level in the campaign. L4D 2 perhaps? lol

Valve sure know how to make a damn good game. Other places could learn from them

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DeePer
Posted 10:29am 29/3/09

HyperJ are you Steve Farrelly?

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Tim
Posted 02:42pm 29/3/09

@DM. Oh fuck yea. Something akin to TF2. A bunch of prebuilt bits, that randomly fit together to make a different layout every time.

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DeePer
Posted 01:57pm 30/3/09

wish there was an announcement about when they're going to release versus mode for all of the campaigns, probably the only shortfall about the game really - bit more variety in baddies would of been cool too i reckon - maybe in an xpac!

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BatShit
Posted 02:01pm 30/3/09

In the commentary mode or whatever it's called they talk about the special zombies and how they had several ideas but combined them to get the current ones. I bet they've got a few ideas up in the air they'll use, maybe non playable ones.

They should make a special zombie that uses normal infected as weapons. That would be cool.

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ctd
Posted 02:36pm 30/3/09

Someone said in the other thread that the versus maps are going to be released at the end of april.

I also wish they would make normal infected playable while you are waiting to spawn as a special infected.

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