Scared Shitless: Left 4 Dead 2 Interview

Valve's Chet Faliszek emerges from the zombie-laden gloom to discuss certain Steam boycotts, the role of daylight, browser-based shooters and the golden goose of console-to-PC multiplayer.

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Kikizo: It's the best kind of argument to have, really. After all, they're protesting because they love the previous game so much.

Faliszek: Yeah, seeing people that passionate about something you've created is pretty cool.

Kikizo: On the basis of the four missions I've played, I'd agree with you that there's enough in Left 4 Dead 2 to warrant a standalone release. On the other hand, the boycotters' point about dividing your fanbase seems worryingly valid. Given that you've said you'll keep supporting the original game with downloadable content parallel to the sequel, don't you run the risk of creating two overlapping but segregated player communities?

Faliszek: One of the weird things I go back to is that we released an update putting in "melee fatigue" [a cool-down period after a certain number of melee attacks]. And people were screaming why do we update our games, we shouldn't touch them once they're out because they want to play the game they bought. And I kind of understand that in a way, but equally even if we don't update... We're reacting to how people play, how they interact with the game. We're going to keep updating it, so we're not going to listen to that complaint.

We need to have some way that those fans who buy the new game and own the old game, or want to pick up the old the game... we've talked about some kind of way for all of that to work. We don't have anything concrete yet that we can say. But definitely we've thought about community and we've thought about those worlds.

For modders, everything they make in Left 4 Dead will work in Left 4 Dead 2. It'll work better if they bring it into Left 4 Dead 2 and recompile it for Left 4 Dead 2, using some of the additions we've made, but it'll work out of the box as well. We just want to make sure that anyone who's making a mod now knows that their time's going to be well spent.

Kikizo: So there's plenty of cross-compatibility between the two games then.

Faliszek: Yeah, and we've talked with a lot of those guys. That's one of those things - seeing people saying that modders are having a reaction against it, and having just traded 10 emails with these guys and I know their reaction to it, we've talked about it, and they're OK with it. They understand. So that's kind of disingenuous. There's a bunch of cool stuff out, there's a bunch of really cool stuff coming. So that should be really cool to see.

Kikizo: Do you think that Valve has not done enough perhaps to promote how well you're doing on the community front? You've got around 160 user-created maps on the PC servers, and many of them are really high quality. There's a great homage to Resident Evil 3 on there.

Faliszek: We released an update that allowed better match-making [for third party campaigns] around a week ago. There's some more stuff that's coming along that vein to help the discoverability and help people interact with that. So if people aren't discovering that now and not understanding it, that's our fault, and we should make sure that people do understand that and can interact with that.

Kikizo: Getting some obligatory questions out of the way - what's the latest on Half-Life 2: Episode 3?

Faliszek: Nah, sorry, don't want to talk about that!

Kikizo: How about you do that thing where you tug your ear twice if the answer's "yes", and so on.

Faliszek: Nope.

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