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.

Page: 1  2  3 

Page 3

Kikizo: And I guess you're not going to discuss Portal 2 either.

Faliszek: Never heard of such a game.

Kikizo: OK. I don't know if you're familiar with the free-to-play browser-based shooting genre - QuakeLive and Battlefield Heroes are probably the most well-known examples - but that sort of ultra-accessible, low-tech community-driven approach seems ideal for Valve. Have you considered it?

Faliszek: Right now, in the near term, working on Left 4 Dead 2, it's still your full, big game - one of the things we made sure of is that if you bought Left 4 Dead and you want to buy Left 4 Dead 2 but you're not sure it'll run on your PC, it will. We're making sure that happens. If you have a higher end machine there are some extra bells and whistles you'll get. And that's really our focus right now. In the future, if there's a project that makes sense that way, we're always looking towards new things, but really the projects we're working on now don't make as much sense in that space. It's going to be interesting to see how those games do.

Kikizo: This is launching on Xbox 360 and PC. I spoke to Doug Lombardi last year about the possibility of cross-platform multiplayer. He told me it was a problematic objective because the control differences are so severe. Has anything changed on that front?

Faliszek: You know, that's a great question to be asked, and then if you go look at the community - besides people wanting to settle bets, you don't see a lot of call for that. There's been a couple of games that have had that, and that's just not been a compelling feature. If we found it was something that people really wanted, like split-screen - split-screen was a really simple one, we put it in and we know how many people play split-screen, it's super-successful, we're definitely putting split-screen in Left 4 Dead 2, right. But that kind of cross-platform play is just this gimmicky thing at this point that people talk about, but you don't see anyone who's done it being really happy they did it.

Kikizo: So the control handicap is too great in this case?

Faliszek: I just think when people play with their friends online that's not a big barrier for them. They kind of tend to have Xbox friends they play with on the Xbox and PC friends - you know what I mean. It doesn't need the cross-over.

Kikizo: You think the PC and Xbox 360 markets are pretty distinct then.

Faliszek: Well especially with Left 4 Dead they're both pretty big, so they can support enough that we're not scrambling... Again there's that fascination but I honestly don't care, especially when I'm grabbing a random game I don't care.

Kikizo: It's a bit of a golden goose, isn't it.

Faliszek: Yeah, it's this weird thing. I'm not quite sure.

Kikizo: Chet, thanks very much for your time.

Left 4 Dead 2 is slated for release on PC and Xbox 360 on 18th November. Watch out for our hands-on preview of the latest build soon.

Page: 1  2  3 

MORE INTERVIEWS >>