Left 4 Dead 2
Left 4 Dead 2 is a 2009 first-person shooter game developed and published by Valve. The sequel to Left 4 Dead (2008) and the second game in the Left 4 Dead series, it was released for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 in November 2009, Mac OS X in October 2010, and Linux in July 2013.[1][2]
Left 4 Dead 2
Valve
Left 4 Dead 2 builds upon cooperatively focused gameplay and Valve's proprietary Source engine, the same game engine used in the original Left 4 Dead. Set during the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic, the game focuses on four new Survivors, fighting against hordes of zombies known as the Infected, who develop severe psychosis and act extremely aggressive. The Survivors must fight their way through five campaigns, interspersed with safe houses that act as checkpoints, with the goal of escape at each campaign's finale. The gameplay is procedurally altered by the "AI Director 2.0", which monitors the players' performance and adjusts the scenario to provide a dynamic challenge. Other new features include new types of Special Infected and an arsenal of melee weapons.[3]
The game made its world premiere at E3 2009 with a trailer during the Microsoft press event.[4] Prior to release, it received mixed critical and community reactions, and attracted an unusually high volume of controversy about its graphic content. In response, alterations were made to the cover art,[5][6] but both Australia and Germany refused to rate the unmodified edition at the time of release.[7] Despite this, the game was met with positive critical reviews, and is considered to be one of the greatest video games ever made.
Plot[edit]
Overview[edit]
Like its predecessor, Left 4 Dead 2 is set in the aftermath of a worldwide pandemic of a disease nicknamed the "Green Flu", which rapidly transforms humans into zombie-like creatures and mutated forms that demonstrate extreme aggression towards non-infected beings. A few humans are immune to the disease, while some of those who are infected have no symptoms. The Civil Emergency and Defense Agency (CEDA) and the U.S. military create safe zones to attempt to evacuate as many survivors as possible. Left 4 Dead 2 introduces four new survivors: Coach, Ellis, Nick, and Rochelle, who are immune to the disease and have individual backstories that are provided through character dialogue.[36][37][38] While the game is intended as a continuation of the original, occurring one week after the first game begins, Valve decided to create a new group of survivors due to the change in location.[39] Like the first game, the five campaigns in Left 4 Dead 2 take place across a story arc.[40] Set in the Deep South, the story begins in Savannah, Georgia, and ends in New Orleans, Louisiana.[3][4] The four survivors have to fight their way through hordes of infected, using safehouses along the way to rest and recuperate in order to reach extraction points.
Characters[edit]
Left 4 Dead 2 features a new cast of four human survivors: Coach (voiced by Chad L. Coleman), a stocky high school football coach with a bad knee (although this does not affect gameplay);[41][42] Nick (voiced by Canadian singer Hugh Dillon), a pessimistic gambler and con artist;[43][44] Rochelle (voiced by Rochelle Aytes), a low-level production assistant for a local television station that was reporting on the pandemic;[36][45] and Ellis (voiced by Eric Ladin), a friendly and talkative redneck mechanic[46] who often talks about his friend Keith and their many misadventures.[3][38] In addition to the four playable characters, Left 4 Dead 2 also features two supporting characters in the form of Whitaker (voiced by Dayton Callie),[47] a gun store owner, and Virgil (voiced by Randall Newsome), a Cajun boat captain who appears (voice only) in the game's final three campaigns. Two soldiers heard in the final map of The Parish, voiced by Bob Gunter and Bill Huggins, round out the NPC cast.
Development[edit]
Development for Left 4 Dead 2 started shortly after the release of the first game—following a short break—building on ideas from the development team to make the next game "bigger and better".[3][70] According to Chet Faliszek in an 2023 interview, Left 4 Dead had been developed quickly to release as soon as possible that it left the game in a bad state that no one at Valve wanted to work on correcting the issues to improve the game. Instead of trying to fix features and include new features like mod support, the team opted to completely rebuild the game as a new title, properly addressing strong development steps to avoid the miscues from creating the first game.[71] The game was given the code name "Carnation" by Microsoft to prevent revealing its details before its official announcement.[72]
Faliszek stated that Left 4 Dead 2's story would explore more of the world of the game, and that Valve had created a full story for the cause and effects of the infection pandemic, including terms that they have used for the AI Director.[72] Each campaign was purposely designed with a different feel; however, all five campaigns were mapped out at the same time by the entire team to provide the narrative flow and ensure the uniqueness of each campaign.[73] The team used a Left 4 Dead dictionary developed to describe level design and flow within the game to provide a common language for developing the levels.[73]
Left 4 Dead 2 contains about 7,800 unique lines of dialogue, a 40% increase over Left 4 Dead.[74] The writers designed the characters and selected appropriate voice actors who had natural accents for their lines and allowed the actors freedom to help authenticate the roles. They would attend recording sessions for the voice actors and allow them to ad-lib their lines for their characters, often getting new ideas for character dialogue to be recorded later, particularly in the case of Ellis (voiced by Eric Ladin) and Nick (Hugh Dillon).[75] Randall Newsome, the voice of the boat captain Virgil, was a local actor from Louisiana who naturally spoke Cajun and helped to embellish the role better than the writers could.[75] Faliszek wanted to include a "no-nonsense" woman from a Department of Motor Vehicles, but this character did not make the cut.[72] The developers solicited several bands to include them in the game: Depeche Mode responded eagerly, and allowed Valve to use its music and other imagery in the game, such as on Rochelle's T-shirt.[76]
In introducing the new Infected, the development team had to consider how the new abilities would mesh with the existing Infected and any changes they had made to them.[73] One discarded idea for a new Infected included the "Leaker"; the creature, when having taken damage, would shoot out spouts of goo at the survivors, and then would be able to self-detonate like the Boomer. However, this sacrificial act would have given survivors time to escape, and the idea was dropped, though features of the Leaker were built into the Spitter.[73]
In development, the programmers wanted to find a way to provide more variation and visual effects for the players, although they were already strained by memory limitations on the Xbox 360 for Left 4 Dead. One key development factor was recognizing a way to create greater variation in the appearance of the common infected through a number of modeling and rendering tasks. Simple changes of the underlying geometry of the model, either the head or the body, with the resulting effects on the texture mapping was one means to create apparent variation. Another means was created by using different head textures along with various blood and dirt maps, and similarly different wounds applied to the body texture. A final means to alter the tone of both the skin and the clothing worn by the infected. As a result, a single infected model could have up to 24,000 variations within the game. This allowed Valve to effectively only keep two to six common infected core models in memory for each level, leaving only the unique infected for each campaign and the special infected as their own unique models. As a result, the memory use for the infected dropped by 50%.[74] Valve's programmers also sought how to better represent damage the players did to the infected by showing inflicted wounds in the appropriate location and in a manner based on the weapon used, allowing for the inclusion of more resilient infected creatures in advanced game modes. They had simulated this in Left 4 Dead by having five possible character models that would result from a fatal attack but felt this could be advanced further. Already limited by memory concerns on the Xbox 360 that prevented further variations on the core infected models, the team devised a system of using textures with transparencies combined with ellipsoid culling from any infected character model to simulate the wounds, with several graphical process simplifications to avoid taxing the rendering system. This allowed the team to simulate up to two such wounds on each infected using only 13% of the memory resources of the based system in Left 4 Dead.[77]
Another visual aspect that the Valve team explored was the rendering of water, particularly in the "Swamp Fever" campaign, which takes place mostly in a large swamp area. Valve found early play-testers would become confused with the large, tree-covered map, but by adding hints of water movement in the direction they were to go, there was a significant reduction in players becoming lost on the map. The water maps were created by using the 3D animation tool Houdini against its landscape maps to create realistic water flow patterns as surface maps. These surface maps were then applied in a "flowing" manner instead of the scrolling manner used in previous games. These water effects were further expanded upon for Valve's next game, Portal 2.[78]
Doug Lombardi, vice-president of marketing for Valve, noted that the SDK released for Left 4 Dead would also be compatible with Left 4 Dead 2.[79]
Promotion[edit]
PC and Xbox 360 players who pre-ordered Left 4 Dead 2 through participating retailers gained early access to the game's demo, which was released on October 27, 2009 for Xbox Live and October 28, 2009 for PC players, and an exclusive baseball bat melee weapon to be used in game.[80][81] Pre-ordering the PC version of the game through the Steam network also unlocks Bill's beret from Left 4 Dead for use in the PC version of Team Fortress 2.[82] Also, when a person buys the game and starts up Team Fortress 2, they will get a frying pan as a melee weapon and Ellis' hat as an in-game hat. The demo became available for all PC and Xbox Live Gold users on November 4, 2009 with Xbox Live Silver users gaining access on November 11, 2009.[83] The demo features the first two maps in "The Parish" campaign.
On October 5, 2009, Valve announced that Left 4 Dead 2 would be promoted by a $25 million advertising campaign, exceeding the $10 million that supported Left 4 Dead. The campaign includes television advertisements during sporting events, on billboards and magazines; and more aggressive advertising for Europe.[84]
Competitive community and tournaments[edit]
On the PC, the original competitive modification named "Confogl", was created by community member ProdigySim.[123] It is now a playable mutation included in the game.[124][125][126] Confogl is a set of rules for competitive Left 4 Dead 2 versus which standardizes certain elements and changes the distribution of items and weapons. It tips the scales toward the infected.[127] Tournaments have been held utilizing the Confogl modification, such as the CEVO tournament.[128]