14 DAY TRIAL // Valve is saying that one of the elements of Left 4 Dead 2, set to be released for the PC and the Xbox 360 from Microsoft in November, that has received special attention from the development team is the AI Director, which directs all the Infected forces in the game.
Valve has put out a statement saying that the new Director Artificial Intelligence, dubbed version 2.0, has “the ability to procedurally change weather effects, world objects, and pathways in addition to tailoring the enemy population, effects, and sounds to match the players’ performance.”
The Director was an integral part of the experience of the first Left 4 Dead, making sure that the limited number of campaigns, just four, did not affect the replayability feature of the videogame.
The fact that the Director had complete control over when to assault the survivors and how to slow down their progress means that playing the same level ten or twenty times over is not a far fetched idea, even if not playing against other humans. Even if Left 4 Dead 2 has the same number of levels like the first game, the improved Artificial Intelligence will offer more of an incentive for gamers to spend more time playing the title.
The Director will even have more toys to play around with as there will be more special Infected to use against the survivors, specifically designed by Valve to combat those tactics most used in the first title in the series to guarantee survival. In addition to those, Left 4 Dead 2 will also be featuring more powerful normal infected characters, some of them having body armor, and others, the clowns, alerting the horde of the players’ presence. It will be interesting to see how they are used and how players respond to their being there.