Without a doubt, one of the biggest announcements at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and that stirred up the biggest amount of controversy was Valve's
Left 4 Dead 2. Made during the Microsoft press conference, the announcement of a sequel to follow up Left 4 Dead in just one year made a lot of people quite angry at the company.
As you know, they formed
a boycott group, in which they threatened not to buy the new game, unless the company kept its promise of delivering new content to the original. This threat didn't really affect Valve all that much, at least according to Doug Lombardi, who has revealed that the company already had the next batches of content planned and in development before fans began to complain.
“I think there was just some confusion,” Lombardi says. “When you go to E3 and make a big splash on a new product you're trying to get the retailer's attention and the press attention. It's not really the venue for announcing DLC and whatnot. I think folks took our announcement as a sign that we were dropping Left 4 Dead 1 and that's just not the case.”
“It really didn't change our plans at all,” he continues. “As I mentioned we had plans to keep releasing stuff. We put the Survival Pack out for free which I thought was pretty cool on 360 as well as PC – it's sort of uncommon to be able to get new stuff out that way.”
Lombardi is quite right, as almost any other company would have charged for the
Survival Pack, which brought not only a new gameplay mode, but also new maps and other improvements over the core experience that was delivered by the retail title.
Hopefully, boycotters will begin to calm down and await the next DLC announcement, which will happen at
the end of this summer. Until then, you can still play the great game that is Left 4 Dead.
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