It seems like the L4D2 boycott settled down and people are back to their zombie-shooting-selves

Nov 6, 2009 10:51 GMT  ·  By

Left 4 Dead 2 had an official boycott, but it looks like Valve managed to fix things after all. When it decided to fly over two of the boycott's leaders to its headquarters and give them a hands-on experience of the game, it hoped to successfully calm the spirits. If anything, it looks like it managed to defuse the situation brilliantly. An official word from the company came, and Valve's Chet Faliszek said that the game's pre-order queue was four times that of the original Left 4 Dead.

The former writer of Old Man Murray talked to CVG and discussed the nerd-rage that had been started over the first showcasing of L4D2 at this summer's E3. "One of the weird things at E3 was we knew we weren't showing the complete package, we knew there was a whole bunch of stuff we were holding back but we wanted to show something," Faliszek said. The one thing that the boycott did do was change "how we talked about it and how we talked with everybody."

As for the game itself, he thinks the whole mess did very little in terms of actual changes in the zombie-shooter. "If you put $20 in a box and charge $10 for it someone would complain you didn't put $50 in a box. Not to say some of the concerns raised aren't valid, but you're always going to have some kind of upset and that's not how we work. We work at looking at the project and trying to get it out." He may be right about it, as people will always complain about even the smallest of things, but, if he said the boycott changed the way the company talked to people, his attitude makes you think in just what direction it changed.

Nevertheless, great pre-orders are a good sign for the game, even though they bring more justice to the first game than to the second. Players usually pre-order titles because they liked the first iteration and have high expectations from the sequel, not really because they got mired by the trailers. "As we get closer to launch we see the reaction to the demo, preorders are four times what Left 4 Dead 1 was, people's excitement, the boycott itself and how it's changed... I think people are just excited now," Faliszek concluded.