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June 10th, 2009, 07:19 GMT · By

Valve Promises New Things for Left 4 Dead, Says L4D 2 Couldn't Be DLC

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The game couldn't have been turned into an update
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Left 4 Dead was one of the most popular titles last year, thanks to its cohesive experience, great single and multiplayer modes and the top-notch compatibility with the platforms for which it was released. As such, it won over a lot of fans and is still a best-seller these days.

But as Valve announced last week, a sequel for the game, Left 4 Dead 2, will appear at the end of the year, introducing many new things such as five new campaigns, new playable characters, melee weapons and enemies, and, most importantly, a new version of the AI director, which will make things ever more challenging for users.

But even though this is a whole lot of content, many users have formed a boycott group on Valve's Steam service, in which they say that the company abandoned the first game and didn't even care about it and its players since it went to work on the second title.

Not so, says Valve's Chet Faliszek, who talked with VideoGamer in response to the claims of the users. He said that the game was too big to be a DLC and that the original game would still be supported for a long time by the development team, which balanced both the title and the upcoming sequel.

“It was just like, OK, this is big enough that this isn’t DLC, we’re not going to be able to leak it out. It’s a cohesive, single thing. It’s Left 4 Dead 2. In fact Left 4 Dead one, we still aren’t done with it,” he said. “We still have updates coming. Our focus is always on what we’re putting in the box, put as much as we can in the box. Let’s not worry about: let’s save that and not put that in the game. No, let’s put that in. And with the five campaigns, all of them out of the box, playable Versus, co-op, Survival and the new mode, there’s just a ton of content in there.”

The developer was then asked if the franchise could become an annually updated one, like Call of Duty or the sports simulators from EA Sports. He replied saying, “We do it once in a year and everyone’s like, oh my God! Let’s do this one. Let’s worry about this and then we’ll see.”

Hopefully Faliszek's statements will make Steam users much calmer and get them to see just what Valve is trying to do here, in order to improve the overall zombie shooter experience.

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READER COMMENTS:


Comment #1 by: Hyper on 13 Jun 2009, 01:33 UTC reply to this comment

The one group of people that seems to be missing in most of the comments on the boycott group site and the articles on the web are the server owners.

As a server owner, I support L4D by paying for 4 West Coast servers out of my own pocket that have had in total roughly 17000 players since they were started 4 months ago. As well, I work for a server company that provides numerous servers for TF2, L4D, CS:S and other Valve games.

One disturbing trend I have seen is the daily cancellation of L4D servers. Since the 'Survival Pack' the company I work for has seen a 70% increase in server cancellations of servers that service Central North America and the West Coast. That number increases daily.

The biggest drop was right after the 'Survival Pack' when people began to realize how minor the changes actually were. Most people played Survival mode until they got the achievements and then moved back to Co-op or Versus. We lost 45% of the servers within days of that release.

The second spike was right after the news about L4D2. That was about 20% of the servers. The other 5% has been just due to attrition since the DLC was released.

Now, obviously there have been new servers started, but the total loss of server coverage totals about 70% in the company I work for, and I work for a * little hole in the wall no one even knows about. In actual numbers that means about 110 servers are now shut down in the past couple months with my employer alone. I wonder how this has affected Gameservers or Darkstar.

I should mention that most of the people canceling servers have been very vocal about why they're canceling them, and I agree with the majority of their reasons, especially about the release of L4D2.

So, I pose this question to you, do you think splitting the games community base will increase or decrease the number of servers for both games?

Secondly, do you think server owners that are canceling their servers will be rushing out to start a L4D2 server after they feel that they've been burned by Valve?

The answers are pretty obvious.

All you flame-baiters screaming about the boycott group being a bunch of whining retards might want to think about that, because without the server owners, you'd have no where to play either game.

As for myself, I don't have any choice but to 'get' the game since it's purchased for me by my employer for troubleshooting and testing. However, I'll be shutting down my servers the day L4D2 is released unless both games can be serviced by a single server and other significant issues about the release of L4D2 are satisfactorily dealt with by Valve.

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