14 DAY TRIAL // Left 4 Dead is one of the most exciting games released this holiday season, largely due to the fact that it promises to bring a whole new twist on the zombie survival shooter genre, giving players a wide variety of new features, which weren't implemented in other games. From the four player co-op mode to the fact that you could play as the zombies against the survivors, all these things sparked a lot of curiosity in the gamer community.
Also, the fact that Valve, the creator of the extremely popular Half Life or Team Fortress franchises, is behind it has made the game even more popular. The demo, which was released a week before the official launch of the game, offered a lot of features and was played quite extensively by gamers, who even made a few adjustments to it, just so they could enhance the experience.
Without a doubt, one of the most interesting and most expected features is the four player co-op mode, which gives gamers the chance to play with three more friends against a vast army of zombies in order to escape a small town. This seems like an obvious feature to be implemented in a shooter, but Chet Faliszek, one of the people who worked on Left 4 Dead, told VG247 that the game didn't have any co-op mode planned in the beginning.
"Originally we had what would be considered Versus mode now: that was the main game. There was no separate Co-op," said the developer. "What we found was that we wanted to make the highs and lows of the co-op experience more distinct. We had this problem that if the infected pound on the survivors then their reward for kicking their butt would be, ‘Hey you don’t get to spawn for 60 seconds because we want to have this really big lull.’ Well, that’s not a good reward. At some point we separated the two… The splitting of those in the process is probably the biggest change we’ve made. It’s really helped define the game."
It's very interesting to hear that some of the features we take for granted in videogames didn't actually appear in the original plan of the title. But let's just be glad that Left 4 Dead has the great co-op mode, which is sure to make people very happy.