Thread: Left4Dead 2?

Originally Posted by DrBeat

Another thing to mention is the changes to the AI director and the way maps behave with the changing of geometries. For map makers: why start a map now when it will be rendered unusable and obsolete by the new AI director? I think the late release of the SDK and this announcement could put a damper on map making.

Exactly, my campaign is on indefinte hold now. At least I'm glad to see they are using some of my ideas to make the game more challenging...

Quotes from my posts back in december then posts from valve in the last few days...

We are going to lay out the maps in such a way so that they are little to no "pick up items" to be found if the survivors follow the "suggested path" so we put choices to the survivors of either trying to go quickly through the map and risk being pistols only near the end, or taking some detours to find ammo/pills/weapons/grenades/etc. We want to put a little bit of the "feeling of the unknown" into the maps in such a way that caters to the 2 main playstyles people employ (rushing or exploring). We want to have an almost risk vs. reward system for pickup items where if you want the reward of the pickup item, you have to take the risk of searching for the items instead of just finding 3 medpacks, 2 pills, 3 molotov's, 3 pipebombs, a second pistol and 2 ammo dumps along your intended path. We are still going for a linear style map, but more like a maze then a straight path with lots of dead-ends.

While there’s no intention to waste players’ time with dead ends, there is a greater emphasis on rewarding exploration. You may well learn the correct route through most of a level, but heading off down a longer pathway, or going to check out an out of the way room, is more likely to be beneficial. The Director is, we’re told, going to be far smarter this time about placing items, and the selection of these has expanded as well.

Not quite the same, but pretty damned close.

The biggest twist will be how we handle our "finale", we want that to be less of a "move to the extraction point and hold off the infected until rescue arrives" and more of a "you have a set period of time to make the extraction point otherwise you will get left for dead". We all think it makes for amore interesting finale to have multiple "crescendo events" where you get the typical horde and a tank spawn which you not only must handle, but do so in a timely fashion. We want to give the survivors a feeling of "we are almost out of here, we gotta keep moving to get rescued" instead of just having survivors do a "last stand" scenario like all the current finales.

Gauntlets are one of the new elements that will occur, as one of many moves to attempt to make L4D2 a more consistently thrilling experience. In the final moments of the campaign, finally reaching the bridge, we had to cross it. At the other end lay the potential of rescue. But it was one long, straight, inescapable path down which the Director was able to screw with us as much as ‘he’ liked. Standing still was never and option, but trying to stay high, jumping from roof to roof of the vans and cars, very much was. Someone sniping from the back here proves helpful, while a couple of at the front wielding axes or frying pans was equally effective. These make for interesting moments, an almost unrelenting onslaught from in front, but the peculiar safety of knowing that nothing you didn’t let get past you would be attacking from behind.

This one is almost identical...

We figured out how to do one of our 2 types of panic events. We can set it up so you have to activate a console to open a locked door, but doing so sets off an alarm that draws in the horde. That horde wont stop coming until you traverse a section and work another console that turns off the alarm that is drawing the horde.

Another very smart change is to prevent sneaky players from trying to sit out the triggered events. In those moments in L4D where you had to press a button that began a frantic attack until an elevator arrived, or a door opened, it seems too many were crouching in a corner together and waiting for it to all die down. L4D2 has plans to prevent such treachery. Now some of the events you start can only be stopped by reaching a further target. In an extremely tense sequence, we had to make our way through a labyrinth of alarmed cars to reach a distant point that would finally see the attack fade. Trying desperately to avoid hitting any of the cars, and thus making the situation far worse, while having to make constant forward progress, amped things up significantly.

Glad to see me and a friend came up with basically the same ideas to improve gameplay a multi-million dollar company did. I'm just a little bitter....