We caught up with Valve’s VP of Marketing Doug Lombardi to talk zombies and petitions…

How has the community backlash over Left 4 Dead 2 at E3 affected Valve and development?

There’s a couple of things at work. Number one, E3 is the place you go to announce new products. We go there firstly to get the retailers attention and obviously to get your attention. It’s all about the big bang – the big thing that’s coming this Xmas. If you talk to the marketing and distribution side of stuff they’ll tell you you’ve got to have an E3 before your next product comes out.

We went there to announce that we’re working on Left 4 Dead 2, not to signal that we’re done with L4D one. I think a lot of folks have jumped to the conclusion rightly or wrongly – it’s incorrect – that we’ve dumped L4D1 and we only have a finite amount of people to do left 4 dead. And by default there can’t be anyone left working on l4d one anymore. Again, that’s not the case.

Secondarily, we’ve always planned to have ongoing support for L4D1 like we plan to support L4D 2 post launch. If anyone goes back at look back et everything we’ve done. Our take is, if we were gamers looking to buy our products we would want to get the most value out of the money spent on the game, and pretty much every release we’ve ever done, we’ve always had a lot of post support. Half Life one, two, counter strike, support for Mods – we think Orange Box was pretty good value. TFII has been support really well, and with L4D1 we’re off to a good start. The survival pack being free on both platforms was a bit of an accomplishment. Doing good stuff with the Modders by getting the authoring tools out and giving backend support so the mod content is made available to everyone that had the first game.

That’s our take and I think that when folks come to see more of what we’ve got for left 4 dead and we’ve only shown a small part of that so far… we’ve shown one of multiple new boss monsters, we’ve show two or three of multiple new melee weapons  one of five new campaigns. Once they see more of the story, what’s in store for L4D1 in terms of support they’re  hopefully going see a method to our madness.

Meanwhile we’re looking at other indicators that are completely at the other end of the pendulum. Retailers are  excited about it, our pre-orders are double the number Left 4 Dead was at this point. MS is very excited and wants to work even deeper with us on it than they did with L4D1, which was even deeper than they had on anything that went before it.
EA is excited and even the press seems to be excited about it. We won the best multiplayer game award from this years E3. We have a group of people that we still have to convince and we have time to show  our actions will prove weather or not we have a solid plan.

What can we expect to see in Left 4 Dead 2 then?
It’s about pushing forward . Its about new technology and its about making an even bigger game than the first one and hopefully a totally epic experience. One of the big criticisms from reviewers on the first game that was consistent and totally valid was that while we had great gameplay, the co-op and replayability worked and the AI Director wasn’t just a marketing gimmick, it was a little light on the content. So right off the bat we sat down and said ‘what do we want to do next?’. There’s a white board exercise that happens at valve and everything happens inside out because we’re not publicly held. There aren’t financial pressures to release a game every quarter or whatever  like many publishers unfortunately have to deal with. We’re spoilt, we get to ask ourselves ‘what’s cool?’ what do we want to do? what do gamers want to do? We literally put everything up on the board and what we saw was our number one priority was me lee and number 2 was bigger game, more content. New survivors, more boss monsters, more common monsters, monsters that are campaign specific, campaigns in daylight (as well as more stuff at night) taking the AI director further. These ideas just kind of snowballed together and when we sat down and looked at the board, there were stuff that was clearly designed as DLC and stuff that just had to go in a sequel. The other two campaigns made available for versus mode – that’s obvious DLC right? The AI director improvements making bigger campaigns and introducing melee, to us pretty obviously lean on the sequel side so it happened completely naturally.

Was there anything held over or left out from the original?
Really only one thing and that was giving the characters the ability to bring you more into the story.
We really boiled it down to gamisms, in terms of what the characters are saying. “Weapons here… Boomer” you know?  Whatever – That;s reptty much all they say in the first game so we wanted to give them more dialogue, we wanted them to really comment on what they were seeing in the game world etc. We showed a little bit of that in the E3 demo where one of the character says ‘We’ve gotta make it to the other side of the mother F’ing bridge!’ Like at the E3 demo right about where you leave the park going to the … someone will always comment and say something like ‘where is he? There’s something on the wall’ so they’re responding more to the world and we did that intentionally. We peeled back any story or that kind of interaction with the environment because we wanted to encourage people to play together, we wanted the players to call out ‘where is he?!’ to teach the gamisms and the mechanics, and now that’s been solidified with the first game we can go back and start layering in the story we had to pull out the first time.

We did a similar thing with portal, but differently. Originally the environments were much richer there was lots of stuff everyone, but when we were playtesting we found that people just couldn’t find the path, they couldn’t find the direction so we started pulling stuff out. Making the colours flatter and then all of a sudden people started to get it – they found the fun of the game.

And similarly with Left 4 Dead with the character references in the story. “I need this” francis is pretty  much just giving comic relief in a very cheap form, which is essentially what the character  which is what the story of the characters delivery got reduced to in the first game  in the name of making the game more solid.

What’s so special about New Orleans?
Chet who’s the writer on the game and other members of the team, myself included, have spent a lot of time in new Orleans in the south. its probably a little bit distant to you guys, but the south is sort of this haunted place  with a very F’ed up history of things that have gone on that are really weird from the civil war to when new orleans was first founded they didn’t realise that it was below the sea table so they were burying bodies below ground and a bunch of bodies washed up in the Mississippi river – just all this weird, creepy stuff. And the architecture is very unique very distinct and its fresh fodder. The last thing we wanted to do was set a Zombie game in London – like no one’s ever done that before! It’s the only game in new orleans, it was fresh and it also had this haunted history and the rich myth from the south – for us it was very fertile ground. It also provides a lot of different locations. By the time you leave gorgia and you reach new orleans we have plantations, we have swamps, we have weird architecture and we have a lot of cool stuff that provides rich diverse sets which we can take the player through in a very plausible way. We took you through Pittsburgh and Philly in the first game, but the locations were pretty similar. The buildings and architecture were pretty much the same thing especially considering everything was in the dark and that’s one of the things we wanted to move away from here. For example the swamp is going to be in the night time and new orleans is going to be in the morning light that’s going to give you a real difference between the campaigns. Having common zombies that are unique to the campaigns too – the Hazmat suit guy  New Orleans also gives it that fresh flavour. Just little things that, at the end of the day, I think will make the campaigns feel different. We hear people say, oh this is my favourite survivor, or this is my favourite boss monster but we very rarely hear people say this is my favourite campaign from L4D1, and that’s because none of them had a truly unique flavour, so that’s just thing, a subtle thing, but its still as important as any other aspect of the game. I can tell you right now New Orleans in one of the campaigns we haven’t revealed yet is for me, there’s something about it that has a cool style.

Its a little clichéd, but we say the more interesting story is not the one told by the game, but the post game stories that are told amongst players. That’s the interesting thing and that’s something we want to build on with our new campaigns.

What about the AI director 2.0?
It’s the one map we haven’t shown from New Orleans yet, it’s the third, missions (we’ve shown the first two and the last two), it’s the cemetery. Since you can’t bury people below ground in New Orleans they have these mausoleums above ground. When you get to the cemetery things will be laid out in one way, but the next time you come through we’ll scramble the layout so you have to take a different path with new dangers. It’s all about keeping players on their toes, helping each game feel fresh each time you play it and adding to the re-playability.

One thing we saw from the original game from the hundreds of thousands of people playing through the campaign finales was that players realised that if they all backed up against the wall and waited for the zombies to come to them it was much easier for them. So now the AI director has been mixed up a bit so the finales and the mini finales play out very differently. The bridge section that we’ve been demoing today is a great example of what we’re doing. You’ve got to go from A to B – you’ve got to get to the other side of the bridge and if the players are holed up A, the scenario would never end and B you’re eventually going to run out of ammo. So you’ve gotta get your ass off the wall, to quote the late Michael Jackson. That’s one of the things the AI director is doing. Another thing is with the swamp and moving in the fog – decreasing visibility is another thing we’re doing to make it more challenging for advanced players. Going through a swamp at night with zombies around is creepy enough, but then your visibility is cut to ten feet. We’re unapologetically beating you into submission and unapologetically forcing you to play as a team. The swamp is going to be particularly unforgiving thanks to the new AI Director – you’re going to wish you didn’t get such a good start when the fog rolls in. “Oh, sh*t – we should’ve taken more damage!”