We often don’t get a chance to print full interviews in the mag, so here’s the transcript of a recent X360 interview with Valve’s Chet Faliszek, lead writer on Left 4 Dead 2. Enjoy.

Where did the inspirations for the settings come from?
We start in Savannah, Georgia, which is on the Eastern seaboard of the US down south, and Georgia is often what people think of when they think of the Deep South. It’s where The Dukes Of Hazzard is filmed and all those kinds of classics; it’s that kind of place. We first originally thought of the idea of the swamps, it was kind of the first thing we thought would be really cool and then it kind of sprung from there. I lived near New Orleans for a little bit back in the Nineties and we didn’t actually go to the swamps. We went to the bayou, which is like the swamps but that’s south of the city. Then we thought New Orleans is near the swamps and it’s a beautiful city and then we were thinking, ‘Do we want to stay in the South? Do we want to head down there?’ First we tried to think of the original characters making this Southern arc, but then we started thinking of going across the bottom and that became more interesting. There are some culturally different things even from here in Seattle people aren’t familiar with. I grew up on the Eastern seaboard near the South, so I’m a little bit more familiar with it, but there are a lot of oddities and weirdness. There’s also a coolness there that you don’t normally see in videogames, as it’s a really rich area to pull from. Not just New Orleans but Savannah and the Deep South in general – it has this really cool feel.

How did you feel about the accusations of racism?
There’s only been the one accusation. When he [the journalist in question] was sitting down here with me and he asked me that question it was before I could think that I was talking to the press. It’s kind of like, let’s say your friend breaks his foot and he’s on crutches: do you then not invite him to the dance? Yes, this thing happened in New Orleans and it’s still going on. If you go down there you’d be shocked at how messed up that city still is. It’s always been an odd city in the US. It’s very different to any other city in the States and that’s what first attracted me to living down there, and it’s still messed up. But to say that you shouldn’t put it in a videogame because it had this thing happen to it is kind of like not inviting the friend on crutches, right? We know we’re having a problem here but we still want to be inclusive and we’re not exploiting or trying to make a statement about it we’re just including it as if it’s a city we wanted to embrace and have in the game.

The original cities for L4D1 were essentially Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and these are cool cities and to say that there’s some cashing-in or some ulterior motive was honestly a surprise.

How did you go about designing the new survivors?
Out of everything we did, the characters took by far the longest to design. It’s a collaborative process where the writers, the artists and then the animators weigh in at various times. But essentially everyone starts doing their own thing and then sometimes the two mesh and one will write back story for a piece of art. A good example is the gambler, Nick; one of our artists drew him first and everyone liked him and the idea of this guy in a suit running around having this kind of attitude. Then I came up with Coach because I wanted to have this older authority figure but who wasn’t a cop or a fireman or any other traditional authority. We then went through a few designs that weren’t quite it and we worked on it and we always thought that it was funny having this guy who was a little overweight and these ideas all went back and forth and then we put all the designs up together and we make teams. One of the things we realised very quickly was everyone else is at a disadvantage if we have an authority figure like a police officer or a fireman whereas Coach is still an authority figure, but come on: he’s a high school football coach.

We also wanted someone from the outside who could talk about the South and that became Rochelle, and we wanted somebody who could just embrace the fun side. I’ve travelled a lot down there and there is this exuberance sort of Johnny Knoxville kind of thing and that’s Ellis. Then we look at vocal ranges making sure everyone has something distinct to say and they’re not running over each other. We look at body sizes. In Left 4 Dead it’s not really that important to be able to tell one person from the next; you just need to be able to distinguish them from the zombies. Even now we’re still changing the characters slightly and we’re still recording them. It’s been a really long process where it’s continuously making sure that they work together that they bring something that we want to bring out in the game and that you would plausibly find them together in this circumstance. It was also really scary because we did really like the L4D1 characters and would have been easy to just keep doing them, but we wanted to expand the world out. We’re not done with those guys yet.

I think it’s important that players feel connected, like they’re part of the movie. What we often see after a game is what’s interesting. We’re not worried about you talking about the story of Left 4 Dead; we’re worried about you talking about the story of your friends. You know, you saved someone, you did this; not they did this. You rarely hear someone say, ‘…and then Lewis was hanging there and…!’ Players don’t become the characters in that way but you want to add to it. You want to add to the funniness of getting vomited on, you want to add to the chaos of a Tank attacking, so we use the characters in that way. We end up trying to add a lot of depth to them and equally with that a lot of the feedback we received from L4D1 was some people wanting more story and a little bit more connection to the world, so we’re trying to do that as well as allowing people to just buy the game, go home and play the third campaign and they’re not, ‘Oh my god! What’s going on? I’m lost in the story!’ We didn’t want to have that.

You’ve mentioned that Left 4 Dead 2 has much more of a story…
If you think about L4D1 it was a very static world. Every place you went to was at the same level of infection. We wanted in L4D2 to show varying degrees, like in Savannah it’s just hitting so the characters don’t have all the names for the Special Infected, they don’t know each others’ names, and you see CEDA fighting the infection poorly. By the time you get into New Orleans the military is saying, ‘You know what? There’s 50 people over there and 48 of you are healthy and two are infected, so we’re going to kill all of you.’ They’re making these hard choices to just keep everyone alive. New Orleans was essentially how you saw a lot of L4D1, with this ‘cities under siege’ mentality. Then along the way you’ll see the swamps. You’ve got this small group of people saying that they’ll try and hold off on their own.

We wanted to explore how people react to the infection as it’s spreading and we use our distance travelled to show that with all these different places. When we were working on L4D1 we did a whole bunch of stuff that we never saw like how the infection started and where it went to, how it transmits and what it means to be a mutant. We always thought we’d plant seeds and do something with things later and we’d not need to necessarily divulge everything, but it was always about ground zero and not knowing anything. We wanted to throw you in. If you’ve ever read The Road, the author just throws you in, and I always thought that was cool. Normally, with a game, there’s some big explanation – ‘Oh, there’s a big evil scientist and you’re going to be the hero’ – but here the hero is you survive. In Left 4 Dead 2 there’s a little more distance and we’re able to talk about the world and we know its rules. So when the sun comes out on a particular map the guy designing the Witch was like, ‘Hey, shouldn’t she be more agitated?’, because we’d talked about how she should walk around during the day. We also talk about cities that aren’t in the game just so we have this reference point.

We’ve done a lot of research on things like the Spanish influenza and that’s a good example of a major epidemic spreading, and in the Sixties there was a flu that spread and even swine flu. We show what FEMA does, the Center for Disease Control, and how they look at these things. We always want to base it in something concrete but we have looked at things like World War Z where zombies can walk under water. Well, our zombies aren’t mystical. They used to be human and though they aren’t any more, they still have same characteristics, so they’ll drown in water. We can borrow from some other people’s lore and obviously zombies come with their own lore, but equally we can make our own. We have a consistent world and when we look at creatures we make sure that they’re based in the real world and they’re not mystical. What would have to happen to someone to make them mutate? We even have scientific names for these things too, like the Special Infected. In L4D2’s first campaign you’ll see some of that at CEDA’s headquarters.

There are a lot of players who just want to shoot zombies. I think at one point about two years ago we had some playtesters in and one of the older guys was asking what his motivation was. It’s f**king zombies! Come on, you need a motivation? Then we did think that it was a valid point, but I always thought that you’re probably not the kind of guy to buy a game about the zombie apocalypse. You’re not thinking in the same way as most people. Players end up being stereotypes of movies on their own without us having to prompt them.

We’ve found it really interesting to create a game that promotes dynamic strategy, where during the event you’re doing the planning, you’re reacting and you’re reacting like you would because you couldn’t have planned for this. It’s always different because you always have a different set of tools available. It’s this kind of thinking on your feet strategy that I always thought was the coolest thing about Left 4 Dead.

What improvements have you made to the engine?
We’ve always been incrementally upgrading the engine so it can do more. We were able to start from the ground up making all new art assets. Before, the team were doing a really great job with just nine guys but now it’s grown to what is essentially a 70-man team. Now, there are five artists instead of just two.

How does the AI Director move objects around the level?
Well, it depends on the level. It doesn’t happen in every map but, for example, if we were to play the Parish in the graveyard the crypts would move around. In the beginning of the Savannah map there are escalators that actually change and move around depending on how well you are playing. Now, those have to get set before you start the map; they can’t be dynamic because you’d never know if there would be an Infected player scouting ahead. But what we’ll do is look at how you’re doing up to that point and then map it out. It can be really insulting when the Director gives you this really easy path: ‘Oh, come on, we’re not that bad!’

Have you listened to community feedback of Left 4 Dead while developing the sequel?
The community does an amazing job at raising issues to us really clearly. Gabe can call me up and ask what the current issues that remain with Left 4 Dead are and I can go list them because I can see them on the forums. They do a really good job at helping us suss them out. The melee bash was one of those changes that came down to personal preference. There was a big outrage when we first did it and now most players don’t even notice if they play normally. But even here that change was something we made to optimise the game for fun. The melee bash was about not optimising for fun. With that we looked at L4D2 a lot and we’d bring in outside playtesters who were those kind of players and we’d say, ‘Try this because we wanted the fun way to play to be the best way.’

The Charger, for example: if you read the forums most people think he’s for corner camping, but he’s not. He’s actually for those teams that move through the maps close together. There are some teams that are almost unstoppable; they’re so good at taking out Hunters and just work so well together. But if you can have one of those guys snatched out of that group and run with and then pounded. It’s really hard to recover from that and get that guy so that helps break up the team. Things like the Boomer is a good example of something that can flip a team by blinding them and then the other Specials can attack.

We play a lot online as well, but it becomes really clear as to what the problems are. We look at the creature development to solve the problems of good players. Originally the Charger would just send everyone flying; the problem then is he has to look for someone to grab and beat on. That’s why we wanted to have him grab one and through testing we found it was really funny to grab the lead survivor because then it’s like The Three Stooges where they do the head knock thing and that’s funny. Left 4 Dead always has this mixture of horror and comedy.

When people talk about L4D2 and its development they really are helping us design the game and we’re watching how people play.

What about the new Special Infected?
There are some others that we experimented with that we may see down the road. But, for example, the Jockey started out as just a shrunk-down Hunter and someone put a little jockey uniform on him. But that’s what we do a really stupid simple thing so that we can get the behaviour right because that’s more interesting. To take it all in from start to finish was much longer because we wanted to make sure they were all polished and balanced. There also the variants like the Witch changes and all the specials from L4D1 are all having a little art treatment, and we also have the Uncommon Common like the Mud-men. Every campaign has something like that.

There’s a guy that does work on the blood. He’s called Gray, and he actually worked on King Kong. There’s this really great scene where Kong is in the theatre and he’s ripping up the seats and really looks like he’s tearing up the theatre – well, Gray did that. Now he’s working with us ripping up zombies and he’s done just a ton of work on how they blow apart, and wait until you see the chainsaw! So we’ve gored it up a little bit and when you gore it up like this you have to go a little to the comedy side as well. So it’s not just this horrific thing. It’s not like a Saw movie or a blood fetish thing; it’s more just goofy fun and the Jockey definitely covers the goofy fun part.

What new weapons can we expect?
The new melee weapons are the cricket bat, frying pan, axe, the chainsaw a katana and a crowbar and obviously we’ve got new guns. Like multiple pistols, multiple rifles and, in fact, the AK-47 is the one rifle that can single-shot the Common Infected. They all have little variations like that to them. One of the strengths we felt L4D1 had was the ability to play split-screen if a friend joined you and you wouldn’t have to explain 30 different controls. It is: pick up a gun and shoot. Different guns do different things, but you know what? They still all kill zombies. One of things you can do with sequels is make it more complicated and you think you need to just add stuff and obviously we wanted to do that, but equally we wanted to keep that streamlined, just jump in and play.

Talking to people all over the world we hear the same thing over and over, and that’s, ‘Oh, I sat down with my friend to play for half an hour and then I bought it.’

There were accusations that Left 4 Dead 2 could have been DLC…
We shipped Left 4 Dead and then we started looking at what we wanted to do differently and change. It’s a huge system of things, one of which was is hard to explain to people. In L4D2 every system has been rewritten. How are creatures work, how the Director works… These low-level things that had really long trajectories of when they were going to be finished. That’s how it became L4D2 instead of DLC. We couldn’t do these kinds of creatures if we didn’t rewrite the system and we couldn’t have these kinds of finales. They now work with the Director and we couldn’t change the Director as he now changes the way he spawns infected and we have all these different things coming at once. None of them were easy. Survival mode is all about people who want to compete but who don’t want to compete with other people.

Now in L4D2 we’ve built on everything, but people playing L4D1 will still see changes and updates. The world is the world, though, so they’re all in that world together. We may see the two groups hook up, we may see other things happen, but what that is down the road and how that comes we don’t know.

Will there be any crossover between the two games?

What that means is lot of talking with Microsoft and what it also means for the player. What makes sense to you if you’re playing L4D2 and you see your friends playing L4D1? How do you play with them? What are those steps? And that’s still being worked out. We want to have something for them – people who have bought L4D 2 and who don’t want to leave behind their friends – but how do we do that?

What changes have their been to the AI Director?
It’s funny, I swear. There are times where [the AI] will get in a rut with me and I’ll be like, ‘Dude, what did I do!?’ It’s funny, whenever we do an update on the forums there’ll always be a thread about how we changed the difficulty and that’s the thing: it is different every time you play it. We’ve gone through when we’ve shown the game to the press and the AI has brought the difficulty down and we’re like, ‘Amp it up! What are you doing?’ We have no control over that. One of the things we added for Left 4 Dead 2 was a little bit more control for the Director. You don’t always want to have it be the same every time. But you want to help with tendencies and you want to avoid bad things. Like running ahead is one, but to be different every time we do have this problem where it does feel like the Director is picking on you in streaks. But then I wonder if I play golf, I’ll start hooking for a bit, is it just me? Do I have a problem? I don’t know. Even though I know exactly how it works, I still feel like there’s something there.

It’s a set of systems looking at how you’re playing, I think even more so in Left 4 Dead 2, you’ll see things you wouldn’t have before like having the events hit you in one of our campaigns. If you’re doing really, really poorly it’s just not going to beat up on you that bad. It’s going to challenge you in other ways but the AI now has more control of what it spawns and where the health packs are. In L4D1 it was real simple – health pack or pills – but here we have some more things. It’s always monitoring and always adjusting but on the other side we’re always making sure we don’t do the rubber band thing that some racing games do, where you’ve crashed everyone off the field and somehow they still pass you on the last corner, because that’s not fun.

We’ve definitely realised that making people move solves a lot of problems. It removes this ability for someone to camp. So, we’ve brought in really good players to play on the Bridge, for example, and those container trucks ended up being these death cabins for them. They would all sit in there and think they could hold on for some period of time and then move on. But the breaks were never enough that it was never worth doing. The Infected would always be getting enough hits that it would just whittle away their health and they would always just die in there. They needed to think smarter: if they go in one of those it’s got to be quick and for a reason. A lot of times when we’re looking at those kinds of things, we want to remember what kind of game we’re making. We’re making a zombie war game and we want to think like, if I’m running down here what would I do.

You’ve also mentioned that players will be able to use multiple types of ammo.
As well as incendiary ammo and the new adrenaline boost there’s explosive ammo, which kills things really graphically and cool. The one idea was you pick up the ammo and you have it for that minute but the other way is that you have to make this big choice. Is it worth picking them up and getting rid of your health kit, because you may face a Tank? What we see now in testing is people with 40 health will heal and pick it up. When normally they’d go down to 20. Was that a good move or not? But it depends, right? You’ll see these strategic things happening on the fly. You see people leaving the safe room with a plan about how to deal with the level and then the things in the level change that.