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Left 4 Dead 2 Announced: Win or Fail?

Author: ted

body by satan!

According to Valve, the successor to the popular game Left 4 Dead is due out November 17, 2009. It will have:

• New weapons. So far confirmed: Chainsaw, bat, frying pan, silenced SMG, fire axe.
• New maps.
• New zombies.
• New players. (4 new playable survivors.)
• New setting- in the south.
• A new gameplay adaption feature. Apparently the game will scale the ingame props and amount of zombies depending on the computer’s performance abilities.
• Some other less interesting things.

This sounds great, but I can’t help but recall the first release of Left 4 Dead. They spent $10+ million advertising it and raised the hype beyond reasonable levels, and when it came out I wanted to bash my head on a curb. There were 3 campaigns and around 8 weapons. I finished the game in about an hour after paying $50 for it. I wished I had never bought it, it felt like a complete waste of money. Sure, Left 4 Dead 2 looks awesome, but who’s to say it won’t be another disappointment?

I know a lot of people liked the original Left 4 Dead, and I don’t blame them. The gameplay was fun and dynamic, and it was well-done for a zombie slaughterfest game. But it was lacking grungy gameplay and real fear; it felt too cartoony to me. Additionally, releasing it with barely any campaigns was a terrible idea. It got boring fast. I didn’t even rush through it. I went back and played it recently and played the new campaigns. Those were fun, but why wasn’t the game released with more? I also wanted more weapons. Honestly there’s no reason to have 8 weapons, they all get old minutes after using them for about an hour.

I also don’t understand why max players is 4. I understand there’s a lot of NPC’s at once, but 4 is not enough. The “versus” gamemode, 4 human survivors and 4 human zombies plus a lot of computer-controlled zombies, allows 8 human players at once. If Valve were to make it 8 survivors against all computer zombies, that would be better.

It looks like Left 4 Dead 2 will only have 4 survivors at once again. Let’s hope there’s more weapons than we’ve seen already, more than 3 new campaigns, and more than 10ish zombie models.

Tl;dr Despite the flashy new video, I’m skeptical about Left 4 Dead 2. Valve is notorious for bullshit, and the first game was a disappointment.