The brand new Crash Course campaign dropped onto Left4Dead servers last week, and as well as utterly crushing the idiotic “abandonment” arguments of Left4Dead 2 boycotters it serves as a lecture on lessons learned from the original. A lecture made by professional gamers and delivered in the form of killing zombies, the way all education should take place.  This is no mere stopgap: it’s a snapshot of development and some things we can look forward to in the next installment.

Versus servers spiked as players try to find the best spot to Smoke Survivors from (Answer: that bit where they pass over the fence on top of the truck - grab the last one when the others have already dropped)

1.  The Length

The reduced length of the Crash Course campaign, with only two chapters instead of the usual four, is sure to fuel the moronic moaning of those who insist they’re somehow being ripped off by continual free updates and extensions.  It also reveals their inability to understand what the developers are doing - the shorter campaign isn’t an attempt to shortchange players, but get pump up the number of people playing L4D servers.

As it stands it’s an excellent zombie-movie experience, but in length as well as mood: a campaign can take up to an hour (with versus easily doubling that) while many players can’t actually cancel their entire evening just to play.  Survival mode, and now the shorter campaign, are obvious attempts to make the game more accessible to people whose day-planners don’t revolve around video-gaming time.

2.  Verticality

We’ve covered left, right, forward, back and down - we’re safe forever!

Crash Course crams more multi-level ledges, overpasses, ridges and apartment roofs into two chapters than the other campaigns have in four.  Instead of narrow alleys or wide open spaces we have considerably more three-dimensional areas, with undead (and especially special infected, repetition on purpose) taking advantage of all angle attacks to eat the un-undead.

Those looking forward to the sequel’s release in November should look forward to two things:

1. Delays.  This is Valve.
2. Enhanced multi-level environments when it finally does come out.

3.  The Plot

The Left4Dead safe rooms are the best examples of videogame writing anywhere, and I’ll stack one wall of Valve graffiti against any ten RPGs you care to mention (Aerith deaths included).  As well as an astonishingly accurate parody of internet commentary, the newly-downoaded content extends on that to paint a wider picture of the world of L4D servers - and it’s not good.

Yep, that looks like the sort of world where you’d need an assault rifle to even look at a map

The game about endless oceans of the undead eating everything else in the world was never exactly optimistic, but that one chart extends the apocalypse almost infinitely.  This isn’t a few potholes of nightmare that need escape - this is an entire world of undead where the entire army gives up on the country and tries to salvage a few isolated pockets, and fails at most of those.  Expect some extremely evil extension on this theme in the sequel.

4.  More Involved Finales

The frantic finales have always been the entire point of Left4Dead servers, and Crash Course tries a few tweaks to the formula (which you just know are experiments the developers are eagerly awaiting results on).  The result isn’t up to previous examples: the truck depot level just doesn’t feel as desperate as the helipads and farmhouses we’ve fought in before, but the increased complexity of the design and the additional events (being forced to run out and restart the generator) speak of attempts to mix up the basic “Hold here while you’re attacked by the entire population of Winsconsin”

We’ll always embrace more Dawn of the Dead references in our survival horror.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 9:28 am and is filed under Left4Dead News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.