Left 4 Dead Preview - The Trip
After classes and work on the 24th Frogopus and I drove up to Cleveland. Seven hours of flights, a layover in Houston and two viewings of the movie "Get Smart" later and we arrived in Orange County, mere miles away from the Valve South offices. We went straight to the hotel and to bed, excited for the days ahead.
Day One
Saturday morning around 10AM we arrived at Valve South with developers Chris Ashton and Jaime Sue. Left 4 Dead was loaded up on the four test machines, we sat down and got our keys bound (both of us use non-standard esdf instead of wasd, always a pain) and connect to the server to play the No Mercy campaign. 81 weeks of anticipation came down to that moment, and just as we were selecting our weapons on top of the apartment building a bright light on the ceiling started blinking and a few loud beeps sounded. Had the extra resources of Valve led to some new hardware to increase immersion? Not quite.. it was the fire alarm.
NOOOOOO!
We reluctantly evacuated the building and found out that fortunately it was just a test. Yay, we still get to play!
They wanted us to experience the game without being led so we set up on No Mercy on Advanced difficulty with two Survivor bots helping us along the way. We battled our way to the finale without any wipes, but the finale is significantly tougher than the other maps and we retried four times before going to lunch. The last two tries we got to the second Tank, but couldn't finish it off.
After lunch there were enough of us to try out Versus mode: me, Frogopus, Chris, Jaime, programmer Matt Campbell, modelers Sean "The Tripod" Keagan and Kon, and finally Jerry "JohnnyFlash" Bennett. We're saving our impressions of the Versus mode for a later article so I won't get into details, but I can tell you now that it's amazing. Our team (me, Frogo, Chris, Jaime) started off decently on No Mercy but were behind all the way to the finale. During the finale we stepped it up as a team and escaped as Survivors and then shut down the other team as the Infected. We narrowly beat them, I believe the score was around 4950 to 4930. It was awesome.
We then decided to try Blood Harvest with no Survivor bots; Chris and Jaime played with us on Advanced. After developing some teamwork in Versus we were pretty well set and beat it without any wipes. Mike Booth showed up and took us all out for some great dinner and then we came back for more Versus mode.
This time we played the other Versus-enabled campaign, Blood Harvest. Again, we'll give you more details on Versus mode later, but we ended up not getting to the end of two of the maps. We pulled out another strong finale showing, escaping and shutting down the other team, but it wasn't enough and we lost by about 900 points.
At that point it was past midnight (Versus matches are long) and we headed back to the hotel.
Day Two
On day two we started off the morning trying No Mercy on expert. The AI Director really didn't want us getting all the way through the second map, and what the Director wants it gets. We headed to Laguna Beach for lunch, tried some Thai food, saw the ocean and lots of people with tiny dogs, and came back to get some footage.
We played through both Blood Harvest and No Mercy on Advanced difficulty while taping, and then taped Blood Harvest on Expert difficulty from my perspective. We have this Blood Harvest on Expert footage to share with you today, over an hour's worth. Read on for more!
