Shacknews Left 4 Dead Preview - 1/17/08

Shacknews recently took a trip to Valve HQ to play Left 4 Dead and has returned with their thoughts and two new screenshots. Chris Faylor and Aaron Linde report that the Witch no longer appears in the normal difficulty, which tells us that normal must have been scaled back a bit. It makes sense, seeing how that before the change Survivors only made it a quarter of the time to the end. They also report that there will be NO CROSS-PLATFORM PLAY. PC and Xbox 360 users will not be able to play with each other. Valve marketing VP Doug Lombardi "attributed the decision to a variety of technical obstacles."

To make the late summer release date hurt less, they explained some of the work that needs to be done:

As can be expected, there is a significant amount of work left for Turtle Rock and Valve to do between now and late summer. Aaron and I only experienced two of the game's four overall scenarios, and we were told that the zombie-controlling side of the game was not yet ready to be shown. Load times need to be optimized, as switching from map to map resulted in a lengthy wait. Though the game ran smoothly with a large amount of zombies on-screen, it would occasionally slow to a crawl for no discernible reason. Its user-interface is very much a work-in-progress. -Chris Faylor

Though the game is still very unfinished--animation and sound bugs, and the occasional curious gameplay quirk, pop up from time to time--the hardest work, building that memorable experience, is already done. -Aaron Linde

We would quote the parts that show what they liked about the game, but that seemed to be just about the entire article, so head on over to read that. Specifically they talked about the "you just have to play it" feeling of the game that most previewers seem to share. They also have put up two brand new screenshots which you can find in our screenshots gallery or resized for wallpapers in our new wallpapers section.