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	DJ Hero 2 ³⁶⁰ PREVIEW: We try out Freestyle's revamped vinyl
	Hydro Thunder Hurricane ³⁶⁰ REVIEW: Messing about on the river...
	Ghost Recon: Future Soldier ³⁶⁰ PREVIEW: Stealth series stands up to Gears
	FIFA 11 ³⁶⁰ PREVIEW: The beautiful game gets even prettier

Halo: Reach gets 10 new screenshots | Call of Duty: Black Ops Hardened and Prestige editions confirmed | Halo: Reach announcement revealed | Xbox 360 Slim 250GB hard drives to be sold separately | Ice-T: Hates Medal of Honor, loves Kane & Lynch 2 | Vanquish gets Casual Automatic and God Hard difficulties | Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock songlist thus far | Gears of War 3 'Save/Kill Carmine' shirts now available | OXM subscription is half-price! | Xbox 360 Slim and PS3 Slim do battle | Blacklight: Tango Down nationwide tournament kicks off next month | BioShock 2 gets patched up | Kinect no good for flight games says Ubisoft | Battlefield: Bad Company 2 gets two more maps | What has been the biggest Xbox Live Arcade seller this year? | Xbox Live Arcade overcame slow start this year | Madden NFL 11 Terrell Owens screens revealed | Microsoft defends Kinect price | Halo PC unlocks Halo: Reach item | Transformers: War for Cybertron DLC hits today | Kane & Lynch 2 gets three new trailers | Red Dead Redemption heading to Japan | THQ creating yet another WWE franchise | Lord of the Rings and Smackdown hits Games on Demand | DJ Hero 'increasing DJ equipment sales'

On the site today - News: Halo: Reach gets 10 new screenshots http://bit.ly/agUjBR

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Feature

Interview with Valve's Chet Faliszek

12-Jan-2010 We quiz the Left 4 Dead frontman about deleted Specials, naming conventions and adding a snow level

5 Comments

Chet Faliszek started out as one half of legendary game site Old Man Murray. Now he's at Valve working on Left 4 Dead, and the OXM team sat down with him just before the launch of last month's sequel to talk about how it was put together.

Mike: In realism mode, did you think about making the voice chat get quieter the further away you are?
That's something we played around with in Left 4 Dead 1 before release, and we decided it's a social event with your friends. Penalising someone who's too far away is really brutal. L4D isn't just about skill, it's about experience, and it's about having an experience with friends. You want to be able to laugh at that friend who's far away.

Jon: Is it Swamp Fever? Where the rain comes in?
That's Hard Rain. We named it so you'd remember.

Mike: Hard Rain just makes me think of that terrible Christian Slater film.
A terrible Christian Slater film? No way, no way. C'mon, that's crazy talk!

Jon: Obviously. But Hard Rain does have the weather, and when the Tank showed up, we didn't hear it coming.
You also see that kind of confusion in people playing The Parish. In The Parish, there's bombing going off. So people will be like: "There's no Tank, it's just the bombing going off." And then: "Oh wait, Tank, Tank, Tank!"

Jon: Each campaign feels different. Were they made separately?
All the level designers and all the artists sit in the same room. We all work together. But it was definitely a deliberate thing by the entire team to make sure that each experience felt different. And having the guys go back and look at what they did previously, to see how they can change it.
We have this thing called the Left 4 Dead dictionary - it's a way to describe places. So you can say "there's a narrow flow of capillaries that open to a wide flow", and that would be a narrow hallway with doors on the side where people can look for items, then followed by a lobby. When we designed maps we would go in and not actually talk about "oh this is going to be a sugar mill". It would be, "we're going to have narrow flow here, going one-way".

Jon: In future DLC will you be able combine those elements differently?
Some stuff we would take. The run and gun crescendo events, for example, we first did in The Parish and then used in other places. Some people playing [The Parish] demo would ask, are the weather effects going to be in the full game? But that would make it like Hard Rain. We wanted to keep each experience very different. Down the road, we might combine them. We use the Left 4 Dead dictionary. Then we go back and look at the locations. If those things make sense we work them in.

Ryan: Can I put in my request for a DLC snow level?
There was a mod which was going to be a snow level. I loved the posters they did. The first thing people did was come up with an idea for a mod, and then come up with a name, and then a poster and a tagline. I loved those.

Mike: Can you tell us any ideas that were left behind for Special Infected?
So I can then be tormented by the tons of emails that come in? Nobody ever trusts us that it was a bad idea... we played around with this one called The Leaker.

Mike: That sounds horrible.
You can tell I had something to do with naming because I'm lazy. "What does this one do?" "It charges." "Yeah, it's a Charger. I'll go with that."

Mike: If you don't name them simply, people will make up names for them.
If this thing was running down the street at you, you're not going to scream out some crazy long made-up fantasy name. With The Leaker, the idea was a kind of Boomer that could take damage, and shoot out spouts of goo. And you could plant yourself and explode - be this walking bomb. The problem is there's a warning that you're going to do that. So when you go to plant yourself, everyone else runs away, and you just die and don't hurt anybody. It's pretty unsatisfying. The idea isn't entirely bad, and some of that we brought over to The Spitter.

Ryan: How hard is it to come up with new Infected that work in tandem with each other?
There was always this intimidating thing amongst us when Left 4 Dead 1 first shipped of, like, "oh my god. We're not going to be able to do Left 4 Dead 2". We really wanted to make sure we hit all the right notes. We didn't just want to take The Hunter and go "oh yeah, he's green now". It was about being smart and making sure of the choices we were making and why we were making those creatures.

Mike: What about the Wandering Witch? How does that change things?
If you're in realism mode, Witches become a really big event again, because one swipe from the witch kills you. Teams have to stop and really talk about taking her down and how they're going to do it. No lone gunning.