Cooperative FPS games are the darlings of the genre right now, but they’re popping up so fast that it’s getting hard to tell them apart. However, in a subgenre mostly defined by players reviving each other after tactical mishaps, Left 4 Dead is still the only game where you’ll drop your comrade mid-revival so you can shoot through him. You know, because of all the zombies.

Valve’s upcoming sequel to that game was present on the PAX show floor, and Ricardo Ariza was kindly fielding questions instead of just hitting zombies with guitars. He’s one of the two character sculptors working on the sequel’s 35 man team and was just chock full of information.

New Special Infected

Jockey

Image stolen from Giantbomb.com

The Jockey made his debut at this year’s PAX, a hunched infected that’s short enough to duck under your field of view or hide among incoming zombies. The Jockey charges the party, hops on a survivor, and pilots him away from the group, chewing the survivor’s brain as they go. Survivors can fight the Jockey’s control to a limited degree, but neither survivor nor zombie is completely in control of your final destination.

Survivor riding affords some tantalizing ambush opportunities in versus mode. They’re somewhat mitigated by a mounted Jockey’s extremely shootable silhouette, but once you’ve wiped the Boomer bile out of your eyes, don’t be surprised when the head count comes up one short.

Spitter
The Jockey had the spotlight at PAX, but the previously announced Spitter also made an appearance. This infected spits and explodes into into acidic puddles of area denial. The Spitter mostly changes trench warfare into a running firefight by dispersing the party, which should make the finales into a meat grinder interesting. However, the Spitter also has tactical offensive applications like preventing survivor revival, and dispersing a clumped party.

Charger
The charger is split down the middle, with half his body looking like a common infected and the other half looking like a Tank. As you’d guess from the name, he smashes into the party like a linebacker, nabs a survivor, and sprints away to savage his victim in private. Like the Jockey, the Charger splits the party and leaves no trail, so you have to witness the abduction to have any idea where your teammate went. Half a tank is easier to spot than a stubby hunchback, but the charger makes up for it with a surprising turn of speed for a lopsided half-man.

New Items
Left 4 Dead 2 will see a significant departure from item design philosophy from the first game. Where your choices were once limited to three guns and two bombs, the sequel emphasizes tradeoffs. In fact, there’s such a wide variety of choices that it’s easier to think of your prospective equipment as three categories: primary weapons, secondary weapons, and items.

The primary weapons are your big guns, like the combat shotgun from the first game. They combine range and stopping power at the cost of limited ammo. Secondary weapons are more in the spirit of pistols, they give up range or stopping power to become your trusty reusable weapon. These include the new melee weapons like the frying pan and the cricket bat. Finally, there will be competitors for each item slot like adrenaline, which occupies the pain pills slot and abolishes melee fatigue.

New at PAX was the electric guitar, which you hold Paul Stanley style. As with melee weapons in most FPS games, it’s not transparent how much different the guitar’s damage and fatigue are from the other weapons (nor is it likely that these exact traits will survive playtesting), but one thing is certain: the guitar makes the best noise when you smash it into zombies. You can hear it in the video (and see the new special infected at work).

Director Upgrades
The AI director is being substantially expanded in the sequel, both in scope and power. Unfortunately for reporting, the director’s hand is invisible, so I asked Ariza for some insight.

Item Placement
Left 4 Dead‘s AI Director could monitor the survivors’ performance and grant or withhold weapon and health windfalls to keep the game tense. According to Ariza, Director 2.0 does the same job, but it can leverage the sequel’s emphasis on tradeoffs for greater precision with its rewards and punishments. He couldn’t give any concrete examples (presumably because the Director is still under construction), but it sounded like the Director would be able to detect something like a preference for flailing melee weapons over precise strikes. With this knowledge, the Director would be able to award a low-fatigue weapon for an extra edge when things aren’t going well.

Dynamic Level Layouts
Items are still distributed at invisible nodes by Director fiat, but finding those nodes may be tricky when the Director can reorganize the levels. Rumors have been thick and details have been sparse about this feature, but Ariza helped clear it up.

Evidently the implementation of this feature is subtle, but unexpected dead ends and garden paths will start cropping up as you become acquainted with the levels. Zombie pathfinding has been improved along with this feature, so it sounds like Director 2.0 can procedurally arrange the connections among hand-built parts, or even the parts themselves. That is, the doors between rooms, and even the arrangements of rooms within a building may be dynamic, but the building will be in the same place. This sort of arrangement would certainly keep the game fresh without introducing that blandness that haunts roguelikes and other truly random games.

Weather Elements
Finally, Director 2.0 will be able to control the weather. Ariza said that weather will actually impact gameplay, citing that pools of water slow character movement. So hopefully weather will actually change the local terrain. Incidentally, walking through water with low health is even worse, and pooling water will probably be one of the leading causes of zombie-related deaths.

Backward Compatibility?
Valve tried to soothe protest groups with promises to look into backward compatibility with the first Left 4 Dead, but there hasn’t been much news since the announcement. Ariza had some perspective on the magnitude of the problem, saying, “Left 4 Dead 2 was basically built from scratch…so the architecture is completely different.” He also volunteered that he wouldn’t want to swap back and forth between Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 discs, which suggests that has been considered as a solution. It’s still possible, but it’s probably time to stop holding your breath.

One Last Tidbit
Oh, and that new multiplayer mode that Valve refuses to tell anyone about? Ricardo wouldn’t give up any details either (no matter how much Sodium Pentothal I gave him), but he did say it’s his favorite. Thanks Ricardo. Now I don’t know anything AND I’m jealous.

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