Left 4 Dead 2 Interview: A Chat with Chet

bit-tech: And you’ve used new characters as well. We get the new setting and the new features, but why shift it to new characters rather than continuing the journey of the old group that was already so popular?

Chet Faliszek: One of the things was that if we moved to a new area with the old survivors then we’d still always be telling their story and we’d be coming at it from a the same perspective. With these four new survivors though, well they have a new perspective on the situation, they have different starting points, different histories, different interactions with each other.

We just always thought that Left 4 Dead was bigger than the characters – it was about the entire world. Early on we just had this idea of the game really being about this expansive world. Really, I wish we had more characters but right now we have these eight.

BT: Are there plans to possibly introduce new characters or features like in Team Fortress 2?

CF: Well, right now our focus is really on building the core parts of Left 4 Dead 2. We might talk about that stuff internally because it’s always important to try and understand those things early on, but really our focus is on what’s in the box.


BT: And do you see Left 4 Dead as an on-going series? Should we prepare for Left 4 Dead 3 this time next year?

CF: Well, this is the thing. If you’d asked me at the same time last year if we were going to do Left 4 Dead 2 then I wouldn’t have known. We don’t know. It’s a little different from how we usually work internally too and it might turn out that actually we don’t like working like this.

BT: How long was the development period for Left 4 Dead 2 then? To get to how it is now.

CF: The pre-production started in December, but the thing that made development easier was that we had a really shared vision. Valve has about 200 developers and about 45 of us are on the Left 4 Dead team and every one of those 45 wanted to work on Left 4 Dead and had something that they wanted to add to the game, which meant there was a shared vision. That just made us able to develop really quickly since we were all in lockstep.

BT: How exactly is Valve structured internally then, because we’ve heard people talk before about how some of the most important things at Valve are the focus on playtesting and the way the company is laid out with set teams for certain series.


CF: Well, everyone at Valve is allowed to work on whatever they want. One of the cool things though is that, for Left 4 Dead and especially near the end, everyone is playtesting all the time. The whole company, literally from the head lawyer on down.

With that we had some people who weren’t working on the project fall in love with Left 4 Dead and want to work on it – and they are now. Like David Sawyer, who’s a level designer who worked on Half-Life and Half-Life 2. He was working on this one project and after playtesting for ages he said he really wanted to switch and work on Left 4 Dead 2 and he did. We saw a lot of that kind of stuff and it’s why we’re able to work so quickly.

BT: It looks like this will have to be our final question, so if you were in Left 4 Dead then what would your survival tactic be?

CF: Oh, find a shotgun. That’s probably the most important thing. That and stay away from Doug Lombardi, because he’s a friendly-firing, grenade-throwing nut. You have to pick your friends carefully, you know?

BT: Careful – we’ll tell him you said that.

CF: Oh, he knows. We used to have a feature in the game where you could vote on whether a player could pick up and use grenades and even when we had journalists playing they’d still vote to not let him have any grenades. It’s just safer.

And that’s it! Thanks to Chet Faliszek and the folks at EA for their time. Left 4 Dead 2 will be released on PC and Xbox 360 in November 2009 and we’ll have our impressions of the game online soon. Until then, let us know what you think about Left 4 Dead in the forums.