Left4Dead Interview: Chet Faliszek

BT: We touched on friendly fire before, but is it impossible to turn that off?

CF: We’re still experimenting with that. There are little ways we’ve been smart with it though. Like, if your buddy is pinned down by a zombie and you’re trying to shoot the zombie off then you can’t shoot your friend. You always do less damage than you think you do anyway.

The characters will interact too and tell you if you’ve shot them and so on. That way, even if you aren’t actually doing damage then you still get the ‘Ha, I shot my buddy’ thing.

BT: Why is it that people always do that anyway? First thing in every team game is find your friends on your team and shoot them. You must see that in play testing, right?

CF: If they know each other, yeah we see that. If they don’t then it’s kind of a boundary they don’t want to cross. Some weird formality. You’ll only shoot your friends.

BT: And one thing I’ve just noticed on the demo stands is the viewpoint. Is it a third-person model with a first person camera in it?

CF: We do some trickery there. If you look down you can see your legs and all that. It’s actually the first time we’ve done that in a game too.


BT: Why did you choose to try that then if you hadn’t done it before?

CF: It’s something that Turtle Rock had started doing before we were even on the project actually. Personally, I like it because we pop you out of first person a lot so you can see your own actions as you bandage yourself or whatever. When you’re hanging off a ledge and waiting for someone to come lift you to safety then you see yourself dangling. We don’t normally see that in games, but here the game really lends itself to it.

BT: Don’t you worry it might break the flow of the narrative?

CF: It’s weird. In first-person you always have to compensate for all the senses you really can’t use, like peripheral vision and so on. If you asked most players if there was any third person in this game then they’d say no because they don’t even recognise that they are seeing themselves. They know that they are in the game, but it never registers as a separate person.

BT: Now, I meant to ask this earlier, but what sort of range you cover in the maps. They mostly seem to be at night.

CF: This is the darkest game that Valve has ever done. It’s why we’re working on better shadows, better lighting, better darkness. The idea though is that the infected are basically human and they have the same basic abilities that humans have for the most part. They can’t see as well at night. If you came out in the day you’d get swarmed all the time, so by coming out during the night you can have some safety.


BT: And how many levels are there? There are four campaigns and my maths is rubbish by the way.

CF: Four campaigns with five maps. If you just ran it from start to finish then it’s probably about six to eight hours of gameplay. It varies wildly, but that’s about the average I think. The levels are made to just be played again and again and again though. How long is de_dust?

BT: And from what I gather the AI Director kind of moves zombies around and makes the levels endlessly replayable.

CF: Exactly. You’ll enter into some spaces and just have entirely different experiences each time. It really works. I know. We play it everyday and I’ve done that for two years.

BT: Now, here’s one final question that I’ve got to ask – what will you do when the Zombie Apocalypse does happen?

CF: See, this is the great thing – I can actually practice now, it’s good! But, yeah, I’d probably be a holing up kind of guy. Shut myself up somewhere in the country with some canned food. We actually have some country maps in the game that’d be a good test for things like that. Those levels are really hard though so I don’t know if I’d survive like that or not.