Left 4 Dead 2

Did You Know?

• Pre-ordering the game unlocked an exclusive baseball bat melee weapon and Bill's beret for Team Fortress 2.
• The demo featured the first two maps of The Parish campaign.
• Valve spent $25 million on advertising, exceeding the $10 million for the first game.

Gameplay

Left 4 Dead 2 is a first-person shooter emphasizing cooperative play. It contains five campaigns, each with three to five levels, and each campaign ends with a finale requiring the Survivors to call for rescue and survive an onslaught, pass a gauntlet, or collect fuel cans. Survivors carry equipment in five categories: primary weapons, secondary weapons, throwable weapons, major medical supplies, and minor medical supplies. Primary weapons are divided into four tiers: tier one weapons like the SMG and Chrome Shotgun deal damage slowly; tier two weapons such as the Assault Rifle and Combat Shotgun deal faster damage; tier three weapons (Grenade Launcher and M60) are rare and cannot be refilled from ammunition dumps; tier four weapons are mounted systems with unlimited ammo but overheat and have a fixed arc. Secondary weapons include melee weapons, small caliber pistols (dual-wieldable), and large caliber pistols. Melee weapons cause extra damage, while all weapons can perform weaker melee attacks to push Infected back.

Synopsis

Left 4 Dead 2 takes place in the aftermath of the Green Flu outbreak on the U.S. East Coast, one week after the first game begins. The four new Survivors—Coach, Ellis, Nick, and Rochelle—are immune to the disease. Coach is a high school football coach with a bad knee; Nick is a pessimistic gambler and con artist; Rochelle is a television production assistant; Ellis is a talkative redneck mechanic who often mentions his friend Keith. The story spans five campaigns set in the Deep South, starting in Savannah, Georgia, and ending in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Survivors fight through hordes of Infected, using safehouses to rest, and aim to reach extraction points. Supporting characters include Whitaker, a gun store owner, and Virgil, a Cajun boat captain who appears in the final three campaigns. Two soldiers are heard in the final map of The Parish.

Development

Development began shortly after the first game's release, with the team aiming to make the sequel bigger and better. According to Chet Faliszek, the original Left 4 Dead was rushed, leaving it in a state no one wanted to fix, so the team rebuilt the game as a new title. Microsoft gave the project the code name Carnation to keep details secret before announcement. Valve created a full story for the infection pandemic and used a Left 4 Dead dictionary to describe level design. The game contains about 7,800 unique lines of dialogue, a 40% increase over the first game. Voice actors were chosen for natural accents and allowed to ad-lib; Randall Newsome, a local Cajun speaker, voiced Virgil. A planned character—a no-nonsense DMV woman—was cut. Depeche Mode allowed Valve to use its music and imagery in the game.

Controversies

Left 4 Dead 2 attracted controversy over its timing and graphic content. After its E3 2009 announcement, some players formed a Steam group called L4D2 Boycott (NO-L4D2), which grew to over 37,000 members. They objected to the characters, visuals, and music shown in the demo, feeling they were inappropriate to the first game's aesthetics, and feared the sequel would fracture the community. Valve marketer Doug Lombardi asked the community to trust them, stating that a sequel was the best option because demand for new content could not be met as DLC, and incremental patches were difficult. Tom Leonard and Chet Faliszek noted that too much content relied on each other. Gabe Newell was skeptical but allowed the project to proceed.