Left 4 STOP THROWING PIPE BOMBS AT THE TANKS
 

I couldn't find a thread on this game so I made one. The demo came out (yesterday) and the full game comes out next week.


There's you and 3 other people in a city where humanity has taken a turn for the zombie. Your mission is to make it from your apartment building to a helipad where you expected to be rescued from certain death, which may or may not include being barfed on. Right now the demo only allows you to play the first 2 stages of the game, but you pretty much get the jist of the game within a couple of minutes. Notably:

• You should probably try to stick with your teammates. The game sometimes encourages you to do this by ruining your shit with a Horde (a large group of zombies coming for your ass), a Smoker (who grabs you with his super-long tongue until someone shoots him), or a Boomer (whose barf tags you to the Infected).
• Ammo isn't a big deal, but pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails are.
• Keeping an eye on your teammates' health is worth it.
• Bugging the witch is not.

From playing for an hour or two, I've determined that (at least in PUGs, maybe) without patience and awareness of your teammates in closed-quarters combat, you'll end up wiping in Advanced and Expert difficulties as you'll end up shooting them (and with a shotgun, that usually knocks them down). Easy and Normal are only worth it for pistols-only fights. The shotgun is nice if you like blowing heads off, but the submachine gun is better for crowd control. There are some second tier weapons too (such as an auto-shotgun, an M16 and a sniper rifle) that you only get to play with in the second level.

It's definitely worth the time to try the demo, at least. The amount of replay value is my biggest concern with this game; despite the AI being top-notch, how many times can you run through the same 6 levels, no matter how random the experience?

Where the real fun may come from is the Versus mode, where you can actually play against a group of Survivors as Infected, including all but one of the Infected classes (the Witch). I wish they had that in the demo, but it seems like that's all that's left to hide from us for now.

Needless to say, anyone who's played any zombie mod has their shit quite worked out for them when it comes to this game. While Zombie Panic was pretty fun, for the most part, L4D shows that with a bigger budget anything and everything is possible.

While I don't share the same feelings of repetitiveness as Dope described above, this game is all about getting 3 or more of your zombie loving buddies and just having a good time. Sure, there is going to be the hardcores out there that play expert, and only expert, but even the lower difficulties, which for some reason all seem to be set at 'normal' even advanced, still have your OH SHIT moments.

What shines in this game, however, is the AI director. Regardless of what difficulty you are on, it won't mean shit if you're forced to go through a tight corridor, only to have a Tank, (a large, hulk like zombie that, if you're on expert one of you will most likely die) come barreling down at you with no other place to go but past him.

The one thing I have noticed about this demo, however, is that even though it's impossible to find a dedicated server, most of the time I can just host my own game, and everyone has a decent connection to it. Even then, if you have a shitty connection, it still doesn't seem to lag too awefully bad, but that could be just me.

Another thing I have noticed is that no matter how many games you play, at least ONE person will always want to fuck with the witch...Always. It's going to become the new Murphy's Law in some way.

My opinions of this game may be biased due to the fact that I've enjoyed almost every zombie game I've ever played (yes, even including shitty ones like Resident Evil: Dead Aim), but this one is going to be sitting on top of the hill as king for a long time to come.

Also, I've noticed something odd. The black guy always dies first...

Played with 3 friends of mine who have been looking forward to it for a while, and we had a bunch of fun with it, just replaying parts after we wiped.

Someone actually launched a molotov inside an air vent while we were all inside. After everyone but me was finished burning, I made an attempt to revive one of my buddies only to be shot in my face. Much teamkilling and hilarity ensued.

I'd agree that medium and easy are kinda cakewalks once you have a general feel for the game. They might be just right for beginners, but once you establish what guns you like, what paths you like to take, and so on, advanced and expert are the way to go. There are a few stipulations:

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/9537/jaspervo8.jpg
Shooting a Boomer too close: that's a wipe.
Getting separated: that's a wipe.
Startling a Witch: that's a wipe.
Using your health pack too early: that's a wipe.
Using your health pack too late: oh, you better believe that's a wipe.


In all honesty, though, they make the game hard, but not impossible, so your friends can always be brought back from the brink of death (or even respawned). The AI director manages to keep things fresh every time, even if the maps don't change.

There's a lot of audio cues in the game, so it pays to listen for the sounds of boss zombies around, or for the music to change when a team member is pinned, or a swarm spawns in. It's the first FPS I've played to put so much relevant info into the sound of the game.

I just finished a 3h session of L4D, that game is just amazing! we seriously need to put a team and play expert, it's just so awesome!

Oh I definitely agree that this is a play-with-your-friends-for-hours-and-never-get-bored kind of game. When I was talking about repetition and the potential for the gameplay to become stale, this was after I finished a two-hour marathon, including a situation similar to Skexis' where we just kept playing the Subway run on Expert over and over. (That run was doomed when we could barely get off the roof.) I'm sure my opinion will change after doing it again tonight.

Thankfully I haven't ventured into a scenario where the Witch wiped us all. Not looking forward to it either.

I only had about 20 minutes to try this out this morning since it took my 360 about half an hour to download the demo, but good lord is it fun. I wasn't really expecting anything spectacular from it and planned to just get it eventually, but now it's going to be a day one purchase. Haven't tried online yet, so I'll embarass myself there tonight.

Like Inhert said, we need to get a team together for some GFF zombie busting.

Been messing around with the initial early release portion of the demo on PC. Before the public release, there was a server command which basically allowed you to play as one of the zombies (since versus mode is not in the demo). Though the command was buggy to begin with, it was so much fun attacking survivors as a tank, or any of the other unique zombies.

Along with that, the director is well-rounded, that you can import in any map you want into the demo, and the game will spawn zombies along with finding pathing for them at the same time.

Also, the game definitely loves to screw you over and scare you at times on Expert mode. Played the demo with Rotor and a few others a few days ago, and I remember all 4 of us went up a flight of stairs, only to turn around the corner to a roaring tank, and running like hell away from it back into the open room to fight it.

Key thing with her, is that if you shoot her a lot despite attacking one person, she'll run away. So it's better have lower casualties, than all.

Currently grabbing the demo (on 360) for this, and I already have a pre-order down, but I am now wondering if there's going to be enough GFFers on the 360 version, hopefully so.

Wait, as in you can stick HL2 maps into L4D?? FOR THE LOVE OF SWEET BABY JESUS PLEASE SAY YES.

That's a good point. The first post of this thread needs a tally of who's going 360 and who's going PC. I get the feeling that most will go with the PC version, which would be inconvenient.

I already preordered the PC version from play.com a few weeks back. I'd love to play with gffers on Live, but like CoD4, this is a PC game for me.

Getting it for PC as well. So many user made maps are going to go into play here. :)

Yes. It's more of a hack job at the moment, but it is possible. I'll link the article when I get back home which includes the youtube video of the person using de_dust as an example.

Only key difference, is that since it doesn't fall under the parameter of how L4D maps are made, it just won't have an actual end to the map. Now user made maps should be somewhat different.

Edit: Here's the video that shows off de_dust

YouTube Video

What, no M16? Isn't this Counter-Strike? Obviously, well lit maps are stupid for this. Now, doing that with Ravenholm would definitely be more entertaining.

"RELOADING!" is going to get real old, real fast

It can get annoying, but I've noticed that it also cues me in to when I should be reloading. If you face down a swarm, you have to have some people firing while others are reloading, so it's staggered slightly. I noticed the other night that when we all emptied clips, we tended to get separated from one another in our panic to reload, and then surrounded soon after that.

That maphack thing sounds pretty amazing, too. Can't wait to see how people put it to good use.

I could see a L4D Time Attack or Endurance mode getting popular on maps like that.

Tried out the demo tonight. It was pretty fun, though I don't know if it has the replayability that TF2 or other online FPS games do. Maybe once you add in that the zombies can be other players it might get more interesting, but I'm curious as to how they're going to go about balancing it.

Gonna try it out this weekend. I remember posting in my journal once how my PC couldn't run the game. Then I get a new PC >_> Maybe it's fate or something.

So judging from the replies in this thread, you can't play as the infected in the demo? Rats.

Well you WERE able to play as the infected through a console command, but the command was buggy, and since it's not the way it's intended to play as the zombies, it was removed on the same day it was released to the public.

And by "play as infected" he means direct control of an individual zombie, specifically.

Director and boss characters is still there, right?

Yea. What it did, was that it switched you over to the zombie "team", which allowed you to play as either a tank, boomer, hunter, or smoker. Due to the limitations within the demo though, it sometimes led to crashes, or server hang-ups.

I'm going to throw this out there, because after playing some more on expert last night, it is just too important:

Shoving will be your bestest friend forever and ever. <3

The AI makes good use of it, so shouldn't we?

Expert mode comes down to whether or not the four people you are playing with know how to do two things, and two things only.

1. If you're in the front, at any time, your ass should be ducked. No questions asked. Now running from one calm location from another is one thing, but in a mob, your ass should be crouched.

and

2. If you are indeed between transitions of one safe place to another, and there isn't a mass rush of zombies, then your team better know the '2 in front, 2 in back' or at least '3 in the front, 1 in back' because if you're not watching your back at all, you're fucked. Plain and simple.

I'm pretty sure the developers said that it was a feature of the game that you could melee and reload at the same time, so I don't think they'll take it out.