Potential Gamer

Having now played Left 4 Dead for a while, us folks at PG feel compelled to comment. Every other blog site on the planet is doing it too, which somewhat dilutes our feedback, but what the hell.

Dave: Before the demo was released my major concern was that L4D would become tedious and repetitive. The more videos I saw, the more of the same things I saw. I worried that it was basically an arcade game where a never ending stream of zombies would be no less soul-crushing than an ever-descending grid of space invaders.

Simon: People still makes space invaders clones, so I think there must be something in the formula that works…

Dave: Yeah but I wanted longevity and depth. Fortunately after a few hours of play, its safe to say I’m wrong because the tedium is solved in one fell swoop by The Director. During play over the weekend, it took my team around 15-20 tries to complete the demo on ‘Impossible’. At roughly 3 or 4 points during this time (around 2.5hrs) I felt the tedium grow. We had repeatedly failed to get past the turnstyles on the underground and it was becoming un-entertaining to play – the kind of annoyance you usually associate with having played too much, having lost your edge, lost your battle awareness and now making silly mistakes.

Simon: This is precisely the point of the ‘Impossible/Expert’ mode, though. I think the genius of the difficulties is that they allow you to choose what kind of experience you want. If you’re starting out and just fancy a quick 10 minute romp, go for ‘Normal’. If you want a challenge, but still want to be able to get to the end of a campaign before the sun comes up, go for ‘Advanced’. If you want a genuine zombie apocalypse, go for ‘Expert’. It’s equivalent to playing Medal of Honour: Allied Assault on ‘Realistic’. Ridiculously difficult, yes, near impossible, yes, masochistic, certainly.  But it gives you that sense of “this is genuinely how vulnerable I’d be in a war/zombie apocalypse/hell dimension invasion/etc.”

Dave: But I’d only played 2 hours – how could I be bored? It was worrying. However every time I felt like quitting, the very next round things were subtly different. Suddenly there were new weapons where before there were not, more molotovs where we needed them most, infected from a new direction, changing quantities of bosses. I forgot my issues and concentrated on the new problem at hand, varying my tactics, my position, my use of the expendable weapons.

Simon: The first few times I played the subway level, I presumed that there were always new weapons on the tables by the turnstiles. When, on a later playthrough, I got to that spot to find no goodies I felt a genuine sense of desperation. I felt like I’d been let down by whatever random survivors had gone through that area previously and decided not to leave all their best weapons.

Dave: That is where The Director wins. L4D is painfully simple, but variations in pacing and content make the game hugely different each round.

Simon: Yeah. I can’t wait to see what Valve do with the Director next. L4D is brilliant, but it’s also one of those games that opens up whole new opportunities. If this is their first attempt, what next?

Dave: It’s easy to credit The Director with too much, though. The only information we know about its behaviour is that it varies the game to suit your ability. This isn’t anything new in gaming, but somehow it works so much better here.

Simon: I dunno. I’ve not played a game that does anything like this before. Different games have had a few similar elements – Diablo‘s had random levels/bad guys, SiN: Episodes had a system that constantly analysed your performance and tweaked accordingly – but I think the key here is that Valve didn’t just make the Director adjust the difficulty/spawn points. It’s also fiddling with the pacing and tone of the game – they’ve imbued it with a primitive idea of dramatic tension that makes all the difference.

Dave: I think the problem with applying the dynamic balancing concept to other FPSs and perhaps why it’s never worked quite as well in the past, is down to the subject matter itself. In Crysis, Far Cry 2, HL2 etc, what flexibility really exists? Modern FPSs are increasing story-based, so when your character is tasked with taking out the rebel leader of a lightly fortified camp, theres only so much quantity-variation The Director could do before you begin to question the definitions of ‘lightly fortified’. Varying weapon/health availability only results in frustration and, invariably, accidental mashing F9 when you meant to mash F5, just as you were down to 1% of health and 3 rounds of ammunition! That pretty much leaves the AI, which i trust as far as I can throw…

Simon: You’re largely right, but I’d say Far Cry 2 is actually an ideal candidate for the Director. Not for the whole game – specific areas, mission objectives, like the posh estate on the hill overlooking the river, or Pala itself, can only really be populated and designed by hand. But the entire ‘wilderness’ area would be at least ten times more awesome with the Director handling things. Take the controversial guard checkpoints, for example, which have irritated pretty much everyone that’s played the game. Rather than every single checkpoint being staffed by murderous madmen, the Director could juggle things up a bit in order to create a decent pace. Say a mission requires you to travel across the entire width of the map – the Director could back off on the encounters along the journey, so that you can just have a fun romp without having to stop every 5 seconds. Or say you’ve already fought through two checkpoints, the Director could change things so the next few are empty, or make it so they behave differently (demanding money instead of shooting on sight, etc). Given that the guard outposts behave with about as much AI sense as zombies with guns, I think it would work wonders with the game.

Dave: The problem with AI controlled ‘real people’ is that as a player you expect them to behave like real humans. I begin each fresh FPS expecting the invariably-lauded improvements in AI to result in complex multi-faceted character with subtle bonds of friendship with his/her comrades and perhaps an undercurrent of a love plot between Mindless NPC 1 and Mindless NPC2, but in practice it always boiled down to hacky play. I’m talking of course about situations like shooting some guy hidden behind the barrels in the only exposed area of flesh – the foot – several times, until he inexplicably died, presumably from blood-loss, or perhaps shame. L4D’s solution to the problem is to go back to basics – if the individual enemies are going to be exploitable, swamp the player with so many they have no time to work out the AI routines. This is why L4D wins: the whole zombie apocalypse plot story requires hoards of enemies of questionable intelligence – it can’t go wrong!

Simon: For me, L4D perfectly blends the tight emotional experience of a heavily scripted, single player Call of Duty or Half Life 2 with the random excitement and improvisation of multiplayer sandboxes, a la Battlefield. Multiplayer gaming has always felt decidedly pointless to me, no matter how fun it is, but L4D manages to give the maps a sense of place and story, and has succeeded in creating memorable characters, so that there seems to be more of a purpose than simply “beat the other team LOL!” It’s something Valve started doing with Team Fortress 2, thinking about it – although that’s a fairly standard team deathmatch affair, the strong character design gives it a style and atmosphere that is almost palpable.

Dave: I’m sure I speak for us both when I say although L4D shows how balancing can be done right, the applications for the future are probably the most tantalising. It’s a fair point that difficulty settings allow you to choose how disposable your play is, but modern single player experiences require a significant time investment. You wouldn’t want to casually crash through a level in a spare 15 minutes without paying attention to the plot or what you were doing, in case you irrevocably ruined your immersion or situation in the game.

Simon: Yeah, I think this kind of adjustment only really works for multiplayer games or ‘fun’ games. It’s why I like Introversion’s multiplayer games, like DEFCON – when you jump into a game, you know pretty much how long it’s going to last. If you’re a student, sure, you can play games for indefinite periods of time. But once you get past the uni lifestyle it’s not really an option anymore.

Dave: Yeah when you start having less free time, you find yourself demanding more intense experiences, which is where The Director can help. The standard provision of Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty levels has often been a source of irritation for me. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R, I foolishly concluded I could take ‘Hard’ mode, but it was only until i’d got too far in to turn back, that I concluded I was out of my depth. Completion was no less rewarding, but I was jaded. I ended up angrily rushing the finale as if by completing it, it would somehow inflict physically harm on the developers’ families. It would be just as easy to foolhardily set Easy mode and complete the game in a disappointingly short time for your £30! Obviously theres the option of replaying the entire game, but who wants to watch such a story-based experience unfold almost exactly the same way so soon after the first viewing?

Simon: Yeah, difficulties don’t work very well in story-based games. If a game is trying to tell a story, then it needs to follow the pace of the story. If the difficulty level changes the pace too much, it’s equivalent to watching a movie in fast forward, or slow motion. It doesn’t make sense.

Dave: Ideally i’d like to see a completely flexible system, where no difficulty levels exist (for single player at least) where the player is continuously assessed and the game constantly altered. The problem, like I say, is the clash with plot. I don’t have any suggestions for the clumsy AI issue though, sadly. We’re still likely to be taking out enemies as they run on the spot facing into a corner for some while yet.