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Q&A: Left 4 Dead shooting for zombie holocaust masterpiece
- June 04, 2007 16:56 PM PST
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You are alone. You are left for dead. Read our exclusive interview with Michael Booth, founder of Turtle Rock Studios and creator of Left 4 Dead, a squad-based shooter that promises to turn the zombie genre on its head.
GamePro: What's the core premise behind Left 4 Dead? What's caused the infectious outbreak that's turned citizens into vicious zombie-like creatures?
Michael Booth: The premise of Left 4 Dead imagines what would happen if a virus emerged that didn't just make people ill, but actually changed their behavior in some dramatic fashion. In this case, the rabies virus has somehow mutated and not only become incredibly virulent, but also severely acute in its effects. Those unfortunate enough to be infected suffer severe and irreparable brain damage, turning them into raging psychotic berserkers, stripped of their humanity, who violently attack any non-infected they encounter, thus ensuring the spread of the virus.
However, as with most pathogens in a large, genetically diverse, population, some are naturally immune. You are one of these very few "lucky" Survivors. Unfortunately, you find yourself surrounded by thousands of swarming Infected, hopelessly outnumbered. Only through cooperation with a few other Survivors do you have any hope of escape.
Left 4 Dead is built around a four-player model. What can you do with four players that you can't do with just one?
You can present them with challenges that can't be readily accomplished alone, but can be tackled if the group works together.
The archetypical case of this is the Prisoner's Dilemma - a very simple situation where two prisoners are accused of a serious crime and questioned separately. If both prisoners stay silent, they both get mild punishment -- say a six month jail sentence. But if one prisoner rats out the other, the squealer gets off completely free, and the other guy gets life in prison. You can see that trust is a big issue here, among other things. Where it gets really interesting is the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma -- where instead of a one-shot situation, you continue to meet the other person over and over again and can use their previous behavior in your future decision making. A good example is trading and bartering -- if a guy cheated you last time, you'll deal very differently with him this time, and so on. Humans are very good at this sort of small group politics, and have developed many innate strategies over hundreds of thousands of years of surviving amongst their fellow natural politicians.
The design of Left 4 Dead explicitly presents many Iterated Prisoners Dilemmas. The simplest is "Do I stay with the team and protect them, or do I look out for myself at their expense". Others include "Do I share my only First Aid Kit with my injured friend, or save it for later in case I need it", or "Do I help my team take down that huge Tank, or hide in the corner until it's over", and so on. In every case, we strive to make "doing the right thing" the fun and exciting thing to do, which not only enhances everyone's experience, but feels very rewarding.
Although the game seems to be about blasting hordes of zombies, it's really about trust and cooperation under intense stress, which is surprisingly engrossing.
The Infected
We've heard you can actually play as "boss zombies" during multiplayer matches. What's different about them? How do they work in a multiplayer battle?
The Infected Bosses have two rather unique properties. First, each is explicitly designed to break some rule of the Survivor's ideal experience. For example, it's obviously important for the Survivor team to stay together and watch over each other. If a mob of Infected hits from an unexpected direction, you have to trust that your teammates have got their quadrants covered because you'll be too busy covering your own to notice. The Smoker's tongue is designed to explicitly mess with this. A Smoker can grab a Survivor and pull them WAY out of position, which often throws the whole team into chaos as they desperately try to regroup. Each of the bosses has a specific rule (or two) that they break in this way.
Second is the radically asymmetric gameplay experience offered by the Survivor team versus the Infected. Whereas the Survivor team is very accessible and somewhat familiar (grab a gun, shoot infected, stay alive, escape), the kinds of tactics and attacks available on the Infected side is very unique. When is the last time you vomited mob-attracting blood on a player in an online game?
In general, how does Left 4 Dead expand the margins of the shooter model? Where exactly lies the innovation?
While we strive to innovate in everything we do, there are two main areas where Left 4 Dead is breaking new ground: Explicitly cooperative gameplay, and procedural game design.
First, cooperative play. While there are many multiplayer online games, there are very few cooperative ones. Even among those, most are more of the "play together in the same game" style rather than actually cooperating directly with your friends. With Left 4 Dead we are focusing on explicit cooperative game mechanics that require two or more players to work together. It is nearly impossible to survive alone -- you must trust your teammates to cover your back. Several attacks are completely incapacitating and require a friend to save you once you are caught. Survivors are encouraged to share their resources, like First Aid and Pain Pills. Dangers such as the [boss creature] Tank are reasonably easy to handle if everyone works together, and very, very difficult if the team breaks up and goes every man for himself. Much of the game revolves around the interpersonal dynamics and tactics of your Survivor team, and is less about being an uber-marksman or having insane reaction times. In Left 4 Dead, I would much rather have a teammate who makes smart choices under stress and I can trust to stay with me no matter what, than a skilled headshot-master who runs off to save his own ass and leaves me to die.
Second, procedural game design: The A.I. director technology of Left 4 Dead procedurally populates the world in real-time as the Survivors move through it. Its primary goal is to maintain dramatic pacing to ensure an exciting and fun experience for the Survivor team. One way we accomplish this is by monitoring the "emotional stress level" of each Survivor and either ramping up or backing off the intensity of the Infected horde, thereby creating peaks and valleys of drama specifically tailored to that Survivor team. A very important additional property of this system is that the game never plays exactly the same way twice, making Left 4 Dead replayable over and over and over again.
