Catching up to the rest of the world

 I'll just hang myself now.

The otherday I was slowly working my way through my ungodly long Steam wishlist (Yeah, we all know that pain, don't we?) and I ended up picking up a game that I must have thrown on that list perhaps a decade ago. It wasn't just on a crazy whim like some of the games I have there either, (I literally have no idea when I decided to throw Kynseed on that list, but I own it now. No idea why or how to play the damn thing; but I own it.) this was a simply legendary game that I wishlisted out of actual embarrassment as much as anticipation to actually play the accursed thing. The kind of game that is probably sitting on the games libraries of so many people out there that most people own multiple copies on now long depreciated consoles and storefronts; whilst I bought my first just the otherday. The kind of game that would get you funny looks for saying you've never played. I bought Left 4 Dead.

Now to be fair, I have played Left 4 Dead 2. I borrowed that quite often for my Xbox 360 back in the days that Blockbuster existed, and I have a feeling that I must have played the original at some point in my life but I could not take a guess as to when or where. But I've never owned either one of those games outright to play extensively until I'm sick of them; which I how I typically like to enjoy my games. Picking it up for the first time now, in the year of our accursed torturer 2022, feels like the kind of thing I should keep quite and sweep under the bed never to be seen again in the light of day. But I talk about literally everything on this blog and no one will ever see. I could pen my own verbose plans to take over an independent oil rig and adjudicate it from it's motherland and no one would be waiting there to stop me. So I might as well air my deepest and most embarrassing gaming confessions.

Left 4 Dead is one of those staples of gaming that shaped so much of what the industry is today. Four player co-op, party game mentality, dynamic level layout; so many of these systems existed in concept and idea before the creation of Left 4 Dead, but that game allowed these ideas to be bought into pristine focus for the first time ever. You can talk all day about a smart level editor who places objects and enemies in relation to how the players are progressing, but until you've seen it play out in front of you through multiple playthroughs of the same few levels; you don't get it yet. And then, suddenly, Resident Evil 4 is making use of similar systems because they work just that well. Iteration and improvement, key tenets of game design until Warner Bros. Interactive got involved. (Thank you once again for trying to ruin game development for the whole world, Warner Bros.)

Coming to Left 4 Dead for, perhaps not he first time per se, but the first fully engrossed time, is certainly a significant moment for me. Seeing the ways in which the game very much lives up to the hype built around it's name and the desperate fans still scratching for a true successor after the half-job that Back 4 Blood did. As well as the surprising ways in which Left 4 Dead somewhat disappoints, specifically I noticed the absolute lack of weapon variety. Which makes sense from a purely mechanical level; the game provieds the exact ingredients it needed to be what it needed to be and absolutely nothing more, but it still feels a bit weird to only find five different primary throughout the course of the entire game. Understandable, but absolutely unacceptable by the standards of today. (Can you imagine how many chairs would be flipped if a modern Zombie game launched without a chainsaw? Apocalyptic!)

One of the really interesting design choices that I haven't seen pretty much any other game of this style employ is a selection of neat musical cues tied directly to specific types of special infected. So that everytime you hear a strike of a piano you know that one has spawned, and when they got close enough to aggro you'll even be able to tell from their backing track which type they are without actually seeing them. It's sort of like encoding the soundscape of the game with it's own language that players start to pick up on subconsciously, or actively, as they play through the campaigns more and more. Of course, these are cues that are played throughout the entirety of the iconic Left 4 Dead introduction animatic, already driving home what soundtrack beats to attribute to which creature before you've even picked up the controller. That really did stick out to me because I just know any other modern company of the exact same time would pile up their trailers with pre-rendered action and unrelated action music. Valve always does go that extra mile.

There's actually a lot of very carefully designed systems that function neatly even within the bold choice of giving spawn placing to the hands of an AI. Smokers can grab and drag you from anywhere in their range, but if there's any sort of obstacle in the way, instead of letting the player dangle helplessly because of bad pathfinding, the pull action will stop and the creature will start choking you right there on the spot, ensuring there's no softlock situation on it's attack. Every high surface has a neat path leading up towards it it for Zombies to funnel through so there's no route to jumping completely out of harm's way and avoiding the horde, most high spots even have spawn spots even higher than you, so you're never free from watching your back. And there's also the nody vanishing, which is handled excessively cleverly so that the engine doesn't explode from rendering too many corpses and you won't just notice entire piles disappear the second you turn your back. Looking at the level of polish dedicated into every area of the design choice for the game kind of reminds me why it is people whine and moan constantly for Valve to come back to game development. (It's not just the Portal teams that paid attention to the little and dynamic stuff.)

Of course the sign for any timeless classic of a game is whether or not all of it's systems are still in use. I quite literally clicked the 'matchmaking' option by accident and was immediately thrown into a game; which alerted me that people still play this game and on open lobbies. Of course, then curiosity struck and I decided to consult the Steam Charts. Left 4 Dead does a respectable 500 people average, not brilliant but the game came out back in 2008; that there's any player base is a shock. And Left 4 Dead 2, the 2009 game, averages... woah- 18,000 players? Regularly? Actually it averages around about 20,000; but there was a moment in November when it was seeing around 80,000 players. In 2022. And 2021's Back 4 Blood, a game designed not only to be the successor to L4D but literally built around encouraging online play- is lucky to hit more than 6,000 players... Some games just can't die, it would seem.

So with my slow mastery of Left 4 Dead, which I'll probably take to Left 4 Dead 2 at somepoint, I've patched yet another hole in my lamentable video game lore and come one step closer to 'acceptable amongst gaming society'. It really is stark how much a single well made game can stand the test of time even amid an industry fraught with rapid improvement and reiteration. The standards of AAA gaming may be insanely high, but the level of care has become a far away myth now and it shows. Whilst games like Callisto Protocol launch with huge bugs that could have been avoided with basic due diligence, and Cyberpunk 2077 still has no word on whether or not they're going to put out a working world simulation police system before they wrap up support; masterpieces like Left 4 Dead and Baldur's Gate remain as pillars of quality demonstrating the value of solid management, clear visions and unflinching dedication.