No Rescue

Valve outlines Left 4 Dead's upcoming Survival Mode.

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By John Gillooly on 17 April, 2009

Left 4 Dead really is an amazingly built game. Valve managed to create a co-op experience in which people actually cooperate, which truly fascinates me after the years spent playing Counter-Strike.

One of the more impressive things about the game have been the various blog posts explaining why things are done. We’ve previously seen some enlightening posts about the graphics techniques used to make the experience more involving, but the latest one focuses on the new Survival Mode, set to drop as free downloadable content next week.

Left 4 Dead campaigns are all about pacing, with the AI delivering ebbs and flows of action. There are certain moments when all hell is guaranteed to break loose, especially during the tense final minutes of the campaign as rescue moves tantalisingly close. Survival takes those moments and removes the promise of rescue, entirely. Instead, the game becomes about, well, surviving for as long as possible.

This is probably a much more realistic version of the inevitable zombie apocalypse than Campaign Mode is. However, this requires a different pacing to ensure that people don’t either die quickly or live forever. In the blog posts, Valve explains how this is done, tweaking spawn times and the way maps work in order to create a game that moves beyond hiding in cupboards and encourages teams to take advantage of quiet moments to shift locations in pursuit of ammo and the like.

Survival may not be an original game mode in and of itself (it sounds like pretty much the entire design of Serious Sam, for example), but it seems perfect for Left 4 Dead. This new mode is coming to Steam next week as part of the Survival Pack. This pack also includes Versus Mode versions missing from the two campaigns, Death Toll and Dead Air. Sometime after that we should finally see the SDK for the game, which should prove to spawn some fascinating content from the community.

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