As you may have already noticed from our earlier story, Valve has announced a brand new campaign for Left 4 Dead, known to the world as "Crash Course." We were invited to Valve's offices in Seattle to check the new levels out and give you the skinny on what to expect. Things are not yet completely finalized, so a few things I saw may be changed before release, but if you want some general impressions on this brand new campaign, you're in the right place.
Read on for our full, exclusive preview of Crash Course.
Left 4 Dead: Crash Course (PC, Xbox 360)
Developer: Valve
Publisher: Valve
To be released: TBA
As already detailed, Crash Course is designed purely for Versus Play. It can of course be played in a straight Campaign mode, and it works with Survival mode, but the shorter length and more intense combat situations are geared toward competition. With eight of us kicking seven shades of crap out of each other in Valve's office, we played through the game multiple times, and before we begin with the details, let me just confirm this straight away -- it's very fun.
Crash Course begins shortly after the events of No Mercy, with The Survivors starting out by the crashed remains of the helicopter that had rescued them. The new dialog was not fully in place yet, but I was informed that the helicopter pilot was infected, and Zoey's been blamed for crashing it after she wigged out and shot him. A whole selection of new audio has been recorded especially for this campaign, and it's sounding like the wit and patter that the game's become known for will be in full effect.
The new campaign is much shorter than the ones you're used to, which is a deliberate decision on the part of Valve. I'd been told that players generally felt that full campaigns were too long for multiplayer matches, and that they generally stuck around for about half of one. With that in mind, Crash Course consists only of two chapters, which sounds stingy, but is a perfect length for a quicker, more decisive Versus match that should encourage players to stay with a battle from beginning to end.
Since we've got a shorter campaign, much more has been packed into a smaller space. Lucky players who know where to look can upgrade to second-tier weaponry almost straight away. However, they'll have their work cut out for them, because there's a chance to get swamped by the horde right from the very beginning. The levels have also been designed to give Special Infected plenty of advantages, if they know the terrain. For instance, there are a greater amount of high buildings and close-knit walls for Hunters to perfect their pouncing techniques, and there are some decent hiding places for Boomers to jump out and do that thing they do so well.
Each of the two chapters have their own major horde event as well, with the first one taking place on a blocked bridge. In order to clear the blockage of abandoned cars, the Survivors need to activate an artillery cannon to blow the vehicles out of the way. The infected then swarm in on the area, which consists of a wide open space and a large house. There's actually not very much the Special Infected can do here. The space is too open for Boomers and Hunters to really get an advantage, and Smokers can be confounded if the Survivors take refuge in the building. Still, the common zombies will provide players with enough problems.
When players cross the bridge itself, they better pray that a Tank doesn't make an appearance. Absolutely littered with cars, this area gives the Tank an incredibly good chance of humiliating Survivors. Luckily I was on the Infected team when this happened, so I got to feel pretty great about things.
Fans of Left 4 Dead's Safe House graffiti will be pleased to know that it returns in Crash Course. It was still being worked on when I played, so the walls were a bit bare. However, there was a bit of poetry scrawled on one surface, which was followed by fresher graffiti absolutely ripping the prose apart. One particular criticism read: "I'm in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and this poem is the worst thing to happen to me." Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek pointed out the graffiti and noted, "Not even zombies can stop people griefing."
The second chapter, by far, is one of the most awesome yet seen in Left 4 Dead. There are a number of surprises in store, so be warned that from here on in, I'm giving out spoilers. If you want to be spooked by this game's grand finale, stop reading. The rest of you, carry on ...
The big finish of Crash Course sees the Survivors reach a garage, where a bus is waiting at the top of a vehicle elevator, just out of reach. In what looks to be an homage to the Dawn of the Dead remake, the bus is armor-plated and designed to railroad the fearless foursome through any marauding army of infected. Unfortunately, players must first get the bus down, and that requires use of a generator located in the parking lot outside.
The generator, unlike usual event alerts, takes time to activate, with players having to wait while the power charges up. As an extra surprise, the generator sometimes fails, regarding a second activation. Once it's powered, the bus lowers and the horde comes. Survivors can hide in the garage, where there's a mounted machine gun and a stack of boxes, or climb atop a coach outside, where ammo is conveniently located. Either location is fraught with peril, as the infected will pour in from literally everywhere. After several long minutes of sustained horde attack, the really bad thing happens.
All the power goes out.
Players are now stuck in the dark, surrounded by zombies, and need to fight their way back to the generator in order to power it on again, stuck in the open and having to slowly wait for the power to return. Of course, a Tank will make his appearance now, before or after, and all this stress combined makes for easily the most intense and challenging finale in the game. Should players survive, the bus lowers in time and those who made it hop in the back, at which time the bus will drive away, mowing down any infected left standing.
Ultimately, Crash Course is an incredibly worthy campaign, perfectly designed for Versus. In the time it normally takes to play one campaign, we got quite a few matches in, with the overall time for the new maps taking around twenty-five minutes to complete. If you're a big Left 4 Dead fan, you really need to play Crash Course when it comes out. These quite possibly could be your favorite maps yet.
Contest:
4:00 PM on 08.04.2009
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And two chapters is fine for me if it's as well made as you said it is, it'll keep me entertained for sure before Left 4 Dead 2.
As a community member who comments often on Jim Sterling blogs, I feel you should do some investigative journalism (an e-mail) and find out the source of all this nonsense.
I think two chapters is a little bit too short. The 360 demo was two chapters and I can only play that through two to three times before having to go and do something else. The possible problem is that you're going to skip from one to the other without much time to forget the one you just played. Three chapters would have felt about right, even if it meant they were a little shorter, just to mix up the matches.
That being said, who gives a shit. It's Left 4 Dead, and I'll take whatever comes.
You were flown out there by Valve BECUASE of Dtoid's (correct)stance on L4D 2.
I mean shit, most other sites get exclusives(not those bullshit exlcusives, real exclusives like this) at a price. You'd have to paint the game as something it's not(like being half way decent).
Dtoid just showed the internet how to do it right. And this is why I love Dtoid. <3
Only two chapters.
Free for PC, but whiny Xbox 360 owners have to pay for it.
No new weapons or special infected.
It took too long to come out.
It doesn't come with a free blowjob.
SO EVERYONE SHOULD BOYCOT THIS BLATANT SLAP-IN-THE-FACE!
microsoft doesn't like the idea of free DLC
Yeah and valve is saying: we dont want your dirty money from you M$, so keep it for your own. How naive!
Maybe I just role with a hard core group, but my friends never quit half way through, and we ENJOY the 60-90 minutes per movie.
Yeah, I'm going to get this, for sure, but Valve better not cater to the idiots out there who don't like the game when they lose.
I have never gone over 40 minutes for a campaign on expert playing with my buddies. I can't imagine going over 60, how many times do you die? If you just don't slow down and watch each other's backs, and learn to bypass the tank, you can beat each Campaign under 20 minutes easy.
I just said that Valve would've made the DLC free if they could, because Valve does free DLC
Shame 360 owners have to pay for it (and aren't getting the awesome community made maps), but as I said in the other thread: it won't change until you force it to... stop paying more for lesser versions.
As for releasing DLC so close to L4D2, I am pretty sure, on PC at least, that the two games will basically function as one and load to a menu listing all the campaigns from both, so it should work fine.
Oh good lord yes. Some of you may remember the titanic complaint an army of PC gamers had when they found out "special content" was only allowed to Windows Live Gold pay members. Now Windows Live has none of this anymore because it has quite literally helped poison the whole GfWL initiative.
I'd say even more so, really, because PC gamers sort of shed the shackles of pay DLC/Pay Online gaming a decade and a half ago when Dwango and Ten.Net died. Heck you know how much PC gamers got it bad then? If you wanted to play MechWarrior 2 online you had to buy NetMech, a whole new boxed item, AND subscribe to Dwango. Thank god for Quakenet, Battlenet, Westwood Online and the Boneyards that put a stop to that nonsense.
I sort of personally think it was a missed chance on Valve's part to make a series of mini-campaigns or one shot maps similar to Unreal Tournament's Assault mode.
The possibility of doing it that way is you could make them stand independently or string them together in a loose fashion like Enemy Territory 1 & 2's 'campaign mode' which would string together three maps into a campaign. EG: The Radar in France then going deeper into the Netherlands with the Supply Depot and finishing at the German Railgun map.
I only pick Zoey because she controls the fate of the world (or the new world). Can't repopulate without her.
As for the new campaign, I am in love. The finale should be sweet. I was expecting the lighthouse finale but this one is ten times cooler. Not sure about the 30 min. length only because I'm so used to playing hour long L4D versus sessions. Should be a nice change of pace. Sucks it has to be 560 M$ points. The bastards.
sounds intense though. I wouldn;t mind more bitesize versus style levels like this.
We can have quantity AND quality.
10/10
I love you Valve.
It's nice to see content coming out on the 360 that doesn't cost the now standard 800 MSP, and I'll be downloading it the second it comes out.
Also, Molotovs over here!
Valve also just loves flying people out: inversely, you can 100% disagree with Valve and still get flown out (the boycotters).
But Dtoid is still awesome.