Left 4 Dead Developer Illuminates Lighting Choice

[SixtyWattMan]

And where the hell is the edit button?

Anyways, Valve always whips out fun-as-a-motherf*$&! games, they're developers spend too much time being perfectionists and apparently it worked. Half-Life original? Half-Life 2? How many GOTY awards? Over a hundred on just those two alone? They know what makes games fun and enjoyable, "frustrating" definitely ain't gonna pay their bills.

Stop bitching about how cool the screenshots look, you wanna play screenshots go put Crysis on max and enjoy the slideshow.

My last post wasn't "bitching" about screenshots, it was about the lack of content and numerous bugs and exploits that are still not fixed. Winning awards on previous work doesn't give you a free ticket to fuck up the next piece of work and not get a "thank you". I don't really mind that they changed the lighting a little, but the game play is completely fucked right now in VS and without an SDK there is a SEVERE lack of content. Tell me a game isn't completely ruined when all 4 survivors grab autoshotties and hide under the ramp at the end of No Mercy or in the corner by the ammo cabinet at the end of Blood Harvest.

 

[Serpico]

Closet camping, melee exploits, cloning exploit, switching to survivor team, suicide, then rejoining infected, no SDK, only 4 campaigns, only 2 VS campaigns, overpowered guns and melee, and underpowered infected. The developers were on the fucking ball with this game.

30 hours of personal gametime in the last two weeks plus however many hours I've played since the demo came tells me that these are issues I can mostly overlook.

Whatever serious issues there are (survivor melee in versus IMHO needs a cooldown period) are all issues Valve knows about and will fix. More maps and more vs maps are on the way. In the mean time, the game is still fun as hell. I just can't stop playing versus mode with my friends. A good 8 person game is ridiculously fun. BTW, you should play with friends and not on stupid pubs whenever you can; you don't get things like team switching and stuff.

As for "underpowered infected", you're doing it wrong...

 

[Serpico]

Man, I just have to say it again, playing as infected in versus is the best. I avoided it for the first month the game was out because it was just too different from anything I'd played before, but I was forced in once all my friends moved onto it. Man was I missing out, three games and it just clicked. You have to be patient but coordinating that perfect storm of griefing on the other team is sooooo satisfying. Fuck! I want to play right now but its already way past my bedtime.

 

[SixtyWattMan]

Wtf do you mean no SDK? Put your panties back on, it's coming out. Downloadable content is also coming out so you can spend your life on more than 2 VS campaigns and 4 regular ones. It's just like TF2, they release content slowly when they feel it's good enough to be released. Closet camping? Rofl, does that piss you off? Underpowered infected? You're playing on easy right?

N00b.

0h L337 $P34K, you're so cool.

Let's try and talk about this without being children. I didn't say the SDK wasn't coming out, I said it wasn't here. DLC will come out eventually but I think everyone was hoping for a little more content when the game was released. Also you can only play VS on Normal so I am not playing on easy. Closet camping makes the survivors invincible, they can cannot be pulled out by smokers, they cannot be pounced on, normal infected do almost no damage if they get a hit off, and the tank dies in less than 5 seconds of concentrated autoshotty fire. Survivor melee does damage, stuns, knockback, and can be exploited to hit twice as fast as normal. Did I mention you can also reload your shotty while using melee?

 

[[H]adouken]

0h L337 $P34K, you're so cool.

Let's try and talk about this without being children.

Alright then, then understand that the game developers are grown adults, probably have lives and have to work under certain criteria to make sure the content they put out is deliverable to their audience, and cannot satisfy you just because you want it, and you want it now.

DLC will come out eventually but I think everyone was hoping for a little more content when the game was released.

Not really, it's just a game at the end of the day, and I couldn't if they didn't release new content. Valve is known for not meeting deadlines or guaranteeing promises, as seen with HL2: E3. Content is coming, and it has to meet their standards, I can live with my money being put into quality.

Also you can only play VS on Normal so I am not playing on easy.

Not quite, many servers allow the change of difficulty to even Expert, as well as allowing VS mode on Dead Air and Death Toll.

Closet camping makes the survivors invincible, they can cannot be pulled out by smokers, they cannot be pounced on, normal infected do almost no damage if they get a hit off, and the tank dies in less than 5 seconds of concentrated autoshotty fire.

Yeah, the VS normal mode lock was a big mistake, everyone I know agrees with that. But trust me, a group of good zombies can own closet campers. It's simple, get a boomer to suicide, they all get pushed back. A hunter or two pounces, pushing them back some more, and a smoker pulls one out. They have to leave the closets eventually, if not I'd find a new server.

Did I mention you can also reload your shotty while using melee?

I've tried this, it doesn't work for me. Hopefully all the issues will be fixed, it's a diamond in the rough.

 

[Serpico]

Let's try and talk about this without being children. I didn't say the SDK wasn't coming out, I said it wasn't here. DLC will come out eventually but I think everyone was hoping for a little more content when the game was released. Also you can only play VS on Normal so I am not playing on easy. Closet camping makes the survivors invincible, they can cannot be pulled out by smokers, they cannot be pounced on, normal infected do almost no damage if they get a hit off, and the tank dies in less than 5 seconds of concentrated autoshotty fire. Survivor melee does damage, stuns, knockback, and can be exploited to hit twice as fast as normal. Did I mention you can also reload your shotty while using melee?

This is all correct. I guess its all perspective, but these are not gamebreakers for me, not by a longshot. The group I play with are all very good and we still manage to have very very close games. If its us on a pub playing with random scrubs, forget it. Autoshotty on the tank is the least of my worries; it requires a coordinated team effort to take one down that fast. Since L4D is about teamwork, I'm ok with this. As infected we do just as well by tongue snagging and pouncing the survivors right as the tank is making his approach. Split them all up and its all good. If it fails, its all in the tanks hands.

The one thing I can really see them changing is having tank hits register on multiple targets instead of just one. This would help a great deal with multiple stacked players unloading all at once. It should at least provide knockback on adjacent players like a hunter pounce does.

I don't think closet camping in sections like triggering the horde with the elevator in No Mercy level 4 can be written out, not unless they make a physical map change like putting a vent into that particular closet. Nothing about the rules itself will fix that (you're in a cramped space on top of each other with guns firing constantly).

I'll be surprised if a cooldown period isn't built into the melee at some point, but we'll see.

Either way, its still fun as hell to play, and very challenging when you have two good teams. If you have one team that sucks versus one that's good, yeah, it'll be a steamrolling, but the same goes for TF2, Starcraft, or any other game.

 

[Serpico]

Not quite, many servers allow the change of difficulty to even Expert, as well as allowing VS mode on Dead Air and Death Toll.

FWIW, the advanced or expert servers on versus are ridiculous. Aside from brutal team damage and FF knockdowns, the main problem is tank spawning. You can't go more than 30 seconds into a round without a tank spawning. Ridiculous! Nobody gets to play through the levels at all, not until round three or so when everyone can spawn with an autoshotty. No fun at all when the first two sections are over in a minute only because of a tank.

The custom VS versions of Dead Air and Death Toll are ok, not very well balanced at all. I don't play them much, waiting on the official maps.

 

[[H]adouken]

Actually I played in Advanced difficulty against a very good clan that pretty much destroyed the zombies and the tanks that were thrown at them, I don't think anyone gets by in Expert though.

Everything is possible, just 95% of the time the survivors aren't good enough or have a person or two that bring the team down.

 

[SixtyWattMan]

Alright then, then understand that the game developers are grown adults, probably have lives and have to work under certain criteria to make sure the content they put out is deliverable to their audience, and cannot satisfy you just because you want it, and you want it now.

Not really, it's just a game at the end of the day, and I couldn't if they didn't release new content. Valve is known for not meeting deadlines or guaranteeing promises, as seen with HL2: E3. Content is coming, and it has to meet their standards, I can live with my money being put into quality.

Not quite, many servers allow the change of difficulty to even Expert, as well as allowing VS mode on Dead Air and Death Toll.

Yeah, the VS normal mode lock was a big mistake, everyone I know agrees with that. But trust me, a group of good zombies can own closet campers. It's simple, get a boomer to suicide, they all get pushed back. A hunter or two pounces, pushing them back some more, and a smoker pulls one out. They have to leave the closets eventually, if not I'd find a new server.

I've tried this, it doesn't work for me. Hopefully all the issues will be fixed, it's a diamond in the rough.

I thought all of the developers were twelve years old, thank you for clearing that up. The game was $50, if it wasn't finished they should not have released it. I have not found an expert server or a VS Dead Air or Death Toll server. Closet campers are a problem on finales and crescendos. If a boomer explodes on them they get pushed backwards into the closet, not out of it. Let's just say everything you said happens, two survivors get pounced on, one get pulled, and the other is still standing with one zombie waiting for respawn. That one survivor melees both hunters and shoots the smoker through his teammate (since bullets go straight through him and he is not used as a shield for the smoker) freeing him. But none of that would happen because a boomer cannot push survivors out of a closet. Reloading while using melee works. Start reloading, then just hold right click, it's that simple!

 

[[H]adouken]

If they released it, it was finished to them. Simple as that, regardless of what you think. If you haven't found a server with what I said, keep looking, a lot of us have. Reloading still fails for me, but definitely not something I'm going to lose sleep over. Seems like your problem is the Normal difficulty you play on and the zombies can't figure out what to do, keep trying you'll think of something one day.

 

[SixtyWattMan]

If they released it, it was finished to them. Simple as that, regardless of what you think. If you haven't found a server with what I said, keep looking, a lot of us have. Reloading still fails for me, but definitely not something I'm going to lose sleep over. Seems like your problem is the Normal difficulty you play on and the zombies can't figure out what to do, keep trying you'll think of something one day.

Really... I will play against you in VS. Get some of your friends and I'll get some of mine and we will play, maybe not right now. If all you can do is call me a noob then I will just have to show you that I am not a noob. We will play on normal as Valve intended and I will be using every exploit in the fucking book.

 

[[H]adouken]

Someones a little sad in their life?

Get over the fact that I called you a noob, I can tell you're a little sensitive, I apologize to you if it makes you feel any better.

Oh and breathe, it's just a game.

 

[SixtyWattMan]

Someones a little sad in their life?

Get over the fact that I called you a noob, I can tell you're a little sensitive, I apologize to you if it makes you feel any better.

Oh and breathe, it's just a game.

lol Won't even play a friendly match in the game you love so much?

 

[[H]adouken]

Friendly match? I can smell your anger and frustration in hopes to beat me, and I can probably destroy you in my closet and auto-shotty exploits. Mad?

 

[SixtyWattMan]

Friendly match? I can smell your anger and frustration in hopes to beat me, and I can probably destroy you in my closet and auto-shotty exploits. Mad?

Not really, but I do come on these forums to have discussions and not have some 12 year old call me a noob and such.

 

[[H]adouken]

Sorry Mr. 40 year old man in his basement, I didn't mean to offend your little heart when I called you a noob. Please forgive me.

 

[Stormrider2000]

Sorry Mr. 40 year old man in his basement, I didn't mean to offend your little heart when I called you a noob. Please forgive me.

HEY!!!! I'm 40, wish i had a basement for gaming, MAN CAVE.....

 

[srangara]

Really... I will play against you in VS. Get some of your friends and I'll get some of mine and we will play, maybe not right now. If all you can do is call me a noob then I will just have to show you that I am not a noob. We will play on normal as Valve intended and I will be using every exploit in the fucking book.

Sorry Mr. 40 year old man in his basement, I didn't mean to offend your little heart when I called you a noob. Please forgive me.

There's got to be a channel on an L4D server you can take this lovely chat to, no?

 

[Bigbacon]

Well, my Steam page is telling me that I've logged 30+ hours in Left 4 Dead just in the last two weeks, and I've been playing it since the beta launched. I have a pile of unfinished PC, 360, and PS3 games waiting for me and all I can think about is versus mode and how hard I can grief the other team as infected, or how fast I can make the finish line as survivor.

I'd say Valve is doing something right.

Same here, L4D made me stop playing BF2142 which I had been playing for over 2 years.

 

[darkpaw]

The flash lights not rendering from the other players was something that I noticed immediately. Yah, it would require a lot of resources, but I'd love to see it as an option.

 

[bfellow]

Perhaps too hardware intensive when done via the Source engine. 4 roaming flash lights is better than 1 and would likely have solved part of their lighting issue.

It shouldn't be too had since Zombie Panic:Source you can have around 21 people with their flashlights on.

 

[lostinseganet]

i think valve should make light-colored fog an option to turn off and on. turning it off IMO would make the game more scarier and more interesting to play

I think they should have had that option change for replay value. Let the computer make the mood.

 

[kllrnohj]

The flash lights not rendering from the other players was something that I noticed immediately. Yah, it would require a lot of resources, but I'd love to see it as an option.

Perhaps that was also intentional and not an engine/performance limitation. I could see people being dicks and just running around shining their flash light in people's faces.

 

[kllrnohj]

I think they should have had that option change for replay value. Let the computer make the mood.

If it is an option that opens up a whole new can of worms. Do you allow people with the option for dark fog play online? If so, do they play on their own servers? Does the server pick which style? What about when meeting up with friends? Do allow for a clients to have a mixture of the style?

Anyway, for those who really want to play with dark fog, YOU CAN. From what I can tell, fog is set on a *per map* basis. Simple do the following and you'll get your dark fog

sv_cheats 1
fog_override 1
fog_color 0 0 0

Bam, dark fog. Have fun Type "find fog" if you want to see the number of options you can set (I didn't mess around with them much, so I don't really know what many of them do)