Valve on the Potential Future of Left 4 Dead
Hunkering down in a recent interview with Valve’s lead writer, Chet Faliszek, Eurogamer outright asked the question on everyone’s minds: Will there be a Left 4 Dead 3? To paraphrase Faliszek in a short response: “Yeah, maybe.”
“A 3? You know, some time down the road. Like anything, I would say that to all of our games. So that’s not a promise of when or where,” said Chet, who personally scribed the original L4D’s story (as spread out as it is in between flying limbs). Valve is even a little surprised at how devout the relatively new series’ fan base is, having sold 12 million copies across two titles.
Faliszek claims apart of the franchise’s success stems from the observation that gamers play Left 4 Dead differently than other games in their collection. While certain titles may be played “religiously” before being exhausted and shelved, Left 4 Dead on the other hand, let’s you “hook up with your friends from college every one or two weeks and you have a round. You play maybe once or twice. You play co-op and then you go on. So it’s a game people keep playing while they play other games.”
Just because the series’ current titles have been profitable without another numbered release doesn’t mean Valve is not without ideas for a potential sequel. The creators went as far as to tinker with a feature that would let a “dungeon master” so-to-speak control the game’s AI Director, therefore placing zombified chaos in the hands of a human player; a demented mode that derives inspiration from Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods (which you need to watch). “Obviously there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to do that,” says Chet. “But it would be interesting.”