Developer(s): Valve Corporation
Publisher: Valve
Platform: PC, Xbox 360
Hours played: 23 hours
Over the last year, I’ve seen a lot of people sharing the games that got them through lockdown. It has been heartwarming to see hardcore gamers and newcomers alike talk about their experiences grinding through their backlogs, picking up a new series, or indulging their nostalgia with a retro favourite. For me, there have been a few lockdown heroes but only one compelled me, the flakiest guy alive, to gather some friends and jump on Discord every week for three months for a gaming session. Monday night is Left 4 Dead 2 Night.
Between trying to find a job after graduating and moving back in with my parents, last year has been tough. I don’t want to diminish how lucky I am to have the security of a supportive family – as well as access to media to escape the world for a while – but it’s fair to say that lockdown was not ideal for my already-waning mental health. A low social battery and nagging internalised shame at struggling to motivate myself made staying in contact with friends a terrifying prospect. In Left 4 Dead 2, however, I found some consistent comfort. Not only could I immerse myself in a world and devote myself to achieving goals (y’know, classic video game stuff), but everything about the game’s level design and mechanics pushed me and two of my good friends to look out for each other to survive the apocalypse. Logging on every week to blast embodiments of plague in the face made for one of the most engaging, edifying, and strangely wholesome gaming experiences I’ve ever had. This is how Left 4 Dead 2 did it, straight from the diaries of a survivor.
Perceived randomness
The rhythm of L4D2’s gameplay is like walking a tightrope. No matter how many medkits we have on hand, we always feel like we’re just a couple of special infected and bad decisions away from a party wipeout. By this point, it’s common knowledge that L4D2’s high enemy numbers and special infected who grab survivors encourage teammates to stick together. Other enemy types work against that instinct, charging through and spitting acid at players to scatter them. They each have recognisable silhouettes and audio cues, so my teammates and I can often be heard shouting “spitter, behind the shed!”, “there’s a jockey around” in the hope of getting the drop on them.
And yet, sometimes it feels like a charger is so perfectly placed and timed that some higher power is taunting us. Then I realise: that’s because it is. L4D team member Gautam Babbar told Gamasutra that the game uses an AI Director “system that tracks each Survivor’s ‘stress level’ by watching for events like ‘how much damage you are taking’, ‘how many zombies have you killed near you’, and so on. […] If a Survivor’s stress gets too high, the system will step in and forcibly throttle back the zombie population system to make sure the team gets a break every now and then.” That grim arbiter, the ‘AI Director’, toys with us, placing a frying pan where there was once a medkit. At other times, the Director smiles upon us by delaying the appearance of a tough enemy.
These procedural elements not only ensure high replayability, but also that player strategies are regularly disrupted and we have to adapt as a team. I might need to abandon my sniping spot because a tank is climbing up to assault me, or stop looting a shop because my buddy is being dragged off by a smoker. The AI Director’s influence also makes players feel like they always have a fighting chance. In a fan-favourite mission, The Bridge, one of our teammates was forced to make a last-ditch dash (more like a limp) to a military chopper, our dying screams buying him some precious time. Our heart rates fluctuated wildly as we watched him take a wrong turn, try to fight a tank on his own, get slowed down by a horde of zombies right next to the helicopter, and trip on the ramp to safety, before we finally knew that our sacrifices had not been in vain. It always stings to see those credits roll and ‘deceased’ next to your name, but watching your teammate pull off a victorious escape like that makes it all worth it – and don’t worry, we made sure that that same teammate sacrificed himself in a future mission to share the glory. L4D2’s perceived randomness churns out anecdote after anecdote like this, team efforts we won’t soon forget.
When it isn’t a frantic dash to safety or survival mission, chapters are bookended by moments of calm in safe houses. Having this time to reflect on a great play or a close-call really hit home how far our rag-tag team had come. We’d restock, heal up to the tune of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’, brew some tea, and shoot the shit while our teammate went to the bathroom to relieve himself. We’d talk hopefully about future holiday plans for when this was all over and read messages scrawled on the walls by survivors: “humans are the real monsters”. Pandemics bring out the worst in people, sure, but as I remember how my brothers in arms formed a barricade around me and led me to safety, I know they bring out a lot of good in people, too.
Improvise, adapt, overcome
The US may be overrun with zombies, but that won’t stop me from admiring its impeccable level design. Despite having no permanent upgrades or currency to speak of, Left 4 Dead 2 encouraged me to scour every nook and cranny of its levels for any kind of edge against the infected. Not only does exploring burnt-out office blocks, spooky hospitals, and dilapidated houses in L4D2 never get old, but they are often filled with weapons, throwables or healing items that your teammates need. There is no way to gain ammunition aside from select restore points, usually at the end of levels, so you’ll need to constantly drop and pick up weapons you find on the way and make sure your pals are doing the same. It might only be a shot of adrenaline, but my friend could really use that. I might have no use for a chainsaw, but I know that my teammate’s thirst for blood can only be quenched by those rotating teeth. Everyone wants to be the first to explore a new location and be the bearer of good news if they find something. We commit to memory our comrades’ weapon preferences and ask if they have space on hand for a pipe bomb – it could be the difference between life and death in the next ambush. It’s all very intuitive: subtle hints in the environment, like messages left by previous survivors, lights contrasting against dense forest, and other points of interest guide us to the next safe house even on our first time playing a level. Scavenging alone gives us a kick, but we also acknowledge that all it takes is one hunter, jockey, or smoker for our hubris to get the better of us. We’ve got to keep the good of the squad at the forefront of our minds.
The longer me and my fellow survivors wander these lonely roads, the more we catch ourselves coming up with clever strategies on the fly. We run ahead into a tight sewer tunnel, dropping a molotov cocktail behind us and kiting zombies into the flames so we can focus on what’s ahead. Whenever we come to an open area that we know we’re going to need to defend, we instinctively fall into our reconnaissance drills: scour the zone for weapons and throwables, make sure everyone on the team knows where the ammunition stash and medkits are, drop gas tanks in front of choke points for an improvised explosive when the hordes start pouring in, and try to guess where the getaway vehicle will show up. Perhaps our proudest strategic moment came when we had to look for gas in a shopping mall to fill up a car. The car was in the middle of the ground floor and the gas tanks were scattered around the promenades above. We soon realised that instead of making multiple trips up to the higher floors, being overwhelmed by zombies on each one, we could simply throw the tanks over the rails into a pile right next to the car and pour them in one after the other. Of course, just one stray bullet could light all the tanks up, sending us back to square one, but you don’t survive out here for long unless you take a few risks. L4D2’s level design doesn’t just allow for these emergent strategies: it invites them.
My favourite level in the game, Hard Rain, demonstrates this well. It had us travelling through a swamp town, a witch-infested brewery, and a corn field to find gas for our boat. Not wanting to startle the witches, we turned off our flashlights and made sure to fight regular infected in spaces well away from them. We looked for any path around the witches we could find: climbing onto rickety walkways, hopping across siloes. We put our faith in God as we ran through the corn field, not being able to see a metre in front our faces, chasing the objective towering in the distance. When we came to our north star, a gas station out in the open, Hard Rain showed its ace in the hole: we’d have to backtrack through the cornfield, the brewery, and the town in the dark and rain. I held that W key through the cornfield, praying that the next face I met would be a friend’s. I clung to my flashlight to cut a path through the brewery, knowing what appetising prey I must have seemed to those witches. When we came back to the town, the rain had fallen so thick that the roads were completely submerged. Rather than wade through the waist-level water, making ourselves easy pickings, we jumped from rooftop to rooftop, sniping zombies pawing at our legs as we went. Finally, in true L4D2 fashion, we had to defend a run-down burger shack while our boat refuelled. Naturally, we tried to stay on the roof when we could, but tanks and chargers were going to make that difficult. We’d empty our clips into the horde, then remember that the only ammunition was on the restaurant counter now swimming in gunk. We’d take shifts: any time there was a lull in the onslaught, someone would make the trek downstairs to reload while the others covered their backs. By the time our boat was ready to go, I felt like we had truly conquered Hard Rain.
On the Mississippi, the town shrinking from view, I gained a new appreciation for L4D2’s level design. Such a simple change in lighting and weather had transformed the way we navigated that familiar geometry. Set-pieces like sneaking past the witches and running through corn added great variety to the shooting. And we wouldn’t have survived any of it if we didn’t watch each other’s backs.
Your own custom Apocalypse
As much as I’ve tried to conceal it, between mentions of ‘Sexual Healing’ and the screenshots, you might have noticed something amiss with my version of L4D2. That is to say L4D2 has an incredibly active modding community over a decade after its release. My friends and I have only gone through the initial campaigns and have yet to try the side modes, but modding has already extended and enhanced our fun with L4D2 to no end. Whether it’s hearing Smash Mouth’s ‘All-Star’ over the horizon signalling an incoming Shrek tank, writer Michael Rosen saying “nice” every time somebody picks something up, fending off hordes with a baguette, or cosplaying as Shaun the Sheep, mods spice up an already chaotic gameplay experience. The cornucopia of model swaps, audio swaps, and even full-blown campaigns and maps made by fans is only growing by the day, convincing me I’ll be returning to this game for years to come. I’ve made sure to credit and link to my favourites at the end of this blog.
Perhaps the greatest gift that mods brought to my L4D2 sessions, however, was the self-expression they allowed for. In much the same way online communities use memes to discuss the media they consume, we used mods as jumping-off points to talk about games we had played in the last week and reflect our individual senses of humour. My friends and I would spend hours before even loading the game discussing what woefully outdated memes we were going to inject into that session. In the heat of gameplay, it was easy to become desensitised to my torch being replaced with TV chef Ainsley Harriot’s face, but every once in a while it would catch me off-guard and make me nostalgic for early 2010’s highschool meme humour. The result was an experience personally tailored to our group’s… eccentric tastes and some much-needed levity after another week in lockdown.
Left 4 Dead gives me life
One of the lights in the darkness of this pandemic has been seeing people using video games as a social forum: stabbing each other in the back in Among Us, sitting around the digital campfire of a Twitch stream watching someone fail at Fall Guys, sharing in the fruits of one’s labour in Stardew Valley. Left 4 Dead 2 was my social forum, a cathartic playground my friends would assemble in every week to overcome a shared challenge. It gave me structure when everywhere I looked yielded nothing but uncertainty. It has provided me with so many fond memories and it will no doubt continue to do so as I plumb its content-rich depths. From its AI Director forcing players to communicate with each other, to ingenious level design that promotes developing new strategies, and the extra dimension of personalisation afforded by mods, Left 4 Dead 2 isthe supercharged team building exercise everyone should participate in. If anything I’ve said in this post has captured your interest, I implore you to give it a try, and keep an eye out for Back 4 Blood, a similar game being developed by the same studio and releasing October this year. Left 4 Dead designer Tom Leonard summed up the game’s design ethos as “Stay together or die”. It helped me and my friends come together at a time when isolation made it feel impossible.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank my good friend Florence Walker for editing this review and providing general motivation. She is @bodypoetic on Twitter. I would also like to thank MrRibena and BlueGandalf for joining me for this wild ride.
Featured mods
Character/model swaps:
Shadow the Hedgehog: MSF
Kazuma Kiryu: Tiny King Trashmouth, SparkKitsune
Bayonetta: Jupiter
Shaun the Sheep: Noot the spriter
Wallace and Gromit: Pyrrha Nikos
Byleth: Despair, Kuromitsu
Melee Ganondorf: bitterskunk
PS1 Crash Bandicoot: Rin Okumura
PS1 Soild Snake: Mr.Unknown
PepsiMan: MSF
Ness: MSF
Isabelle: MSF
CJ: Raitogaming
Pyra: Raitoningu
The Mystery Inc. Crew: dodgybloke
Dark Souls NPC pack: Splinks, Splinks2
Shrek tank: gir
Teletubbies: Flameknight7
Weapon mods:
Lightsaber katana: Nicky_Da_B
Baguette: 8sian Dude
Ainsley Harriott flashlight: Deppresso
Finger guns: Splinks, Splinks2
Yoshi hunting rifle: Bonnie the fatherly Kangaskhan
Sounds:
Michael Rosen “nice”: DESPAIR SYNDROME
Marvin Gaye ‘Sexual Healing’: COCO
“Bonk” sound effects for melee weapons: real men eat ass