“We know a lot of players have had conversations in their heads about what would happen when the cast of Left4Dead 1 met the cast of 2,” says Valve’s Chet Faliszek, writer of the two zombie-slaughtering shooters (and possibly still more famous for being one half of legendary game-skewering site Old Man Murray). “If you don’t know who the characters are from the first game, it’ll become apparent pretty quickly.” Faliszek reveals that he wrote 30 different intros to the characters’ get-togethers, “so you’ll see Ellis fall for Zoey, or Nick and Francis go at it and carry that conflict through the campaign.”

The ‘classic’ guys are just there to help, however, and some of the details of how they ended up in this fictional Southern Georgia town — where The Passing takes place — will be revealed in a comic book companion. Then, in what Faliszek describes as something of a “schizophrenic” decision, you’ll be able to play the last part of the comic book — a prequel, technically, to The Passing — in DLC for the original Left4Dead. “If it was just about sales we’d stop, but we care about the players,” he adds to reinforce an ongoing theme of keen attention to the customer.



As for The Passing itself, our hands-on time revealed that the core, successful mechanic remained truly intact. Stick with your friends, heal ‘em, help ‘em, and they’ll repay the favour when you’re inevitably on the floor with just a pistol to keep back the hordes. The streets, the buildings, the graffiti, the sewers, the dark, the swarms, the panic, the vomit: all are still as tangible and terrifying as before. The Passing certainly isn’t crammed with new content beyond the locations. A new infected-type that apparently doesn’t believe itself doomed to the disease will actually carry health or ammo you can use – and you’ll likely be thankful for the ‘drop’.

So the focus here appears to be around story, the bringing together of the two groups and the exposition of the characters, their conflicting (or conforming) personalities, and the conclusion of that meet-‘n’-greet when the original game stars come back to help out for the last of the three maps. The Chet Faliszek showcase? “When Eric [Wolpaw, co-comedian at Old Man Murray and GDCA award winner for his work on Psychonauts] and I, who have known each other for 25 years, were sitting in our first apartment, Left4Dead is the game we would have dreamed up,” he says, adding, “I even had a zombieland URL at the time.”



That early fascination with the zombie gameplay dynamic, and their continual evisceration of game design clichés caught the attention of Valve boss Gabe Newell, leading to “real” jobs and the chance to develop a lifelong dream. But Faliszek still wasn’t overly surprised by the reaction to and subsequent commercial success of the original Left4Dead concept. “The moment I first played the working demo [of L4D1] I thought, ‘Wow, I love this’,” he gushes. “Me and Eric were at a lunch with Gabe, and we were babbling about how it was the greatest thing ever.”

A slight overstatement, maybe, but not totally off-base given a fan base committed enough to formulate (short-lived) boycotts, garnering the continued attention of the deepest development teams. “We do have a lot of communication,” says Faliszek, “they can see us listening to them - they know we’re gamers.” He admitted to making tweaks to the gameplay design in response to community comments, particularly around the ability to be essentially removed from the game by one Boomer vomit incident. “But while we do listen, sometimes they’re wrong,” he adds, “though even when they are wrong, they’re not.” He recovers a little: “it just may not be the actual problem that they’re thinking of, but we have to investigate.”



As for the potential for any part of this franchise (or, indeed, any other future Valve games) making their way on to the PS3 platform, Faliszek doesn’t offer too many reassuring words for Sony fan boys. “Before we do anything on the PS3 we need to be able to support it in the right way,” he says, largely in reference to the port provided for Orange Box. “But we’ll look at it, and I’m sure down the road we’ll do it.”