New monsters. New survivors. New weapons. New Orleans! Left 4 Dead 2 spills some blood on the bayou in a surprising Southern-fried sequel.

"Oh, kiss my ass." We’re playing a very early build of Left 4 Dead 2, and after taking a beating deep in a Southern swamp, things just got worse. The Director — L4D’s A.I., which controls the relentless chaos of the zombie apocalypse — just saw fit to unleash a monstrous Tank on our beleaguered party of survivors. And it’s taken a liking to Chet Faliszek, writer of Left 4 Dead 2, who offers the creature a puckered invitation.

“I’m about to die, I’m about to die!” he screams. “Do so quietly,” suggests fellow survivor and Valve co-conspirator Scott Denton.

Frankly, it’s nice to hear that even the creators of the most intense zombie survival game still get caught off guard, too. Left 4 Dead 2, slated for a mid-November release, won’t be relieving any of the game’s infamous pressure — instead, Valve’s unleashing new infected monsters to battle, new weapons, new survivors, new story elements, and New Orleans. But for all the sequel’s content, the team knew the game had to remain lean and mean.

“A lot of times when you’re looking at a sequel, the first instinct is to muddy up the simplicity of what you did the first time,” says Faliszek. “Left 4 Dead is very deliberately a throwback to games like Doom — you could jump in and you knew what to do. So how do you add to that without complicating [it]?”

The answer is extensions rather than reinventions — weapon additions like incendiary ammo that lights the infected on fire, a more detailed body-deformation system that lets you blast holes in enemies, and the appearance of melee weapons like axes and frying pans. “We’re still giving you things you understand; you don’t have to make really complicated choices, like choosing between sniper-rifle ammo,” Faliszek tells us. “It’s how you play that’s your strategy. And once we started expanding that, we found a whole bunch of systems we wanted to redesign — how weapons work, how we add creatures, and how the world interacts with you. And we realized, this isn’t Left 4 Dead, this is something bigger than that — well, this is Left 4 Dead 2.”

Fresh Blood

While players quickly became fond of survivors Bill, Louis, Zoey, and lovingly irritable Francis, you may be surprised that none of them will appear in Left 4 Dead 2. “We have a little ode to them in the game,” teases Faliszek. “We’re not going to put them to bed yet. When you make a sequel, you have to have these arguments for why you’re doing new characters. They’re really expensive — design time, model time, voice acting. But we really want to tell this story from a different place and be true to the original — those guys had their story, and these guys will, too. They’re not going to be the same people, like, ‘Hey, I’m Louis’ cousin!’ We’re not going to shrink the world like that.”

In fact, the world is big enough that the infection hasn’t even spread to L4D2’s starting point of Savannah, Georgia. “Left 4 Dead was in Philadelphia, which was ground zero — it expanded from there,” explains Faliszek. “So the people who were right there when it was happening are going to know the absolute least — they’re too close to it. [In L4D], we wanted you to hit the ground confused. The characters in this game, though, are a little more distant. They’re down south in Savannah, and we’re starting their story right when the infection hits. They’ve been going to the mall, getting gas, hearing things about this thing up north and they’re not quite sure what it is. One character, Rochelle, has a little info as a member of the media, but even that’s not always right because even newspeople are misinformed at times. So we’re going to play on that and we want them to learn more as they go. We start with the characters fresh, they just meet each other, and by the end they’ve changed who they are and how they interact with each other.”

The good news is that the bare-bones storytelling of the first game will be fleshed out a bit for the sequel, but don’t expect a villain to step from behind a curtain and explain his evil plot. “Is there a ‘This happened exactly how and why and I saved the world by killing the evil scientist’? No,” affirms Faliszek. “But we want to give people eager to delve into the world a little more to latch onto. That said, we have people who played L4D for 300 hours; we can’t put in these giant cutscenes that you have to watch every time. We’ll still be telling the story in a non-traditional way. Some of the things we did in L4D — where some of the speech plays only once in a hundred times — maybe you’ll hear it once in a thousand times here. We’re going to do more of those kind of things, where you learn about things by playing it more.”

Southern Discomfort

These new survivors make their way from the starting point of Savannah down to New Orleans, where the government is evacuating people on cruise ships. “That sounds like a good idea to us,” reasons Faliszek. “Figure we go out there, go to the Gulf of Mexico, and ride out the zombie apocalypse. That’s the plan.”

Of course, to put that plan into action, you’ll have to traverse miles of swampland, shattered cities, and other nasty surprises through the game’s five scenarios. And assuming you survive, what you’ll actually experience is Faliszek’s nightmarish love letter to Louisiana’s most colorful city. “I got to live in New Orleans for a little bit and really fell in love with it,” he admits. “There’s something really neat about the culture down there. In the swamp level is a little town where they basically say: ‘We can take care of ourselves. We don’t need the military; we know how to handle it.’ And in New Orleans, obviously after Katrina, there’s a way to handle things and a way to survive. And the people who are still there, I mean, think about that — they pretty much had their city decimated and they’re still coming back.”

We played most of the final scenario, a run through various sections of New Orleans, and a little bit of one of the swamp areas. Whereas the Savannah levels will reportedly be pretty clean (“It’s a regular city, and we’re going to be there just as the infection hits, so we’ll see how CEDA’s plans work,” teases Faliszek), it’s clear that New Orleans has already been hit pretty hard. It’s littered with debris, destruction, and barriers in a way that will look familiar to L4D players — we’ve seen this kind of chaos before, and we know all too well what caused it.

We began in a riverfront area where the government’s cleared out and the infected have since taken up residence. We fought to a bus depot and a “crescendo” segment — what Valve has lovingly labeled the horde-attack events sprinkled throughout L4D that were later isolated for standalone Survival games. This time, however, the crescendos aren’t as simple as flipping a switch and spraying the crowd with bullets from a closet or corner until the clock runs out. At the bus depot, we triggered a blaring klaxon alarm that then needed to be deactivated inside a maze of wood and scaffolding — and the zombies didn’t stop coming until we turned it off.

Faliszek says this gameplay tweak came straight out of watching player behavior. “One of the things we saw a lot in L4D was a mini-finale where they’d hit the button and go stand in the corner and Shiva-stack [a mild exploit where all four players try to occupy the same space, creating an eight-armed body with guns — Ed.]. Here’s a mini-finale where you hit the button and it’s going to continue and never ever stop until you hit the button on that tower. So we force you to move.”

Day of the Dead

Even creepier, we can see everything with alarming clarity. The sun has come out, and the monsters did not slink back into the shadows. “One of the things you’ll notice here is it’s a little brighter,” explains Faliszek. “We have different behavior for sunlight and darkness. In the daylight, we have witches that wander — they don’t just sit there and cry, so they become a little bit harder to deal with.” Sure enough, it wasn’t long before we spotted one...and prayed she wouldn’t spot us. But you know how that usually goes — her unpredictable scrambling around an abandoned building and staircase led to our discovery and a brutal showdown.

In addition to new behaviors, you can look for new special infected, which will also be playable in Versus mode. The only one Valve was willing to reveal was the Charger, an overgrown hulk with a bulging right arm that Popeye would…give his right arm for. Not quite as massive as a Tank, the Charger locks in on a target and rushes, swatting aside multiple people as he plows a path to his target. Your whole party might be flung to the side and temporarily incapacitated before the Charger stops to exact brutal vengeance on a player who thinks that hiding in a corner, blasting away without fear of being attacked will save them in L4D2. Newsflash: It won’t.

“The design process for the Charger has been going on for months,” says Faliszek. “At first you would just knock people over, which is a problematic thing in the game, but it didn’t feel really fun. You want to have that final moment where you’ve got the guy down and you keep him down.”

Kill It with a Skillet

Survivors, meanwhile, have a novel new way to combat specials like Chargers, Smokers, and Hunters: a frying pan. Valve’s added melee weapons to the mix for L4D2, and while it’s funny to hear the CLANG of a skillet on a skull, it’s also surprisingly effective against the brain-rotted enemies. An axe makes for even flashier dispatches, thanks to the ability to dismember corpses: “You can actually chop off sections, including heads,” boasts Faliszek. Right now melee weapons can kill specials in one hit if they are engaged — a great way to get rid of those damned shrieking Hunters — and Valve is considering making specific melee weapons damage certain special infected. We saw only the skillet and axe in action, but Faliszek mentioned a baseball bat and confirmed the addition of every zombie hunter’s favorite weapon: the chainsaw.

If you’d rather not get too close to the infected — they are infected, after all — incendiary ammunition should fit the bill. You’ll spot it occasionally in yellow cartons, and it’ll replace a few shots of your standard rounds with ones that ignite when they strike your target. Of course, that means you’re turning deadly zombies into deadly flaming zombies, but fire spreads among nemeses, and it actually works to your advantage. “The minute they’re set on fire, they forget about you,” says Faliszek. “Even if they’re running toward you, with that horrible scream, they’re dealing with their pain.” We found some incendiary rounds just before a zombie horde rushed our position, but we managed to neutralize the crowd with careful use of flammable ammo. Flammo!

Regardless of how you dispatch the infected, you’ll do it with more flair and more gore. “I do love the new body-deformation stuff,” admits Faliszek in the middle of a horde rush. “I also love that the shotgun does those Wild West body blowbacks. When you do it right, you can send the guys flying.” Other details include blasting holes through bodies and heads that crumple when hit with melee weapons. After blowing holes straight through an enemy’s midsection and not dropping him, we found ourselves asking “Why won’t you die?” in true cinematic fashion, but Faliszek says a zombie with a missing stomach is a zombie that won’t be bothering you for long. “Once you do that, they’ll die quickly,” he promises. “They’ll come after you for a few steps. You’ll see zombies approach you with both arms blown off and still try to get you, but they’ll go down. Because they’re not supernatural, they’re still infected. But you kill so many zombies in the game — they’re in your view so much of the time that we wanted to make that a little more fun than it was the first time.”

Swamped

Not all of the game’s five scenarios are finished, although Faliszek says the first four are more or less in place. The swamp level we played was on the early side. A train crash forces the survivors to travel by river — “if it’s good enough for Huck Finn, it’s good enough for them,” Faliszek quips. “They know a riverboat plantation is up ahead, and there’s a shortcut through the swamp. What could go wrong?!”

He had to ask. Lush vegetation makes enemies harder to spot: you hear them before you see them. Water puts out fire, so molotovs are less useful against rampaging Tanks in the swamp. You also move slower when you’re waist-deep in muck, even though it might offer a straight path. You’ll often have a choice between a swamp “shortcut” or a longer, more exposed pathway, like a woodenplank walkway. Certain sections of the rotting wood are susceptible to cracking and collapsing under your feet, but you can spot them if you pay attention. If you’re in a hurry or under attack, of course, you’re screwed.

The swamp also offers some special rewards, if you know how to spot them. “If you look up into the trees, you’ll see a parachute, letting us know that someone parachuted out overhead and some goodies are by there,” says Faliszek. “It’s like the Director is moving around the hole on a putting green.”

Flipping the Crypt

We kept picking our way through the streets of the city, stepping over our share of ghastly scenes. We found a chilling trio of bodies lined up on the asphalt, covered in blood-spotted blankets and towels. “All those dead bodies aren’t infected,” confirms Faliszek. “Things are getting a little bad.” Before long, we come to a downed helicopter. “This is man-on-man fighting at this point,” notes Faliszek. “We’re seeing a bit of crumbling society. We also have jets flying over and bombing; in the next map, they’ll change your available paths. So the Director has bombers. That may have been a mistake.”

It wouldn’t be a proper horror game without a spooky cemetery, but the one implemented in the New Orleans run of Left 4 Dead 2 is unique — in fact, it changes every time you play it. The layout of crypts and headstones reconfigures randomly every time you run through it; there are a bunch of different puzzle pieces but they can go together in several ways, and you simply can’t predict how the Director will choose to put them together. “There are so many combinations of the cemetery that I never know,” admits Denton. “I’ve played it through so many times, and you can’t really figure it out.”

Faliszek suggests looking for some visual cues on the edges and in the sky to try to pick your way through. “I tend to look for the center point; from there you can see a gate, and navigate that way,” he says. “There are times when it’s a straight shot from gate to gate, and you’re so relieved! Other times it’s a twisting, turning path. We don’t do the ugly maze thing of making you backtrack — that’s not fun. But some of the layouts are definitely hard to get out of.” Best of all, you’ll see this device used on other levels, too; it’s another way to keep L4D vets from playing on autopilot.

A Bridge Too Awesome

Eventually we hit the French Quarter, which Faliszek describes as “the protected area. The military has decided that putting everybody in one place would be good — they’ll put them in buses and take them across the bridge to the boat.” Just one problem: The buses ain’t runnin’ no more, not with the heavily damaged bridge overrun with infected. But since the only way out is through there, the only option is to cross it on foot — and face the thousands of infected scampering over its crumbling lanes.

“The bridge represents a new thing that we call a gauntlet,” explains Faliszek. “It’s also part of the expanding Director 2.0 — we’ve given level designers the ability to change up how the Director itself works. We had the idea of the gauntlet with Left 4 Dead, but we didn’t have the tech and the Director to handle it — we didn’t have a lot of the underlying system path to be able to pull that off. And now we do.”

A gauntlet is like the end of any of L4D’s original campaigns, but instead of defending a hot zone, you’re constantly in motion. “You have to start at one end of the bridge and get to the other end,” explains Faliszek. “It’s similar to how we trained you at the bus station — you have to keep moving. If you don’t, you’re dead. You’re constantly on the edge — when the Tanks come, when the Charger comes, any of those things can knock you off and send you sailing.” Sure enough, after a few hundred feet of protective guard rails on the side of the bridge, there are no walls to protect us from rampaging Tanks. One punch sends us flying hundreds of feet out into the water to our death — with a car flying after us for good measure.

The bridge itself is a labyrinth of possible pathways — you can choose to risk it on the broken, crater-riddled asphalt (and lure zombies into falling through its many holes) or scramble on top of the trucks, jumping between abandoned vehicles. Infected mostly attack from both directions, but the military has your back — sorta. For one, you’ll find some of their mounted machine guns along the way that “can shoot guys in half — it’s evil,” says Faliszek with no small hint of glee. More than that, the bombing runs have continued throughout your escape run, so as you progress, planes scream overhead and obliterate the bridge behind you as you cross it. It’s the very definition of “no turning back.” We agree: Constantly moving during the finale is much more exciting than making a final stand in a farmhouse. (And hey — we totally loved the farmhouse.)

Research & Development

Valve has more surprises in store, but the most interesting realization to come out of our trip was how many of Left 4 Dead 2’s improvements really have come straight from research. Valve tracks a lot of player data, then dissects it for trends that lead to enhancements. Are random-matchup beatdowns (“pub-stomping”) the real source of rage-quitting? Change matchmaking so that seasoned teams that log on together will find similarly skilled groups in Versus mode. (This will be added to the original L4D, too.) Is the community coming up with good ladder-tournament ideas? Valve’s investigating, codifying, and adding them. Have players found exploits? Don’t just ban the users for being naughty; fix the problems and program in better alternatives. It’s all part of Faliszek’s overall Left 4 Dead 2 goal of building the game’s experience around how people actually play it — or as he puts it, “having the fun thing be the best thing.” So far, it’s working.