A lot of nerd rage has been vented online over the unexpected announcement of a full-blown Left 4 Dead sequel - Left 4 Dead 2. "Valve is abandoning Left 4 Dead" is the most common complaint, followed by the usual claims that Valve is trying to milk the consumers for more money. Chet Faliszek, one of the project leads at Valve working on Left 4 Dead 2 talked to Ars Technica about the subject. The short version? "Please, don't burn us at the stake just yet. Let us explain!".
"We had some meetings about it, and we all talked about our ideas, and everyone was pretty focused and thoughtful, a lot of the same ideas were happening," Faliszek told me. The team wanted better storytelling, they wanted swamps, and they wanted to include New Orleans. "We wanted the Director to be smarter, but to be smarter it needed more special infected in its stable. For example, the Charger that we see today."
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"It just became very clear that this was a cohesive, singular statement we wanted to make, not a more slow update t 2235 hing... too much stuff was tied together with too many other things. The Common Infected—now there is destruction in different parts of their body, to ship all the new Common Infected, even with an update, would be a huge thing."
Personally I think that Left 4 Dead 2 promises so much new stuff - new characters, new levels, new weapons, new game modes and more - that it is a full blown sequel and not an attempt to milk the players for a second round of the same thing and this interview tells me that Valve really did think things through before committing to the sequel route. If they actually manage to pull off a way to combine the two games (perhaps allowing the use of old characters in new levels or new weapons in old levels etc.) if you own both titles as well, there is little reason to whine.
Game development costs money and if Valve is putting on the table a completely new set of content - characters, weapons, levels - that just happen to share the key gameplay idea of Left 4 Dead (escape from the zombie horde), charging full price for it as a proper sequel is fine in my book.
