LogInThis is what Valve's former writer Chet Faliszek said, explaining why they moved on so fast to the second game, Left 4 Dead 2.
Image credit: Valve, Left 4 Dead
If you've ever wondered why Valve released the second installment of the Left 4 Dead series so quickly, then you may be interested to know that it was all because the game was so "fragile" that the creators didn't want to work on it any longer.
"Left 4 Dead was such a broken thing that nobody wanted to touch it. That game iterated so quickly that if it meant breaking something horrible, where you had to load a map [two] or three times but you could playtest it today, we did it. That meant at some point, you had to pay for that debt," Chet Faliszek, the writer behind the original Left 4 Dead, shared with Game Developer.
Image credit: Valve, Left 4 Dead 2
He also shared that fixing different issues was a big problem that might resulted in the unexpected disappearance of player characters, which made Valve developers hesitant to make any changes to the unstable yet functional setup they had created. This posed a challenge when it came to developing Left 4 Dead 2. At that time, with the first game recently released, it would have made more sense to incorporate the second game's content as an update or the DLC. However, nobody wanted to risk disrupting the delicate balance of the first game.
"There was no way you were going to support mods for Left 4 Dead in the same way we did for Left 4 Dead 2 without a big reset," added Faliszek.
Image credit: Valve, Left 4 Dead 2
As a result, instead of the DLC or updates for the first game, we received a significant reset in the form of an entirely new game in the Left 4 Dead series. Well, it turned out to be for the best - although this decision caused some unrest at the time.
If you're curious why Valve didn't openly acknowledge that the reason for creating Left 4 Dead 2 was due to underlying issues with the first game, Faliszek provides an explanation: "When people kill themselves to ship a game, you don't really want to say that there were problems with it… To be appreciative of that, I'd rather just have somebody mad at me because they thought it was my idea."
You can read the source on PC Gamer and the interview on Game Developer and join our 80 Level Talent platform and Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.