The lead designer of Left 4 Dead has announced that he’s making something like Left 4 Dead again – a four-player co-op shooter that “expands on the co-op-formula in ways I’ve wanted to explore for a long time”.
Whatever they end up calling it, the game is in development at Bad Robot Games, a studio founded by the film and TV outfit behind Lost, Cloverfield and Westworld. So the project has both expertise and funding to spare, in theory. There is little else to tell, right now, but you can sign up for a playtest if all this has you combing the rooftops for Smokers and scrabbling around for your shotgun.
Former Turtle Rock creative director Mike Booth announced the project in a Reddit post this week. “If you enjoyed the teamwork, tension, and replayability of my past games, you’ll probably find this one interesting,” he wrote.
Left 4 Dead aside, Booth has credits on Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Team Fortress 2. He worked for Valve after they acquired Turtle Rock in 2008, then left in 2012 to join Blizzard and work on something unannounced. Then he went to Facebook to work on multiplayer virtual reality mcGuffins for the Oculus Rift. Most recently, he joined the board of directors for Resolution, creators of tabletop RPG Demeo. Here’s hoping the new Left 4 Deadlike isn’t some kind of VR exclusive, or otherwise tainted by exposure to Mark Zuckerberg’s skullfucking metaverse meanderings.
“We’re still in the early stages of development, but we’re opening up playtests to a limited number of players,” Booth added in the Reddit post. “If you’re interested in joining us on this next adventure and helping shape the game early on, we’d love to have you involved.” You can sign up for a playtest here.
I’m always keen to play anything Left 4 Deadlike, but I have been burned before. Back 4 Blood was not the unofficial Left 4 Dead 3 its title format implied, partly because it tried to make Left 4 Dead’s spontaneously ‘AI-directed’, playable B-movie gambit work within a clunky latter-day progression system.
Alice Bee (RPS in peace) had fun with Back 4 Blood, admittedly, calling it “peak early-00s cheese”. And there have been other, recent quatrofoil co-operational bangalongs that pull off something like the old L4D vibe, such as Fatshark’s various first-person Warhammer games, GTFO from 10 Chambers, and dwarven asteroid miner Deep Rock Galactic.
(Side note to Rock Paper Shotgun’s automatic keyword linking system: why do you link some game titles, and not others? Why do you vex and torment me so? I will never unravel your heathen wiles and mocking parlor tricks.)
As for the possibility of an actual Left 4 Dead 3 – those magic words appear in relatively recent Valve documentation, but I’ve seen little evidence that such a project is in active development. Right now, the Steam company appear focussed on perennial chart topper Counter-Strike 2 and the upcoming MOBA shooter Deadlock. As for Booth’s old joint Turtle Rock, they appear to be making Back 4 Blood 2, which displeases me inasmuch as I’d rather they make a new Evolve.
