Gearheads of War

As we discussed earlier Blank, problem is, a ton of people have already tasted the L4D waters with the first one, and didn't like it.  So, the potential customer base is that much smaller this time than last.  Next, you get the pissed of people of the loyal group.  Hmm....  They may have sold 2 mil+ copies of the original, but if they pull their heads out of their butts, they will realize that they will be lucky to sell half that many of the sequel, unless they come up with some incredible new XBL features or something.

No surprise.

If the gameplay is good / unique from the first version, then it is understandable why they changed.

Sometimes you start with a good idea, then a great idea comes along.  But you are so far along that instead of scrapping the good idea, you finish it.  Then start working on the great idea.

The jury is out for me on this.  If it is a great improvement over the first, then I'm paying attention.

All these companies have budgets, timelines, bankloans to pay off...

but I can also see the other side of it.

picked up on the boycott (perhaps even noticing Blankman's diary here) and there is an interesting thread over there.  The fact is, regardless of whether or not the game is "worth" 50 dollars, regardless of whether or not there is enough "new" content to merit a full second release, the problem is that Valve led us to believe that we were buying into a multi-year game:

So each time we've released one of those for Team Fortress 2 we've seen about a 20% increase in the number of people who are playing online. And that number is really important because it determines how many community created maps there are, how many servers are running, and so on. So we'll do the same thing with Left 4 Dead where we'll have the initial release and then we'll release more movies, more characters, more weapons, unlockables, achievements, because that's the way you continue to grow a community over time.

I wasn't sure that Valve had promised this because I get so much of my news just from chatting during our FFFs etc.  However, as I said from the beginning, if Valve continues to support L4D, then I won't be against purchasing L4D2 - they will have made good on their promise - a promise upon which I made the decision to get two additional copies of L4D. They need to make good on their promise, or publicly admit that they handled the press really, really poorly on this one.

In the end, I think Valve will understand that it is in their best interest to follow through with some substantial new content for L4D, as Chet in the podcast assured us they would.

UPDATE:  As I am composing this, I notice there is yet more, over at RockPaperShotgun.

RPS: The main point of contention has been that a while back there was a statement from Gabe Newell given to VideoGamer in which he said there were plans to add more characters, unlockables, weapons and achievements to the original Left 4 Dead.

Doug Lombardi: So, we’ve made a number of releases on the PC, and we made a pretty big release on the 360 in terms of the DLC, and we were able to get out for free which I thought would pretty cool, and it was not an easy thing to pull off. Beyond that, we plan to continue updating Left 4 Dead. We’re not done with that title, it’s not over. The SDK stuff just came out. I think we mentioned to RPS that if you’re using the SDK and making maps for it, those will work for L4D2 as well. We are trying to keep the community together – we’re going to be doing more stuff about keeping the community together as we get closer to launch.

I think the short answer is: trust us a little bit. We’ve been pretty good over the years, even with L4D going back just a few months, about supporting games post-launch. Gabe’s always talking about providing entertainment as a service – it’s not about making a game any more. That’s one point of it.

The other point is, we didn’t sit down and say, "We need to ship a sequel next for next Christmas, what features do we need?" That wasn’t the way it happened, that’s not the way Valve works. What did happen was, the team sat down and said, "We’ve got a bunch of ideas of stuff we want to do." People were really fired up when the game was finished, and there was a lot of feedback and ideas that came from watching people play – on the scale of millions of people, as opposed to hundreds of people that we went through during the playtesting sessions. So we put a lot of those things on the board and said, "What can we do quickly? What’s going to take more time? What’s the best way to get stuff out to customers?" And part of that plan ended up with L4D2, with things like changing the way the finales worked, introducing some new Survivors, giving new dialogue, telling more about the story, introducing new Specials. We said, "Wow, that makes for a nice sequel." And then there was the stuff in the Survival Pack which makes for a nice DLC. And what we’d like to do is release a great game, provide lots of entertainment-as-a-service type of features, whether they’re technical updates or whether it’s the Survival Pack, and then also deliver more.

Lots more in the RPS interview.