Epic Default Productions

So I’ve had about a week of playing left 4 Dead on the 360. I know it’s a Valve game, and that they are better on a PC, but alas, my laptop cannot even run the original Half-Life, so I doubt it could handle L4D.

I have yet to try the live play with anyone other than the people on my friends list, and I probably will pass on it. If Halo, Gears, and CoD4 taught me anything, there are a lot of people out there who I would more than likely shoot in the back of the head instead of teaming up with them to survive the coming Apocalypse.

However, I came up with an idea that could make this great game even better when it comes to online play. If you’d like to know what it is, hit the jump.

So, I’ve actually “playtested” this with some of my friends, and much of the rest of the staff here at EDP, all of who are a menagerie of gamers in their own right. So I think I’ve got a good polling audience of both PC and 360 players on this. And so far, there hasn’t been any objection to this idea. So I sent an email off to Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve. Below is the email.

Hey Gabe,

first let me get the fanboyish rant out of the way. I’ve never been much of a PC gamer, but I’m a huge fan of you guys ever since the Orange Box came out. You seem to just have the perfect mindset as far as what gamers like us want from a developer. Please don’t change any of that. Sure it takes a long time for games to come out from you guys, but whenever they do…they are practically perfect. I’d much rather have that than have a shoddy game come out every three months or so. So keep up the good work.

I picked up l4d last week for the 360 and it quickly became my favorite game. Definitely this year, but quite possibly all time. But I had an idea that I actually tossed to a few of my friends, both on the PC version and the 360 version, and they all said this would be an awesome addition, as either DLC or maybe something to add to the next installment of the franchise.

Director Mode.

In the basic sense, give players the ability to be the director in a multiplayer game.

Here’s how I see it (and I wish I had the skills to be able to come up with a player mod for this to send you, but alas I do not, so I have to describe it in words).

A five-player game. Four players are the survivors, and they play as normal, but one takes the place of the AI Director. The normal population algorithms and random item spawns will still be controlled by the game, but the player who is the director would have possibly a top down view of the map they are playing at that point. Or some sort of view of it. On it, they would see where the start and the end would be, and where the Survivors are located in real time.

It would basically be like an RTS. The “Director” would have six buttons to worry about: Smoker, Hunter, Boomer, Attack Horde, Witch, and Tank. When they select their “weapon,” so to speak, they have the ability to picks its spawn point and let it loose.

That automatically would raise balancing issues, but the way to combat that would be very simple. Actually, there are a few ways that you could do it, all very simple. the buttons could be set on timers…so that there would have to be a recharge period before you can use them again. Say the smoker has a 30 second recharge, the hunter 1 minute, boomer 2 minutes, etc., all for example. Or you could do a combination time and damage points. So the smoker, hunter, and boomer can all be time based, and the witch, tank, and attack horde could be charged by the amount of damage the Survivors take.

For those gamers that would save all the options to just inundate the survivors, I have a couple of solutions for that as well. Either use the same process that you use for the Tank in versus mode, in other words, you have a certain amount of time to place an attack or else the AI takes over and attacks using one of the options the player has available, subsequently taking away that option from the player until it recharges again. Or place a time limit between each attack the player can use. For example, you might have a Tank, a Boomer, and a Hunter available. Instead of placing a boomer, then a Hunter, then a Tank, you can only place one, and then you have to wait until either that has died OR say 60 seconds before you can spawn another attack.

I and most of my friends who I have pitched this idea to think this would be an awesome mode to have, especially for people who don’t like playing with random people online, but rarely can get all their friends together to play. It would be a great two-player mode, pitting two minds against each other. Plus it would increase the re-playability, because, lets face it, there are probably people out there already who are reverse engineering the game in order to figure out the probabilities that the Director will spawn certain items in certain situations. This way, it would bring an even more challenging option to use in the game, because you can never predict what humans are going to do, especially when granted with that sort of power.

I thought it was an interesting enough idea to send you an email. Keep up the good work, and I look forward to what you have in store for us in the future.

Haven’t heard anything back from him yet, but who knows…if we see this mode show up in a future update, or in the next game…you’ll know who to thank.