Chet Faliszek, one of the main forces behind Left 4 Dead, spoke with bit-tech at a recent event held by EA. The engaging four page interview offers up the latest information on what you can expect from Left 4 Dead when it is released later this year.
BT: So, when you playtest are your testers not always hardcore gamers then?The interview does contain a nice mix of old and new information. You might also learn a thing or two about how to survive a Zombie outbreak while you're at it.
CF: We try to get as wide a range as possible. If you’ve just got hardcore gamers then you’re going to get a really small percentage of your audience, right? So we have a cross-section and we use an internal wiki page where people can just add their names and email addresses and I’m actually the person to go through and contact them.[...]
And the thing that really got me, when I first joined the company and when I first saw this was ‘Where do we get all these stupid people from? How can’t they figure these things out?’ After a while though you realise that actually you’re the one who’s not so bright because everybody does the same thing.
Like, everyone wants to kill their buddy and we wanted to fiddle with that, but we had problems with the interface, so we thought we’ll take out friendly fire. But then, even with the problems, we’re not smarter than our customers.