Newell Responds to Left 4 Dead 2 Complaints

[Shawn Zipay]

Valve's president, Gabe Newell, has offered up his own response to the complaints against Left 4 Dead 2.

"Doing a sequel in one year is new for Valve. But providing ongoing support for our titles after the initial launch isn't - it has been part of our philosophy since Half-Life was released ten and half years ago," said Valve president Gabe Newell in a statement to Kotaku. "We see no reason to change that and will continue to support the over three million customers in the L4D community."

"E3 is a trade event where developers and publishers come to announce new games for the coming year. L4D2 — like any new product — requires an appearance at the show," Newell said.

Valve says, it will continue to support the original with continued updates.

"Some in the community are concerned that the announcement of L4D2 implied a change in our plans for L4D1. We aren't changing our plans for L4D1."

Whether that will allay fears that Left 4 Dead will be left behind by some community members remains to be seen, but Valve notes that it hasn't abandoned the original.

"In addition to the recently released Survival Pack, we are releasing authoring tools for Mod makers, community matchmaking, 4x4 matchmaking, and more new content during the coming months for L4D1," Newell says. "We also agree with our customers that there needs to be an interoperability plan for players of L4D1 and L4D2, as multiplayer games are driven by the cohesiveness of their community."

Valve anticipated the "gut reaction" of the community prior to the E3 announcement, but feel confident that naysayers will change their tune in the coming months. Check out the full article over at Kotaku.

[Ev!L ErN!E]

Re: Newell Responds to Left 4 Dead 2 Complaints

this is still BS... they still don't get the point that this will devide the community... from people who will be palying L4D1 and the people playing L4D2, you can't play two games at the same time.... so after only 1 year of release Valve is gonna cut the L4D gamers in half.

You need to give a game time... let the community build and then after some time has passed (more than 1 year) you release a sequal, something better, something with more original content.

I'm not the only person here who thinks L4D feels like an unfinished game as it is right now... so now were just gonna have two unfinished games that are gonna need to be updated all the time to keep epople interested...

Personally I hope this jumps up and bites Valve's sales in the ass... they need to stop telling us what we want, and start listening to what we want.

[nemes1s3000]

Re: Newell Responds to Left 4 Dead 2 Complaints

I hate it when Gabe talks, because his wisdomatic words are like music to my ears and eventually I'll have to give in to his demands, but sadly, not this time, sorry Gabe, but the words "Doing a sequel in one year is new for Valve." just goes to show me that this is just the start of you pulling all these bullshit moves to try and justify your actions. You know it's wrong, the community knows it's wrong, on top of dumb -- Valve is slowly emerging into the new EA. Want another horrible sequel? Might as well call yourselves EA2.

Still love you Valve.

[Munra]

Re: Newell Responds to Left 4 Dead 2 Complaints

IMO 2 things they must do to keep the community together.

1) L4D servers need to be able to run both games( Lobby connects from either game)
2) allow l4D1 connect to be available inside l4d2 with out switching games. (Pretty much allow you to connect to a friend games)

[K-16]

Re: Newell Responds to Left 4 Dead 2 Complaints

Hmm... Something tells me there would be a temporary transitional phase for less than a year through these two implemented features Munra suggested. From there, people are encouraged to trade-in L4D for a $20 discount off of the original price of L4D2 in order to bring everyone over to L4D2, and over time the sequel will contain L4D's content as backwards compatibility (Munra's second suggestion would then be replaced with this). It just might work business-wise, similar to the transitional phase from 98 SE to XP (please ignore the actual feature differences between the two products, as I imagine L4D2 will be significantly different in the future updates, so the OS example isn't necessarily an apples and oranges example).