I’m considering picking up L4D as an X-Mas present for my brother.
Has the game held up for the past month? After playing through the campaigns, is it still interesting?
Furthermore, does it look like the game will support a community of active players for any length of time? Or if I pick it up today, will there be no one to play with seriously?
Finally, any word if valve is planning on giving this the love that TF2 has gotten?
I am pretty sure Map Packs are on the way, and for the PC game at least there will always be user created maps.
Seeing as L4D is the only real zombie shooter on the PC, I think it could hold an audience for a while.
TF2 still has amazing longevity. There are still 300+ servers with active games going on in them every night.
Yeah, I really don’t think you need to worry about its longevity that much. It may die down around Qt3, but it’s not going to die out completely.
If your brother is into cooperative online gameplay, it’s probably the best game I’ve ever played in that regard. Many other games (that I’ve played) don’t force cooperation, even if that cooperation goes a long way towards winning. This game simply does not accept disorganization, and the punishment for it seems to do well at forcing organization.
Many of us still play this game at least once a day. The zombie killing is just so satisfying for a large subset of players that I think it has become part of a daily routine… a kind of compulsive desire for that end-of-the-day zombie blasting, not unlike the desire I still get to jump into NFS:Most Wanted and drive 200mph along the highways for about half an hour.
Like any online community, probably only the hardcore are going to still be at this game in two years, but with the great sales numbers for both PC and XBox Live, plus the achievements (and the possibility of more) I can see this game having a steady mainstream playerbase for at least another half a year.
I don’t see why Valve wouldn’t release the tools needed to keep this game going. I’m waiting patiently for the SDK to be released so that I can go at it myself. The ability to import other Source-game levels to work with this game should create some neat crossover gameplay. I don’t see any reason they’re not working at this moment to further balance the game, although they have made no announcements about anything.
L4D definitely seems like a long-lasting game, the kind to which people will return after their infatuation with Newly Released Game X has died down. You could say it even has an advantage over TF2 in that the latter requires a greater “critical mass” of participants to really feel like a good match, whereas L4D needs just a handful.
I still play daily. Regarding the SDK comment, they’ve made posts to the effect of “soon”. They havent released sooner, because they want to be able to improve their matchmaking process at the same time (so, for instance, you could actually join some of the custom content the SDK facillitates).
Maybe this is not the thread for it, but I would like to suggest a steam QT3 sub-group for L4D. Once a steam group gets over 200 members, you cannot see which members are online by the little friends/community list. A smaller subgroup would let me shift-tab ingame to join or invite QT3’rs more convieniantly.
Assuming you’re talking about the PC, of course, since you mention TF 2.
The longevity will equal or surpass TF 2. Every time I get on, I have not had to wait more than a few seconds to get in a game, especially a versus one. Should figure out if he likes it, as I suspect more people will play on that, especially the further ahead we get in time; new maps will be required to extend that life.)
Seriously, there are a lot of people playing this game. It is like TF 2, DoTA, WoW, CoD4, Halo 3, GoW 2–people play this game a lot, and have purchased it to be at least the next 500 hours of multiplayer action they want. I wouldn’t worry about longevity as much as I would that he likes all the game modes.
Counter-Strike is in the same vein as L4D, and it’s been around forever. TF2 and L4D will be around for quite a while too, I suspect. The main problem is that Valve’s games often cannabalize themselves.
This is a good idea. I noticed the Penny Arcade group does the same thing, making “subgroups” for all the different games.
Perhaps I’ll make a sub QT3 group tonight and start inviting people. It would also be nice for people who don’t have L4D to stop getting spammed with group events for the game two or three times a day.
How is the Xbox community?
My concern is that it inevitably devolves into a swarm of super-powerful, foul-mouthed fifteen year olds.
I play almost daily. It really retains its charm if you have a good group of friends with which to pwn zombies.
BTW, if anyone’s interested I have an unopened retail box of the PC version of L4D that I’d sell to a QT3er on the cheap-ish. My well-meaning wife bought it through the Amazon Marketplace as a Christmas present, and I’m not excited about going through the hassle of returning it.
If you do, do invite “BLUE POWER VAN” … or maybe it’s “BLUEPOWERVAN”. Thanks!
The only reason I’ve tapered off is because of our 3 week old daughter. I’d still be playing a few days a week if I had time. The game hasn’t gotten old to me at all.
Speaking of which, whatever happened to They Hunger: Lost Souls? Have they even bothered officially canceling that thing yet?
The longevity is in the multiplayer versus games, but I agree, as long as some more maps are released it’s a worthy purchase.
I think Left 4 Dead is already on the road to ruin. In the last few nights, I’ve logged in to experience (more than once):
…on top of the Russian Roulette that is picking a server.
At least with CS or TF2 there are enough choices and “favorite servers” that one can find non-jerks to play with. L4D needs better server browsing, and fast.
There are casual gaming groups to weed out this sort of nonsense. If you’re interested enough in the high quality cooperative play given by L4D to keep trying, it might be worth the time to search out these groups and join them (on the Steam version, at least).
There’s this generally laid-back group of gamers with a public Steam group which always is recommended. Something about quarter-to-something.
I’m at around 70 cents per hour in L4D now. Long break to work on projects, but I still need more. I hope they do some official versions of the remaining maps for multiplayer (there are points where they don’t fit versus, climbing spots need to be marked). If the sales are as good as TF2, I don’t think we have to worry about its longevity. I’m sure they can afford to make some extra maps.
It isn’t bad. I think the worst players are actually the ones that remain completely silent throughout, but beyond that the game doesn’t offer a lot of room for griefing or anything like that. It seems to have lost favor pretty quick with the QT3 folks on my friends list, however. I’m sure the longevity won’t be helped by the fact that we have to wait for official map releases.
As for player vs player griefing, it would take so long to kill a survivor on Normal just doing headshots, that a player can be vote-kicked long before you’ll even get incapped.