ZOMBIES
By End_Boss 2 Comments
Yeah, yeah...
Well, I know I said I was taking a break for a while, and after the podcast I certainly thought that would be true, but for some unknown reason I found myself writing this blog twenty minutes ago, so here you are (and that's all the justification you'll get!).I recently went back to playing Left 4 Dead 2 after (surprisingly) at least a month of it not gracing my disc tray. Please understand that this wasn’t out of a lack of love for the game, just that it was one of three games I originally owned for my Elite and thus saw a lot of play-time early on. Anyway, now that I’ve come back to it, it seems the luster of yesterday is somewhat lacking today. Don’t get me wrong, I still love zombies, and I still love killing zombies, but I’m starting to wonder if I love L4D because it’s the zombie series for me or simply because it’s the only decent zombie game out there (sorry, never could get into Dead Rising).
I’m starting to feel it’s the latter.
Though the game nails the frantic action of the zombie apocalypse, it doesn’t do a whole lot else: there’s little to no story except for the insignificant tid-bits Valve dangles in front of our noses, and frankly I’m getting a little tired of having to scour safehouse walls to get any sense of narrative. I mean, seriously: wouldn’t people run out of Sharpies after a while?
Still, I get what Valve is doing, and they’re doing it well. Providing players with the distilled, nail-biting survivor’s experience is a noble goal, and they’ve been achieving that goal since 2008. The barrenness and pervasive silence of L4D2’s world when you’re not being hounded by the undead conveys the hopelessness of a post-zombie-apocalypse efficiently, but I can’t help but wonder if that’s just incidental to Valve’s sparse level design. Though the trappings of humanity litter the ground and the occasional keepsake can be found in an abandoned home, I never really feel like this world has been lived in before, which is especially bizarre when L4D2 claims to take place at the onset of the infection, not weeks or months in as the desolate locations imply. Even something so basic as the dead guy in the first safehouse of The Parish campaign can become jarring; sure, it’s interesting to know that another group must have passed through here before us and that they lost a person, but after you’ve realized you’re standing on him for the twentieth time, you start wondering if someone would really leave a dead body to decay in one of the last few bastions of safety for humanity, releasing all of its disease and sickness into the air. Why don’t we see more pyres, more evidence of life before the infection?
A while ago I posted a blog in which I talked about Undead Labs, a new MMO company headed by an ex-lead designer for Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. I had hoped that they might take zombie games one step closer to being fully fleshed out worlds with some persistence; dreams of bunkering down in an abandoned prison (a la The Walking Dead) with a handful of friends immediately began rocketing around my head, demanding as many giddy high-school reactions as it could get.
Well, the company claims it’s still going to do that for us, but seeing as their latest update was over two months ago and features nothing but conceptual speculation, I’m getting a little uneasy. It’s been said on the forums that Valve should be the only developer that’s allowed to touch the zombie genre ever again. I certainly hope not.
Thanks for reading,
End_Boss.