L4D’s Crash Course May Not Work In L4D2

It’s still uncertain as to whether or not Crash Course will work in Left 4 Dead 2.Crash Course, a forthcoming DLC pack for Left 4 Dead that will be free on PC and paid on 360, may or may not work with Left 4 Dead 2 come release.The news comes from an Edge interview with Valve’s Chet Faliszek focused on the Crash Course DLC, which is aimed at creating a shorter Versus experience. “We look at our statistics and we see that players ideally want to play between 20 and 30 minutes,” said Faliszek. “So we wanted to create a Versus campaign which you could play through in 30 minutes – a quick competitive thing that slots in between TV shows. It’s a two map campaign with a finale, so it’s almost a three map campaign.”When asked about whether the content will work in Left 4 Dead 2, however, Faliszek seemed less certain. “We’re still struggling with how interoperability is going to work, right now. When we talk about L4D, the story stuff – there’s actually a lot of character dialogue that’s based in each map.””But there’s this thing of the world – these characters wouldn’t be here – how much does that matter? We have a world sketched out and we have an understanding of where everything is and what’s going on, you know, so story-wise it wouldn’t make much sense. But equally there’s a whole group of the fans who don’t care.”Edge queried whether or not Valve could simply add the Left 4 Dead 1 characters to the sequel and have the loaded map dictate which characters are used, and Faliszek responded “That’s one of the routes we’ve talked about going, and maybe adding the new creatures, or whatever. There’s a lot of back-and-forth.””We haven’t fixed on what we’re doing yet, so we don’t want to talk about it and make people think something is going to happen when we don’t know ourselves.”However, it appears that Left 4 Dead 2 may act as a platform for further content in future. “I think people don’t understand that, L4D2 versus L4D – we redid so many systems,” stated Faliszek. “When you look at why the authoring tools took so long, it’s because it wasn’t a simple Source game, like Team Fortress 2 or Episode Two where we use the exact same tools. We used new tools here, we used a new file system, new dependencies – and we had to redesign all these things to work in this new world. But now we’ve got that base so that in the future everything will work with that.”Hopefully, those last comments will placate those who still hold out that Left 4 Dead 2 could have been DLC for Left 4 Dead, although as Valve has stated several times that there are a lot of changes to the engine and the systems, that might be too much to wish for.Check out our thoughts on Left 4 Dead 2 from when we got our hands on it, or our most recent interview with Valve’s Doug Lombardi about the title, with more available in the IncGamers TV section of the site. Wh topic of Falve,ft”/iw”>I cGlmeb Chet Faliszek has also been chatty about Microsoft’s Project Natal. You can read up on that here.