Left 4 Dead: Chet Faliszek talks about Crash Course DLC

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has talked a bit about Left 4 Dead's upcoming DLC, Crash Course, which was announced yesterday.

This time around, the focus is on Versus Mode.

"It has the co-op Campaign, and also has Survival, but the focus is Versus," he told Edge. "One of the problems with Versus – well, perhaps it’s not quite a ‘problem’ because there are actually equal player minutes between Versus and co-op – but it’s a two hour game. And we look at our statistics and we see that players ideally want to play between 20 and 30 minutes. 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. Obviously if the teams are bad and get wiped quicker then it goes quicker.

"We’ve also added some things – you can now see your teammates’ statuses and their recharge timers. The world also stays exactly the same between team changes, so there are no complaints about it being imbalanced any more. We’ve actually been working on this a bit, but we’re finally close enough that we’re comfortable to talk about it."

Chet says that Valve is working on how to integrate the DLC with L4D2, and one of the things it has discussed is letting the maps dictate the characters you are playing.

"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.

"We’re still struggling with how interoperability is going to work, right now [with Crash Course]. When we talk about L4D, the story stuff – there’s actually a lot of character dialogue that’s based in each map."

More through the link.