In Search of the L4D Killer

Left 4 Dead & Left 4 Dead 2 are among my all-time most favourite video games, thanks to their unique and ingenious design: a series of short, story-driven campaigns featuring relatable, interesting characters and mountains of apocalyptic window dressing; a four-player cooperative multiplayer format with incredible interdependence between players necessitating effective teamwork; endless replayability thanks to careful randomization elements and the “Director” AI tweaking the difficulty of each level to suit the skill of the players; and the general polish of well-paced, varied, shooter combat.

In their wake, I have been on a long quest for more and better cooperative gameplay.

A few games jumped aboard the multiplayer co-op bandwagon with survival and horde modes, but the concept of holding out as long as possible against inevitable death was far from the goal-oriented drive of L4D’s campaigns. A few titles here and there bother to include cooperative campaigns to complement their single-player modes, but these tend to be lengthy and unreplayable, making it difficult to enjoy a quick pick-up game of them. Exempli gratia: I played only once through Portal 2, and only with a single partner for that entire run.

Borderlands had great promise, adding an open world and customizable skills and gear to the formula, but ultimately leant too heavily on its Diablo-esque format: optimizing a character for play can easily take 100+ hours, at which point there aren’t any quests left and the grind has robbed all excitement from the endeavour. I found myself playing for the addiction, rather than the action, while I could have my optimal gear loadout within 30 minutes of starting a new L4D campaign.

Then there was Brink, which didn’t seem to understand that making a competitive multiplayer mode and then replacing the other team with bots isn’t really the same as having a properly designed cooperative mode. The triviality of respawning every 30 seconds robbed me of any sense of character – I wasn’t a named protagonist, I was just one of an endless supply of reinforcements, regardless of how much consequence the game tried to heap upon the results of a match.

When I heard about Payday, it seemed like a sure thing, being as it was more or less identical to L4D. Unfortunately, a lack of polish was crippling: massive, time-consuming character progression, awful pacing and difficulty balance. Payday 2 had promise, since it did a lot better in terms of varying the gameplay, but has recently extended its character progression into the realm of several years of continuous play, and I don’t have the patience.

Planning to try 2012’s Syndicate and the upcoming Destiny set for release in 2014. Still searching, still hopeful.