Don’t expect a hug.
For those with longer memories, it’s not unlikely that you remember the hullabaloo around Left 4 Dead 2. It’s often a bit more common for Valve games to stick around for a while with a large amount of post launch support. After all, Team Fortress 2 is still getting updates, and it’s only a year away from being old enough to play itself without parental supervision.
Well, as it turns out, there was a reason Left 4 Dead 1‘s support was cut short to pave the way for L4D2. As it turns out, the engine for the first game was a bit delicate. At least, according to former Left 4 Dead lead and current The Anacrusis lead Chet Faliszek.
From an interview with Game Developer, Faliszek claims that the engine would often break for bizarre reasons.
I don’t think outside people can appreciate how broken the Left 4 Dead engine was. It loaded each map two or three times in the background.
Chet Faliszek
Essentially, no one wound up wanting to fiddle with the house of cards that was the first game’s engine, for fear of breaking something that would take longer to fix than it did to work from scratch. And so, a year later, Left 4 Dead 2 became its own thing, rather than DLC or expansions for the original game.
Left 4 Dead was such a broken thing that nobody wanted to touch it. That game iterated so quickly that if it meant breaking something horrible, where you had to load a map [two] or three times but you could playtest it today, we did it. That meant at some point, you had to pay for that debt. There was no way you were going to support mods for Left 4 Dead in the same way we did for Left 4 Dead 2 without a big reset.
Chet Faliszek
Naturally, at the time, players were pretty peeved. They expected a string of updates for the game they bought the year before, rather than having to pay for a whole new game. When asked why Valve didn’t just claim the new game was due to the fragility of the first game’s engine, Faliszek claimed it was a matter of decorum. One that he was willing to take one on the chin for, at that.
When people kill themselves to ship a game, you don’t really want to say that there were problems with it. It was a lot of patching and Bondo-ing to get it through the door. To be appreciative of that, I’d rather just have somebody mad at me because they thought it was my idea.
Chet Faliszek
Source: PC Gamer
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