Tag Archives: Chet Faliszek

Valve writer Chet Falliszek has told Videogamer that Portal 2 will feature two end credit sequences, one for single-player and one for co-op.

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Valve’s Chet Faliszek has said this Portal 2 on PS3 was the first 100 percent internally created product for the firm, because it had external help with The Orange Box on the platform.

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Valve’s Chet Faliszek has said since the Xbox 360 community is “head and shoulders above the PS3″, it’s one of the reasons that the developer bypasses the Sony console.

“Right now for Left 4 Dead 2 we’re looking at PC and 360 because the community aspects really fit the game – it’s all about playing with your friends,” he said. “But that’s the short term. What we’re looking at for the long term… if it works out, it works out.

“Right now don’t not buy it on the 360 because you think it’s coming out on the PS3 – it’s not going to. Right? It’s coming out on the PC and 360. It’s going to be exclusive for that.

“In hooking up with your friends and the community aspects, I think the Xbox 360 is head and shoulders above the PS3. The 360 and PC are on par, right?”

More through CVG.

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has said that British gamers have a tendency to clam-up during online play, and just don’t chat enough, apparently.

He does, however feel that the Realism mode included in Left 4 Dead 2 will remedy the situation.

“One thing I wanted to add before I go for you Brits: communicate. Don’t be scared of a microphone,” reports CVG. “You guys are notorious non-talkers on both 360 and PC. Americans are just chattering away, working together as a team. If you want to work together as a team you’ve got to talk!

“You can go into a random 360 game on US servers and it’s crazy talk. It’s fun. I think a lot of people knock that community but again and again I’m surprised by how fun that is. I’ve played expert campaigns where by the end of it we’re best buddies.

“Realism mode will prod you – you have to talk. If you don’t talk you’re not going to make it. Instead of being harder Realism’s actually more challenging as a team because you have to communicate. When a Smoker pulls you off somewhere you’ve got to yell because nobody can see where you are.

“The first time you see people play, somebody will go in a house to get some stuff, turn around a be like ‘shit, I can’t see anybody’. It’s a scary feeling. We’ll see if that maybe stimulate the British sternness.”

OK stern ones. You heard the man. Get online and start shouting away. Throw some obscenities out there too, and while you’re at it, for good measure insult, your fellow gamer’s lineage. They’ll love you for it.

More through the link.

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has revealed that the number of preorders for zombie shooter Left 4 Dead 2 are “four times” that of the original.

“As we get closer to launch we see the reaction to the demo, preorders are four times what Left 4 Dead 1 was, people’s excitement, the boycott itself and how it’s changed… I think people are just excited now,” he told CVG.

Ad far as the complaints over a sequel being released so soon and the subsequent petition is concerned, Faliszek seemed slightly indifferent to the criticism.

“One of the weird things at E3 was we knew we weren’t showing the complete package, we knew there was a whole bunch of stuff we were holding back but we wanted to show something. Honestly I made the joke and it’s true: If you put $20 in a box and charge $10 for it someone would complain you didn’t put $50 in a box.

“Not to say some of the concerns raised aren’t valid, but you’re always going to have some kind of upset and that’s not how we work. We work at looking at the project and trying to get it out.”

Game’s out this month.

Valve’s finally confirmed proper details on Left 4 Dead 2′s Realism mode, saying it’ll be playable at all difficulty settings, will remove character glows to force teams to greatly increase communication, and give the Witch super-kill powers.

“Realism mode isn’t just making Expert harder,” Valve boss Chet Faliszek said at the London leg of the EG expo last week.

“We have our four skill levels again, and you can play Realism mode with any of them.

“We find that people play with the same people a lot… And those teams don’t necessarily want to play Expert or Hard, they want to be challenged as a team.”

Faliszek outlined an intrigued proposition at the Expo, one designed to take closely knit player-groups to the limit.

“It’s real easy to say, ‘Let’s make the creatures harder for you to kill and you easier to kill.’ It’s less interesting,” he added.

“With this, we remove the glows, we make events like the Witch more important now, because if the Witch hits you once, she kills you. And you die. You don’t come back.

“There’s no safe closets. You can use the defib to get back, but your team has to do that for you.”

No glows? No glows.

“Way back in development of Left 4 dead 1 we didn’t have glows for a while, and it was really frustrating and hard,” Faliszek said.

“The first time you turn around, and you run off by yourself and you’re going to get something out of this building, and you turn and go, ‘I’ve got the pipe bomb! Oh, man, where is everybody?’ And you have no idea. It’s a really different experience.

“Realism mode is really about pushing the skill of the team.”

Left 4 Dead 2 hits on November 17. The 360 demo’s out now for all Gold subs.

During his Left 4 Dead 2 talk today at EG Expo 2009, Valve’s Chet Faliszek explained that the DLC pack names found in the demo were spaceholders only, put there as required test by Microsoft.

“If you’re reading in the forums and you’re reading about the “Miracle” DLC or whatever, that’s test code,” said Faliszek. “To get tested through Microsoft certification, we had to do test scenarios with DLC.

“We haven’t actually come out internally with what we’re going to do yet.”

Also, as far as the original survivors are concerned:

“They’re not dead, so we’ll see what happens with that,” he said. “They’re not undead either.”

There’s loads more through the links there.

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has decided to grace the Eurogamer Expo in order to show off Left 4 Dead 2.

His presentation will be liveblogged by Tom Bramwell, and is set to go live at 3.30pm GMT.

You can read what happens when it happens through here.

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has said that the reason it chose New Orleans as the location in Left 4 Dead 2 had more to do with the east coat of the US not being used in games much, this making it a fresh locale.

“We still wanted it to be on the East coast, a bunch of us are from the area,” he told Planet Half-Life. “It’s an interesting place that is not covered in a lot of video games. There’s not a lot of video games that go down to the deep south, through the Savanna and New Orleans. There’s a lot of cool gameplay there, there’s a lot of cool areas. You can be in the swamps, the Savanna or New Orleans, it’s a beautiful city.

“It seemed like a good opportunity to go through there, so we jumped on it.”

Don’t forget that the deep south can be a very mysterious place, what with all the live oaks littered with Spanish moss fluttering in the breeze; the humid heaviness of the air; the thick essence of jasmine and wisteria wafting through your nostrils; toothy zombies just gagging to sink rotting fangs into you.

Great place it is.

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has told Joystiq that there are more melee weapons in Left 4 Dead 2 than guns in the original game – bringing the total melee implements to 10.

Here’s the list:

• Baseball Bat
• Cricket Bat
• Crowbar
• Electric Guitar
• Fire Axe
• Frying Pan
• Katana
• Machete
• Tonfa (police baton)
• Chainsaw

Looks like there will be loads of bashing and slicing going on.

Here’s the link.

Speaking at PAX, Valve’s Chet Faliszek has admitted that the developer has tossed aside and “thrown out entire games”.

No really, we’ll let Chet take it from here:

“We’ve thrown out entire games. You think something’s gonna work and… [developers] talk about this giant design document and it’s just like we’re so much more iterative.

We have these ideas we want to express [and] the easiest way to test those is get them in the game as soon as you can and then have someone not on the team play it.

All through the Left 4 Dead process, all through the Left 4 Dead 2 process we’ve had outside players come in and play the game and give us feedback.”

More at TVGB.

Valve writer Chet Faliszek has admitted to Eurogamer that Left 4 Dead 2 is “a really big departure” for the developer while creating the sequel.

“Left 4 Dead 2 is a really big departure for us. For example, with Half-Life 2 Episode 1, do you remember when you get into the Citadel for the first time, there’s one of the big things that fly over you, and he’s holding some striders?

Getting people to look up to that was impossible. We put a guy up in a balcony shooting at you, and then you turn and look. Problem with Left 4 Dead is, it’s all dynamic, it’s meant to be different every time, we never want to have that guy up there always shooting at you,” said Faliszek.

Game is out on November 17 for Xbox 360 and PC.

More from the interview through the link.

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has weighed in on Natal, and while he thinks it’s “really cool”, he is more concerned with the games that will be created for it.

“We [Valve] got to check it out, and it’s actually really cool,” he told D’toid. “Like, there’s someone running around, jumping around and someone else walks up and it instantly recognizes this other person, splits them off and [they do] their own thing. There’s a lot of coolness around it, but I’m not sure about the game that comes with that, and I’m not sure, personally, how much I wanna move around. I’m a lazy, lazy man. I don’t want to move. I don’t want to be fatigued playing a game.

“I think Wii hit it out of the park with the titles that it shipped with. I bought two Wiis, and they’re both [for visiting] family, and playing. I can’t seem to box them up and carry them, so I had to buy two. [Wii's launch titles] are perfect games for that … I haven’t found much else that’s compelling.

“I want to see the compelling game first.”

Half Life 2: Episode 3 using Natal to simulate a crowbar attack across the face of a hostile Combine – now that would be compelling.

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.

Valve writer Chet Faliszek has said that moral choices do not exist in games, despite titles like Fable, BioShock, inFamous, etc. claiming to contain such options.

“There’s never a real moral choice you’re ever making in a game, because you’re never going to have to live with that choice,” he told D’toid. “We do things in our game to get you to behave better, to make you play together, to have this interaction in a game, but I don’t think those are moral choices.

“I don’t think games allow you to make moral choices. Games allow you to be evil, to do bad things. In Grand Theft Auto, I’m going around running people over, and guess what, I’m not doing that in real life.

“So, in the context of games having moral choices, that’s a weird thing to me. I don’t think they have real moral choices when I think of that. They have something else, like strategic choices, choices inside their world, but to me a moral choice is something that would live outside of a game. I don’t see that.”

More through the link.

It looks as though some band paraphernalia and music will be present in Left 4 Dead 2, starting with Depeche Mode

Chet Faliszek, co-lead and writer, says Valve contacted record labels and different bands for the game and Depeche Mode was one of the few who responded.

Faliszek explained that the band was very free with the use of its likeness, music, and merchandise in the game – but did not say whether the band itself would make an appearance or not.

Still, rather cool.

Via Kotaku.

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has told Kikizo that all L4D mods will work with L4D2. Just in case you needed any more Left 4 Dead news.

“For modders, everything they make in Left 4 Dead will work in Left 4 Dead 2,” said Chet.

“It’ll work better if they bring it into Left 4 Dead 2 and recompile it for Left 4 Dead 2, using some of the additions we’ve made, but it’ll work out of the box as well. We just want to make sure that anyone who’s making a mod now knows that their time’s going to be well spent.”

What a bastard. Quick, sign a petition.

Valve really isn’t phased by the fact nearly 40,000 people are saying they don’t want Left 4 Dead 2. They’re complain no matter what its plans were, Chet Faliszek told Videogamer last week.

“I once joked that we could put $20 in a box and charge $10 for it, and someone’s going to complain,” he said.

“And that’s just fine – that’s just the way it is.”

Faliszek took to opportunity to yet again affirm that Valve will continue to release Left 4 Dead content, despite bringing a full sequel to market.

“We never thought, ‘We need to say that we’re going to keep updating Left 4 Dead,’ because that was always our plan,“ he said.

“Briefly before that [E3] we’d already posted on our blog about the updates that were coming. We didn’t think people would think, ‘Oh wait, now they’re not going to do that stuff they talked about’. Yes, we are.”

Left 4 Dead 2′s out later this year.

Left 4 Dead dev Chet Faliszek has confirmed to Shacknews that a PC patch is due for the fast-paced zombie shooter this week.

“The problem on the PC side was a few large bugs affected other systems that we were going to rewrite on the PC so we ended up waiting to fix a whole class of bugs instead of just individual bugs,” wrote Faliszek on the Steam forums before the aforementioned confirmation.

“Also for the patching, the real key is to patch more often and not wait for everything to accumulate,” added Faliszek. “Because of a perfect storm of events, this patch got larger than we would have liked and that really snowballed the time it is taking.”

More through the link.

By Mike Bowden

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has told Kotaku in its video podcast that DLC for zombie shooter Left 4 Dead is in the works.

“We have the DLC coming, we’re going to do the 360 at the same time as the PC,” he said.

“If it wasn’t the holidays and people weren’t taking all these vacations here at Valve, you’d have seen that announcement already.”

No details of exactly what the DLC content would contain was forthcoming.

Thanks, EG.

By Mike Bowden