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Will Left 4 Dead fail on the Xbox 360?

August 14th, 2008 at 12:00 pm · 18 Comments

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Valve’s Left 4 Dead, debuting this November for the PC and Xbox 360, is somewhat of a media phenomenon. It basically came out of nowhere about a year ago to rise to the cream of Valve’s crop for 2008. It rose to the top for good reason. It absolutely rocks. It’s like no other game I have ever played. It takes the cooperative first person shooter, adds zombies, perfects the controls and the cherry on top? An AI Director that will make sure that every time you replay a scenario, it will be a different experience.

This game has the goods. How can it go wrong?

Well, for starters, it’s only been shown on the PC and has yet to be played on the Xbox 360. You know what else that rocked on the PC, that was made by Valve? Team Fortress 2. You know what else was an absolute failure on the Xbox 360? Team Fortress 2.

You see where I’m going with this?

For some reason, Team Fortress 2 was and still is a disaster on the Xbox 360. Yes the Orange Box was a great compilation, but Team Fortress 2, which is just an absolute powerhouse on the PC, has a small following on the Xbox 360, a platform that is driven by top notch first person shooters. TF2 should have been a no-brainer top of the online chart darling of the 360 community. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Proposed 16 player co-op quickly settled on 8 to 10 player co-op. For a game that easily handles 24 to 32 players on the PC, playing a five on five match just sucks.

The reason? Who knows. I’m not the techie here. Maybe Valve doesn’t know what to do with the 360? I know, I find that hard to believe too, but the fact remains, TF2 remains all but unplayable on the Xbox 360, but shines on the PC.

Will Left 4 Dead also fail on the Xbox 360 for the same reasons? Make no mistake, this is my MUST BUY game of the Christmas season. I want to play it on the 360. I have my usual gang of friends on the 360. I like how silky smooth it is to get in and out of online games on the 360. I like the ease of use.

But I don’t want a broken game… I hope to get my hands on it at PAX. If I do, I’ll report back and let you all know how it goes.

My fingers are crossed.




Related posts:

  1. PS3 Left 4 Dead, Seeks out Xbox 360 Exclusively
  2. Left 4 Dead… Dated.
  3. QuakeCon: Hands-On with Left 4 Dead
  4. Updated Rumor: Left 4 Dead being developed for the PS3
  5. E3 2008 Hands-on: Left 4 Dead

Tags:
Categories: PC · Xbox 360

  • DeathByWaffle

    I hope it doesn’t. It is a must buy for me, and I would rather have it for 360.

  • Mike

    I wasn’t aware that it was a lagmonster on the 360. How weird, do all the other games run good from the orange awesome box run nice?

  • http://www.sarcasticgamer.com Lono

    I think TF2 is the only online game of the Orange Box compilation.

  • http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/index.php/author/yousty/ Yousty

    Isn’t this mostly a single player/co-op experience with the max number of players being 8?

    Orange Box worked perfectly in the single player mode and also on multiplayer up to 10 people so since Left 4 Dead isn’t going to attempt 16 player multiplayer (as far as I know) this game should work just fine.

    At least that’s my hope.

  • Diortem

    It will be fine… not enough players for it not to be.

    But this kind of concern is why MS NEEDS to let some games have dedicated servers.

  • http://www.geezergamers.com DeusExMathias

    I hear you, Lono. TF2 was extremely underwhelming on the 360.
    I’m really looking forward to this game as well – my Clan LMB from GeezerGamers.com is all about the zeds ;) and this game seems to come straight from our wet dreams :P but I’m worried that it’s going to totally suck when it arrives like Far Cry on the 360 did.

    We loved FarCry when it was on the Xbox 1, but the port that they tried to pass off onto us on the 360 was a steaming pile when it was released – it’s been patched, but it took way too long and most of LMB had traded it away by then.

    I really hope the Left 4 Dead developers have their stuff together or they’ll meet the same fate.

  • Rcwpong

    Buying it on PC, mouse and keyboard FTW. Plus Steam’s functionality is getting pretty close to Xbox Live.

    Top it all off with my HQ Ventrilo server for decent voice comm which I’m sure this game will need.

    I will cross my fingers for you 360 guys though. It’s a shame TF2 didn’t have a strong opening to garner a following on the console.

  • arrgh

    I’m not sure if you guys are aware, but there is nothing stopping Valve from using dedicated servers. There are many dedicated servers in operation for games on live. It is simply up to the dev company to run them

  • Diortem

    Is it? I was under the impression MS puts them through some serious hoops to let them do it. (I could have sworn it came up in something I was listening to intervewing on the port of QuakeWars to 360)

  • Truth N Justice

    I hope it works well. @ E3 I made it a point to ask to ask Chet from valve, if the networking for the 360 has been figured out so we didn’t have another TF 2 . He told me he plays the game a lot on the 360 and that I shouldn’t worry about it. So here’s to Chet keeping his word. Oh and he said that the 360 achievements are awesome.

  • Scott

    What ruined TF2 on the 360 was no party support and they still never added any new content. Lag really isn’t bad its just that you have to find a good host but that made it a pain to try and get friends together since not everyone can host without it lagging out which can kick you out of the server sometimes.
    Left 4 Dead for the 360 won’t be anything like that. It will have party support and other features that you see from most other big XBL games (Halo, CoD4). Its being worked on Certain Affinity who are bunch of ex Bungie workers that started up there own studio. They have a lot more experince working on Live then Valve does.

  • http://huhuhuhuhuuhuhuh.com Huh?

    What? Tf2 for 360 really isn’t THAT bad. There is some poor netcode issues yes but when a decent connection hosts a max number of players it doesn’t lag at all.

    Not to mention that the max amount of players is 16, not 10, makes me wonder if the writer even played the game for 360.

  • http://genesis92 Genesis

    This game will fail because of the copybox 360 this crappy console.What a piece of utter garbage crap.99% of the games uses the unreal crappy engine 3 like gays on war 2.Killzone 2 will kill this gays of gore 2 aka gears 2.

  • DM

    Genesis, that kind of excessive 360 fanboy’ism only hurts gaming.

    The PS3 has many things going for it.

    For example, the Cell processor which as we all know was used in a supercomputer (Specifically 12960 of them, along with 6912 AMD Opteron processors) and as the PS3 has one Cell processor, that basically makes it a supercomputer.

    Then you add on to that the free online gaming, which does everything (Well, mostly) that Xbox Live does.

    It’s also the only console to offer 1080p on all of its games, which makes everything far crisper than anything available on the 360. Well, look, maybe it can’t do that at all, but at the very least it’s the only console to allow you to upscale all your games to 1080p, which while the 360 can do that, the PS3 upscaling is undefinably better, and you can’t argue with undefinably.

    More important than any of this, Sony are far more dedicated to making good games on their console (They’ve promised at least twenty, and I can name at least two that are coming out probably this year.)

  • DigIt

    Inzader and I will be playing it at PAX also and I also hope it goes well for the 360 (i have yet to play a valve game on the 360 but i’m a Valve fanboy on the PC)

  • Truth

    I thought we were talking about Left 4 Dead not the ps3 and its hardware, also Left 4 Dead is a must have for zombie shooters its like the last stand with FPS view and touched up graphics

  • Truth

    GENESIS I will give tou a hint many good games on the PS3 use the unreal engine so your riping on your own system.

  • http://www.surpashoespro.com supra skytop

    learnt a lot from what you just posted. lol