If Metal Gear Solid 4’s 2 million hours of cut-scenes were just that little bit too much for you to handle and your brain imploded from all the wishy-washy philosophy, Valve might have a solution for you in the form of Left 4 Dead. Speaking to Kotaku at PAX, the company’s Chet Faliszek said that, much like Half-Life 2, everything will be said to your player character in real time by fellow companions.

For more super awesome details and junk, you know where to go. (The link. Over there. Not to Kotaku. Don’t be stupid.)

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Save for a short introductory movie that gives a bit of backstory to the impending zombie apocalypse, the entirety of Left 4 Dead’s character interaction and storytelling will be left to over 8000 lines of dialogue and messages scrawled on walls, Portal-style. To give you an idea of how vast the bank of voiceovers is, Half-Life 2 boasted a ‘mere’ 2,500 lines of script so the scale that Valve is hoping to achieve with L4D is huge.

However, Faliszek isn’t expecting you to hear every single one of those 8000 lines in the one playthrough of the game. The dialogue is filtered to fit certain situations so depending on whether you’re the sneaky sort or the all-out guns-blazing type of player you’ll hear different things being said by your companions. As Left 4 Dead is being promoted by Valve as a game to play again and again, they didn’t want to bog it down with a massive backstory. Said Faliszek:

We didn’t want to have the game game gummed up with a story line. We wanted to keep it really clean and tight. A zombie apocalypse. [The game]’s about killing zombies, not some fable on the reconstruction of humanity.

That’s that then. No super confusing, cutscene-laden tales of woe for you. Instead, Valve are coughing up four scenarios in Left 4 Dead consisting of five huge maps each, with several ways to play each one keeping you amused. However, even when you’re done with all of them, having heard every line of dialogue and played them in every way possible, Valve are promising new scenarios later in the game’s life. We’re reassured that these will be worth the moolah and wont just amount to “horse armor”.

All good news then. Not that it matters to me though, unless some rumours come to fruition. Which they wont. Oh well.

Left 4 Dead To Be Cut Scene Free - Kotaku

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