Post Script
The fight to become Left 4 Dead’s successor
Pinpointing influences is a perilous business, but Left 4 Dead is more genre than game nowadays, if not quite up there with the Metroidvania or Roguelike. The imitations and homages span indie and AAA, from Saber’s cult favourite Killing Floor 2 through asteroid-burrowing Moria sim Deep Rock Galactic to Arkane’s forthcoming Redfall,
in which punks wielding shotguns and magic battle vampire gangs. Left 4 Dead’s most successful spiritual heir and/or competitor is arguably Call Of Duty’s long-running Zombies mode, which shambled onto shelves a year after it, and blends co-op wave survival with a Modern Warfare-style levelling system. But the greatest and most flagrant of its clones is surely Fatshark’s Warhammer: Vermintide
series, which somehow makes Left 4 Dead
work in the realm of dark fantasy.
Fatshark’s game lacks Left 4 Dead’s
accessibility – there are too many olde worlde place names and weapons to enhance – and its rodent equivalents for the Special Infected aren’t quite as well executed. But it outshines Left 4 Dead in terms of characters that are at once potent, predefined individuals and strongly shaped by player behaviour, with hundreds of superbly voiced, contextual dialogue lines. Perhaps most impressively, it manages to be wittier than its inspiration despite its crushing burden of lore. Left 4 Dead 2 gave us Ellis, a country mechanic prone to monologuing like he’s perched at the bar. Vermintide has trash-talking elves, Blackadder-style witchfinders, and a whole archive of drunken voice performances to mark five rousing years of rat murder.
Why has Left 4 Dead attracted so many disciples? Partly because there was nothing quite like it when it launched, but also because it tapped into certain undercurrents. It’s the closest we have to a videogame adaptation of Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later, which rejuvenated zombie cinema by transforming the zombie into a sprinting menace, bursting from the shadows of silent cities. Its semiserious exploration of group behaviour in lifeor-death scenarios helped it reach audiences outside gaming. Its celebration of the ‘watercooler anecdote’ value of cowardice and treachery have cast a long shadow: we struggle to imagine the social stealth genre epitomised by Among Us existing without Left 4 Dead. The game didn’t invent everything it’s cherished for, however. It was revolutionary but also reassuringly familiar, its cunning AI Director often feeling like a tabletop GM, its squad mechanics stirring up memories of Gauntlet.
Left 4 Dead set trends for environmental storytelling, its legendary saferoom graffiti and incidental dialogue showing how narrative elements could be piped into multiplayer without breaking the flow. Among Back 4 Blood’s mistakes is to bring in too much of that wider world, though this has as much to do with the changing shape of zombie fiction at large. Where Back 4 Blood’s community of preppers evokes post-apocalyptic soap operas such as The Walking Dead, Left 4 Dead’s campaigns are simple survival stories with the pacing of a classic 90-minute feature film. Each campaign is introduced by a vintage movie poster, with players credited as actors.
These diverging reference points partly explain Back 4 Blood’s comparative lack of intrigue or suspense. Set sometime after the zombie outbreak, Back 4 Blood trades on quests about clearing territory or acquiring resources: its levels are organised around a quasi-military hub, and full of NPCs in need of supplies. It’s a resurgent society rather than a smoking ruin, a settled, storied environment appropriate to a game about acquiring things or unlocking them. Left 4 Dead’s apocalypse is more recent and hazy at the edges, its maps like islands in the mist, its fires still blazing. The objective is generally just to get the hell out of there, which makes the landscapes all the more intriguing – nothing haunts you, after all, like a place you have to escape from.