Hi I’m Joe and here’s what I’d do if someone at Valve put a gun to my head and told me to add a new type of Special Infected to the video game Left 4 Dead
First thing to think about is, as a goal, you need an issue you want to address. For me, in Left 4 Dead, that’s players rushing. Whether it’s co-op or or versus, players in L4D can pretty much just speedrun everything, if they want, and get away with it. I’m hostile to this. I don’t like those players – they can only have a good time if everyone else has a bad time.
So, my Special Infected is the Lurker.
-The Lurker always spawns ahead of the survivors on the escape route (an L4D concept which is just “the path from map start to map end”).
-It doesn’t spawn very often, and only once per map.
-It looks and acts identically to an idle common infected (normal zombie), and does all the usual idle behaviours: leaning on walls, staggering around, vomiting.
-If any player gets too close, it erupts into a terrifying mess of bloody tentacles like The Thing and does low-damage minor-knockdown slashes within a several-meter radius, still staggering around. It doesn’t incapacitate like other special infected, but it knocks you around.
-If it takes too much damage, it disengages and tries to escape by getting low and snaking off ahead. If it gets away, you might encounter it again, back in stealth mode.
-It doesn’t do much damage, but it has a lot of health, so fighting it takes time, and draws some attention. It’s also faster than a player, so you can’t just run away.
-Pre-aggro, there’s two ways to know it’s not a common infected:
- Regardless of noise or damage, it never aggros unless you’re close to it, it just keeps doing those idle zombie behaviours.
- If you shoot it in the head, it “dies” like a normal Z, but like 5-10 seconds later it gets up again.
This means you can’t confidently detect a Lurker without drawing attention from other enemies by shooting (which matters a lot or a little, contextually), or by slowing down and taking a few seconds to be sure. You’re disincentivised from rushing because the level of danger ahead is unclear, since every zombie is a little bit of a suspect, at least some of the time.
I think this could be a pretty good solution to how, for a certain type of player, a lot of the survival-horror tension goes away when you realise that instead of cooperating with the experience, you can just run fast.
In versus, as the Lurker, you get a third-person view, and play the The Ship type game of trying to look plausible as an NPC, while trying to get close to an area where the survivors will have to get close to you. For instance, playing as a Lurker, you might stagger into the path the survivors need to stealth along to avoid disturbing the Witch.
I wish L4D supported modding so I could actually give this a try!
Thanks for coming to my Zed Talk
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
I think this idea is sound, but speaking as someone with nearly 1000 hours of L4D2 logged, I feel like this wouldn’t be very fun in versus mode. It seems a little too passive — it would be easy to get in to matches where a bad Lurker is a real drain on the infected team. You’d be down a whole special infected who was busy setting ineffective traps and never engaging with survivors.
I almost wonder if it would be easier for a Lurker to spawn zombies, and place them strategically, like mines. That would be a lot more active for a player, and wouldn’t put so much pressure on setting up and missing one shot. Have a pool of like, three “mines” and either they decay over time or a survivor pops them and they become a super zombie.
Could be a range thing. Maybe the Lurker gives off pheromone particles so you know it’s near. If a mine is out of range of the pheromone particles for too long, it shrivels up and dies. That way, players are clued in and know to slow down, and it keeps the Lurker nearby and engaged with their thrall.
Maybe the Lurker itself is on a timer, sort of like a Tank, so if a Lurker just wants to camp and hide, they can’t just do that forever.
Oh! Maybe a Lurker can manually pop his zombies but needs line of sight with them to encourage coming out of hiding.
e: Instead of phenome particles, maybe its like, corpse flies or something, and you shoot a big swarm to activate a super zombie. They’d leave a big long trail leading back to wherever the Lurker was when they were shot and then slowly dissipate over time.
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