Why Left 4 Dead is the Ultimate Social Game

you know i've been super annoyed by current multiplayer games lately they just aren't fun or if they are they make you go through some insane hoops to actually get to the fun stuff i could list off a million examples but in the interest of not tearing apart a game you all might be enjoying let's just say that to me it seems like multiplayer games are getting more and more complicated in all the wrong ways ridiculously convoluted progression systems health bars hovering over enemies heads letting you know that you should be meta gaming the enemies rather than getting immersed endless lists of call outs that you need to be learning to be a halfway decent teammate it feels like games are getting so clean so buy driven so metacentric there's totally a place for these complicated games with tons of nuances to master but well sometimes it feels like the age of simple fun casual and above all else social multiplayer is dying out speaking of dying left 4 dead [Music] [Applause] valve has a very special way of designing games now this is all just my own assumptions i can't say that anything is definitively how they do it but it seems to me that each valve game starts with a core idea in all of the pieces from narrative to characters to setting to gameplay are all designed around conveying those ideas half-life 2 is a game about using your giant brain and quick reflexes to carve your way through a mysterious and unknowably mutated world portal is all about feeling clever questioning the things around you and eventually rebelling against them team fortress 2 is all about laughing at the absolute insanity that pvp can generate while providing each player with their own unique methods and motivations to interact with the chaos but how about left 4 dead we all know what left 4 dead is so instead let's talk about why left 4 dead is that is to say what the point of the game is basically left 4 dead exists to let players build relationships with each other while in a hectic and stressful situation seriously the whole reason i even started my discord server is because of friends i made in left 4 dead just random players who i bonded with over the course of a one or two hour long session i've never in my life seen a game that was so good at connecting me to other people and even when playing it with friends that i already hold dear to my heart it still has that same effect for myself at least it's the ultimate bonding experience and i want to talk about how it achieves this we'll start with the broad strokes of enemy and level design and move forward into the extreme minutia seriously i'm even going to talk about this little metal bar on the safe room doors but first the infected so this one's obvious but the main point of basically every special infected you know these guys is to take advantage of the players dependence on each other each one of them specializes in separating you from your team or punishing you for getting separated in the first place and the way to combat each and every one of them is to just stick together smokers pull you away from their team and their ability to attack from long range can serve as a great way to distract teammates who might want to try and take him down chargers work the same way really but they trade flexibility for insane speed and tankiness one can easily grab a player and push them super far away from their team then the teammate might go in to save them only to get separated from the rest of the group by some spitter goo and vulnerable hunters the enemy whose sole purpose is punishing players for being too far away from their friends jockeys have near full control over where they pull a survivor to so they can quickly grab you and move you around a corner disorienting the survivors as they have to turn around or rush ahead aggressively to save their friend or take a side route then lastly we've got the boomer probably the most nuanced special infected in the game these guys thrive on panic needing to get close to the survivors to do anything but being incredibly easy to kill if they're caught with their pants down if you're distracted trying to save your teammates or yourself and a boomer catches you off guard you can be in serious trouble you're totally blind making it harder to avoid friendly fire or save your teammates and what's worse if you get vomited on by a boomer a whole horde of common infected spawning to rush you down if you get burma biled your best bet is to just sit in a corner and pray that your teammates are covering you even trying to fight off the zombies coming for you can be risky because of how dangerous friendly fire is on higher difficulties so that's the special infected again it's pretty obvious how these guys are designed to encourage teamwork it sounds like a complicated list of things to keep track of but because of valve's classic highly readable audio and visual design it takes one encounter with each of these guys for you to understand what they do and what you need to do to handle them learning which sounds correspond to which special infected takes a few hours longer but as long as you know what the risks might be you should mostly be able to handle yourself each one of these guys is super simple having a single attack but when you mix and match them all sorts of different things can happen the common infected though they're just as interesting so the big thing with left 4 dead is getting swarmed just being surrounded by way too many angry zombies to handle by yourself ask any player i'm sure that they'll say that that's the first thing that comes their mind when they think about the game so when these guys attack you they can do anywhere from 1 to 20 points of damage depending on difficulty that's bad enough but what might be even more dangerous is that they slow you down for a second every time they hit you which means that just one zombie sprinting up behind you while you rush to save a teammate can slow you down and cause that pin teammate of yours to take another 10 points of damage luckily though your teammates do this because it's important to warn the player about just the scenario the other effect of this slowdown is that if you're surrounded on all sides by common infected it isn't enough to just kill one or two of them so you can squeeze through you're gonna need to take out the whole group if you want any real shot at getting away and the longer it takes you to do that the more health and time you're wasting that's why covering fire is so incredibly important in this game you've got limited ammo in your magazines you can only shove away so many zombies before you get winded and get a cooldown on your shove and if you take enough damage to fall down and become incapacitated your whole team has to drop everything to save you which can quickly cascade into a disaster situation where you almost game over then and there just from being down one guy at the wrong time point is you want to always know where your teammates are and know what's going on with them it's going to be a lot easier to avoid damage if you work together to protect each other from these common zombies talking about common infected could lead into a whole discussion about positioning but let's save that for another time now that i'm talking about protecting your teammates let's get away from the game mechanics for a bit and talk about a narrative element specifically the characters see i almost always end up having the most teammate protections when me and my friends finish a campaign and that's why i play as rochelle she's just the character that i most identify with she gives off the vibe that she's putting up a front of being hopeful also that her team doesn't lose too much morale she's friendly and compassionate but she's got a low [ __ ] tolerance i always get the vibe that she's the one that's gonna make sure that all of her teammates are doing okay which is exactly how i play a lot of players think that rochelle is the least developed character but what development she does have fits my playstyle like a glove then you've got rochelle's polar opposite nick unless you want to be picking your teeth up off the floor stop shooting me it seems like every time i play left 4 dead with a full party there's always one player running ahead and it's always nick see nick is selfish cocky a little shady arrogance is all hell he doesn't think he needs his team and well it seems like most players that picnic kind of play the same way then you've got coach the team leader who just wants to make sure that the team keeps making progress and sticks together much like an actual coach and lastly you've got ellis who's just the goofball basically each of these characters were designed around fitting a player archetype you've got all sorts of players in the left 4 dead community but i'll bet that every single one of them has a character that they most relate to and prefer to play as even though statistically they're all the exact same then especially if you play this game with friends you've got a lot of great moments that arise from the different relationships these characters develop with each other over the course of the game it changes from play through to play through so you never really know what dialogue you'll be hearing or who will end up getting closer to who by the end of a campaign so you've got a lot of funny moments where you'll see two of your friends characters arguing over something and it just leads to more memorable moments that more closely connect you to your character of choice and the people around you we're gonna stroll across the bridge and the army's gonna take care of us or they're gonna line us up against a wall and shoot us well you free to make yourself a new life right here in this room nick okay all right let's go and this doesn't just stop at the left 4 dead 2 cast it applies to the original survivors as well you've got bill who's basically like coach the objective oriented character who wants to keep his team together then you've got francis most similar to nick the guy who thinks he's hot [ __ ] is kind of dumb and hates everything hell on some playthroughs he even makes it pretty clear that he straight up can't stand lois oh god it should have been lewis spinner zoe and lois both sort of take turns filling the goofball role in the optimist role see given left 4 dead ones slightly less campy tone compared to the second game the characters are a bit broader and the whole learning how to work as a team aspect is pushed a lot harder lois especially seems like he doesn't have an ounce of ill will towards anyone in the party even francis but if you know anything about lois it's the pills here that there are pills here see valve's been doing this since before the term meme was brought back into pop culture but they kind of make a point of creating inside jokes amongst their communities pills here quiet everybody i hear a [ __ ] i ever tell you about the time keith and i made fireworks i think i hear my ex-wife ugh i hate stairs oh my god you hate stuff too sure never really thought about it but yeah i hate things i hate those stairs i know i hate that bridge it's so stupid i hate your vest i know wait wait what they're just a ton of inside jokes in the world of left 4 dead and these do such a great job of being iconic of the individual characters personalities but even more importantly they make playing this game with the same old buddy for the hundredth time all the more entertaining i can't tell you how many times me and my friends will reference these lines and others whenever we play together it just furthers that sense of connection with your teammates so effectively every game community has their inside jokes but they're just so many and left for dead plus because of the way things are randomized with each playthrough even after however many hundreds of hours i have in this game i'm still hearing stories about keith or things that francis hates that i've never heard before it's not like i'm paying insane attention to the dialogue the whole time i'm playing but every now and then i'll just have those quiet moments where somebody pipes up and i'll hear a fantastic piece of writing that i've never noticed before speaking of quiet moments here's where we can get to what i think is one of the quietest pieces of just amazing game design and left 4 dead the safe rooms so let's talk about what exactly goes into a good safe room first off these are the areas where players are going to be freshening up their drinks taking longer than everyone else to connect chatting with each other or checking up on their socials so it's absolutely critical that safe rooms have things inside of them to occupy players while they wait for their buddies to be ready or just catch their breath in between the gameplay sections the most obvious way that the game does this is by letting players shoot zombies ahead without ever leaving the safe room you can just chill and kill zombies with your unlimited supply of ammo with no danger to you whatsoever but then especially in left 4 dead 2 safe rooms will often include dialogue that tells the players what their motivations are and usually has a good joke or two thrown in there then you've got the graffiti there's an absolute ton of funny sad or interesting stuff written on the walls in these games and if i'm not mistaken the graffiti 2 is randomized a lot of the time i'm constantly just scanning all the walls and reading graffiti while i wait for my friends to be ready in fact me and my buddies have been playing a lot of custom campaigns lately and while i can't speak for them one of my absolute favorite parts of these campaigns is keeping an eye out for custom graffiti that the map creators have made it's just a small little detail that shouldn't matter that much but graffiti's often been the number one thing that differentiates custom campaigns in my memory but eventually we've gotta stop smelling the flowers and leave the safe room this seems like the most pointless detail ever but can i just gush for a moment about how much i love this little animation of the bar dropping it's a way to wordlessly communicate your attention to leave the safe room or to urge your teammates to kick it into gear and pay attention it's small and subtle but it brings a social aspect to opening the safe room door the sort of social aspect that makes love for dead so special abc always be closing it's not as simple as just open the door and leave the way you throw the bar off of it as a sort of permanency to the act of opening the door and i think that permanency alone is the reason why i almost never see players just spam me on the door and leave without saying a word to their team even the players who tend to just run ahead and disregard their team usually respect the sanctity of the safe room door and i think that this little bar is the main reason why short of starting the horde early spamming e on the safe room door is the ultimate social faux pas in left 4 dead but now that we're back on the streets we can get back to what really defines left 4 dead killing zombies with your friends let me talk about a cult classic ps2 game for a moment so that i can more easily make a point here eco it's a really cool little puzzle game but the main mechanic is that you have to escort this girl all around a huge castle solving puzzles and defending her from monsters see other than falling off of cliffs you can't die in this game the only way to game over is to let the girl get captured and dragged into a portal the effect of this is that your proximity to the girl essentially acts as a sort of dynamic health bar you feel a real sense of dread when a puzzle forces you to leave the girl away from you you just know that if you take too long some monsters are going to show up and kidnap her and you won't be able to do a thing about it so you feel really worried when you're away from this girl but the other side of that coin is that you just feel safe and secure when you're holding your hand and escorting her around nothing can touch her and therefore nothing can touch you left 4 dead kind of does the same thing i don't feel safe if i'm more than 10 feet or so away from my teammates depending on the environment and if i'm within 5 feet of my teammates i just feel snug safe and cozy no matter what's going on around me i know that this sounds like an experience exclusive to the incredibly anti-social but there's a real tangible effect however slight to standing next to another player's character in a video game you just know that someone on the other side of the screen is looking right back at your character just as you are theirs it's a social experience and by creating game mechanics that so drastically encourage you to stay close to your teammates you just bond with them subconsciously there's no two ways about it if a teammate sticks by your side in this game you're going to feel more compelled to stick by their side and after saving each other's lives a dozen or so times over a campaign you might even shoot them a friend request like i said some of my earliest online frames were ones that i met in left 4 dead and i added them after only one campaign again i know it sounds like i need to touch some grass right now but in left 4 dead i just want to be close to you bro all joking aside it really has allowed me to get a lot closer to some of my online friends and at the end of the day that's the reason left 4 dead exists every single thing in this game was designed to make you and i companions and to help the companionship bloom into an honest god friendship i just boot up the game and without any clunky menus or storefronts or advertisements or ranks or anything to sift my way through i have a great time bonding with my friends and getting close to them for about an hour and then i put the game down satisfied every single time without fail this game puts me in a good mood halo's great i've loved counter-strike over the years i've had amazing memories and arma and minecraft and dayz and lots of good fun and among us trouble in terrace town gta online jack box and a million other multiplayer games but left 4 dead will always be my number one example of a game that proves just how well a video game can bring people together and as silly as the game can be i can't help but think it from the bottom of my heart for what it does [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] before i wrap up today's video and get back to playing death stranding i'd just like to give a verbal thanks to my patrons especially those who are donating 10 bucks or more a month on patreon such as ada avery almost dead again askell atheit benny bobby blitz calliope uranus celadon chun gina colin kajic cornelius nelson demise dennis vashakumar dominic johann eduardo roca emma plays go george rosenbaum icassern ijk iw joanna's jiggly giggles jonah she k kenneth n finger kitty cat knife kujata the fish laffy lil bunda lilith vampasa hibiscus liv luz m megan walker mia mako mixer rules mokai espress moss fan 1 neurofilter nicole of lucian petra zoo poof donut queen cthulhu raxvan robert botang shayno ben n big time jim and ceelo that's a lot more than last time and i'd just like to give another thanks to everybody who's decided to support after the trans video came out needless to say that was a scary one for me but anyways have a great evening

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 149,287

Keywords: analysis, explained, essay, review

Id: 8BIxQce1SoY

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2022