LEFT 4 DEAD: “CRASH COURSE” DLC

I love you Valve. Everyone had their doubts.. but I had faith. That’s right, Valve have announced the first REAL DLC for Left 4 Dead (by real I mean hard-cash-paid-for-new-content-REAL)!! I am extremely excited. As much as I can’t wait for Left 4 Dead 2, I am not ready to give up on the original characters just yet. I have bonded after many hours of gameplay with Zoey, Francis, Louis and Bill.

So a little background; the new DLC is called “Crash Course” and is meant to bridge the gap between the campaigns ‘No Mercy’ and ‘Death Toll’. The main purpose is to give players an awesome Versus experience (which is a good game mode.. but not what I play for), and is also playable on Survival and Campaign mode (YAY)! Valve say it’s meant to be a straight up 30 minutes game play and the AI director has been tinkered with. Well it’s available in September and it’s going to cost 560 MSP, or £4.76 in human currency.

Ahh.. Microsoft points. 560 of them. It’s a shame we have to pay for it unlike those lucky PC players, but you know what that means? By legal rights, if DLC has a charge that means we get ACHIEVEMENTS. This hasn’t been confirmed.. I’m speculating. But it’s true. Who’s going to pay for something when you don’t get anything out of it anyway? I’m intrigued to find out what they’ll be. Complete it the campaign on Expert? Or from forum speculation, we’re going to have more multiplayer based achievements. From the fact Valve are implying that it’s going to be awesome in Versus mode, I’m assuming we’re going to have more Special Infected achievements. Which never was a bad thing.. just it’s really hard controlling non-humans than humans. But hey.. that’s a challenge right!! What else would be cool is achievements in Survival mode. At the minute I have no incentive to last longer than 4 minutes in a constant onslaught of zombie hordes. But add some achievements in there and I’ll be lasting longer than 10 minutes thank you very much.

And 30 minutes gameplay?! That gave me a shock. My team and I can spend hours and HOURS on a single campaign usually. Why so short? Well it’s only two levels long. Which makes me glad I’m not paying the usual 800 MSP for it. I wouldn’t do that without a few grumbles. Again, Valve say it’s because they’re trying to create a more streamlined Versus experience. No sitting in corners and meleeing anything that comes for you by the sounds of it. But we already knew they were eradicating that for Left 4 Dead 2 (I fear the Charger..). I hope when we’re playing a 4-player co-op the experience is lengthened. I know it’s only a bridge campaign between what happened in ‘No Mercy’ and ‘Death Toll’, but COME ON! 30 minutes?! AND, apparently there was meant to be a similar level in the game already (or an ongoing storyline at least) which linked these two levels to begin with. At the end of ‘No Mercy’ after you escape in a helicopter, it is meant to have crashed due to various zombie related reasons where you end up in Riverside.. the beginning of ‘Death Toll’. However, developers removed this because it would have taken away from player’s sense of achievement of escaping only to be stuck at ground zero once more. Which hello.. the entire game does that.. over and over again.

Anyways. I don’t mean to sound so negative. I am genuinely really excited for this. It’s about time we got something fresh to play. By the sounds of it I’m going to have to play Versus a little bit more than usual. Obviously as time draws closer to release we’re going to hear more info on it. Hopefully filling in some of the gaps. There’s not much about the actual storyline, but Left 4 Dead doesn’t really have one other than survive or die. Looks like I’ll need to go purcahse some Microsoft Points afterall..