Using the physics engine of Half Life 2 by Valve, the developers of Left 4 Dead are working on a cooperative multiplayer in the style of the horror movie Dawn of the Dead (the reimagined 2004 version, not the original 1978 movie).
The developers proclaim that they will have a merit/demerit system that will intelligently track things like “demerit, you jump in front of other players when they’re shooting” … as opposed to “demerit, shooting team mates” … it will of course have demerits such as “team killing” … it will also track meritable actions such as healing a team mate, saving them from being attacked from behing and so forth.
The interesting thing about the merit/demerit system is that once you start playing, your de/merit ranking is life time. That means if you accidently kill a couple of team mates as you’re learning, anyone who plays with you will always know that you team killed. This is intended to be a way to track people who habitually join games to grief people either by team killing or wandering off on their own and not being helpful… something that is punished in this game rapidly and with a vengeance.
The game will throw dozens and sometimes several dozen infected humans at you at a time. The AI is reported to mimic the same kind of intelligence that a movie director would display… this means that you’ll have moments where the pace of the action is frantic and more than you can handle, followed by periods of quiet to heighten the tension of the next encounter. The entire deployment and control of the infected enemies is controlled by the AI, which means that even if you play the same map a dozen times, the infected will never appear in the same place twice.
As the game capitalizes on teamwork, it is immediately appealing to me.
Here’s a gameplay trailer if you’re interested.
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