Techland has now revealed the full details for its Dying Light/Left 4 Dead 2 crossover event, which is live in its open world zombie game (for free) from yesterday until Monday, October 28. The limited time event ramps up the action with “an increased number of Virals [and] waves of attacking hordes”, but those who partake in the challenges will be rewarded with unique Gold Blueprints for crafting exclusive weapons inspired by Valve’s zombie slaying classic. 

This includes the Electric Guitar, Frying Pan, and Golf Club, but don’t worry if you don’t have time to log into Dying Light this weekend; the standard, non-Gold blueprints for each weapon will be available as a drop in the baseline version of the game once this Left 4 Dead 2 event comes to its end. You can watch the full trailer for the crossover mode below. 

Original story below: 

Left 4 Dead 2 (opens in new tab) represents the pinnacle of local co-op shooting, a frenetic blast through hordes, in the truest sense, of zombies littered with scary-as-hell special foes like boomers and witches. Unfortunately, the series has lived up to its name, with the most recent entry being the now 10-year-old Left 4 Dead 2. Thankfully, fellow zombie shooter Dying Light (opens in new tab) seems to be resurrecting its co-op ancestor in some sort of crossover with Left 4 Dead 2, announced by Techland on Twitter. 

The post on the official Dying Light Twitter account is agonizingly vague, offering virtually nothing beyond an official confirmation that Dying Light and Left 4 Dead 2 are getting a crossover in some shape or form. There’s an official poster featuring both games’ logos, but outside that small morsel of official material we’re left with nothing but guesses to go by.

Dying Light already allows players to link up online for up to four-player co-op play, so it’s unlikely we’ll see a whole new game mode, especially now almost five years after Dying Light’s release and so near the release of Dying Light 2. It’s easy to let your imagination go wild, but I soberly admit there’s almost zero chance we’ll see some reimagining of The Parish campaign or even an individual chapter from Left 4 Dead 2. More likely, we’ll get some cosmetics and if fortune’s in our favor, we’ll enter a dimly-lit building and hear the distant cry of the dreaded witch.

Whatever Dying Light has up its sleeves with regards to Left 4 Dead 2, we’ll gladly lap it up while we wait not-so-patiently for Left 4 Dead 3 (opens in new tab), which is actually going to be called Back 4 Blood (opens in new tab). 

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However perverted this might sound, being able to fight off bloodthirsty women as well as men makes me so god damn happy. Whether these nameless, cookie-cutter foes are being used as meatbag distractions during a boss fight or are the kind that roam across an open world and are all too happy to open fire on you, having a mixture of men and women in their ranks is one step closer to equality between the sexes in video games, and helps to get rid of the damaging notion that women aren’t aggressors. Let me explain why. 

Mixed-sex cannon-fodder

It might just sound like an aesthetic choice, a small tweak that you don’t really notice when you’re gaming. But having both men and women attack you slowly but surely erodes the idea that men are the default setting for generic enemies: that they’re nameless cannon fodder, disposable and meant to be killed without a second thought. However, great as it is to have major female NPCs, treating men and women the same when it comes to the lowest level of nameless-NPCs is just as important. This is far from a new trend, though: Skyrim (opens in new tab) has mixed-sex guards and bandits, Far Cry 5 (opens in new tab) has cultists and Highwaymen of both genders, the soldiers patrolling Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (opens in new tab)’s forts and cities are both male and female, and other games like Dishonored 2 (opens in new tab), all the Bioshock (opens in new tab) games, and Left 4 Dead (opens in new tab) have the same gender balance. Most recently Borderlands 3 (opens in new tab) joined the party by giving us female psychos (at last). 

Whichever way you look at it, it’s good to prove that like men, women can be dicks and join causes that belong to the baddies, as well as leading those hordes of evil ne’er-do-wells. Pretending otherwise is just putting women on a pedestal, implying that we’re without fault and couldn’t possibly contemplate hurting another living being. But even though most games already include lethal ladies, part of what is holding some titles back (and could have occurred to you too) might be that faint and outdated idea that you shouldn’t hit a girl, no matter what. And you shouldn’t, as a rule, but – and I hope this is so obvious that I don’t have to point it out – nor should you hit boys. But there is one big exception: if they seem thirsty for your blood, gender doesn’t really matter when it comes down to making sure your vital organs actually stay inside your body. It’s like that scene in 22 Jump Street, where Schmidt doesn’t want to hit Mercedes (opens in new tab), or Colossus’ initial reluctance to fight Angel Dust (opens in new tab) in Deadpool (opens in new tab). 

Time to point out the obvious: if some girl is trying to whack your head in with a baseball bat, it’s alright to fight back. For whatever reason, for some fighting women who are pretty ok with fighting you seems to be one of those old weird chivalry rules that hasn’t quite gone away yet. I sincerely hope that if any of us were faced with Mickey and Lou from Far Cry New Dawn (opens in new tab), Doom (opens in new tab)’s Olivia Pierce, Irene Engel from Wolfenstein 2 (opens in new tab), God of War (opens in new tab)’s Valkyries, or Lady Butterfly from Sekiro (opens in new tab): Shadows Die Twice, we’d be ok with shedding some blood in the name of survival. 

Monstrous mobs

This goes far beyond just low-level female and male mobs though, and into the depiction of monsters and the monstrous in video games. Although with some creatures it’s almost impossible to tell their gender due to their androgynous appearance – like Devil May Cry 5 (opens in new tab)’s Hell Atenora or Metro Exodus (opens in new tab)’ humanimals – other games seem to incline more towards having a majority of monsters with masculine physical qualities. Take Outlast (opens in new tab) and Outlast 2 (opens in new tab), for example. Even though the second game had horrific female enemies like Val and Marta, the Heretics that you fought near the end of the game are all men, as evidenced by their almost-naked bodies and, ahem, genitalia. Then Outlast only had male enemies, despite there being a female ward at Mount Massive Asylum. 

Helwalkers, Trolls, and Draugr in God of War all have male physical characteristics too (broad shoulders, slim hips), plus in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (opens in new tab) Lynels, as just one example, are all evidently buff lion centaur dudes. Depicting most monsters as having typically male qualities is limiting to say the least. Although they look cool as heck in a kind of horrifying way, monsters can and should have female characteristics too, like God of War’s Revenants or Left 4 Dead 2 (opens in new tab)’s Spitter and Witch special infected. By the way, those two examples also prove that women can be monstrous without using their gender as the reason for their monstrosity, which is unfortunately the category that enemies like Marguerite Baker from Resident Evil 7 (opens in new tab) fall into, with her twisted form seemingly relying on a twisted mockery of pregnancy (opens in new tab) to disgust us. 

Read more

The best upcoming new games of 2019 (opens in new tab) (and beyond)

And yeah, I know my entire argument can be simplified into ‘let me kill more women in video games, dammit’, but I’m ok with that. You want to support a tyrant? A cult leader? You can, no matter what’s between your legs! Including women among those low-level mobs undermines the idea that women can’t be aggressors, and helps to combat the sexist idea that women can’t be violent. A notion like that harms both genders, and who knows, this could just be a small step towards men being treated as women’s equals in other bits of real life too. Since we’ve started to talk more about equality between the sexes it’s no coincidence that current trends indicate men are feeling more able to open up about being the victims of violence: reports of sexual offences against men having tripled in the last 10 years (opens in new tab), and reports of men being domestically abused have risen (opens in new tab) also. Having a balanced depiction of generic, evil men and women in video games might seem like a trivial point, but it’s small things like this that end up making it easier for all of us to be treated equally. 

If you want to know what’s going on this week, here’s our pick of the week’s best TV, movies, and games (May 6-12) (opens in new tab), or look below to see it in video form!

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Invisible, all-seeing and all-powerful, the director is a weight on your mind throughout each chapter, however reassuring your surroundings, and however hale and hearty your gang of gun-toting human Survivors may be. This is a brilliant gambit not just because the result is a ferociously unpredictable co-op game, perfect for frequent play. It also demonstrates how interactive art can reinvigorate conventions beloved of older media, by taking well-worn devices – the rasp of violin strings when something ghastly squelches out of a sideroom, the miraculous yet expected discovery of a shotgun in a basement – and reorganising them on the fly.

In terms of the blow by blow of combat and survival, Left 4 Dead is frustrating to write about because its moving parts are so cleanly and cleverly meshed that they’re hard to analyse in isolation. The temptation is to bumble off on a series of anecdotes, rather than dissect the mechanisms that give rise to them – that time everybody found themselves dangling off the same rooftop by their fingertips, for instance, or that time a lone Survivor made it all the way to a campaign’s end, only for a rogue Smoker to snatch her up as she ran for the helipad.

It’s also a game that manages the trick of amassing complexity and variety around simple concepts, without diluting their charm. Take the four Special infected, playable in the game’s competitive multiplayer. Each handles in a unique way – the Hunter is a hyperactive panther in a hoodie, the Tank a rotting Hulk – but they’re all meditations on the same core function: separate the human players from each other as they move through the level, then pick off them off one by one. The Boomer causes Survivors to scatter for fear of being showered in zombie-attracting stomach acids. The Hunter is there to ambush gung-ho types and those who make a desperate break for the exit. The Smoker’s job is abduct Survivors during bigger brawls, suffocating them while friends are busy fending off the horde. And the Tank’s role is to soak up precious bullets and smash people out of formation so that other Specials can run them down.

The exception to the divide-and-conquer rule is the Witch, a sadistically zero-sum piece of enemy design (thankfully not playable in PvP) who appears near building entrances or mid-corridor, sobbing hysterically. Stray too close, and she’ll cut you to pieces in a heartbeat. This naturally entails a drop in tempo, as you tiptoe along the wall one by one, or cautiously nose around for side-routes – and while you’re picking your way past, the Director may be sneaking up behind you with an army of common infected. It’s a magnificent interweaving of priorities and pressures.

You could argue that Left 4 Dead is all the zombie game you’d ever need: the Director’s underhandedness, together with the choice of strategies afforded by the layouts and each special Infected’s abilities, make for a co-op shooter that still feels fresh after your hundredth playthrough. Excellent though it proved, the second game wasn’t able to build on the formula in a revolutionary fashion. Nevertheless, I’d absolutely love to play the long-rumoured threequel, which is reportedly in development for the next generation of Valve’s Source engine.

For one thing, the zombie genre at large has progressed since Turtle Rock’s game hit shelves in ways that might benefit from the AI Director’s attention – it came out before The Walking Dead TV series, before Telltale’s video game adaptations of the same property, and before the mighty DayZ. There’s something to be said for a change of backdrop, too: a Left 4 Dead that takes place in a picturesque European city, perhaps. I don’t know about you, but the idea of whisking the arms off a pugnacious stiff while roving the cobbled streets of Cologne has a certain appeal.

Beyond that, we need Left 4 Dead back because there’s still nothing on offer that scratches quite the same itch, as abundant as wave-based zombie survival modes have become. I’d say we need a new Left 4 Dead more, even, than Valve’s other hotly coveted sequel, the borderline imaginary Half-Life 3. Many a first-person odyssey has riffed on Half-Life’s level design, toolset and narrative beats, from Bioshock, through the Thief, series to Metro and even Halo. By contrast, Left 4 Dead’s only real imitator (the upcoming HUNT: Horrors of the Gilded Age aside) is Turtle Rock’s spiritual successor Evolve, a predatorial offworld adventure of huge ambition and richness that never quite coalesces into something amazing.

Perhaps above all, Left 4 Dead deserves resurrection because, as frantic and unhinged as the action can be, it’s also one of the most layman-friendly games ever made – an emissary of sorts to the world beyond our industry. That reliance on shlocky cliche means that even a total game-o-phobe can work out what’s going on, given a passing familiarity with B-movies – one of my sisters, a resolute non-gamer, used to watch as my brother and I put the Survivors through their paces, laughing along with us when we fell victim to the game’s machinations. It’s rare to come across a title that straddles the gap between industries and disciplines this smartly, at once revelling in the legacy of cinema while making a case for the video game as an artform.

It’s this balance between brains, depth, possibility and accessibility that makes Left 4 Dead so important. With Evolve both simplifying and over-complicating things – focusing down the threat, while replacing the immaculate Director with unreliable human intelligence and a good deal of random environmental hazards – and zombie co-op in games now represented largely by a, well, horde of identikit horde modes, we need Left 4 Dead back.

We need it back to remind us just how special undead survival really can be in the right hands, and hell, to remind us just how special the hands at Turtle Rock and/or Valve can be. In order to justify its existence, Half-Life 3 needs to evolve the FPS in the same way that its predecessor did. That’s an almost unattainable goal, and certainly a very long-term development prospect if it even is possible. Revitalising the half-dead corpse of one of gaming’s finest co-op campaigns though, for a generation now obsessed with zombies, survival, and connected worlds? That resurrection is all too possible.

The post Forget Half-Life 3, I need a Left 4 Dead resurrection appeared first on Game News.

AI companions tend to come in a couple different flavors. There’s the true companions, versatile and interesting characters who really add something to the experience, like Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite or Alyx from Half-Life 2. Next are the harmless annoyances, who aren’t great to have around but don’t get in the way–Ashley Graham has the good sense to keep her head down, and Navi has some alright advice here and there. And then there are the AI companions who actively make the game worse by existing. From charging headfirst into enemy bullets to using up your precious resources while you shriek in rage, they seem deadset on making EVERY level the “hell level.”

In (dis)honor of these hated, virtual hanger-ons, I’ve compiled a list of the worst AI companions gaming has to offer. Hoarders, pesterers, jerkfaces and straight-up dead weight–they’re all here, and they’re going to do their best to ruin your fun. It’s time for some naming and shaming!

Sheva (Resident Evil 5)

The thing about going into battle with someone is that you need to trust them. “With your life” is a pretty good benchmark, since your partner will hopefully be stopping bullets and knives from trying to occupy the same space as your internal organs. That’s why so many players hate Sheva, Chris Redfield’s partner in Resident Evil 5: she can’t be trusted. She consumes all your shared ammo and health items like its penny candy, and when you’re on your last legs and need her most, she has a penchant for standing around and letting nature run its course. She may not be a bad character per say, but it’s kind of hard to remember that when she’s watching you die like an unfeeling robot.

Tails (Sonic 2)

Bless Tails; he really does try. He just sucks so bad that failure is his only option, and he simply can’t keep up with Sonic “Gotta Go Fast” the Hedgehog. Sometimes that’s literal, like when he’s so slow on special stages that he regularly runs into bombs and ruins everything. Other times he’s just flat-out dense, like when he collapses platforms before Sonic can even touch them or runs straight into very obvious spikes. You want to give him a little credit, because he will nab a ring or two for you. But then he’ll promptly lose them doing something stupid, or drag you down when you try to help him, and you’ll suddenly wish Sonic would aim his fist bumps a little higher.

Duck Hunt Dog (Duck Hunt)

With man’s-best-friends like these, who needs enemies? Not Duck Hunt, where your only real enemy in the struggle for duck dominance is your son-of-a-bitch hunting dog. Rather than focusing on your victories like any good dog should, the Duck Hunt Dog spends more time ridiculing you for your failures. The mockery never ends. Every time one of the slippery fowl gets away from you, the Dog is there to undercut your self-esteem until you just can’t take it ANYMORE!!! You can’t shoot him either, to the disappointment of frustrated players everywhere. However, he is set to appear in the upcoming Super Smash Bros for Wii U/3DS, so revenge might finally be ours.

Roman (Grand Theft Auto 4)

Niko Bellic deals with some unpleasant things in GTA IV, brawling with vicious gang members and dealing with the popo after accidentally mowing down a group of tourists. But few things in Liberty City make your stomach drop like getting a phone call and hearing “HEEEEEY COOOOOOOOOUSIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN” blasting down the line. After the fifteenth time cousin Roman ask you to join him in an annoying bowling minigame, you start running people over out of rage instead of just for fun. It would almost be bearable, if that was the worst family failure you had to deal with. But when you have to kick the crap out of a bunch of guys to clean up your cousin’s mess? And then he calls you for the sixteenth time? Bowling balls aren’t all that’s gonna roll!

Survivors (Dead Rising)

I get that the zombie apocalypse can be stressful, especially when you find yourself locked in a shopping mall with a horde of the undead, packs of psychopaths, and no Orange Julius stands in sight. But as completely idiotic, frustrating, and useless as the survivors in Dead Rising can be, it looks like the zombies arent the only ones in want of brains. Most of your human cohorts are unbelievably slow, lagging behind you even when you’re carrying an injured party on you back. They’re virtually incapable of defending themselves even with a weapon, and have a nasty habit of walking into the thick of a zombie pack and expecting you to get them out. Sure, you can leave particularly infuriating survivors behind, but that hurts your overall score, and the one you left for dead could be replaced by someone equally useless!

Survivors, again (Left 4 Dead)

Speaking of left for dead–sorry, Left 4 Dead–those survivors don’t come out looking so good either when a fellow player isn’t controlling them. CPU versions of the zombie-blasting friends do their best to emulate human behavior, like a robot trying to calculate the square root of love, and do seem to get it right some of the time. But they’ll just as soon stare at you Sheva-like as you die, play lemming and leap off balconies, or get comfy in a toasty patch of fire. Forget any time you need to lay low and not draw attention–the AI knows that proper way to combat the horde is to run in with guns blazing. Oh, and never forget to walk directly up to a witch. Come on, they just need some love.

Superfly Johnson and Mikiko (Daikatana)

Granted, Daikatana itself is notoriously awful, and it’s AI characters could hardly escape the crapshoot. Still, Superfly Johnson (yes, that’s his actual name) and Mikiko go above and beyond, combining their powers to make this game as bad as it could possibly be. These two hit all the terrible AI touchstones: running directly into any stream of bullets you let loose, getting stuck on doors, and happily putting themselves in lethal situations where their deaths spell Game Over for you. They even spice it up a bit by being blithely hostile, occasionally shooting you in the midst of a firefight instead of getting shot themselves. Did I mention friendly fire is on? When Mikiko double-crosses you and steals the Sword-of-Ultimate-Power-or-Whatever at the end (I’d warn for spoilers, but who cares?), you almost start to wonder if these two were actually brilliant enemy combatants. But, no–they’re just that stupid.

Your comrades (Gears of War)

The characters in Gears of War are men and women of extremes. I don’t mean those times when they go mano-a-monster with the demonesque Locusts, but the part where they’re either really bad or way too good at it. In the first Gears game, your brothers in (h)arms spent a lot of time doing lethally stupid things, like meleeing a megaboss or standing on top of a campfire. Dom in particular is known for putting himself in deadly situations that are too dumb to comprehend. The developers saw the problem here and adjusted for Gears of War 3, by which I mean the game basically plays itself. Yes, replace my clunker van with a rocket I can’t ride. That’s so much better.

Natalya (GoldenEye 007)

Yes, Natalya, I know we have to go to the main control room. Now if you could do that without walking in front of all of my bullets, marching directly into enemy fire, or getting stuck on the goddamn door of the goddamn main control room, I would REALLY. FREAKING. APPRECIATE IT!!! The most frustrating part of an otherwise great game, Natalya is the epitome of rage-inducing escort bots. Progressing requires that you anticipate her slow, clunky movements and keep her from walking into the business end of a rifle like she thinks it’s shooting money and free ice cream. I’m pretty sure she leads a double life as a target dummy, which explains why she has such crap dexterity that she gets stuck on a doorframe.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT???

Even years after they first drove us into a frothing rage we haven’t forgotten these AI idiots, and I’m sure most of us would rather hang out with anyone else over them. A rabid wolverine, perhaps. What do you think? Does the memory of these horrible partners make you want to tear your hair out? Did we miss an odious offender? Tell us in the comments below, and share in our hate-pain. Hain. Yes.

Want more rage against hapless “helpers”? Check out the Top 7 video game sidekicks we hated. Would you rather sooth your wrathful heart? Check out 10 sidekicks that deserve their own game, because they’re not all useless.

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Naturally, our excitable minds immediately leap to the conclusion that it will be used on Half-Life 3 and that Valve isn’t ready to announce that game yet. Especially as the original Source was made for Half-Life 2 (opens in new tab). But then, we keep expecting Half-Life 3 at every major gaming event (opens in new tab) and it just never shows up.

The original Source Engine runs everything from Half-Life 2 and Portal (opens in new tab) to Team Fortress 2 (opens in new tab) and Left 4 Dead (opens in new tab). It was designed to be incrementally upgraded, which is why it’s powered top-end games for so long. But the base code is getting old, so the existence of a brand new, next-gen version is definitely worth getting excited about. More as soon as we have it.

Source: Develop (opens in new tab)

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For 560 MS Points.

Above: The Cold Stream campaign is not officially canon to the Left 4 Dead storyline, but at least it’s officially being published by Valve. A seal of approval if ever there was one

560 MS Points may be a nominal amount, but it is a price ‘in money’ for something PC owners can already get for free. We would admittedly rather have to pay for the content than not have it at all (as Left 4 Dead is ace), but it does seem a bit unfair.

But is it? Double Fine’s Tim Schafer famously went on the record to say it costs $40,000 (opens in new tab) just to release a patch for a game on Xbox Live (as well as having to jump through a load of hoops). But perhaps the most telling story is that of Valve itself, who famously said that all of their first party DLC would be free (opens in new tab) back in 2009. Left 4 Dead’s first DLC was indeed free, but the second pack was not. Valve’s Chet Faliszek said at the time (opens in new tab):

“We own our platform, Steam. Microsoft owns their platform. They wanted to make sure there’s an economy of value there.” When pressed about whether Microsoft effectively enforced the pricing, he added: “Well, they helped us get the first one out for free. We had the one DLC out for free. And I think… they have to look and say, wow, we’re kind of being unfair to everybody else if these guys can do that.

So it’s more likely a case of Microsoft wanting people to pay for DLC on their service than Xbox owners getting a bum deal from Valve. Fair enough, of course – XBLA is not a charity. And besides, you won’t just get the Cold Stream campaign for your money. You also get ports of four campaigns from the original Left 4 Dead – namely Crash Course, Death Toll, Dead Air and Blood Harvest, plus the ability to use all the mutations in multiplayer.

Above: You do need to own ‘The Passing’ DLC if you’re playing on Xbox to access Mutations

If you’re still grumpy and wondering why it’s also hitting 360 a week later than the PC and Mac versions, it’s due to the ‘title update’ for L4D2 that’s coming at the same time. Apparently it took longer than anticipated to get that through Microsoft’s certification process, and the DLC won’t work without the update. It’s a whole other world that we’re pleased we don’t have to worry about – we can just play the results. Even if it is for 560 MS Points.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Source: OXM (opens in new tab)

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Yesterday rumor mongers came up with an especially enticing little morsel of gaming news. The rumor floating around was that Overkill, the studio behind the co-op bank heist shooter, PAYDAY, was working with Valve on developing a prequel to the Left 4 Dead series.

Honestly, the rumor seemed a bit sketchy at the time so we decided not to write about it until an official word came in. Today, Chet Faliszek of Valve announced (opens in new tab) to the world that there is no such collaboration in the works.

I don’t want to give it away, because we want the community to explore and find it, but I want to make sure that people don’t think the prequel is coming,” said Faliszek told PCGamesN. “If that happens, then it will make this other thing we’re doing feel uncool, when the thing we’re doing is really cool. I mean, the problem is, if you make a rumour, and you can make the rumour anything, you’re going to make the rumour really, really cool. And that makes everything else sound less cool.”

The idea of a collaboration between Valve – with their endless resources and ingenuity – and Overkill with their obvious talent for unique co-op experiences, had many fans worked into a tizzy. However, Faliszek says that the collaboration is more akin to Team Fortress 2, where you’ll see other games weapons incorporated into the play. Not that the collaboration is exactly like that, but he says it’s similar. Whatever that means.

We’ll be sure to report on any news regarding the actual facts of the Overkill/Valve collaboration. Even if it’s minor in scope, we’ll still be excited to see what they’re doing together.

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