Left 4 Dead from Counter-Strike AI">Turtle Rock Studios and Valve is one of the most anticipated FPS titles this year. It is said to have a feel of Counter-Strike, only with a bit of a twist. Eurogamer was able to sit down with Valve's project manager Eric Johnson and marketing manager Doug Lombardi.

There hasn't been much info about Left 4 Dead but then we could literally see curiosities pique when we heard about zombies. The interview covered a number of things particularly the co-operative side of their titles. Left 4 Dead is a Turtle Rock developed game, built around Valve's Source engine and distributed over Steam. Basically, the development itself is as cooperative as the game itself.

According to Eric Johnson, co-operative games are not so easy to make as it seems as the experience for the members of a team are taken into account. When players get a single player experience out of the game "but at the same time nudging them fairly hard into playing cooperatively", then they know they've made a good co-op game. As for the zombies, Johnson said:

Mike [Booth, founder and head of Turtle Rock Studios] knew when he was designing the game that one of the things he wanted players to do was fight overwhelming odds. Zombies, or an infected strain that's gone wild, provides a pretty good fiction backdrop for that. We knew that part of what would make the game compelling for people emotionally was that kind of horror setting: us against the world, everything's attacking us including the world itself. It kind of gives you an automatic modifier for people's emotional state.

There are so many advantages with a first-person perspective, especially in single-player: making the player feel they are that person, telling the story through the eyes of the character. But when we think about the Half-Life games, we don't think about them as shooters, we think of them as telling a story where you're the star.