We went over the current status of the game, the changes made to Versus mode over the past year, how long we might have to wait for another TF2 update, and why vomiting can be more fun than anything you'll do this year.

Shack: As far as the game's status, the Xbox 360 version is essentially complete?

Doug Lombardi: Yeah.

Shack: Is it done-done?

Doug Lombardi: It's into [certification], yeah. So we're waiting to hear if we're done. [laughs]

Shack: And there's just a little work left on the PC version?

Doug Lombardi: The PC version, we're just putting the finishing touches on it. You know, doing final testing, putting polish on the matchmaking, and getting ready to go. We announced the pre-orders today on Steam. So yeah, we're getting down to those last little.. putting polish on stuff, getting the demo ready.

Shack: And the demo will be out around Halloween?

Doug Lombardi: We're going to announce a date before Halloween, and the demo will come out in early November.

Shack: So you guys were working on Versus mode right up to the end, I take it?

Doug Lombardi: Yeah, yeah, Versus was sort of the last thing that came together. We had the survivor stuff obviously very playable since QuakeCon of last year, and had been taking that out on the road and showing that quite a bunch. And Versus stuff was something that we spent a lot of time on at the end.

It tends to sort of be that at the end of the projects, the dedicated multiplayer part comes together, because you're really using a lot of the staff. Once you have the Boomer nailed, and the levels nailed, then it really makes more sense to try and attack that portion of the game. Before you really understand what the Boomer behavior is gonna be, if you try to start designing the Versus stuff, you're going to end up doing a lot of work that's going to get thrown away.

So we sort of deferred that. We had the other key elements of the game, the building blocks and the foundation laid, and then sort of added that wing of the house if you will, that is Versus mode.

Shack: And Versus was always around in some form.

Doug Lombardi: Yeah, the whole game, much different from other games that we've done before, the whole game has been pretty darn playable all along.

Now, I mean, it was rough around the edges certainly--and the interface in particular on the Versus stuff, we waited a long time to work on what you were seeing, and what the feedback devices were on the Infected side. It's really hard to show that to the public, so we really didn't show that too much until recently.

Whereas the survivor stuff was more straightforward. The UI was somewhat akin to Counter-Strike, we were always able to lean on that. People would sort of have that immediacy to understand what they were doing, and what the bigger chunk of the game was going to be, which is the survivor game.

Shack: What has changed in Versus since we last saw it?

Doug Lombardi: There's a bunch of stuff. The interface is really the biggest thing, with the players able to access the--we just heard some screams in the other room, there's a bunch of people out there that have been playing for less than an hour I think. So hopefully we were successful there, to be able to get people into the game and to understand it.

The other thing that came in was that we were trying to figure out how are we going to make the game viable for competitive play. And that was really the thing that came together in the last few months here that made us go, okay, cool, now we've got something that's a fun game and not sort of this "idea" if you will.

Shack: When you say that, are you referring to the back-and-forth element of Versus?

Doug Lombardi: Yeah, so what we did was we took two of the Survivor campaigns, No Mercy which is the hospital mission and Blood Harvest which is the cornfield mission. And we said, okay, there's five maps in each mission, and what we'll do is, you play as Survivor until the first safe house, or checkpoint if you will. Then you switch sides and you rewind to the beginning and let the other team play Survivor to try and get that far. And there's points that are given to each team when they play as the Survivors only.

So it's almost like an offense-defense thing. You get the ball when you're on the Survivor side, and when you're on the Infected side you're just trying to keep the points down. And then you swap positions, and you get this Us vs. Them, when the scoreboard all of a sudden comes into play, and you have this cool competitive element that you can sort of wrap your head around.

It's not just, "I want to play boss Infected because I'm a griefer and that's my only purpose in life." We wanted to wrap something more around it and say, "If you complete this you won something." The teams have to switch each side so there's more of a, I'll use the really obvious word, it's more of a game now, rather than a "multiplayer mode."

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Shack: What I love about Versus is that--you know, I've played Counter-Strike a lot, but when I play it I can get ridiculously frustrated. But Versus is mostly just hilarious. It's really funny.

Doug Lombardi: Yeah, there's this slapstick quality to the game that really comes to life on Versus mode. When you're playing as a Boomer, your best shot is to vomit on somebody and maybe see the horde come in before you get taken out. You're not going to be around too long.

It's funny how something that simple and insane-sounding is fun and so satisfying. It's really something different than you've done in a game before, and I think that's part of the charm of it. It's like, "Wow, I vomited on all these people and I get to watch all these zombies and rip them to shreds." You know, there's this sense of a little bit of the accomplishment thing, but then there's also this slapstick moment where it's like, "I vomited on him."

Shack: Are you trying to get these elements of the game across in the marketing of the game?

Doug Lombardi: There are a lot of ideas to get across in the game. There's this idea of the AI Director and the replayable co-op game. The idea of really punishing people into submission to play as a team, in some ways that we did with Counter-Strike where we made you really think about your actions, because once you're out, you were out for the round.

So there's a lot of different messages that we're trying to get out there. Showing the game a lot more than we've done previously is one tactic that we're doing. Doing a demo before we release the game, oddly enough, as many games as we've done all these years, it's the first time a demo has come out before the game.

We really did that because, you know, Chet and I have been traveling, we've seen you at a bunch of these events--people have a reaction to the game when they play it. You tell them about the game, you show them a screenshot, you show them a movie, and they're like, "That looks pretty cool." They play the game, and they're like, "Wow, this is one of the best games coming this year."

So the idea of the demo is to really put it in people's hands, give them the experience from the Survivor side to see what it's all about. They'll meet all the monsters in the brief session of the demo, and hopefully through that they'll go, "Oh wow, I want to play the full game because I want to play as the monsters as well."

Shack: So it's just Survivor side for the demo?

Doug Lombardi: Just Survivor side for the demo. And it'll be the first, it'll be a special cut of the first two maps from No Mercy which is the hospital map. It'll be playable 1-4 people, online/offline. On the 360 you'll be able to play co-op and split-screen.

Shack: I was reading that a large portion of the Team Fortress 2 team moved onto Left 4 Dead to work on Versus?

Doug Lombardi: Yeah, yeah, Robin Walker and Adrian Finol, and a lot of the guys that are on the TF2 team pitched in at the end. People move around a lot.

I mean, Robin was the lead on Episode One, and after that he took a break from TF2 for a while, and came back to it after some other people had been working on it without him there for a while, and then he sort of re-engaged on that. Josh Weir who was working on Episode Two worked a lot on Left 4 Dead, and is moving on to other projects outside of the Episode staff.

So it's really open at Valve. If folks are making a valuable contribution to whatever project they're working on then that's what matters. It's not like, "Oh, you worked on Half-Life last time so you need to work on it this time." That doesn't make any sense. And it seems to be that you get more of a freshness on the team when people have a chance to move around between different projects, especially when the projects are different in orientation. Like, Team Fortress 2 is a radically different development process than a Portal or a Half-Life, so it keeps people--keeps their minds exercised and fresh.

Shack: Speaking of Team Fortress 2, do you know when we'll see the next update?

Doug Lombardi: Well, it won't be this year. [laughs] It won't be this year. But we're going to keep evolving TF2. And we want to bring all the stuff that's been done to date for the PC to the 360 guys. Once Left 4 Dead wraps, you'll hear us clamoring more about that.

Shack: Thanks Doug.

Left 4 Dead hits PC and Xbox 360 on November 18.