Valve Struggling with Cross-Play Between L4D DLC and L4D2

Will you be able to play Left 4 Dead‘s new DLC, Crash Course, in Left 4 Dead 2? Valve’s working on a solution for cross-compatibility, but they admit that they’re “struggling.”

While those who are ardent in their refusal to support Valve’s Left 4 Dead sequel will settle for enjoying the new DLC campaign, those who don’t have a problem with Left 4 Dead 2 have probably got to be wondering if they’ll be getting a taste of that new content without having to jump back into the first Left 4 Dead. Well, Valve’s working on it, but it’s not easy.

“We’re still struggling with how interoperability is going to work, right now,” Valve’s Chet Faliszek said. “When we talk about L4D, the story stuff – there’s actually a lot of character dialogue that’s based in each map.”

In addition to having to replicate all that dialogue, there’s the problem of the game’s stories not being exactly compatible. “We have a world sketched out and we have an understanding of where everything is and what’s going on, you know, so story-wise it wouldn’t make much sense,” Faliszek ssaid. “But equally there’s a whole group of the fans who don’t care. So we could put new characters in old places and old characters in new places.”

Yeah, I really don’t think fans are going to get too bent out of shape about breaking the lore if the content stays the same in essence. Don’t count on anything, though: Faliszek says that Valve “haven’t fixed on what we’re doing yet, so we don’t want to talk about it and make people think something is going to happen when we don’t know ourselves.”

This issue could exemplify the gap between how the public perceives Left 4 Dead 2 and how Valve sees it, on a technical level. The difference between the first game and the sequel is really quite larger than meets the eye. “But I think people don’t understand that, L4D2 versus L4D – we redid so many systems,” Faliszek said. “When you look at why the authoring tools took so long, it’s because it wasn’t a simple Source game, like Team Fortress or Episode Two where we use the exact same tools.”

[Via Edge-Online]