ABOUT Left 4 Dead 2
The story takes place in Savannah, Georgia, after the events in The Sacrifice. The four survivors climb up the roof to witness the last rescue helicopter leave the rooftop of The Vannah. They decide to go to a mall, where a second evacuation point is located. While on their way, they learn each others names: Ellis, Coach, Rochelle and Nick. After an encounter with Whitaker, the survivors enter the mall to discover that it is overrun, with all CEDA agents at the center either dead or infected. The group enters the mall's atrium to discover Jimmy Gibbs Jr.'s stock car and, following Ellis's plan, fuel up the car to break out of the mall where they head to New Orleans, rumored to be the last standing city in America.
ABOUT Left 4 Dead 2
After being rescued, the helicopter pilot becomes infected, prompting Nick to shoot him and cause the helicopter to crash. The Survivors exit the wrecked helicopter to find that they have landed in a bayou. They discover a small village, where the villagers decided to fend for themselves, but ultimately failed as they were overrun. Working their way through the swamp, the survivors come across a crashed plane, dead military paratroopers, and infected swamp villagers. The previous survivors had informed any passerby to head to the Plantation House. When the survivors head there, they find a radio, which they use to contact Virgil for rescue. After fending off the horde, Virgil blasts the Plantation gate open to allow the survivors to escape on his boat before the horde could overwhelm them.
Virgil drops the group off at New Orleans, where Coach is immediately reinvigorated as they see fighter jets in the sky, revealing that the military has not abandoned the city yet; Nick however is skeptical about their presence. They decide that the bridge in the distance is the best chance of survival, but discover the corpses of non-infected people on the way. The survivors suspect that the military took over CEDA's pitiful attempts to contain the situation as they find themselves in an area being bombed by the military, and quicken their pace to the bridge. They interrupt a transmission on the bridge between the two military personnel: Papa Gator and Rescue 7, who suspect that the Survivors are Carriers. Rescue 7 is prepared to carry the Carriers, and Papa Gator informs the Survivors that they are lucky as the Military had just left the area, and that they must reach the other side of the bridge for rescue. The Survivors fight through the Infected amassed on the bridge and reach Rescue 7. As he carries the Survivors out, the fighter jets bomb the bridge to prevent the Infected from leaving the city and the pilot takes the Survivors out to a military cruise ship at sea. [3]
The game made its world premiere at E3 2009 with a trailer during the Microsoft press event.[4] Prior to release, it received mixed critical and community reactions, and attracted an unusually high volume of controversy about its graphic content. In response, alterations were made to the cover art,[5][6] but both Australia and Germany refused to rate the unmodified edition at the time of release.[7] Despite this, the game was met with positive critical reviews, and is considered to be one of the greatest video games ever made.
To enable situational awareness of other Survivors, players are shown the health and status of their fellow survivors. If a player does not have direct sight of another Survivor (e.g. a wall is blocking their view of the others), they will be shown the Survivor's highlighted silhouette. The Survivors are also susceptible to friendly fire, forcing players to exercise caution when shooting or swinging their weapons.[13] As Survivors take damage, they move more slowly; if a Survivor's health drops to zero, they are incapacitated and left to fight off the Infected using a handgun until rescued by another Survivor. If a Survivor dies, they remain dead until the next level, unless revived by a defibrillator, or, in Campaign or Singleplayer mode, reappear in a "Rescue Closet" to be freed by other Survivors.[14] Should all Survivors die or be incapacitated, the game will end, at which point the players may restart that chapter or quit the game.
Left 4 Dead 2 also features a Realism mode, which can be enabled at any difficulty for either Campaign or Versus. This mode removes some of the video-game aspects from the gameplay: Survivors cannot see each other's silhouettes, and dead teammates can only be revived with defibrillators and will not respawn later in the level.[16] Weapons and other items will only glow when the player is within a few feet, forcing the players to search the levels more thoroughly. Headshots to enemies deal more damage, whereas limb or body shots require more shots.[17] In addition, the Witch enemy can kill any Survivor she would have normally incapacitated (on difficulties other than Easy). Designed to force players to work closely together and rely on voice communication, Valve created Realism mode to give players a way "to be challenged as a team" without having to increase the difficulty level of the game.[16]
Left 4 Dead 2 features a new cast of four human survivors: Coach (voiced by Chad Coleman), a stocky high school football coach with a bad knee (although this does not affect gameplay);[40][46] Nick (voiced by Canadian singer Hugh Dillon), a pessimistic gambler and con artist;[41][47] Rochelle (voiced by Rochelle Aytes), a low-level production assistant for a local television station that was reporting on the pandemic;[39][48] and Ellis (voiced by Eric Ladin), a friendly and talkative redneck mechanic[49] who often talks about his friend Keith and their many misadventures.[3][43] In addition to the four playable characters, Left 4 Dead 2 also features two supporting characters in the form of Whitaker (voiced by Dayton Callie),[50] a gun store owner, and Virgil (voiced by Randall Newsome), a Cajun boat captain who appears (voice only) in the game's final three campaigns. Two soldiers heard in the final map of The Parish, voiced by Bob Gunter and Bill Huggins, round out the NPC cast.
Left 4 Dead 2 opens in Dead Center (set in Savannah, Georgia), where the four survivors find themselves abandoned on a hotel roof by rescue helicopters. They decide to head for the local mall, where a second CEDA evacuation point is located.[54] After a brief encounter with a gun store owner, Whitaker,[50] the survivors discover that the mall is overrun, with all CEDA agents having become either dead or infected as well. Ellis helps the group use a stock car to break out of the mall[8] and travel towards New Orleans, rumored to be the last standing city in America.[55]
At the start of the Dark Carnival campaign, the four survivors find the highway ahead completely blocked by ditched vehicles, and are forced to travel on foot through an abandoned (but still operating) amusement park.[42] After navigating their way to the park stadium, Coach devises a plan to use a large-scale light show on the concert stage, which had been abandoned by a rock band called The Midnight Riders, in order to signal a helicopter pilot for rescue.[59] After being rescued, they later discover that their pilot is infected. When the pilot starts attacking them, Nick is forced to kill him (echoing a similar situation in Left 4 Dead),[60] causing the chopper to crash into a bayou, which acts as the setting for Swamp Fever.[61] Working their way through the swamps, the group comes across a crashed airplane, dead military paratroopers, and isolated swamp villages which had held out against the infected but were eventually overrun. After spending the morning fighting through the swamp, the group arrives at a plantation mansion and make radio contact with Virgil, a Cajun boat captain who can assist them; however, his boat begins to run low on diesel fuel on the way to New Orleans.[62][63]
As a tumultuous hurricane approaches (the titular Hard Rain of the subsequent campaign), the survivors go ashore at Ducatel in Mississippi, after which they make their way through an abandoned (and Witch-infested) sugarcane mill to a gas station to get diesel fuel,[64] and return to signal Virgil using the neon sign of a burger chain restaurant.[65] In the final campaign, The Parish, Virgil drops the group off at New Orleans, where the military appears to be evacuating civilians across a bridge.[66] On the way there, the four discover the city overrun with infected and that the military is actually leaving the city.[67][68][69] The group manages to reach the bridge, where they make contact with the military. Judging from their dialogue, the military pilots suspect the survivors to be "carriers",[70] similar to the original survivors of Left 4 Dead. After securing their rescue helicopter, the survivors lower and cross the bridge, escaping on the helicopter just as the bridge is destroyed.[70] While the survivors' fate is left unclear after this point, the game's writer Chet Faliszek stated in a 2009 interview that the military took survivors on cruise ships to the Caribbean in an attempt to escape the infection.[71][72]
Left 4 Dead 2 contains about 7,800 unique lines of dialogue, a 40% increase over Left 4 Dead.[76] The writers designed the characters and selected appropriate voice actors who had natural accents for their lines and allowed the actors freedom to help authenticate the roles. They would attend recording sessions for the voice actors and allow them to ad-lib their lines for their characters, often getting new ideas for character dialogue to be recorded later, particularly in the case of Ellis (voiced by Eric Ladin) and Nick (Hugh Dillon).[77] Randall Newsome, the voice of the boat captain Virgil, was a local actor from Louisiana who naturally spoke Cajun and helped to embellish the role better than the writers could.[77] Faliszek wanted to include a "no-nonsense" woman from a Department of Motor Vehicles, but this character did not make the cut.[74] The developers solicited several bands to include them in the game: Depeche Mode responded eagerly, and allowed Valve to use its music and other imagery in the game, such as on Rochelle's T-shirt.[78] 041b061a72