Left 4 Dead 2 was built from the ground up and used material and ideas (used & unused) from the original left 4 dead. Left 4 dead 2 remained the same over the course of its development with few to no changes made until the games release. In a nut shell, most of the concepts that weren’t incorporated into the original Left 4 Dead has been incorporated into Left 4 Dead 2. >> Read the full article!
Left 4 Dead 2 was built from the ground up and used material and ideas from the development of the original Left 4 Dead. Left 4 D ead 2 remained largely the same over the course of its development with very few changes made until the game’s release. In a nut shell, most of the concepts that weren’t incorporated into the original Left 4 Dead were incorporated into Left 4 Dead 2.
Disclaimer: What is documented in this analysis is quoted from left4dead.wikia.com. Most of the images are from IGN.com and the beta & leftover item images are from www.Left4dead.wikia.com
[Article by DCodes 7, corrections by Nate Edwards]
The survivors changed (somewhat) over the course of Left 4 Dead 2’s development, but didn’t change as much as the survivors from Left 4 Dead 1 had. Left 4 Dead 2’s survivors changed solely in terms of color scheme and back-story.
For example, the developers changed coach’s shirt from a yellow & turquoise color scheme in the beta to a purple & yellow color scheme in the final.
Rochelle also received a color change as well. In the beta her shirt was a bright orange T-Shirt, whereas in the final version, her shirt was a pink Depeche Mode T-shirt.
What we have here is an unreleased game by Irrational Games, known as Division 9. The premise for this game is similar to the Left 4 Dead franchise, it featured a co-op survival style gameplay, in a mass city with Zombies as the main antagonists. It also featured complex FPS elements such as game changing missions, one instance being a situation where you could turn on a power generator that would give you light for any night time mission.
It began as a joke amongst the developers, having just finished SWAT 4, this game would be like a Swat 5, jokingly referred to as the Zombie Swat. Sadly, the company, going through some trouble at the time was unable to pitch the idea to the buyers in time, having only a week to prepare a demo. They did well, and were ready to sell it to Vivendi but they had just sold the company to Take-Two. Other concerns were the assumption that the zombie genre wouldn’t be as popular as it was in the target year.
If production had gone as planned it’s release would be around the same time as Bioshock. Thanks to Irrational games for this news (more info on the project can be found at Game Informer)
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As we can read from this article from Kotaku, it seems that Valve decided to cut a couple of characters from the original Left 4 Dead 2 cast, changing them with 2 other ones that look more appropiate:
Two characters that didn’t make it into the final version were a female DMV worker-amiable, not stereotypically surly-and a fireman, someone who would know how to expertly use those axes players can now pick up for melee attacks.
But the scrapped DMV employee just wasn’t turn out to be as interesting as originally hoped, dashing Faliszek’s dreams of being able to appeal to real-life DMV workers that he “was the guy who put a nice DMV employee into our game.”
That firefighter just didn’t seem to fit into the world of Left 4 Dead, Faliszek said, not like the new cast, a group of Survivors who will have a more noticeable arc.
Sadly they did not released any image of the 2 removed characters…
