drexer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
drexer) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
scans_daily2010-09-14 10:58 pm
drexer) wrote in scans_daily2010-09-14 10:58 pm
Left 4 Dead: The Sacrifice - Part 1
As I suppose that a relatively sizable amount of the readers here might have some knowledge of videogames, I will just go for the short version.
Left 4 Dead, the 4 player co-op game created by Valve, has now started its release of a comic book story intended to link the events of the first game with the second.
Seeing as the first part was posted today, I do think a post here would be nice for discussion when considering some points.
First is of course the transition from the videogame medium to comic. Most of those occur normally as simply monetary tie-ins for the companies, and the quality wildly varies across the board usually to the low side. Valve on the other hand as a company usually very dedicated to their work and community, even mentioned in a recent PC Gamer interview that this project works as a way to explore avenues of their work; and mainly to create their own content on their story universe, as people invested in it(instead of the usual fate for books/movies/comics tie-ins when using separate authors).
Also to note, that this signifies the change from a semi-static story, as before each finale could be considered canon as played by the players(as long as everyone survived), and thus each story of it varied from person to person. with this, they are interchanging the dynamic dialog and actions of the game, for creating a fixed storyline in crucial story points. A risky trade-off, but necessary for the medium.
As I am already stretching a bit, I'll just leave here some final comments regarding this comic from Valve's president, Gabe Newell:
"So we’ve learned a lot by what we’ve done with TF2, and I’m a huge fan of the Left 4 Dead comic. I was a huge comic head, you know, Judge Dredd, what was Frank Miller’s samurai robot dude? (It was Ronin.) Yeah, all through the early 80’s I was really super heavily into comics, so I think the comic we’re doing is great.
It’s way darker than the stuff we’ve been doing on the TF2 side, and it’ll be super interesting to see how the community responds. If they love it, that’s great, if they hate it then it’s interesting. Even if it’s a failure, it’ll be an interesting failure. We’re taking risks on the art direction of the book, but first and foremost, it has to be able to work on its own, as a comic."
The first few prelude scenes are relative to the death of a character between L4D and L4D2, so I'll leave those for you to read.
The story pickups then on the finale of L4D's final campaign, intersecting it with scenes from Louis life before the game; this seems to be the probable future plan for all of this comic from the teaser images.
There is a great work on the before/after angle of the zombie apocalypse, both on the text/thought perspective and on the visual cues. This might be a classic zombie tale, but it is being told with immense care to its details. Also, Heavy Weapons Guy statuette. :D
Except that here the good finale note that we were left with at the end of the game suddenly turns sour. This is specially important to note, as even if this was written before it is very hard to implement in a game and still manage to make the player feel satisfatory after facing so many challenges.
Any other pages anyone might want to bring attention to? Or some other interesting game-to-comic transformations?
Sure hope that I diidn't screw up my first post here. :P
Left 4 Dead, the 4 player co-op game created by Valve, has now started its release of a comic book story intended to link the events of the first game with the second.
Seeing as the first part was posted today, I do think a post here would be nice for discussion when considering some points.
First is of course the transition from the videogame medium to comic. Most of those occur normally as simply monetary tie-ins for the companies, and the quality wildly varies across the board usually to the low side. Valve on the other hand as a company usually very dedicated to their work and community, even mentioned in a recent PC Gamer interview that this project works as a way to explore avenues of their work; and mainly to create their own content on their story universe, as people invested in it(instead of the usual fate for books/movies/comics tie-ins when using separate authors).
Also to note, that this signifies the change from a semi-static story, as before each finale could be considered canon as played by the players(as long as everyone survived), and thus each story of it varied from person to person. with this, they are interchanging the dynamic dialog and actions of the game, for creating a fixed storyline in crucial story points. A risky trade-off, but necessary for the medium.
As I am already stretching a bit, I'll just leave here some final comments regarding this comic from Valve's president, Gabe Newell:
"So we’ve learned a lot by what we’ve done with TF2, and I’m a huge fan of the Left 4 Dead comic. I was a huge comic head, you know, Judge Dredd, what was Frank Miller’s samurai robot dude? (It was Ronin.) Yeah, all through the early 80’s I was really super heavily into comics, so I think the comic we’re doing is great.
It’s way darker than the stuff we’ve been doing on the TF2 side, and it’ll be super interesting to see how the community responds. If they love it, that’s great, if they hate it then it’s interesting. Even if it’s a failure, it’ll be an interesting failure. We’re taking risks on the art direction of the book, but first and foremost, it has to be able to work on its own, as a comic."
The first few prelude scenes are relative to the death of a character between L4D and L4D2, so I'll leave those for you to read.
The story pickups then on the finale of L4D's final campaign, intersecting it with scenes from Louis life before the game; this seems to be the probable future plan for all of this comic from the teaser images.
There is a great work on the before/after angle of the zombie apocalypse, both on the text/thought perspective and on the visual cues. This might be a classic zombie tale, but it is being told with immense care to its details. Also, Heavy Weapons Guy statuette. :D
Except that here the good finale note that we were left with at the end of the game suddenly turns sour. This is specially important to note, as even if this was written before it is very hard to implement in a game and still manage to make the player feel satisfatory after facing so many challenges.
Any other pages anyone might want to bring attention to? Or some other interesting game-to-comic transformations?
Sure hope that I diidn't screw up my first post here. :P
no subject