Left4Dead
As I bookmarked the l4d blog on my delicious account, I added some notes and just kept going:
Look at it - 4 distinct characters, great theme, co-op gameplay, created by Valve, presumably polished and built for short bursts of fun, this game looks freakishly poised for success. Just imagine, for a minute, what it would be like it they manage to turn the massively succesful Counter Strike into a massively successful, mainstream, accessible shooter.
Since I always like to draw some lines around relisations like these, from the past to the present and into the future, it’s easy to see why I write such a uncharacteristically long delicious note - Counter Strike was one of the first online shooters, but never quite made it to the MMO stage. At the moment, it feels like MMOs are scaling back from massive persistance into a more focussed, together-online approach. Left 4 Dead looks like it could take Counter Strike to a new generation, on consoles, and popularise the 30-seconds-of-fun ideal that Halo is renowned for.
Looking to the future, World of Warcraft is the biggest, freakish MMO in existence. What if someone were to rework WoW to be more populist, accessible and casual. Wouldn’t that be at least equally as profitible?
