Edge recently scored an interview with Chet Faliszek from Valve about the recently announced Left 4 Dead DLC (Downloadable Content), as well as compatibility between L4D and Left 4 Dead 2, coming to PC ans Xbox 360 on November 17th. To clarify, there will almost certainly not be a PS3 version of L4D2.

And because I know how you zombies hate to click links, here are a couple of highlights to whet your appetite for brains…er, knowledge.

“Can you talk us through the DLC?

It’s a campaign called Crash Course, continuing from when No Mercy ends up until when Death Toll begins – we give you the intermediate story. It has the co-op Campaign, and also has Survival, but the focus is Versus. One of the problems with Versus – well, perhaps it’s not quite a ‘problem’ because there are actually equal player minutes between Versus and co-op – but it’s a two hour game. And we look at our statistics and we see that players ideally want to play between 20 and 30 minutes. So we wanted to create a Versus campaign which you could play through in 30 minutes – a quick competitive thing that slots in between TV shows. It’s a two map campaign with a finale, so it’s almost a three map campaign. Obviously if the teams are bad and get wiped quicker then it goes quicker. We’ve also added some things – you can now see your teammates’ statuses and their recharge timers. The world also stays exactly the same between team changes, so there are no complaints about it being imbalanced any more. We’ve actually been working on this a bit, but we’re finally close enough that we’re comfortable to talk about it.”

Excellent idea. I don’t kill nearly enough zombies to meet my quota, and it’s primarily because I often don’t have a huge block of time to dedicate to the task. Bravo, I say. Bravo.

“Do you foresee L4D evolving into a platform rather than a series of discrete games?

There’s something about that that makes sense for this world. But I think people don’t understand that, L4D2 versus L4D – we redid so many systems. 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. We used new tools here, we used a new file system, new dependencies – and we had to redesign all these things to work in this new world. But now we’ve got this base so that in the future everything will work with that.

It’s hard to predict what the future of the franchise will be, because we don’t really think that way. You’d think that we’d have a big room where we map these things out in a scientific way, but it’s more about what the team wants to do, what the community’s like, the feedback we get. I mean, early on updates for L4D were about making the game that you had actually worked the way people were playing it. The changes we made, like the melee fatigue, were based on watching people play and community feedback. We’re going to keep doing that with L4D2.”

Good news for the mod community. Even if Valve someday halts active development of new L4D titles and content, modders will still have this platform. Based on what we’ve seen so far, I think we’re all in for a treat or two.

So, are you excited? Are you still protesting L4D2‘s creation? Do you think the new campaign is a great idea, or just a cheap way to cover up Valve’s earlier promises on L4D content? Tell us in the comments!