New infected for Left4Dead

[Cowabungaa]

Slimer

A slow infected that secretes a sticky slime. The slimer can lay down a large puddle of the stuff by standing still and secreting it all at once, but the Slimer also leaves a trail of sticky footprints everwhere it goes. This slime can cover anything and slows down both survivors and infected as they pass through it, with the exception of the Tank and Witch.

It's melee attack can knock a survivor down, and if knocked down into the slime the survivor gets incapacitated has to be assisted up. The survivor can only use ONE pistol in this situation but the intital knock down won't cause the survivor to bleed out (unless the hit reduced the survivors health to 0).

When killed the slime will slowly bleed out of its corpse.

I find this one pretty damned fantastic tbh, I think it's one of the most balanced out there. Also, yes I think we might add some more special infected, but in return there should be a max of 4 infected up. So although the game might up with...10 types or something, but that just means that each time you can face a different team of zombies.
The ranged-attacker zombie is pretty awesome as well, think a zombie the size of a Tank with a crapload of holes in em where infected bats linger, and he can shoot them out like the hornet-plasmid in Bioshock. The balance would be that he would have no melee attack, like...arms mutated that way that they're useless or something.

 

[Asehujiko]

How to balance the survivors against this: 3rd tier weapons. M249 upgrade in the "dakka dakka" slot, .50cal as sniper and AA-12 for shotty. The first might need extended magazines to make its reload/shooting time balance out, i'm thinking of 250 rounds each with a reserve of 1000 rounds.

As for the infected, an infected soldier with a gatling cannon. Deals damage like the deployed one but also has the same spin up time and can only fire in bursts because of the immense recoil. Pimary attack is a 5 dmg melee, secondary is spin up ranged weapon, making alot of noise in the process and then attacking deals about 30 damage, similar to the tank. good in places where the survivors can't hear it coming but useless alone.

 

[N.K]

Lol, you know I'd never realised that smokers cut of team chat before. I know that sounds silly, but it just never occurred to me. Now I understand why I'm left hanging so often. Doh!

me too! maybe that's cause I usually play with people who are within a couple of feet of me and the in-game communication is usually deafened by the constant shouting

 

[starrman]

Trouble is that I think one of the reasons L4D works so well is that it only has three primary weapons. That means the gameplay stays clean and you actually have to aim at what you're trying to hit. You start including area effect weapons or power upgrades and it turns into a mess. The balance of zombie horde rampage and small survivor pocket is essential and I think introducing more or bigger weapons would hamper that.

 

[starrman]

I agree with all of that, which is why I said earlier that the boomer should be standard and in the post above that 'one' of the reasons it works is the weapon system. Certainly some of the ideas above would be incompatible with the game mechanics, but not all of them are without merit. To say otherwise would be to conclude that the game can't be improved and I think it could be.

I also think this thread is partly about seeing what interesting zombie concepts people can come up with and thereby in some way revealing what it is about the game which works so well, as it stands at the moment.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

One word. Arch-vile.

 

[wordsmith]

Trouble is that I think one of the reasons L4D works so well is that it only has three primary weapons. That means the gameplay stays clean and you actually have to aim at what you're trying to hit. You start including area effect weapons or power upgrades and it turns into a mess. The balance of zombie horde rampage and small survivor pocket is essential and I think introducing more or bigger weapons would hamper that.

It's not only about the weapons.

The infected are perfectly balanced as a whole.

You have the support infected which drags people around making a mess and delaying them which is called the smoker.

You have the basic, standard, DPSer infected which is the Hunter.

You have the no-go area of effect which is the boomer and he also serves as the key to make any kind of damage.

And then you have the god-mode Tank, where the survivors have to scatter to beat him down.

If you start introducing more infected like the flamer, a fire breathing zombie, then this balance would be fucked up. I can see a loop where a flamer and a boomer would stand in the roof of a corner and when the survivors got near the flamer would spew flames in the ground, the survivors couldn't pass and the boomer would barf them from the roof. Once the horde dies, repeat. There you go, survivors won't ever pass from that point.

And that would totally fuck up respawns as well. There's situations where you really need a boomer. If you have more infected then the probability of a boomer to be chosen is reduced.

Problem Solved!

The flamer ignites himself (primary attack) and runs at the enemy. Each time he ignites, it takes 15hp off for a 15 second burst, followed by a further 15 second reset period (after the ignition runs out). No ranged attack, his job is to ignite, drop into the crowd and run off in the confusion. If he gets killed, he soaks the survivors with flammable liquid, increasing the damage they take from fire for a period of time (15-30 secs).

Would that solve your chain-barfing woes?

 

[Caliostro]

]

If you could design another infected for Left4Dead what would it be? Bear in mind that the game mechanics will probably alter dramatically whatever you do and that you have to keep the current infected, you can't replace any of them with your new design. This isn't to say I don't think the game works as it is, it does, I'm just curious about people's ideas.

Thinking about game mechanics I think I'd like to see a child zombie who's cry can deafen you, rendering in-game speech and your awareness of on-coming infected temporarily disabled.

They already had an idea for a special infected like that, called the screamer. It was going to be like the witch, non-playable. Anyways, they replaced it w/ the smoker's smoke ability to cut off team chat.

Actually the screamer originally served the purpose the boomer does now. If he saw you and you didn't kill him, it would run around shouting and alerting the horde till you did.

They removed it because it could be game breaking, specially when it decided to run deep into the level forcing you to either dash right through the zombies to get to him, usually dying in the process, or have to fight a permanent onslaught of the horde.

It's in the developer's comments.

 

[Caliostro]

That would totally make the smoker as a viable infected, unlike the piece of shit that he is right now.

Learn to use him... The smoker is one of the most dangerous infected if you know what you're doing.

 

[Ghost]

decapitated clowns with axes. thats all i have to say.

 

[Caliostro]

That would totally make the smoker as a viable infected, unlike the piece of shit that he is right now.

Learn to use him... The smoker is one of the most dangerous infected if you know what you're doing.

I know how to use them, the fact still remains that the hunter is a lot more dangerous in almost every situation than the smoker.

You could make the argument that smokers are dangerous when near ledges but then I'm reminded by the fact that when you hunter pounce someone, anyone near them will be stunned and they're likely to fall from the ledge.

The only situation where smokers > hunters is when you activate the crane in the third level of no mercy or in the later part of the finales.

Heck, ever tried to tongue someone who's surrounded by horde as a smoker?
You're tongue literally can't go trough the horde, while the hunter can just pounce that person and get them.

..It's actually the other way around, the smoker is almost always more dangerous... That's why you can have 2 hunters but only 1 smoker.

The hunter has 2 strengths, 1 is the ability to do huge leaps that instantly pin down a survivor from out of nowhere, possibly damaging him in the process, and 2 ability to run around during a horde using the alt attack to injure people seriously. On both situations, he needs to get up, close and personal with the survivors, which usually means a short life span unless your team is doing what they should.

The smoker, on the other hand, not only can instantly immobilize a survivor, but they can also PULL them. This is invaluable if you know how to use it, as it can not only stop the survivors in place, but instantly either remove a member from their midst (by pulling them through fire, or into a horde, or a pit), or force them to go BACKWARDS to grab their comrade. The smoker is also far more silent (doesn't scream while flying through the air and can stay far away to not be heard). How many times have you see a hunter pounce a rushing group of survivors only to be meleed and shot a second after, it takes them a second to deal with it. Meanwhile the smoker poses a far bigger predicament. Run back for the guy that was just pulled, destroying the "flow" of the rush, or let him die?

Also, pulling someone who as just "biled" is amazing, as you generally get a giant shield of zombies to protect you while you kill the poor sap.

The smoker is also faster to immobilize a target (you know, those seconds when you see a survivor about to free someone else from a hunter or melee a horde of them). The smoker can almost instantly grab them and pull them. While he's not doing considerable damage just for pulling them he did instantly immobilize the target, allowing the rest to continue their rampage.

Another gigantic advantage from the smoker is the ability to destroy a "trench". A hunter can leap a bunch of cornered survivors, but he'll die very fast, and they'll be back to "normal" in a second, while the smoker can pull one of them away, forcing them to break off for, at the very least, a couple of seconds. Or the ability to pull the survivors from an objective or path (like, the roofs in No Mercy 2), or in places where they can NOT be rescued (that first jump down the "hole" on the floor in No Mercy 1, then the jump down the sewers in No Mercy 3), which spells instant death for a survivor.

Seriously, I'll take the smoker over the hunter most of the time. I've killed entire teams with it and destroyed quite a few more. It's my favorite infected, and I can tell you, it's far from underpowered.

 

[Doddyno2]

I think animals is a good idea but it would be a bit too close to what a hunter does
maybe some virus which turns you into a better common infected zombie?
Like a 5 min countdown

 

[Crystal Cuckoo]

I'd like to see a Fogger...
His ability would be to breathe this poisonous fog, which lingers for about 30 seconds, and if the fogger breathes right int he survivor's face, then the survivor either takes damage over time, or hallucinates into seeing other survivors as infected.
Also, I'd like the hunter to be able to clib walls and trees, too.
It would also be cool have the tank being able to geenrate shockwaves whenever he pounds the ground...

 

[Cpt. Red]

I would like to have one that looks almost the same, maybe his eyes glows or something, as an ordinary zombie but with more health and greater damage. He would also be able to bite his target, meaning he grabs them and bites and then lets go.
The bite would deal less dps then the ordinary attack but he incapacitates the target for a second or two.
I maybe would call him The Biter or something....

 

[Davey Woo]

I'm thinking an assistant infected or something (obviously with a cooler name) But some kind of infected that is more intelligent than the other infected, and can open and close doors rather than knock them down, and they could have a squad of stronger zombies that would follow them around or something, I think this would be cool to play as in versus because you'd get to order around your little unit without being "killed faster than a gerbil in a punchbag - Yahtzee".

I also like the thriller dancers. XD

 

[The-Big-D]

A zombie that could possibly like dislocate its jaw and eat the survivors whole a bit like a snake, as its eating you whole your incapped and your fellow survivors ahve to shoot it to prevent it eating you whole.

Also regarding the animal idea, yes definatly. Play as a horde of zombie crows and just swoop down and just peck the crap out of the survivors and do a damage as a group. Or zombie dogs, bears any wild rabbid animals that would be pretty cool.