According to Mike Booth, creator of Left 4 Dead, although there was a kind of bang in the genre, there was still room for improvement…

Booth was one of the founders of Turtle Rock and is an indispensable name in Left 4 Dead’s creation. In an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, he discussed several topics, including how the growth of co-op games has not made a significant difference to the popularity or success of the genre. It is worth pointing out that the pandemic has had a considerable impact.

According to him, “It’s hard to make a good co-op game because you have to build the game from the beginning assuming that it’s co-op. To design a game assuming that you have to work together to win the game, and not in a punitive way, in a way that players want to do that, and it feels great, is a fundamentally different way of thinking and designing a game around that, and there just aren’t enough yet. There still aren’t enough.”

Booth said that he will continue to make co-op experiences at Bad Robot Games and that a non-VR version of his digital tabletop RPG Demeo is in the works. The game will offer an experience similar to Tabletop Simulator, so you won’t necessarily need, say, a Steam Index to play it. This game was also influenced by the AI “director” of Left 4 Dead. According to Booth, “You don’t want to, behind the scenes, roll the die on individual things. You want to make a virtual deck of cards, shuffle it and deal it out. So that way, it’s not possible to get the terrible thing happening 17 times in a row – I know it’s implausible, but it’s possible [with dice]. If it’s in a deck of cards, and it’s only one card, it can only happen once.” And he has a point: this approach might make randomness fairer.

By the way, Demeo: PC Edition, the VR-free version, will launch in early access on Steam in April.

Source: PCGamer