WARNING: Spoilers for Left 4 Dead 2: The Passing and Half-Life 2:
Episode 2
For the last few months, Valve coyly hyped up that in their new Left 4 Dead 2 DLC "The Passing" the survivors from the first game were going to meet up with the survivors of the second game, and that one of the original survivors was going to die. Awesome, I thought, but no. Here's how Valve managed to fuck that up: I went into The Passing without expecting anything groundbreaking in terms of gameplay (it is, after all, just a DLC pack). What I was expecting was some story. Obviously, the overall arc of Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 isn't very well presented. Hell, the first game was supposed to be 4 unrelated B-Movies strung together with Valve retroactively making an actual coherent story out of them all. But with the release of Crash Course and an overall arc between episodes in Left 4 Dead 2, I was expecting Valve to at least do something memorable for this somewhat-hyped The Passing. What we got is two decently sized levels of typical L4D2 zombie killing. Fine. A little stale, but fine.
What do we get as our two-groups-of-survivors-crossing-paths? We walk by a bridge with three survivors standing on it, looking normal, acting like everything's ok, ready and willing to help. About three sentences later, we're off. Ok… maybe the cool part is coming up. Go about searching these rooms and oh-by-the-way there's Bill's body in a corner room. No subtle hint of sorrow from the original character NPCs. No awesome go-down-in-flames moment. Everything's fine and there's a body in the corner over there that nobody seems to notice. I understand that this is Left 4 Dead we're talking about. It's not exactly a game for its cinematic value and storytelling. Most people just want to kill zombies and be done with it, but come on. That's it?!? At the very least, we could have had the original survivors covering the new group as they make their way across the finale (which they already do anyway), with a short 20 second in-game cut-scene of the old survivors holding off the last wave of zombies while the new heroes speed off into the distance only to have Bill get whisked away by a Charger that crept up out of nowhere. his body thrown into the wall with Zoey and Francis shooting after it only to realize they're too late. The Charger and Bill lie motionless on the ground. Zoey breaks into tears hovering over Bills body whimpering "Bill!…. No…" with Francis offering his best attempt at sincerity: "I'm going to miss that old bastard…" [CREDITS]. Something!… Anything is better than the oh-by-the-way-Bill-died-when-you-weren't-looking that was delivered. What Valve did was pretty much akin to if the original Star Wars never showed Ben Kenobi's death, but rather Ben Kenobi deactivates the tractor beam and is along his merry way only finding out in dialogue as Luke runs to the Millennium Falcon "Sorry kid, the old man's dead, now get your ass on board!". No Luke spectacting the fight. No wise jedi raises his lightsaber and sacrifices himself for the greater good. No cry of anguish from Luke with a John Williams score to seal the deal. "What happened to Ben?" "Oh, he died, but whatever."
We spent the entire Left 4 Dead game with these characters; their dialogue and dynamics building through each succeeding chapter. With Left 4 Dead 1's scarcity of ammo and supplies with you were constantly running out on harder difficulties, forcing you to rely on these characters as your life-line in dire situations. This establishes something with these characters that was completely not acknowledged in The Passing. Remember the end of Half-Life 2: Episode 2? There's a reason you do. In that ending, we lost an important character that we had watched evolved from Half-Life 2. It was an emotional moment for the characters and also an emotional moment for anyone playing who gave a slight damn about the story of Half-Life. We watched Eli Vance die. We didn't walk in and find Alex acting nonchalant to her father's body propped up in the corner. The characters of Left 4 Dead 1 were developed in the same way. We fell in love with the cast of Left 4 Dead 2, and they deserved the same respect as the cast of Half-Life. The only possible way Valve can make this right is if the Left 4 Dead 1 DLC has you play the events prior to The Passing and concludes with Bill's death, and it's actually done in a way that respects the character.
