When the hunter pounces your friend, you should shoot it. (click to enlarge)

A big content patch is coming next week to Valve’s Left 4 Dead.  The patch will add a new game mode, dubbed ‘Survival’ and official versions of Versus maps ‘Dead Air’ and ‘Death Toll.’

On the Left 4 Dead Blog, a post from Kerry Davis and Scott Dalton said Survival mode will be more than just trapping players in a small part of a map, unleashing the hordes and recording the longest time.

Valve wants Survival games to last less than ten minutes.  It will be a mode of play “distinct from Campaign or Versus.”

Davis and Dalton wrote about the pacing offered in a Survival map, saying they needed “to define as precisely as possible how the difficulty ramps up during the course of a round.”

The designers have a number of different variables to work with including spawn times for mobs, special infected and tanks; the number of each type of infected that spawn; the time in between each spawn.

“All of these variables to work together to create a fairly smooth difficulty curve,” Davis and Dalton wrote.

You’re not going to last forever when playing a Survival match, which might be a bummer for the folks surviving the World At War zombie level. Davis and Dalton did write about the rate at which the difficulty curve increases.

You'll need to kill hordes efficiently, or the zombie hordes will overtake you. (click to enlarge)

“If the curve ramps up too sharply, we find that teams of all skill levels tend to hit a wall at the same time,” they wrote.  “There isn’t enough variation in the times to separate great teams from average ones. If the curve is too flat, then average teams will have a good experience, but really good teams can grind on long enough to cross the line from having fun to just getting worn out.”

Obviously, a tank will be much harder to take down if you’re still battling the zombies that have spawned before it.   Davis and Dalton also wrote about a break period in between respawns and how it will increase as the round goes on, they call it a “lull.”

“Each lull gets slightly longer as the round progresses, but that’s no guarantee the team will actually see the lull – it just prevents new infected from spawning,” they wrote.  “It doesn’t help with infected that are already in the arena. Killing mobs and tanks as quickly as possible is the best way to ensure that a team can take advantage of a lull to heal, resupply ammo, or just move to a better location with more supplies.”

I really can’t wait for this mode to hit.  It’s going to be pretty intense.  The number of zombies killed in a single Survival round will often be more than an entire campaign, according to the blog.  Conserving ammunition, timing reloads and aiming for the head will all be key come next week.

Will you be battling the zombie hordes when the patch hits?  Leave a comment below.  Feel free to check out my Steam Community Page and friend me so that we can kill the hordes together.

Questions? Shoot me a note on Twitter, or send an email to matt(dot)schuler(at)woodtv(dot)com.