More than 15 years after Left 4 Dead 2, fans are still waiting for Valve to return to its iconic zombie series. However, a third game actually entered development — and Valve had some surprisingly ambitious plans for it.
Details revealed through Geoff Keighley’s The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx showed that Valve was developing Left 4 Dead 3 around 2013, with approximately 30 developers reportedly working on the project.
Unlike the first two games and their largely linear campaigns, Left 4 Dead 3 was being designed as an open-world experience set in Morocco. Exactly where in the country the game would have taken place was never revealed, but the change of setting would have taken the series far away from the American locations of its predecessors.
One of Valve’s biggest ambitions was the sheer number of infected. The studio reportedly wanted the new technology behind Source 2 to allow hundreds of zombies to appear on screen at the same time, potentially creating hordes considerably larger than those encountered in Left 4 Dead 2.
Unfortunately, that ambition also contributed to the project’s problems. Left 4 Dead 3 was being developed while Valve was still building Source 2, and the engine reportedly wasn’t mature enough to support everything the team wanted to achieve.
Valve eventually shelved the project, making the Moroccan open-world version of Left 4 Dead 3 another fascinating look at what could have been.
Very little else is known about the abandoned game. Valve never revealed its survivors, story, special infected or exactly how its open world would have worked. But the combination of Morocco, an open world and hundreds of infected suggests Valve was considering a considerably larger evolution of the Left 4 Dead formula rather than simply making another traditional sequel.