Since the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2, Valve has assured its fans on multiple occasions that the new title would not be an outright replacement for last year’s award-winning co-op zombie apocalypse simulator. They made good on their word last week when they announced Crash Course, a brand new campaign for the original Left 4 Dead. With the DLC set to launch in September, Valve is now pondering ways to bridge the gap between this new content and the upcoming Left 4 Dead 2. Writer Chet Faliszek has revealed in a recent interview with Edge that it’s not going to be easy.

When asked about the DLC’s compatibility with L4D2, Faliszek said, “We’re still struggling with how interoperability is going to work, right now. When we talk about L4D, the story stuff – there’s actually a lot of character dialogue that’s based in each map.” As cool as it would be to have L4D DLC playable in L4D2, Faliszek raises a valid point, “..there’s this thing of the world – these characters wouldn’t be here – how much does that matter? We have a world sketched out and we have an understanding of where everything is and what’s going on, you know, so story-wise it wouldn’t make much sense.”

Valve has always been known to take great care with issues of consistency in their games, so it may take a bit longer to figure out a sensible way to incorporate this new content within L4D2. Either way, both the DLC and the new game sound and look fantastic, so I’m not too concerned with this issue myself. What do you think? Is it really worth Valve’s time and effort to interweave these two titles?