According to Keighley, Valve had very big plans for Left 4 Dead 3. Bigger plans than most people ever realized. Left 4 Dead 3 wasn’t just going to be another iteration on the popular cooperative shooter format. Rather, Keighley says that Valve planned to make Left 4 Dead 3 into a major open-world game the likes of which had never been done before.
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While Keighley didn’t expand on what being an open-world game would mean for Left 4 Dead 3, he did mention that it would enable Valve to potentially feature hundreds of zombies on-screen at a time. Days Gone managed quite a large number of zombies in its open world, though those zombies wouldn’t aren’t as clever as the ones known from Left 4 Dead. Dead Rising 4 also featured a lot of zombies in its open world, but not necessarily what Valve could have accomplished if it stuck with it.
The only other detail shared by Keighley about Left 4 Dead 3 is that it would take place in Morocco. There’s no notable information regarding why Morocco was chosen, but it does coincide with several leaked Left 4 Dead 3 screenshots from early 2019 that showed a wide-open Moroccan map.
Ultimately, Left 4 Dead 3 was reportedly canceled due to frustrations with and the slow development of Valve’s Source 2 engine. The now unfinished engine has been cited as the cause of several of Valve’s modern canceled projects.
For the time being, Keighley says that Valve has a major secret project that it’s working on since 2018. It’s also said to be considering a major Half-Life game following the success of Half-Life: Alyx. There’s no word on another Left 4 Dead project for the time being, as exciting as an open-world Left 4 Dead 3 could be.
Left 4 Dead 3 is a canceled project from Valve that’s no longer in development.
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