Lag Infecting 'Left 4 Dead 2'?

"Left 4 Dead 2" drops today and you may be one of many out there that's itching to grab a copy and jump online. Before I get to posting my review, I need to spend a bit more time with the game post-release to really see how the game handles with the countless servers running the whole zombie apocalypse show.

I only say this because this past weekend on Xbox Live I ran into an enemy more deadly and more terrifying than "Left 4 Dead 2's" own Witch or Tank infected. If you can't tell from the headline above, I'm talking about lag.

Now it wasn't an issue 100% of the time, but it did crop often enough that it felt like something just wasn't working as expected. Given that the first game rarely suffered from lag, even at launch, this conundrum seems all the more perplexing. Let me elaborate.

My first run-in with lag happened during an online campaign with myself and two other local Los Angeles-based writers. We all noted the lag right away, but it didn't render the game unplayable, so we continued on and worked through the minor delays we were experiencing between input and response. It wasn't until we entered a 4v4 versus campaign that things really started to vault downhill. Every single person in the room displayed the lowest possible latency rating, and we were all jumping about and shooting rather aimlessly. We quickly exited and started up a new match, and that worked just fine.

Now, I do understand lag during pre-release because the number of players and matches is relatively low while distance between those players remains high, but it was one particular scenario that kept cropping up that prompted me to write this post: I suffered from terrible lag while playing the campaign online by myself. I'm talking about at least a second between my input and response on screen. And that second makes all the difference when you're trying to judge which zombies are alive and which are in the process of dying before squeezing off your last few rounds of shotgun ammo.

Thankfully, exiting the current match and starting a new campaign (one most likely hosted by a completely different server) managed to remedy the issue.

An update released yesterday may be there to fix the latency issues I've experienced so far. I've pinged Valve for comment, but have yet to receive any word on the matter.

Are you online playing "Left 4 Dead 2"? How has your experience been?

Tags ea, left 4 dead, left for dead 2, valve