Left 4 Dead 2

Setting

Like its predecessor, Left 4 Dead 2 is set in the aftermath of an outbreak on the East Coast of the United States of a disease nicknamed the "Green Flu", which rapidly transforms humans into zombie-like creatures and mutated forms that demonstrate extreme aggression towards non-Infected beings. A few humans are immune to the disease, while some of those who are Infected have no symptoms. The Civil Emergency and Defense Agency (CEDA) and the U.S. military create safe zones to attempt to evacuate as many survivors as possible. Left 4 Dead 2 introduces four new survivors: Coach, Ellis, Nick, and Rochelle, who are immune to the disease and have individual backstories that are provided through character dialogue.

While the game is intended as a continuation of the original, occurring one week after the first game begins, Valve decided to create a new group of survivors due to the change in location. Like the first game, the five campaigns in Left 4 Dead 2 take place across a story arc. Set in the Deep South, the story begins in Savannah, Georgia, and ends in New Orleans, Louisiana. The four survivors have to fight their way through hordes of Infected, using safehouses along the way to rest and recuperate in order to reach extraction points.

Characters

Left 4 Dead 2 features a new cast of four human survivors: Coach (voiced by Chad L. Coleman), a stocky high school football coach with a bad knee (although this does not affect gameplay); Nick (voiced by Canadian singer Hugh Dillon), a pessimistic gambler and con artist; Rochelle (voiced by Rochelle Aytes), a low-level production assistant for a local television station that was reporting on the pandemic; and Ellis (voiced by Eric Ladin), a friendly and talkative redneck mechanic who often talks about his friend Keith and their many misadventures. In addition to the four playable characters, Left 4 Dead 2 also features two supporting characters in the form of Whitaker (voiced by Dayton Callie), a gun store owner, and Virgil (voiced by Randall Newsome), a Cajun boat captain who appears (voice only) in the game's final three campaigns. Two soldiers heard in the final map of The Parish, voiced by Bob Gunter and Bill Huggins, round out the NPC cast.

Plot

The Sacrifice takes place before the main events of Left 4 Dead 2 and after the events of comic book of the same name. At the end of the first game, the original survivors—Bill, Francis, Louis, and Zoey—arrive at the portside town of Rayford in Georgia in order to search for a boat that can take them to the Florida Keys. After finding an adequate sailboat, the survivors have to manually start up generators in order to lift a bridge for their boat to pass through. One survivor (canonically Bill) sacrifices themself in order to kick-start a generator once it gives out, so that the others may reach safety. This is the end of Bill's story in the Left 4 Dead video game series.

Left 4 Dead 2 opens in Dead Center (set in Savannah, Georgia), where the four survivors find themselves abandoned on a hotel roof by rescue helicopters. They decide to head for the local mall, where a second CEDA evacuation point is located. After a brief encounter with a gun store owner, Whitaker, the survivors discover that the mall is overrun, with all CEDA agents having become either dead or Infected as well. Ellis helps the group use a stock car to break out of the mall and travel towards New Orleans, rumored to be the last standing city in America.

The Passing takes place between Dead Center and Dark Carnival, and after the events of The Sacrifice campaign. The survivors arrive at the bridge in Rayford, where they meet Francis, Louis, and Zoey. As they need to cross the bridge to proceed, the Survivors need to find another way across to refill the generator with gas. After fighting their way through a wedding reception (complete with a Witch bride), the streets, and a historic under-the-river tour, they meet up again with the original survivors, who help by covering for the group while they fill the generator and lowering the bridge once it's full.

At the start of the Dark Carnival campaign, the four survivors find the highway ahead completely blocked by ditched vehicles, and are forced to travel on foot through an abandoned (but still operating) amusement park. After navigating their way to the park stadium, Coach devises a plan to use a large-scale light show on the concert stage, which had been abandoned by a rock band called The Midnight Riders, in order to signal a helicopter pilot for rescue. After being rescued, they later discover that their pilot is Infected. When the pilot starts attacking them, Nick is forced to kill him (echoing a similar situation in Left 4 Dead), causing the chopper to crash into a bayou, which acts as the setting for Swamp Fever.

Working their way through the swamps, the group comes across a crashed airplane, dead military paratroopers, and isolated swamp villages which had held out against the Infected but were eventually overrun. After spending the morning fighting through the swamp, the group arrives at a plantation mansion and make radio contact with Virgil, a Cajun boat captain who can assist them; however, his boat begins to run low on diesel fuel on the way to New Orleans.

As a tumultuous hurricane approaches (the titular Hard Rain of the subsequent campaign), the survivors go ashore at Ducatel in Mississippi, after which they make their way through an abandoned (and Witch-infested) sugarcane mill to a gas station to get diesel fuel, and return to signal Virgil using the neon sign of a burger chain restaurant. In the final campaign, The Parish, Virgil drops the group off at New Orleans, where the military appears to be evacuating civilians across a bridge. On the way there, the four discover the city overrun with Infected and that the military is actually leaving the city as well as conducting bombing runs on roads and bridges presumably in order to stop the infected from migrating.

The group manages to reach the bridge, where they make contact with the military. Judging from their dialogue, the military pilots suspect the survivors to be "carriers", similar to the original survivors of Left 4 Dead. After securing their rescue helicopter, the survivors lower and cross the bridge, escaping on the helicopter just as the bridge is destroyed. While the survivors' fate is left unclear after this point, the game's writer Chet Faliszek stated in a 2009 interview that the military took survivors on cruise ships to the Caribbean in an attempt to escape the infection.