I Hate Mountains

Since the release of Left 4 Dead 2 a week ago, we received a few emails asking us if it was going to have any consequences on our I Hate Mountains campaign. I thought it could be good to clear up the situation for everyone at the same time. So here’s our thoughts on the current situation.

• First, there’s still no SDK for Left 4 Dead 2 and something tells us that we might not see it before a long time. So we can’t port our campaign to Left 4 Dead 2 if we wanted to.
• Second, even if we could, we won’t be able to port our campaign to Left 4 Dead 2 because Valve kind of changed their mind about their so-called interoperability between Left 4 Dead 1 and 2. There is no such thing and all the content we used from the first game (textures, models, sounds, etc.) isn’t available in the second for the moment. Let’s hope they’ll remedy this situation later.
• Left 4 Dead 1 is still crippled with bugs and it’s still rather impossible to create a serious campaign using custom everything (models, particles, music, sounds, etc.) that doesn’t rely on dirty and risky hacks. We might finally use these, but we’d really like to avoid it.
• Most people are starting to move on from Left 4 Dead 1 to Left 4 Dead 2 and even us are seeing Left 4 Dead 1 as a serious regression over Left 4 Dead 2. It frighten us a bit because, now that the community is splitted, we don’t really know were our potential players are.

Finally, I guess nothing really changed for the moment. We’re still working on the campaign, but we’ve been quite depressed by the quality and the originality of the new Left 4 Dead 2 campaigns. It’s really hard to focus on your own campaign when you perfectly know you’ll never be able to reach this kind of result, damn you Valve<:em> and your clever ideas! But still… we’re working on it.