I Hate Mountains

This is it again! We are hereby releasing the last and final iteration of the Left 4 Dead 2 version of I Hate Mountains, and only the Left 4 Dead 2 version. There is no 1.5 version of the campaign for Left 4 Dead 1 (it was deemed useless since the last version works correctly)!

Once again, it took way more time than anticipated (dude, we’re way over 9 months late), but to be honest, this is just a patched release to try and fix everything that has ever been reported by players over the course of the last months (or was it years?). There was a bit of confusion in the last releases (1.3, 1.4, 1.5) but hopefully this should be the real final version. This way, we won’t exit the Left 4 Dead scene with remorses or missed expectations.

This is still the exact same campaign, but with a shinny new coating slightly increasing visual aspect, optimization and gameplay topped with dozens of bug fixes (especially this nasty one about the score in versus). As far as we’re concerned, there’s nothing left to add, remove or fix and we’re calling it a day with this whole thing!

For help and support concerning this release, please visit:
http://forums.ihatemountains.com
If you can’t find help in the forums, you can always try to drop us a word here:
http://www.ihatemountains.com/contact-us/

We hope you enjoyed I Hate Mountains, be it with the Left 4 Dead 1 or the Left 4 Dead 2 version. Feel free to drop us a word by going on the Contact Us page. All in all, a warm thank you to all of you, players, testers, helpers, fans and even haters. You truly made this whole experience a blast for the 3 of us and we’ll never forget your awesome support and feedback over the years!

Best regards,
— The I Hate Mountains Team:
— Nicolas, Marc and Geoffroy

Thanks!

What should we say? I guess all we have to say is thank you everyone! The I Hate Mountains release went very smoothly and so far, the feedback we received is outstanding. Like we said in a recent interview, we never released a project that got so much praise in our whole lives, that was really incredible. Thanks everyone for the feedback on the forums (be it positive or negative), thanks for the e-mails, thanks for the bug reports, thanks for the comments on various websites around the Internet, thanks for spreading the news, thanks for playing it and thanks for everything else! So far, the campaign was downloaded approximately 100,000 times during the first 10 days and since then, it has unfortunately plummeted. Hopefully it’s okay with us, because we never thought we’d be able to reach so many people given the state of the Left 4 Dead community!

Feedback & issues

We stopped to try to read everything everywhere on the Internet because, well… it was way too difficult to keep up with the amount of pages created after the release. Researching “I Hate Mountains” on Google gives us 82,000 results created during the last month, that’s just huge. So far, we didn’t make complex scientific calculations but the feedback looks 75% positive, 20% positive with a few negative criticism against lighting and multi-paths and 5% of haters. We’ve been (slowly) working on fixing issues during the last two weeks and you can follow our progress when browsing our dedicated forum and the change log. We heard the half a million reports of the sticky helicopter bug and we’re sorry about it, head over there for more informations about it.

Interviews

There’s a few things already available and more to come in the near future. First things first, for our French-speaking fans, we did an interview with the Joystick magazine. They said it should be available in the next summer issue so keep an eye for it. Then for our English-speaking fans, we’ve got interviewed by the awesome folks at Podcast 17 in issue #87. If you don’t know them yet, it’s a small devoted team talking about the Steam/Valve/Half-Life universe every week. You can listen to Nicolas trying (struggling) to speak in English from 00:56:00 to 01:28:00 (yeah, that’s 32 painful minutes). Finally, there might be something big coming on Real Talk Gaming in the next weeks because we made a very big interview with them, I’ll update this post and Twitter as soon as it’s made available.

Left 4 Dead 2 and future

For the moment, the Left 4 Dead 2 port hasn’t started yet. We’re working on fixing general issues first because as we always say, there’s no point in porting the bugs too. We’ve been fixing over 40 bugs in the last week and we’re reworking the whole lighting of several places because obviously, the dark atmosphere didn’t suit everyone. As we say on the forums, our goal isn’t to alienate the fans of this ambiance, we’re not going to make it daylight. We’re just making it slightly brighter, adding lighting clues about where to go and deleting visual clues like arrows. The first three levels are fixed, two to go during the next week. The next version will be labeled 1.2 and should be released in two weeks. The Left 4 Dead 2 version is lost in translation and we’ll see if we can work it out, it looks easier now that Valve has finally started fixing the custom campaign system (only for the second game unfortunately).

Miscellaneous

• People are looking for the hidden domo-kuns in the campaign, help them if you can!
• Arstechnica.com like us but commenters are fighting over.
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun don’t like us and commenters are quite harsh.
• Destructoid like us!
• Joystiq likes us too!
• Halflife2.net loves us!
• Half of the I Hate Mountains commentaries on websites degenerate in L4D1 vs. L4D2 or Portal: Prelude haters vs. Portal: Prelude lovers or PC vs. Xbox flamewars.

Just curious…

Ok fine! I know what we said, we were supposed to be in vacations for a week after the release of the video trailer, but well… I guess it’s stronger than us, we had to put our noses in every forum topic, in every news and every article that talked about us to reply to people and give our opinions. We’re also gathering sponsors for the release and that’s good news, we’ll try to send them a preview version beforehand so that they can comment about it.

General progress

Unfortunately we’ve also been working on the campaign even though we said we won’t, I guess the link is too hard to be broken that easily. We found some minor issues that wouldn’t have impaired the gameplay but well… while we were at it, we fix them. The software freeze should occur tomorrow though, so that won’t be happening anymore.

Forums

Well, I just wanted to say that we opened our forums after the release of the trailer so you can head over there and ask your questions on a decent support instead of using blog commentaries all over the Internet.

Bonus section

Also, we’ve been working on this bonus section for the website. It will go live just after the release. You’ll have to find the password in the campaign to open it, but I think we already talked about it. Just for your eyes, here’s a sneak peak into this bonus section you can’t access for the moment: