Two weeks later and we still hate mountains!
Posted by Nicolas in Development, General, Progress
Tags: gameplay, left 4 dead 2, maps, problem, valve
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.
