I Hate Mountains

Hi folks,

We really think that it’s time to give you some fresh news about what’s going on and what’s planned for the Left 4 Dead 2 version of I Hate Mountains.

• First of all, if you didn’t check our Twitter recently, you have to know that Nicolas moved in Montréal (Canada) a few weeks ago. So Geoffroy and me assumed the end of the conversion and we are currently working on it. Nicolas actually helps us as much as he can with the help of MSN and Skype.
• Then, you have to know that we took a long break since September. However, just after the 1.1 release, we listened to all of your critics and built the 1.2 version of I Hate Mountains.This version is already finished and will be simultaneously released with the L4D2 version.

About this last one, we are currently working hard on it and it shouldn’t be too long for a release ! As we said on Twitter last week, we fixed a deadline but we prefer not to reveal it for the moment.

Apart from this, we are trying to adapt our original poster into a L4D2 layout style. But we actually hesitate between two instances. Tell us what is your preference, and we will choose according to your votes! (choose screen 1 or 2 in your commentary)

Please keep in mind that these propositions are still work in progress.

Finally, we received a postcard from Francis and his folks. They currently spend some VERY good time in the Canadian forests, and expect to see you again as soon as as possible!

And a last word : Thanks to Valve and their last DLC which has greatly simplified our work! It took time, but it’s finally good!

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.

Three days ago, Chet Faliszek (one of the project leads on Left 4 Dead at Valve) posted on the Left 4 Dead mailing-list to announce something that they never really did until then. I don’t think it’s our role to relay this information, but I also think this is too important to confidentially stay on the mailing-list. Here’s an extract from the message he posted:

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 5:14 PM, Chet Faliszek <chetf@valvesoftware.com> wrote:

With “The Passing” just released, I just want to cover a few things coming up in the near future directly affecting the mod community. […]

We are going to start including community content on our dedicated servers. We have our first test up in our data centers. For this test, each data center has 40 instances dedicated to community content. What this means. If the custom campaign is on our servers, while players will still need to download it from one of the other sites (l4dmaps.com etc), they will be able to play on dedicated servers. This should improve the experience for most players. We will also be making posts and promoting the campaigns on our blog in the coming weeks.

I currently have 2 campaigns up for testing. You can mail me a link to your campaign if you would like to be included. We do ask that your campaigns only include work that you have the legal right to use and for the start, we are only looking for finished campaigns (we will update them at your request of course but looking for campaigns with a lower churn rate at first because I am doing this by hand for now). We also always reserve the right to not host any Campaign.

The first two up for playing are Dead City 2 and City 17. Make sure to give feedback to the designers, be it on this list, in forums, or on sites. Please try and connect and play on our dedicated servers, let me know how it is.

[…]

While this sounds like really good news, I can also remember they promised a Q/A session in January and that it never happened. I can also remember them saying “we’re going to fix it this month” a dozen times and it never happened either. I know they can’t do everything, but I’m pretty confident that they’ll keep their promises this time. I just want to make sure not only mappers and modders know about this, so that the decision can have a little bit more attention from everyone and hopefully prevent them from ditching u.

We’re actually discussing if we want to send them the final version of I Hate Mountains before it goes live for real. On one hand, it couldn’t really hurt anyone but on the other hand, that would potentially delay the release by several weeks… and we sure don’t want to wait for it. What do you think about this? I’m pretty confident we can obtain a quite good coverage via gaming websites and partners we gathered from the Portal: Prelude era, but official support from Valve would officially be kick-ass.