I Hate Mountains

Face it, everytime you’re beginning to get ‘famous’ in a way or another, everyone starts to ask you what’s your opinion on everything. I’m not too fond on giving personal opinions in public, but hey… this is a blog after all. So, stop sending us e-mails, here’s our opinion.

With the recent announcement that Valve would be releasing Left 4 Dead 2 just one year after the first one, we’ve all been a bit shocked. Frankly, I was the first to shout a big ‘WTF’ and call it a prank when Geoffroy told me about it. We honestly thought that people at Valve had lost their mind, changed their business strategy and just realized there was tons of money to make there and that they just had to jump on the occasion, vomiting at the face of early adopters, all-time fans and modders just like a boomer would do.

Honestly, I felt ‘betrayed’ by this announce for a few reasons.

• First, Left 4 Dead was sold for a ridiculously high price for what it was. I mean, 50€ makes $70 for a quickly polished but unfinished mod where Team Fortress 2 cost a third of this price and is supported for free since its release. It seems like Valve forgot the reason why the TF2 model works so well (or so it seems), which has nearly quadrupled in size since it was launched (It started with 6 maps, it’s now on 24). They mention that 20 new weapons is too much for a free DLC, but that’s exactly what the TF2 team has done, and it wasn’t only re-skins.
• Second, there was only four campaigns with only two of them available in versus mode, that was pretty cheap for 70 bucks, even if I almost played it a million hours since it came out.
• Then, I thought about all the quality custom content that would be released a few months after, that same content WE are trying to add to the game but for which we’re still all waiting for an official support 7 months later (matchmaking anyone?).
• But more importantly, what about their constant preaching about what is a real customer service and how you should make games? Isn’t it Gabe Newell himself who declared this:

‘So we’ll do the same thing with Left 4 Dead where we’ll have the initial release and then we’ll release more movies, more characters, more weapons, unlockables, achievements, because that’s the way you continue to grow a community over time.’
Gabe Newell on VideoGamer.com a few months ago.

Now, what’s the situation? We got this barely interesting survival mode that basically makes a whole game mode with the worst parts of the original game (personal opinion). Well, sure it was free, but that was just the right price for what it was. Then we got 7 achievements linked with it, which are totally impossible to unlock for me because the game keeps resetting my medals count. And we got the two missing campaigns in versus mode. Now where are the new campaigns? Weapons? Unlockables? Survivors? Zombies?

Most people feel betrayed because they already felt that they paid largely enough money for a game that was half-finished, or even because they payed for it while keeping in mind that there was going to be a TF2-like support behind the price, and that’s my case. Trying to gather people into a community is a good thing, but making them pay the full price again for something you said was going to be free while preventing everyone from making their own custom content is really shooting yourself in the foot. I looks like Valve is preventing people to make user-content hopping that more people would buy their own.

Now, let’s face it again, we’re all going to buy this Left 4 Dead 2 (well, I guess), but Valve’s reputation seems to be going down again and again after each of their recent moves. First there was this HUGE price increase with the stupid 1€ = $1 conversion on Steam (remember kids, it’s still 1€ = $1.41 today), then Left 4 Dead came out half-finished, and now they’re lying to customers luring them to buy their stuff. What’s next? Of course we’re not hating them, since we’re all day-one fans of their work, but somehow, it still feels wrong. As Doug Lombardi said on Rock Paper Shotgun, we should just trust them a little bit… but with this full price tag coming along with what seems like just a few minor changes to the game (honestly, who cares about adding a frying pan as a weapon), this is not going to be easy. Let’s just wait and see how it turns out.

P.S.: No one’s against a Left 4 Dead 2 by the way, as long as they finish the first one. On the other hand, everyone knows they’re not a charity company, but when you make promises, you should try to respect it.

All right, you can stop sending us e-mails to say that the Left 4 Dead SDK was released yesterday, we already know it. We’re actively following what’s going on in Valve’s universe day after day and downloaded it as soon as it came out.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t add anything useful to us for the moment, simply because we made our own SDK during this 6 month wait and because the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools doesn’t provide anything more for the moment. Basically, it’s just a renamed Source SDK. For the moment, we didn’t investigate much, but it looks like all the changes are more or less to make the old tools compatible with the new Left 4 Dead Source engine, to release the same old particle editor and to copy/paste the Valve Developer Community’s tutorials into the Left 4 Dead folder.

We’ll see how it goes, but as far as I can tell, we’ll only use one file from the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools, the editor’s official entity list configuration file: left4dead.fgd. The Sketchup plugin looks cool too, but we’d really prefer a plugin that would allow us to export Sketchup models directly into Source models using a GUI, because Sketchup always allowed us to export in a random format (well, the professional version does it) and then convert it into an SMD file using XSI Mod Tools.

Anyway, there is no revolution for the moment. We are more eager for them to update the matchmaking system and I bet this release won’t change much for us. At least until the SDK is fully finished and polished. Then we may see tools like the ones everyone thought they would add. But I’m getting a bit bitchy there :D

When we began to think about a campaign title and a slogan, we naturally tried to highlight our montainous environment with a catchy title, just like every official campaign. Once the title and slogan found, the second step was the creation of a movie poster, an essential step for every Left 4 Dead campaign, because this will probably be the first thing people will see before downloading it. With his artwork/photoshop/drawing skills, Geoffroy decided to work alone on this task using the photoshop poster template built by Adam “Supernorn” Riches. Once the global layout fixed, we all had a meeting to discuss every little detail of the poster and compare a good dozen of different versions.

This poster wasn’t unveiled until then simply because the website design already uses it to some extent. It allowed us to start releasing material without repeating the same error than most custom campaigns seems to do. Which means, find an idea, make a kickass poster, don’t show anything more for two months and reward people with a few crappy screenshots that don’t even match the campaign poster. Now that everybody seems to know what we’re doing, it’s time to unveil our poster:

But unveiling the poster is also and above all an opportunity to talk a bit more about the campaign, and especially the fourth map which ressemble the poster the most. Lumberyard begins when underground ends (what a surprise), after travelling through a long underground tunnel system, the survivors finally reach fresh air again using the railway passing through the mountain. While walking in this fourth map, you’ll realize very quickly where you are (vertically talking) and this is also where the mountainous background at the origin of the title of the campaign will make its greatest appearance.

Walking through the fourth map, you’ll have to travel along a lakeside road, inspired by Canadian landscapes. This road is larger than most roads you’ll have already faced during the campaign, these are not forest trails anymore, and this one is scattered with corpses and multiple car crashes. It seems to have been used for a mass exodus who went terribly wrong. Then, what happened? In the distance, along the lake, some buildings stand out from the horizon: the sawmill. Why do they all seemed to head for this installation? This is what you’ll have to discover when the campaign will be ready to play.

From the developer viewpoint, Geoffroy, who is in charge of the level, always tries to keep a significant coherence. This credibility problem is reflected through the architecture of the level and the placement of the various buildings and props. Thus, the sawmill was entirely built for the sake of realism even before it had a gameplay layout. It may seem like a controversial way of building a map, but lumberyard was entirely imagined this way, the gameplay often adapts to the environment and not the opposite. Each 3D prop, each car on the road, each bush and tree was scattered in a realistic way, which is kind of our main goal with this campaign after all. We’re trying to put a bit more design work than what Valve did with the poorly designed survival maps released with the recent update (who said smoky rocks, invisible walls and uncrossable 2 foot height fences?). Just kidding, we love you Valve <3

Stay tuned for more developer banter until the release.