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Left 4 Dead DLC, SDK Announced
Today Valve announced plans for Left 4 Dead's first DLC, called The L4D Survival Pack. It will include a new game mode and two campaigns for Versus mode. The new content is coming to both the PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game (a PS3 port to the base game still seems unlikely). The press release goes on to say, "In addition, for PC gamers and aspiring developers, the first Left 4 Dead release for the Source Software Development Kit (Source SDK) will allow the creation of custom Left 4 Dead campaigns that will be discoverable via L4D's matchmaking system. The SDK update is also due for release this spring, and is free of charge to all owners of L4D on the PC." The Opposable Thumbs blog also reports on a way to play Left 4 Dead in 3D.
Left 4 Dead is an amazingly fun game to play but Valve really screwed us over on the details. It's clear from their history of handling this game in the beta and afterwards that they focused on sales with a perpetual we'll-fix-it-later attitude. We were already supposed to have DLC and the SDK.
More importantly, the network system for the game is lousy and they don't seem to want to improve it. Instead of the tried and true simplicity of seeing a list of available game servers and choosing one to play on, they tried to get all fancy and game console-y and remove even this basic feature (unless you go through the command console, but even then it's clunky). We're slaves to their matchmaking system, unable to choose who we play with unless we do so through their social networking system. Often times there are not enough servers available (how can they possibly fail to provide enough resources for their customers? Is it really that expensive, incrementally, to run a few more servers?), and poorly configured servers pollute everyone's game experience by adding a lot to the overhead of finding a playable match.
Sometimes you'll have to go back and forth between game lobby and gameplay because you keep getting assigned to a crap server. Sometimes you'll be having the match of your life, then everyone gets disconnected and scattered to different corners of the system because the server shut down.
I'll say it again, L4D is fun as hell, but that's only when you're actually playing. In-between campaigns it's just thousands of collective manhours of overhead.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
I am very disturbed that it doesn't mention whether the "new" levels (really existing levels with slight modifications to improve play in Versus mode) and new play mode will be free for PC users. The way they specifically say that the SDK will be has me worried.
I'm pretty sure everyone who bought the game at release was counting on major FREE updates, like those that Team Fortress 2 has received. It certainly isn't worth $45 ($50 if you didn't pre-order) in its present state, but people paid that much so they could play the existing content now and enjoy new free content later. That's definitely what I did.
Valve is one of a handful of gaming companies that (many) players respect, and that respect drove early sales of this game. I'd hate to see them abuse it.
From what I understand, Microsoft requires DLC to be for-pay; Valve's stance, reiterated on January 14th, has been that free DLC is a more effective sales catalyst. And then you get the guy on RPS claiming that Gabe emailed saying PC DLC is "free".
I love L4D, I agree that it's light on content and there are quite a few problems, but I've gotten about 300 hours out of a game that cost me $40ish. That's a bargain in my book, regardless of the issues.
A bunch of my friends and I set up a Steam group and got the dedicated server package installed on one of our Linux servers over Christmas.
If you play L4D a lot, this really is worth doing IMO (you can rent an 8 slot L4D game server for $10-15 a month, between a few people this is nothing) - we have a server geographically close to the majority of us on a decent tube, and we generally get around 30-40ms pings with 60ms spikes. It's very smooth, and is not difficult to setup (took me about 10-15 minutes one Sunday).
The best way we have found to connect to this server via the lobby system consistently is to set steam_group_exclusive in the cfg to our group only. This stops people not in your group from starting a lobby on it. Then when we want to play, we bring up the developer console after starting a lobby and use "sv_cheats 1; ms_force_dedicated_server IP:port". This then connects the lobby to our server every time when we click the Search menu item.
I agree Valve need to do something with this mess and it's a bit annoying to have to work around it like this, but this works nicely. You can of course alias the sv_cheats / ms_force_dedicated_server command to make this even easier.
You can apparently achieve similar results with setting an sv_search_key in the cfg and your group's clients, but this has given us problems so we use the above workaround instead. There is also the openserverbrowser command that gives you a browser window of available / recent / favourite L4D servers to connect to, similar to TF2, CS etc.
Given that a) you post on slashdot so I assume you're technically competent enough to install hlds and edit a config file, b) you obviously enjoy the game and c) your enjoyment is only being ruined by bad servers, I highly recommend you look into picking up your own server, sharing the cost with a few people if necessary. I can gaurentee you it will make the game a lot more enjoyable.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....