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Left 4 Dead 2 Announced For November
hansamurai writes "Left 4 Dead 2 has been announced at E3, and a trailer for the game has surfaced. It will be released November 17, 2009, just a year after the first game. Gameplay changes include a new focus on melee weapons, especially the iconic anti-zombie weapon, the chainsaw. The cast of characters is brand new, but the plot appears to take place during the same zombie outbreak."
The game is being developed for the PC and Xbox 360, and Valve says it will make use of a new version of their AI engine, which has the ability to "procedurally change weather effects, world objects, and pathways in addition to tailoring the enemy population, effects, and sounds to match the players' performance." Rock, Paper, Shotgun got the chance to do a hands-on preview, providing details about the gameplay and confirming that "it's a coherent new imagining of the game, this time bigger, smarter, and far more elaborate. Oh, and gloriously more gory."
remember that Left 4 Dead that made by Turtle Rock Studios or now Valve South. Valve North have been quite quiet, apart from the TF2 updates.
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Basically Valve broke their promise from last year and is now officially a greedy developer. If they intended to have Left4Dead be a technology preview all along, they should've gone and called this paid beta-testing as the Prologue version, like Gran Turismo 5.
"Valve intends to support hotly anticipated zombie survival shooter Left 4 Dead post-release with new characters, new maps, new achievements and new weapons in order to grow the community, Gabe Newell has revealed.
Speaking to VideoGamer.com at Leipzig Games Convention, the Valve co-founder and managing director said the developer intended to follow a similar downloadable content policy as it has with Team Fortress 2.
Newell said that Valve's support of the game post-launch will be essential for growing the community.
He said: "One of the things that we're doing is we seem to be in a transition between games as a package product and games more of a service. So if you look at Team Fortress 2, one of things that's really helped grow the community is the continuous updates, where we release new maps, new character classes, new unlockables, new weapons. And we tell the stories about the characters, like the meet the sniper, or meet the sandwich. And that ongoing delivery of content really seems to grow the community."
source: http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/left_4_dead/news/valve_details_post_left_4_dead_launch_plans.html
It was released in beta a couple weeks ago. If you own the game, go to the "Tools" tab in Steam, and it should be there. In another few weeks, they said they'll be releasing the ability for the game to handle 3rd-party maps/campaigns.
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Gabe Newell (gaben@valvesoftware.com) reads all his mail. If you are upset about the failure to treat L4D as more than a tech demo, send him an email discussing your concerns. At the least, he'll respond, and who knows? It might help.
Be polite, be reasoned, and make sure to explain why you're upset. At the risk of making it sound form-letterish, I'd quote what he said as mentioned by this article:
http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/left_4_dead/news/valve_details_post_left_4_dead_launch_plans.html
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I'm assuming they have different teams for different games, and I'm equally sure the half-life team is, in fact, concentrating on wrapping up the half life 2 series.
Plus, in my opinion, TF2 outshines HL2 and the episodes, even though they were amazing themselves.