left-4-dead-demo posts

As people continue to play the Left 4 Dead demo they have found some interesting things that are either hidden in the code or really hard to spot in the game itself. Kotaku spotted a box in one of the rooms in the demo that shows an ad for a Team Fortress 2 action figure. The box says "Collect all 10" which has led Kotaku to speculate that there may be a 10th Team Fortress 2 class planned in the future (the current game has nine player classes of course).

Meanwhile the fan site Left4dead411.com has posted up word that they have discovered what was apparently a new boss character in the game that was dropped from the final version, the Screamer. There's even a concept art drawing in the code. Meanwhile the demo, which ends on Nov. 17, has a new patch that fixes some issues and adds the ability to tie in game servers to Steam Community groups.

If you like your games to have full co-op mode in the single player campaign then this year is a good time to be a fan of PC first person shooters. This week developer Treyarch and publisher Activision release Call of Duty: World at War, which finally adds co-op support for the first time in the series. Next week is even bigger as Valve finally releases the full version of Left 4 Dead, a game designed from the ground up to be a co-op shooter.

Today we look back at the history of co-op gameplay in first person shooter titles.The genre actually had quite a few games that supported such features when it first started but the last few years have seen a decline as FPS have emphasised more popular multiplayer features like deathmatch, CTF and more recently big team based gameplay. But with Call of Duty: World at War and Left 4 Dead out this month co-op gameplay may be coming back.

Click on the picture above to continue reading Playing Together: Co-Op in PC FPS Games.

This past weekend we reported that enterprising hackers had enabled split-screen support in the the PC version of Left 4 Dead. However, the new demo patch for Valve's upcoming zombie co-op shooter has disabled that hack. Fear not, however, for split-screen support is coming in the full version on Nov. 18.

As stated by Valve's own Yahn Bernier, "...we are planning on making some of the functionality work on the PC as an 'unsupported' bonus feature. We turned it off for the demo because we didn't want to have to deal with any additional bug reports etc. about it interfering with the demo experience, but the current plan is to re-enable it after we launch the full product." It's always good to know when developers have their customer's backs.

[Via Blue's News]

If you have been itching to try out the demo for Left 4 Dead but are too cheap to pay for the game's pre-order, your time has come. The demo for Valve's zombie co-op shooter should be free for anyone to play via Steam today. The demo will supposedly "conclude" next Tuesday, Nov. 18 when the full game ships to stores and is made available for download via Steam.

Meanwhile the demo itself has gotten a solid patch update via Steam. There are a number of issues fixed or improved in the latest update including some matchmaking changes that have been the one major source of problems with people playing the game. The patch notes include statements like "Tuned matchmaking to provide better search results" and "Added UI to host a game on a local server." Of course you can expect Valve to make regular and fast updates to both the demo and the full game after its release.