valve posts

A number of fans express their displeasure over the fact that Valve had decided to release a sequel to their 2008 shooter Left 4 Dead less than a year after the original. But does Valve have something up their sleeve that could merge the two games in some way?

In a new chat with Valve marketing head Doug Lombardi at our sister site Joystiq, he states, " . . .it's definitely a goal of ours to have cross-operability for those who own both games." He points out that mod makers who are currently making levels for Left 4 Dead will have little trouble making those levels work for the sequel when it comes out. He added, " . . . that's stuff we're still really working out and we're not prepared to disclose just yet. We understand that the best possible scenario is to keep everyone together in the same community and treat it as a platform . . . "

Meanwhile despite the Internet furor over Left 4 Dead 2, Lombardi tells Eurogamer that the sequel is already secured twice as many pre-order copies as the first game did at this time last year.

One of the big complaints about Left 4 Dead 2 from fans is that the upcoming sequel to the zombie shooter will basically kill support for the original Left 4 Dead. At the time of the sequel's unveiling at E3 last month, developer Valve made it clear that they still planned to support and add content to the original game.

While we still don't know what that content will be like, Computer and Video Games has a quote from Valve's Doug Lombardi who states, "There will be some announcements coming before summer's out about what's coming there . . ". Let's hope so; we don't need another online petition, do we?

Gallery: Left 4 Dead

Like other PC game download sites this week, the Steam service is starting their weekend sales pitch a little bit early thanks to the US-based Fourth of July holiday. Today Steam announced that for the next few days the price of the hit Bethesda Softworks RPG Fallout 3 will have a 50 percent price cut.

Yep, that means that the highly acclaimed 2008 game, which is normally $49.99 on Steam, can now be bought for the next few days for just $24.99. It's too bad that you can't download the four (so far) mini-expansions to the game via Steam as well.

Just two days after Valve released a new Team Fortress 2 patch, the developer has gone ahead and released yet another quick patch for their popular multiplayer shooter via Steam.The patch is mostly a bug fix update but there are a couple of notes that Valve meant to mention were included in the previous patch.

One is that the new Ambassador weapon (added during the Sniper-Spy content update) no longer penetrates building (which we are sure some people are not happy about). The other note is that movement speed penalty on The Razorback item has been removed. Again we are expecting to hear something soon about the next TF2 character class update.

As promised, the latest update for Valve's zombie co-op shooter Left 4 Dead is now available to download via Steam. As we reported a few days ago this update is being released primarily to help make user created campaigns easier to make and earlier to install.

For players, the update lets you select any third party maps and campaigns via the game's user interface. It also adds matchmaking support for those maps as well as leaderboard support. Players can download any add-on maps and campaigns as one .VPK file. For mod makers, the update offers up sample files for Left 4 Dead's official maps as a resource to map new maps and campaigns.

Valve didn't just add Novint Falcon support to Team Fortress 2 today. The company also released a pretty big patch for their popular multiplayer shooter. The release note on the Steam web site give all the details on what's new, changed and fixed.

Among the additions is a way to to select left or right handed view models in the advanced multiplayer menu. There's also some new mapmaker options as well as as a number of fixes for both the Sniper and Spy characters. As one might imagine we are still awaiting word on when Valve will release the next character class update for the game.

It took much longer than previously announced but today Valve revealed that they have added support via Steam for the Novint Falcon PC game controller to all of the games in Valve's Orange Box collection. That includes Half-Life 2: Episodes 1 and 2 along with Portal and Team Fortress 2 (the original Half-Life 2 already supports the Falcon controller via a patch from Novint).

The controller allows gamers to "feel" effects like weapon fire recoil, the weight of holding objects like barrels and even feel textures in the game world. Valve has promised that they will add Falcon support to their other games including Left 4 Dead.

Valve's head man Gabe Newell mentioned earlier this year that sales of their games tend to spike when they have price cuts on Steam. Now a new study seems to confirm that player activity for their zombie shooter Left 4 Dead has gone up for the PC version compared to the Xbox 360 port of the game.

Gamasutra reports that a new study from DFC Intelligence and the social networking site GamerDNA shows that player activity for both versions of the game were more or less the same until Valve held a 50 percent sale of the PC version on Steam in February. PC player activity went up and then leveled off but still was somewhat higher than the Xbox 360 version.

In late April the free Survival Pack was released for both platforms and while both the PC and Xbox 360 experienced spikes in player activities, the PC version went even higher thanks to a "Free to play" weekend that the Xbox 360 version could not duplicate. Since then the PC version has continued to be much higher in terms of player activity than the Xbox 360 port.

Valve is getting ready to release a major update to its zombie co-op shooter Left 4 Dead and this week the game's official blog site posted up some details. The update, to be released automatically via Steam sometime next week, will concentrate on supporting new campaign add-ons made by third parties.

The update will include the official release of the game's SDK editing tools (the SDK has been in open beta for some time) with a few changes and fixes. The mod tools will allow players to make their own campaigns for Left 4 Dead. The update will also have some UI changes to support add-ons as will as matchmaking for any new third party campaigns.

According to the note, "Content authors will be able to package up their new maps, along with new posters, models, and textures, into a single .VPK file." They can then be placed in an addons folder in the game where they will be accessed via the game's Extras menu as seen above.

We are not sure if Valve is just pulling our finger (pun intended) but in their latest blog post on the Left 4 Dead site they talk about how they created the image of the four fingered hand for the box cover to their zombie co-op shooter. Valve didn't want to use Photoshop so they got one of their artists, Andrea Wicklund, to bite her thumb for reference pictures.

Valve then claims the ESRB ratings board didn't care for that kind of dedication to the art, saying they "cited some fake-sounding legal loophole about it being illegal to take pictures of people biting off parts of their hands." For the upcoming sequel Left 4 Dead 2 Valve says they simply tucked in two fingers for the box design (which you can see after the jump). Valve does say " . . .it took lopping the fingers off two staff members' hands to get the lighting reference perfect, but since those didn't appear on the box, we think we're legally in the clear." We think they are joking.