5/6/2023 0 Comments Left 4 dead 2 logoHayward’s view is that the beauty and longevity of Left 4 Dead 2 suggests that fans don’t really need a new entry in the franchise, but new updates to the solid foundation can’t hurt. The Source Filmmaker animator has been offering creative input to the team and notes that working on The Last Stand was a “really great opportunity for me to tackle new things… and get support from other experienced individuals”. According to Zeek, there’s another video in the works. Zeekrocs117 is the animator behind The Last Stand’s first two teasers, which have given players a gorgeous glimpse at the team’s newly created areas from the forthcoming map, including a slick animation of legendary survivor Bill wrestling an axe from a zombie’s back. Davis added that the project was also an opportunity to update Left 4 Dead 2’s scripting features, so that the game’s workshop contributors could have “more flexibility with their creations”. The team has created new models and sounds for The Last Stand, with Hayward teasing that there would be “something for every type of player”, regardless of the mode of play. “We worked our way backwards from the lighthouse, by adding various areas leading up to it, until we reached the point of it being long enough for it to be its own standalone campaign.” “What we’re doing for this update is making an entirely new campaign with the original lighthouse area being our basis,” Hayward tells me. ![]() Unlike the original The Last Stand map, which was just a one-and-done Survival map that centred around a lighthouse, the Left 4 Dead 2 port is being fleshed out into a full-blown mission. With a normal project we can do all that on our internal version of Steam, but of course none of the community members have access to that so we switched over a small group of our public servers to our beta build,” Davis explains. “We wanted to validate our work on an official dedicated server. This stoked rumours that Valve was finally working on an update for Left 4 Dead 2.ĭavis demystified this for me over email, revealing that it was all part of The Last Stand project. “On Valve’s side we’ve been providing code support and working on bug fixes, but everything else is the work of community members that’s being integrated into the official game.” Back in June before the project was formally announced, a set of official Valve servers were found to be running the lighthouse map on a new build of the game that players couldn’t access. Once Alyx had shipped, Davis took a look at the work the community had been doing and decided to commit to helping them out. “The entire company was in the final push on Half-Life: Alyx, so we wouldn’t have been able to give the necessary attention to an anniversary update.”Īfter learning that Valve had its hands tied, Nondorf suggested that he could put together a team to add the lighthouse survival map ‘The Last Stand’ from the original Left 4 Dead into the sequel, asking Davis for the Valve Map Format files as it was the only mission that was never ported over. ![]() According to Nondorf, the initial idea was a “straight up port of the survival items from Left 4 Dead with some additional Left 4 Dead 2 items for a rushed November release”.ĭavis liked the idea at the time, but unfortunately, the studio couldn’t commit to helping them. Nondorf is a Steam community moderator for both Left 4 Dead games who initially pitched the update to Valve to coincide with Left 4 Dead 2’s 10th anniversary in November 2019. To find out more about the forthcoming update, I spoke to Valve developer Kerry Davis and a few community members from the project ( Raymond “Rayman1103” Nondorf, Jaymes “JAiZ” Hayward and zeekrocs117) to get some exclusive details about how this project came together, and what Left 4 Dead fans can expect when it launches. The game has stood the test of time like Portal and Half-Life before it, and if you boot it up in 2020, you’ll find a good-looking game with a gameplay loop that has constantly been imitated, but never beaten. With over 300 hours played myself, I still can’t get enough of it, and running through a few campaigns with my friends in Versus Mode is a bi-weekly ritual. ![]() It might surprise you to learn that Valve’s classic co-op title is still being played by tens of thousands of people on Steam every day, nearly 11 years after launch! It’s more of a statement of intent, and a testament to the thriving community behind Left 4 Dead 2. But The Last Stand Update is not simply one last hurrah for a game from 2009.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |