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.

Re:Pay for update?

[spire3661]

What that line you quoted means is that 360 owners wont receive the SDK, as the Xbox 360 is not a platform you can develop levels on.

Awesome.

[AbRASiON]

Great game.
I purchased it on steam in a 4 pack for about 35$ US - I felt 50$ US was too pricey but at 35$ this is excellent value and incredible fun in co-op.
I really hope it breathes new life in to the game with the SDK

Re:Cost??

[Grym]

It's even worse than that. The two "new" versus campaigns they're selling are not new at all. They're two of the co-op only campaigns that they very slightly changed to run versus. There are seriously modified servers running right now that allow almost the exact same thing--for free. And let's not forget that the SDK they're mentioning as an upgrade was supposed to be released months ago...

Can you imagine the tone of this article and subsequent discussion if EA had done this?

-Grym

$0.00

[DingerX]

From one [edge-online.com] source that did followup:

Update: Due to a miscommunication, we had updated the original piece, stating that PC and Xbox 360 Survival Packs would be paid. However, Valve again contacted Edge to say that it hasn't ruled out the possibility of the price being "$0.00." Sorry for any confusion.

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 [rockpapershotgun.com] claiming that Gabe emailed saying PC DLC is "free".

Re:Pay for update?

[FTWinston]

The Value way has consistantly been free DLC, for PC at least. HL2DM, all the (significant) TF2 content updates ... all free. I suspect the article may be just being cautious, as I'd be very suprised if Valve were going to charge for this expansion. If they do, I guess they would perhaps do so so that console owners don't feel put out at being charged?

Re:Cost??

[Canazza]

Apart from the fact that valve run very few of the actual servers out there (they're mainly hosted by other companies, like jolt)
Yes, using the console is clunkier, but frankly it's worth it just to get a lag free game (you can use the browser to sort from local games)
granted, you can't START games this way, but you can always join a game in progress.
for anyone wondering how to do it, you have to activate the developer console from options->keyboard->advanced then pressing '`' (to the left of the number 1 key) then type 'openserverbrowser'

Re:Cost??

[colonslashslash]

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.

Re:Long gone are the days of FREE extra content.

[Joseph T]

For the PC everything is/will be free, just like the TF2 updates. The 360 is different because Microsoft wants them to charge for their DLC, which is why they've waited a bloody long time to release it.

Gabe interview: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3170080 [1up.com]

PS If you haven't already, go to interlopers.net with your map. Hell of a community that will give you all grades of feedback.