Blade.3510

out september 29th ill try and find more info

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Evo<^|SiNz|^>

Sounds like it's only going to be half a campaign...

How convenient! I'm glad I don't have to pay for it.

I'm surprised Valve isn't doing more to support third-party campaigns. I think it's very strange that Valve's tradition has been to allow users to download custom maps, content, etc... (think CS:S, DoD:S, etc...) while in-game, but L4D boots you out if you want to get custom campaigns. There are a few good ones from the looks of it, and they should make it as easy as possible to play these.

It's been about 10 months since the game was released, and four scenarios is getting stale. Valve tries to rationalize this by saying that there are 20 "maps", but I think that's not a fair way to put it given the context of the game's presentation. It's designed for you to play through the campaigns, not individual maps, and it's usually easy enough to do one campaign in a sitting.

I'll probably eventually pick up L4D2 when it goes on sale, just like I did with L4D when it first went on sale for 50% off. I think I'd be more inclined if it started off at the $40 price point. The problem with me for L4D was that I didn't quite see the value in a multiplayer-only game with only 4 maps and two modes that were quite similar. I'm sure they put a lot of work into it, but value is in the eye of the beholder. I think Valve is the best in the industry in recognizing that, but I think they've made a mistake in how they're marketing and supporting these particular products.

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"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.
He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
- Attributed to General George Patton, Jr.

Uchiha Obito

Your post got me thinking Evo, why doesn't Valve support the mod community more? Granted, I think they already do more than most companies, but I think the next step in L4D isn't that big. Valve should sit down and play test some of these custom campaign maps as though they had developed them. If they find anything they don't like they try to get in touch with the modder and see about changing it or simply move on to the next campaign. In any case, they could then release a DLC pack for free with 2 or 3 new campaigns and just label them as unofficial. By releasing the maps through Steam they take a shred of responsibility for them and now everyone has these maps and will have an easier time match making.

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Evo<^|SiNz|^>

Valve and most other big developers have extreme strict standards in place for quality, and they would probably never publish a mod under their brand name without extensive input from their own development staff. There are great modders out there, but Valve has its own development doctrine, and most modders just don't have the resources to produce the quality of maps made by full time development houses.

Just look at Relic with Company of Heroes. They've had two or three map making contests, but after they picked the winners, the maps went through several months of revisions by Relic's dev team to bring them up to the company's standards of presentation and balance before slapping their name on it. And these are still labeled as "community made" maps when you load them up in game. It can turn into a much more time- and resource-intensive process than simply playtesting a couple of times and contacting the modder with any changes.

There are a couple solutions to this, though. Like you said, Valve could publish these specifically as "unofficial" or community-made. But then, they are still releasing these things themselves, which sort of makes them "official." I doubt Valve wants to put its name next to something, and find out there is a massive balance glitch, or a bug in the map that crashes the game if you move your character to a certain spot, even if it's releasing it with a disclaimer.

The solution I think would work best is to allow users to download custom scenarios while in-game, and create a rating system for custom content. After you play, you'd be able to give the campaign a 1-5 star rating, and the cream would rise to the top. This would take some of the ambiguity out of deciding what custom content to play, and it would encourage modders to make more, better campaigns.

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"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.
He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
- Attributed to General George Patton, Jr.

Reaperassault

There are plenty of custom maps out there, some better than others. Maps are big even when zipped talking 200-300 MB and that is not going to work trying to DL on the fly. The maps are also hard to create, lots of special pathing that has to go into them. l4dmaps.com is a great place to check out maps, everything from completed to maps that just got started. Map instillation could not be easier, unzip the file and then double click the .vpk file and it installs.

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Evo<^|SiNz|^>

I know how it works, and it's easy from the standpoint that there are few steps to installing it. My point is that Valve should add this functionality in-game, streamlining the process. You shouldn't have to actively seek these things out, they should be there for you in the game to select.

Also, we know that with bzip, large files can be downloaded from game servers relatively quickly. A 200-300MB file would admittedly take a while, but I would bet that if they put the option to download that content in the game, more people would use that then finding a third party site to get their content.

Of course, on the other side of the coin is the annoyance of having to download sounds, skins, etc... in CS:S every time you go to a new server. But I think if you get the choice to download these things in game, it's better than no choice at all.

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"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.
He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
- Attributed to General George Patton, Jr.

Kebab-Kastike

I'm fairly sure that Valve WILL release community maps as official maps at some point.
It's just that right now most community maps aren't fully finished.

Oh and the reason why XBox360 got to pay for it because Microsoft doesn't like to give things away free for their console. That's one of the reasons why TF2 hasn't been updated on that front.

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Lyramion

Comparing TF2 and L4D maps is like comparing apples and eggs:


L4D maps are made to be played thru. Some of them have a GIGANTIC file size of 200 to 300MB. It´s very unpractical/unrealistic to make you load those from the server you want to play on.

L4D maps need loads of testing and balancing. Tf2 maps you can just kinda toss out there. Some custom TF2 maps that have been released by Valve are very simple like Turbine or mach4.

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Celestial1

Not to mention that L4D needs AI pathing done whereas TF2 maps do not.

Could be a time-consuming process, amplified by how large the map is, which is another thing that makes L4D maps more intricate and time-consuming in comparison.

Also dynamic events, which are like individual maps in themselves; you have to balance out those events to make sure that it won't completely decimate the survivor team or be a cake-walk for them.

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Lyramion

A) It´s out

B) downloading dam slow

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