Left4Dead.be

Sequel to Best-Selling Co-op Thriller Coming This Holiday

June 1, 2009 -- Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2), the sequel to the best-selling and critically-acclaimed co-operative multiplayer thriller.

Coming exclusively to Xbox 360 and PC, L4D2 promises to set a new benchmark for co-operative action games and become one of 2009′s marquee titles.

“A large part of how Left 4 Dead became 2008′s top-selling new IP on Xbox 360 and the PC was the custom-tailored gameplay made possible by the AI Director,” said Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. “With the knowledge gained from creating the original, new technology, and a passionate team, L4D2 will set a new benchmark for cooperative action games.”

Set for release on November 17, the title adds melee combat to enable deeper co-operative gameplay, with items such as a chainsaw, frying pan, axe, baseball bat, and more.

Introducing the AI Director 2.0, L4D’s dynamic gameplay is taken to the next level by giving the Director the ability to procedurally change weather effects, world objects, and pathways in addition to tailoring the enemy population, effects, and sounds to match the players’ performance. The result is a unique game session custom fitted to provide a satisfying and uniquely challenging experience each time the game is played.

Featuring new Survivors, boss zombies, weapons, and items, Left 4 Dead 2 offers a much larger game than the original with more co-operative campaigns, more Versus campaigns, and maps for Survival mode available at launch.

Supported by a $10+ million marketing campaign, Left 4 Dead has sold over 2.5 million retail copies since it was released in November of 2008. Left 4 Dead 2 is targeted for release on Xbox 360 and the PC on November 17, 2009, and will be launched worldwide with a multi-million dollar marketing campaign across TV, Outdoor, and Online.

“Left 4 Dead was backed by our most aggressive advertising campaign to date, and resulted in a top 5 showing on two platforms during holiday 2008,” said Doug Lombardi, VP of marketing at Valve. “Left 4 Dead 2 is a larger game and will be supported with even more consumer and retail advertising programs than the original.”

Left 4 Dead 2 will be featured as the cover story on PC Gamer and Official Xbox Magazines this month.

Source: http://store.steampowered.com/news/2552/

Updates to Left 4 Dead have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Survival Mode

• Removed an exploit from The Construction Site
• Fixed issues with Survival Mode medals not being awarded properly in rare cases
• Times will no longer be awarded when joining mid-round and cheats had been active during that round

Servers

• Server will now reset correctly after all players leave a Versus game

Match Making

• Fixed a mismatch between lobbies and servers that will remove the “Server is full” errors when quickmatching
• Fixed match making issue affecting Vista64 users

Updates to Left 4 Dead have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Survival Mode Changes

• Darkened the Lighthouse background movie and increased the contrast with the user interface elements
• Chapter selection is now available when creating a Survival lobby
• Single player coop now works correctly after playing Survival online
• The correct game mode will be set when playing back a demo
• Changed holdout server spew to be development only
• Stats are no longer updated while viewing a demo
• Correctly update the leaderboard based on the player’s personal time, not the team best time
• Show the player’s best time in the scoreboard
• Removed Survival exploits from The Terminal, Last Stand, The Crane, The Boathouse and The Warehouse
• Fixed tanks sometimes not spawning after 15-20 minutes

Updates to Left 4 Dead have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Left 4 Dead

• Fixed an incorrect DLL for windows dedicated servers
• Corrected players not receiving the Lighthouse achievement
• Added missing Survival only sounds
• Fixed issue with awarding medal achievements
• Corrected ghost icons appearing survival scoreboard

The Left 4 Dead Survival Pack is now available for the PC and Xbox 360, free of charge to all owners of the game. The full change list for the PC release is below. In addition, both the retail and Steam versions of the game (PC and 360) are now available for a special price. Check Steam and local retailers for pricing details. For more information about L4D, please visit www.l4d.com

Survival Mode

• New gameplay Mode
• 16 maps including Last Stand
• Leaderboards
• 7 new achievements

Versus Changes

• 2 new versus campaigns
• Fixed a case where versus team score would continue to be recalculated after the score panel was displayed
• Fixed an issue with recalculating the versus score health bonus for a player when they are rescued from being incapacitated
• Fixed being able to start a swing as an infected, then teleport to the survivors and have the claw swing hit a survivor
• Fixed a case where teleporting to the survivors would not reset the ability timer
• Fixed an exploit where you could load the chamber of a weapon with bullets by holding down the melee key
• Fixed a case where it was not possible to join a game while it was in a finale
• Fixed a rare case where listen servers would speed up the game over time
• Removed convars related to melee fatigue
• Fixed a case where infected players would get a respawn time on their initial spawn into a map

Server Changes

• Made ms_force_dedicated_server not require cheats
• Add a message when queuing a heartbeat
• Simplified setting of game mode
• Removed convars director_no_human_zombies and director_holdout_mode
• Added mp_gamemode [coop,versus,survival]

General
Added lobby join and leave messages