• (ESCalation) L4D - Remake: Original Unreleased NO MERCY Campaign
    22 replies, posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Ub8vK1ZOY
Looks like a HD remake of No Mercy, now I want to see all other campaigns remade in the same way, especially L4D2 ones which already severely lack detail and atmosphere.
Turtle Rock's design took place in California, not Pennsylvania.
I'm guessing all these graphical flourishes were removed to better optimize the game on older systems and/or to avoid absurdly long loading times between maps.
To be honest I'd guess most of the visual stuff is down to the games needing to be developed for last gen consoles.
A lot of these changes were to things that already ran fine in CSS, a game released 4 years prior. Left 4 Dead was also already running quite well of machines of the era in 2007. From what I can tell, petty drama between the two teams caused the fall of Left 4 Dead's art direction.
I think they made the right decision in redesigning some of the layout in the final version. Especially around the gas station area. I thought it was awkward trying to maneuver around those tight hallways leading onto the roof of the warehouse. Other than that, I absolutely love the look of TR's No Mercy. Especially the lighting and road reflections. The brushwork is kinda blocky, but that was probably a product of the time.
Valve did a series of blog posts on why they overhauled L4D's visual design. In a nutshell, lighting changes were for both aesthetic and gameplay purposes. For example, Valve reduced the number of light sources so that locations looked abandoned and lighted areas could provide visual cues on where players should go, whereas the earlier TRS builds had much more (pointless) visual clutter. http://www.l4d.com/blog/post.php?id=1962
pretty good
Ah, so once again the brain-dead playtesters valve hires may have been responsible. Recall that Episode 2's antlion hive was redesigned because someone kept taking the wrong path over and over.
I wouldn't put it down to brain-dead playtesters this time, there's a lot of thought and detail evident in the blog posts and the lighting/clutter is just the start. Fairfield Terror retains a lot of the old clutter, it just looks comparatively nicer now because it's being recreated 10 years after build it's based on (though it has to be said, the reflections look pretty poor. Take 1:00 in the video for example).
Well I mean, if you're partly making your game for people who don't really play games, it'd only make sense you pick your playtesters accordingly. I wouldn't be surprised that if Valve left everything the way it was that lots of people would downvote the game because of things like "they don't know where to go."
I agree with them on the lighting part. As much as I love TR's lighting, when the map is so bright it can be hard to highlight points of interest. Nothing really stands out to the eye and it's not as obvious as to where you're supposed to go. Alan Wake is another example of lighting being used as a guide and it works wonders. Not only aesthetically, but also from a level design standpoint.
Yeah, while I think the TRS looks good, I don't think it's fair to say it looks objectively better. One of the things that stuck with me the most when I first played L4D1 all those years ago was that cold dead feeling that all the environments had from the washed out palette. I actually think the foggy washed out look suited the game better than the dark and glossy look of the beta. Plus seeing the silhouettes of infected in the distance against the grey fog always gave me chills. That aside, I'm a total slut for cut content so this is great.
I like the remake more on a visual perspective but I can understand why they went with a simpler atmosphere.
Were any of the other campaigns drastically different compared to retail? Or is No Mercy the only beta footage we have?
I have some memory of watching a commentary node video and someone claimed to be that very same playtester and talked about how he kept going in circles, p'funny if it's true.
Yeah, Valve works long and hard to make their map design very intuitive. Because their bread and butter was the Half-Life series which made immersion and flow major parts of their design it kinda carried over into everything Valve did, at least singleplayer wise. They minimize or even completely eliminate more obvious railroading techniques like taking control away from the player or objective marker tooltips and instead try to draw players to those areas naturally via light, sound, and by avoiding maze-like maps.
The final version may not be so fun to look at but I'm certain it's much better gameplay. The grey gradients caused by fog and smooth lighting make the areas' geometry so much more readable, and enemies stand out.
Using light sources to guide players in a game that requires quick navigation is just good design. The antlion hive having a looping path which could theoretically be taken on repeat forever was a sign that this additional, pointless bit of level geometry was not telegraphed well enough as a loop and rather than introduce more visual clutter to differentiate it they simply got rid of it. It's almost like level design is not just about putting as much shit on screen as possible.
The reflections are actually likely a memory optimization for consoles. Valve mentioned how much L4D had their backs up against a wall when it came to their memory budget (remember, X360 only had 512MB shared RAM) - and as a Source mapper myself, I can tell you that cubemaps add up, fast. L4D 2 also has even fewer cubemaps and reflective surfaces.
this would look so good with parallax-corrected cube maps
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