That campaign was horribly bad, horrible bland design, horrible aesthetics, some things didn't make sense. Like how in one tunnel the water was inclining for no reason whatsoever, the ladder to the helicopter made no sense and isn't the kind to be tied to a helicopter skiff.
I can't say I'm disappointed, I wasn't expecting much anyways. I hope he smartens up and fixes it for the final.
The DLC was incredibly vanilla in comparison to all the other campaigns.
Just played this new campaign with a friend. It wasn't the best, but I can't say I really expected it to be.
The first map is a discombobulated mess of junk with no real sense of direction. We just wandered around what we thought was the right path and found the saferoom after about two minutes. The second map started off blinding us, then turned into alternating between a river and road multiple times, followed by some running crescendo. I really liked the idea of strong currents in this bit, but it was very short-lived and was pretty much the only good part of it at all.
Map 3 seemed to be heavily inspired by The Parish to me, and had far too many ammo caches. The bridge exploded for no foreseeable reason, which launched a car that incapacitated everyone. There was also a random slow-motion bit after climbing down the bridge, and we didn't see anything dramatic to justify having it either. Then the finale was ridiculously long, and had [i]absolutely[/i] no break between zombies for us to gather our bearings, excluding when the tank showed up. We had to turn the difficulty down from advanced to easy half-way through, and even then we just barely made it. Climbing the rope ladder up to the helicopter might sound good on paper, but in versus it'll just be an instant-death trap, although I'm doubting many people will even get to make it that far.
I spawned outside of the safe room in the last chapter.
[i]Betaaaa[/i]
[QUOTE=acfan;28759486]I spawned outside of the safe room in the last chapter.
[i]Betaaaa[/i][/QUOTE]
So did I, then I got to the chopper and everybody else died. :smug:
They're trying so hard to make me not like their game.
hahah most of the textures from cold stream are stolen from other maps/campaigns
even the new models are stolen from gm_forest
Here's some crazy screenshots from first playthrough (with the bots):
I didn't do anything. There's a stone falling down the hill in this part. I also recorded a demo showing it (might upload it later).
[media]http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk202/TehBarnz/c13m2_southpinestream0001.jpg[/media]
Well shit, how the fuck I'm supposed to know that?
[media]http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk202/TehBarnz/c13m2_southpinestream0002.jpg[/media]
Again, I didn't do anything. They shot the truck and it blown up.
[media]http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk202/TehBarnz/c13m3_memorialbridge0005.jpg[/media]
Yeah, does this look fun? No.
[media]http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk202/TehBarnz/c13m3_memorialbridge0007.jpg[/media]
[QUOTE=myself]This is terribly made. Beta isn't an excuse (generally, it won't be different)
I couldn't even find the uzi/shotgun at the beginning.
The atmosphere is generally terrible and doesn't fit with valve's standards. I didn't even WANT to look around for surprises or even explore for fun. It was just a massive pile of trees and cars.
The brushwork is HL1 quality. Literally. Lego-like houses and stairs.
The gimmicks like the boulder, random explosions, death holes and slow-motion (what?) shows a new level of amateurism in source design.
The items are randomly thrown around. No signs of why the player should even look around for them.
Most props are out of place (broken down HL2 cars are recognizable from a mile away) and don't even fit in a realism point of view. (hint : ambulances aren't filled with wooden boxes IRL, cars aren't glowy neon pink/red/blue, car dumps aren't located right ontop rivers)
The general prop lightning also needs work, as most props are simply darkened out even in direct sunlight.
The finale makes zero sense whatsoever. Why should you be able to trigger it straight from the safehouse, and what does that crashing helicopter have to do with the rescue? The second helicopter isn't even noticeable, you just wander around trees like idiots until you find a move_rope ladder in your sight.
The bridge architecture looks straight from quake1. If you ignore the ambulances filled with boxes.
Anyway, it's spotlight quality, sure, but don't even think about permanentely including this crap in my game.[/QUOTE]
what I posted on spuf
this is a shame to left4dead (and any other mapper with a clue, really)
Too bad a lot of people will blindly rage against you claiming it to be the best thing to ever grace Left 4 Dead.
Link to the thread though?
[editline]23rd March 2011[/editline]
Oh nevermind I just ran into your post, I thought it was a thread in it's own.
[QUOTE=lionheart1066;28756228]You guys haven't even tried it yet and your saying horrible stuff about it...[/QUOTE]
Played it 3 times. It's hard to see which way the level goes but it super linear so you'll walk into a bunch of walls. It was mostly boring, you walk through a creek for most of the campaign, then to get to a safe room in a sewer, then you immediately leave the sewer to go back to walking down a creek, where a bunch of rocks fall on you and you'll probably die if its the first time you've played. Then you get onto a highway for a bit, weaving into a creek and back onto the highway several times. Then you blow up some barrels and go back into a creek and into another sewer, you exit the safe room to go up to the surface to one of the ugliest mapped places I've seen leading up a poor looking stairwell onto a bridge. You climb over 14 trucks and a tanker explodes putting a hole in the bridge which is easily walked straight across. You climb down a very poorly designed structure where you can easily fall off the first ladder and the second ladder is thin as a twig (the bots usually all die here) back into some water. Then you walk through yet another creek into a safe room that exits to another creek which leads to a forest that is easy to get fucked up in because you don't know where the fuck you're going because the stupid rescue notification leads into a dead end that needs to be navigated around to climb up the floating ladder of doom and crouch walk into a helicopter.
I can't believe Valve decided to release this map.
Also no loading screen.
[img]http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/6339/l4d1l.png[/img]
[img]http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/9872/l4d2.png[/img]
[img]http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/8955/l4d3.png[/img]
[img]http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/163/l4d4.png[/img]
Also the bridge gets blown up by a fucking random jet, seriously what the fuck? A jet just happens to fly by right as you walk under it? And then the game goes into slow motion for 10 minutes while you watch the cars fall down. And what the fuck is up with the finale, you call a chopper, the chopper just blows up and thats all you see, it then tells you to get to the chopper and guess what they sent another chopper! By this time I'm the only one left alive so they risked the lives of loads of people to save 4 random people? This campaign is a piece of shit.
[QUOTE=Pat.Lithium;28762452]You climb down a very poorly designed structure where you can easily fall off the first ladder and the second ladder is thin as a twig (the bots usually all die here) back into some water. [/QUOTE]
I fucking hate this in games. People should avoid using them in their maps at all costs, climbing backwards down a ladder usually results in death since it's so hard to get a good grip on it without just getting bumped right off to your death.
[i]This just in, SPUF loves this pile of shit campaign! Is anyone really surprised?[/i]
I didn't get how you guys could all get lost. I mean, it couldn't be that bad, right?
I got lost leaving the safe room :downsgun:
Why it must be so fucking bad.
It's not only gameplay horrible, also looking awful. this acid-green bushes and unbelievable bad fire
[img]http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/541763649736126362/749A471E8B29EBA698486338212D987CA96C106B/[/img]
[img]http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/541763649736139274/B473B1BBDEE18D21873F2B5D8DFB3B252100392B/[/img]
I mean, REALLY
also all bots died when trying to climb up to helicopter
The blog post itself says there are lots of issues.
That fire looks like it's from MW2.
They shouldn't have released the beta at all, they should've had a few of their own testers run through it to spot the issues.
I'm pretty certain I've said it before, but I'll say it again regardless of whether I have or not: I'm very impressed with the Valve as a whole. They're a great game company that listens to their community and puts out good games and updates, but the Left 4 Dead team has severely disappointed me. They're slow to update at all - even minor bug and exploit fixes - and when they do it's either a full DLC or some minor tweak or bug fix that nobody ever notices it.
Now they're taking it even further and giving 90% of a DLC's work over to one person from the community, and they're not even bothering to really support him. No custom lines from actors, no mapping assistance, not even usage of their play testers for bug spotting and criticism.
I'll remain impressed by the rest of Valve - the TF2 team continues to provide us updates and new content, the Portal team is finishing up Portal 2, the HL team is... actually I think most of them are working on Portal 2. The DotA team I'm largely uninterested in, but that's because I hate DotA and not because of anything they've done. But the L4D team needs to put more effort into their game to live up to the other teams' standard.
I wish they would add some sort of "Survivor Preference" system.
Why the fuck is this awful Cold Stream campaign getting official support, and not the incredibly amazing and better-than-some-of-Valve's-campaigns I Hate Mountains?
[editline]23rd March 2011[/editline]
Or even the slightly less amazing but still very good Dead Before Dawn? I mean of ALL the campaigns to support, they choose one that's bland as hell, uninteresting, set in the daytime (as if we didn't have too many daytime campaigns already), and not even damn finished yet?
[QUOTE=Lijitsu;28763849] the Portal team is finished with Portal 2[/QUOTE]
The L4D2 map can go die for all i care, i just want Portal 2 already.
For a Beta this wasnt so bad, I havent played I Hate Mountains though.
[QUOTE=postmanX3;28764255]Why the fuck is this awful Cold Stream campaign getting official support, and not the incredibly amazing and better-than-some-of-Valve's-campaigns I Hate Mountains?
[editline]23rd March 2011[/editline]
Or even the slightly less amazing but still very good Dead Before Dawn? I mean of ALL the campaigns to support, they choose one that's bland as hell, uninteresting, set in the daytime (as if we didn't have too many daytime campaigns already), and not even damn finished yet?[/QUOTE]
I Hate Mountains doesn't work well with L4D2.
idgi why do people hate on it so much :V for a beta it seemed decent
though i sure as hell hope they plan on making the ladder leading to the rescue chopper something less stiff, like an actual rope ladder that falls down
I played it with four other people, we all got lost pretty fast, we didnt see that boulder the tank throws at you come at us, so one person already went down.
Then sooner or later the constant hordes and special infected amounts, even on normal difficulty, just wouldent ease up, theres no taking a breather.
If i had to choose a community map, it certainly wouldent be this one, oh and that fire effect and slow down are real cheesy.
And dont give the excuse that its beta, i didnt expect it to be this bad.
Everybody that got lost in this map needs to think while walking, I never got lost and dont know how you would even be able to get lost in that campaign.
The Nav Meshes + general AI was fucking horrible though.
You cant say that that flooded sever wasnt cool.
I didn't play it all the way through because I got tired, but my impression of the campaign is pretty poor even for a beta.
There are some nice ideas, and some things I can accept as simply being beta problems. Missing details (like no sound from all that flowing water), rough-around-the-edges visuals, bugs, balancing issues, et cetera, but there are some instances of poor design as well. I got lost a couple times, but only briefly. There is a pretty significant lack of context throughout the campaign, though. You're just plonked into the world with no sense of where you're going or why, and the starting area gets swamped with infected very quickly which seems to be a faux-pas to me. I also feel not nearly enough effort has been put into pacing. Not only are the special infected spawn rates increased significantly, you're being hassled by a half-horde about 80% of the time.
We all know how the game normally works. You encounter random zombies just milling around, then there's a horde, and then a quiet period with the immediate surroundings depopulated for a short while, and maybe a few special encounters. You take a brief breather, look for supplies, regroup and move on. Cold Stream largely lacks those lulls. There were some other things that just rubbed me the wrong way, also. The gimmicky slow-mo at one point was one, for instance. Another is the use of the mudmen uncommon infected. They belong in a swampy setting which actually has mud, not a mountain stream kind of setting.
I also encountered two pretty serious bugs. First, I spawned outside the safe room at one point. To make things worse, the door was locked until the other survivors activated a radio, but they couldn't do that until a 10-15 second cutscene finished, during which time I was strangled and incapacitated by a smoker! The next time I spawned inside the safe room, but AI coach got stuck in the gun cabinet and so we couldn't activate the radio (all four survivors have to be standing in front of it), breaking the game.
Even ignoring beta bugs that will likely be fixed in due course, I don't think this measures up to any of the good addon campaigns I've played (mainly for the first game).
The biggest problem I had with it is that I couldn't find a single closet you could spawn in. If you lose someone, you have to be without them until the saferoom.
I just played it, and here's what I think about it:
The intro don't look "smooth" like the ones from Valve's campaigns. All the maps looks pretty much the same thing with just another location. The water effects from the river are awfull, specially if you're running. The fire and explosion effects are just bad. The survivors should speak a lot more, even without new lines, they could re-use some and/or use some of the long list of unused lines. Everytime I get confused about where I have to go because there is nothing to "tell" me where to go. There's a lot of insta kill spots, wich is good. Not much medkits and ammo, wich is good too.
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