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Left 4 Dead 2 To Get Steam Workshop Integration, And Steam Linux Support Next Month, In Mid-October

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An interesting move! To be honest, I figured most of Valve had simply forgotten L4D existed.

Left 4 Dead 2 To Get Steam Workshop Integration, And Steam Linux Support Next Month, In Mid-October

In a brief announcement post on the official Left 4 Dead blog, Valve have revealed that Steam Workshop support is coming to Left 4 Dead 2, together with some extra modding goodies. Let’s take a look:

The Steam Workshop website will allow you to browse, rate, and discuss thousands of community created add-ons and even install them directly to your game with just one click of the mouse. We are also going to try an experiment with the L4D2 Workshop that will allow content to appear in the L4D2 world even more seamlessly based on the community’s response.

To compliment the new access to maps, weapons, and items, we are also creating an expanded scripting tool to allow deeper and more varied experiences inside of Left 4 Dead 2. Similar to the current Mutations, these experiences can be laid on top of existing maps or included with brand new maps. These new style Mutations will also be available from the Steam Workshop.

So not just will all Left 4 Dead 2 add-ons and custom campaigns be hosted onto the centralized official Steam Workshop, but they’ll also feature some sort of mysterious experiment, allowing content to appear more seamlessly within the game. No idea what that may be, but I have to admit that it does sound quite tantalizing.

As for the revised scripting tool – no idea how that might work either, sadly. Still, I can only assume it works pretty well, otherwise I don’t think Valve would be spending their time on it!

On the whole, I do think that bringing Steam Workshop integration to L4D2 is a really solid move. Primarily, it means all L4D players will get to frequently play high-quality fan-made content from a legitimate Valve-operated source. But on the other hand, I can’t help but feel as if Valve have missed a pretty significant opportunity here: hosting a TF2-esque Workshop section where community modders can submit fixes for the main L4D2 game. Because as we all know, L4D2 certainly does have more than a few bugs, glitches, and issues.

And the funny thing is, setting that kind of Workshop up would almost certainly be far easier than setting up this kind, which actively hosts and operates user-made content. Certainly, they still haven’t set up a Workshop of this kind for TF2, which I always found a bit peculiar. There should at least be a basic, fundamental divide between these two Workshop systems, because as it is, it can get a bit confusing.

But I’m digressing. Next up, Valve inadvertently reveals the release date of Steam for Linux in the most carefree manner conceivable:

All of this will also be available not just on the PC and Mac, but also for Linux users as well starting in the middle of next month and rolling out from there. We will have more details as we get closer to launch.

Now, we’ve known that the upcoming Linux version of Steam will drop alongside a native Linux port of Left 4 Dead 2 for a while now – even the Cold Stream DLC webpage explicitly said so. But now we know that both Steam for Linux and L4D2 for Linux are both set for a release some time around mid-October, and that is literally just one month away!

Pretty promising, I suppose – let’s hope we get to hear more about it relatively soon.

Meanwhile, here’s a little something else I thought was worthy of your attention, coming to us via VG247. According to Drew Goddard, the director of acclaimed horror flick The Cabin In The Woods (released just this past April after a very protracted release schedule), Valve was, at one point, working on some sort of downloadable Cabin-themed DLC pack for L4D2. Here’s what he stated about this project, in an IAmA posting on Reddit:

We actually were going to do a downloadable L4D2 expansion pack, where you’d fight in the Cabin world, but then MGM went bankrupt so the delay squashed it. But the people at Valve were still cool enough to let us use some of their monsters to fill the cubes in the background (I had a lot of cubes to fill.) […]

By the way — the game was gonna be amazing. You were gonna be able to play in both the upstairs “Cabin in the Woods” world and the downstairs “facility” world with all the monsters. Believe me, I HATE all video games based on movies, they always suck, but porting Cabin into Left For Dead felt like the right fit. It pains me that it didn’t happen.

How intriguing! It sounds a lot like the unique interactive teaser for J.J. Abrams’s Super 8, bundled within Portal 2. I can only assume this was in development some time between early 2010 to early 2011. By March 2011, MGM’s bankruptcy issues had already gotten serious, so I assume that’s the point where this DLC pack became a lot less feasible. Since it hasn’t surfaced in any way, I can only assume it’s been shelved more or less entirely.

Shame it’ll never materialize, then! I’d kill just to see it in action, let alone play it. And it genuinely sounds like something that would have worked very nicely.

Oh well – rest in peace, unnamed Cabin-L4D crossover.

8 Comments

  1. lol. “Mid-October” In Valve time that means in about 1-2.5 years.

  2. Brace yourselves, hats are coming

  3. Wasn’t the L4D2 Linux port noted in the Source 2 code we found? Maybe we’ll find more information about the new engine when the update comes out?

  4. Aw, damn, I loved “The Cabin in the Woods”.

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