If you were to restart your Steam account, you’d notice that your copy of Left 4 Dead 2 would start updating. This is to add in the beta for a new campaign, Cold Stream. It has a few bugs, but that’s why God gave us betas. Wow, that’s such a succinct news story I need to add another.

If you were to restart your Steam account, you’d notice that it would have updated to change its voice chat technology. As anyone who’s ever used Steam Voice will know, it wasn’t exactly as good as it could have been. It’s now been replaced with SILK, an audio codec developed by the Skype peeps, with what I like to call a “dynamic bit rate protocol”, meaning it can vary its bandwidth up to 30kbps (twice as much as Steam Voice would use.) Valve adds that the voice chat connectivity and reliability has also been improved, which is mighty fine news as we were increasingly finding ourselves opting for using non-Steam chat when playing together. Isn’t that all smashing?

Curious. Following The Sacrifice and The Passing, Eurogamer‘s got word that Valve will be releasing a third piece of downloadable content for Left 4 Dead 2 with a new Cold Stream campaign. Cold Stream is actually a work in progress fan campaign by Matthew Lourdelet, creator of the acclaimed 2 Evil Eyes campaign. According a post on Valve’s official Left 4 Dead 2 blog, Valve have seen Lourdelet’s work so far and decided to release it in a non-story driven pack containing the other three Left 4 Dead 1 campaigns not currently in L4D2.
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Valve send word that The Sacrifice, the DLC for both Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, is now available on Steam.

“The new DLC is available free of charge to all Steam gamers who own a copy of L4D and/or L4D2. And, for a limited time, L4D and L4D2 (as well as their respective Steam bundles) are available for 66% off the regular price.”

That said, my Steam doesn’t seem to be updating. Hmm. Oh, now it is.

Welcome to October, via more zombie drama for Friday morning. The Sacrifice, the latest DLC for both Left 4 Dead and its sequel, is arriving on PC on 5th October. Rather looking forward to this one, I have to say. (more…)

But which safehouseman? Or safehousewoman? That’s your problem, bucko. Your problem to solve as you play the latest DLC for Left 4 Dead on October 5. Or! As you play the latest DLC for Left 4 Dead 2 on October 5. Yes, yes, they’re doing that. >All is fair in love and released-slightly-too-soon-zombie-sequels. (more…)

The first part of the previously announced Left 4 Dead comic is out. It’s coming out in four weekly parts, leading up to the release of the actual The Sacrifice pack. It’s also a hefty creature. The first part is over forty-pages, so the whole thing should be getting on for 160 and actually includes details to the background of the plague itself. It’s also drawn my Michael Avon Oeming, who’s a fantastic visual storyteller and worth looking at generally. I especially like the BLAM! apocalypse. If you want to investigate further, I’ll suggest the first Powers trade. Anyway, you can read the first part of The Sacrifice here. Go! do so!

…who lives and who dies, apparently. As it stands Bill dies in The Passing, and there’s going to be comic that explains how and why that happens. But it turns out that in The Sacrifice, you can – in keeping with the game’s own moment-to-moment decision-making – choose who dies for yourselves. This comes via Kotaku, who point out that in this GameTrailers’ chat with Valve, Mr Faliszek reveals that this next bit of free DLC for Left 4 Dead (and also Left 4 Dead 2, it’ll work with either) enables us to experience what happened in the events of The Passing from the perspective of the original cast. The events of this new expansion will, therefore, allow you to choose which of that original cast winds up dead. The Sacrifice also gives Left 4 Dead 2 owners a version of No Mercy, which seems like a splendid little bonus.

L4D2’s ongoing Mutation event-of-the-week giggles continue, this time pushing the legendary Gnome Chomsky to the forefront of the game. I hand you over the official description:

Last Gnome On Earth: Protect the gnome at all cost.Do you crave attention? Want all the infected to swarm you and the gnome you are carrying? Then we have the game mode for you. The team needs to carry the garden gnome from start to finish in any campaign. The common infected hate the gnome and will swarm whoever is carrying him. Watch out putting him on the ground, a boomer explosion will send him flying!

Carnage, I suspect. In a good way.

Where were we? Sorry about the delay. I’ve been in France, making awful jokes about floating skulls to Chris Avellone. He didn’t punch me, miraculously, but I remain mortified.The Passing, then. I’m going to keep away from spoiler stuff in this post, bar stating the pretty-much-obvious that you don’t get to control the L41 survivors in any way. (more…)