Left 4 Dead 2 - Valve
Updates to Left 4 Dead 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

- Temporarily removed a change that broke a ladder in Dark Carnival.
Left 4 Dead 2 - the gish
<b>Four Swordsmen of the Apocalypse</b>
Four Swords against plenty of apocalypse!

Armed with only swords the survivors face near continuous streams of Special Infected ready to be sliced and diced.

<b>DLC Date</b>
Now that we have a solid version of the maps (some minor changes still coming), we are focused on the DLC and getting some pesky bugs out of the shipping version. As soon as we have a release date we will let you know.

<b>Upcoming Mutations</b>
Thursday we <a href ="https://twitter.com/#!/l4ddev">tweeted</a> out a request for the next mutation. Minutes later we had a request for Four Swordsmen and just as we said it aloud we decided to load it up and check it – it had been awhile and we have some new members of our team.

Four hours later we realized we better ship this since it‘s what we tested. So while it only has three votes, we will take the top tweets for upcoming Mutations. Right now we are leaning towards Versus Survival. A team favorite as well.
Left 4 Dead 2 - the gish
Four Swordsmen of the Apocalypse
Four Swords against plenty of apocalypse!

Armed with only swords the survivors face near continuous streams of Special Infected ready to be sliced and diced.

DLC Date
Now that we have a solid version of the maps (some minor changes still coming), we are focused on the DLC and getting some pesky bugs out of the shipping version. As soon as we have a release date we will let you know.

Upcoming Mutations
Thursday we tweeted out a request for the next mutation. Minutes later we had a request for Four Swordsmen and just as we said it aloud we decided to load it up and check it – it had been awhile and we have some new members of our team.

Four hours later we realized we better ship this since it‘s what we tested. So while it only has three votes, we will take the top tweets for upcoming Mutations. Right now we are leaning towards Versus Survival. A team favorite as well.
Left 4 Dead

Four Swordsmen of the Apocalypse
Four Swords against plenty of apocalypse!

Armed with only swords the survivors face near continuous streams of Special Infected ready to be sliced and diced.

Left 4 Dead 2 - Valve
Updates to Left 4 Dead 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

General:
-Fixed survivors being able to climb some infected-only ladders

No Mercy 1 – Apartments:
-Survivors should no longer be able to fall into the street-level infected-only area from the starting rooftop -Players should no longer be able to drop down onto the invisible brush at the corner.
-Survivors should no longer be able to incapacitate themselves by jumping toward the electric box prop opposite the starting rooftop. It should now be fatal

No Mercy 2 – Subway:
-Players should no longer get stuck when in the back corner underneath the starting safe room -Survivors should no longer be able to jump onto the tiny ledge on the side of the building following the door/generator event -Made the piano near the ending safe room into a an immobile, static prop to solve an issue with infected players using it to block the safe room.

No Mercy 3 – Sewer:
-Survivors who somehow manage to get on top of the gas station should no longer be able to leave the map.
-The work light at the mid-way point in the sewer is now an immobile, static prop to solve an issue with infected players using it to block survivor progress.

No Mercy 4 – Hospital:
-Added the missing "breakable" decals to the breakable wall in the second part of the stairwell.
-Made the breakable wall in the second part of the stairwell breakable to all infected.
-Survivors should no longer be able to enter the infected-only vents and passages above and near the elevator event.
-The two tank-only breakable walls in the upper, under construction floor into can now be broken by any infected.

No Mercy 5 – Rooftop:
-Added several props to cover and remove an invincible spot on one of the lower tiers of the rescue rooftop.

Cold Stream 4 – Cut-throat Creek:
-Fixed infected not being able to path to survivors when standing in the boat near the tank fight.
Half-Life 2


Upcoming Valve games Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive will support the Razer Hydra PC motion controller.


Motion gaming support has been added to over 250 of the most popular games on Steam, including Left 4 Dead 2, Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, via creator Sixense's MotionCreatorTM 2.0 software.


Steam users will get motion control updates for current and future titles automatically from now on. A new in-game overlay lets you view control maps for the Razer Hydra as you play.


The Razer Hydra uses an electromagnetic field, via a base station, to track hand movements as you hold two motion-sensing controllers, both complete with thumb sticks.


We first heard of the Razer Hydra Valve love affair early last year, when we discovered those who owned the Razer Hydra were entitled to exclusive Portal 2 content.

Feb 24, 2012
Left 4 Dead

Half-Life
Portal Gun 3
We've seen some impressive fan-made Portal guns in the past, but they've been rare, costly one-off projects. Valve are giving us the chance to get hold of our own Aperture Science Handheld Portal Devices without having to burn ourselves horribly putting together an injection mould. Joystiq mention that, at Valve's request, toy manufacturers, NECA have put together a life-sized Portal gun. It'll hit the shops this summer with a $130 price tag attached.

There will be lights and those lights will change colour, but will it make the "pwung" noise? There's only one way to find out, and that's to buy at least five. Perhaps ten. Maybe more. More. MORE.

NECA will also be releasing a line of Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life action figures, a few of which were shown off at the NYC Toy Fair. The Team Fortress 2 wiki has a snap of the new figures, you'll find that below along with a few shots of that Portal gun. Baggsy the Heavy.







Left 4 Dead 2 - Valve
Updates to Left 4 Dead 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

General:
-Fixed missing steam avatars in transition panel.
-Witches on fire will now continue to attack instead of sometimes flailing around aimlessly.
-When infected players slash at a jockeyed survivor, all damage will be applied to the survivor and not the jockey.
-Added some missing music files for the L4D1 campaigns.

Crash Course 1:
-Rescue closet doors that are blocked in versus are now inaccessible to both teams.
-Fixed the area portals near the howitzer event. Players should now be able to see through the infected-broken holes in the walls properly.

Crash Course 2:
-Rescue closet doors that are blocked in versus are now inaccessible to both teams.
-Removed a bad item cluster in the finale which was causing too many items to spawn.

Dead Air 3:
-Fixed an AI bot pathing issue with climbing the fence leading into the construction yard.
-Removed the ability to climb an electric box prop near the barricade in the construction yard. It should no longer be possible to skip the barricade event.
-Added an infected ladder to some pipes on the far side of the barricade to create a route for player infected on that side to easily enter the construction yard.

Blood Harvest 4:
-Widened the gap in the railing on the final bridge.
-Falling off the cliff or the final bridge is now fatal to both teams.

Blood Harvest 5:
-Fixed a potential bug for low-end machines where certain walls and textures near the starting safe room would vanish in certain views.


Cold Stream 1:
-There is now only a single hunting rifle in the cabin after the rope bridge.

Cold Stream 2:
-Moved the magnum near the start of the map, nearer to the other tier 2 weapons.
-Tier 2 weapons near the start of the map are no longer single-spawn.
-Adjusted cars and road props to reduce the chances of players getting caught on geometry.
-New infected ladders added.
-Added a weapon spawn in the tent on the barrel explosion bridge.
-Fixed an exploit that allowed survivors to climb the tent on the bridge to skip the barrel explosion event.
-Added an M60 under the barrel explosion bridge.
-There are now slightly more infected coming at slightly faster intervals during the end-level onslaught.
-Fixed a bug where players and infected could get caught in the geometry along the walls in the tunnel leading to the stairwell during the onslaught.
-Several minor visual tweaks and bug fixes for performance throughout the map.
-Added wrong-way signs to indicate when infected players have reached the end of the playable parts of the map.
-Fixed several spots where players and AI could get stuck.

Cold Stream 3:
-Added a new, much more obvious path across the tanker explosion gap.
-Tweaked the wooden catwalk area following the tanker explosion to make it easier for survivor and infected AI, as well as infected players, to navigate.
-The water now has a new texture effect which will work on low end machines.

Cold Stream 4:
-Fixed a melee weapon that liked to spawn inside of a table near the start of the map.
-Fixed a case where AI infected would sometimes get stuck trying to mount the drain to climb up toward the start of the map.
-Consolidated items in the tank fight area at the halfway point.
-Altered tank fight area in the stream so that AI tanks don’t spawn in nearly useless/sitting duck locations.
-Removed one of the triage tents and replaced it with an open trash/storage area.
-Added a pair new routes up the final tower for infected players to reduce AI common infected collision and pathing issues, and to give infected players more strategic options.
-Several prop adjustments for players using low-end settings.
-Added wrong-way signs to indicate when infected players have reached the end of the playable parts of the map.
Left 4 Dead 2 - the gish
<b>Hard Eight!!</b>
Double the specials, quadruple the fun!

Face eight Special Infected at one time, this is double the standard number! And if that wasn’t trouble enough, we also increase the spawning frequency so it is raining Specials.

Why aren’t you going to give it a try? Scared?

<b>More Cold Stream</b>
Today we are releasing some bug and exploit fixes on the PC for Blood Harvest.

We have to thank everyone for their feedback and help catching these issues and making the campaigns better but we want to give a special thanks to Tabbernaut from the Steam forums for providing a concise lists of issues.

We still have a few minor fixes and performance improvements for the Cold Stream Campaign. We are going to be releasing those changes in a few weeks as the final build for the DLC.

On the 360 side we have been making some additional performance improvements. The finale section of Cold Stream in particular was a sticky area to pull off. Not only do we have to worry about view distances but the way the common infected move and navigate areas.

One of the results of our extensive performance tuning of the Cold Stream campaign is that we will be writing up and sharing some information with modders on improving the performance of their campaigns.

So enjoy Hard Eight and in a few weeks we will have another content update as we prepare Cold Stream to go into the Xbox 360 certification process.

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