Do you have plans for Halloween? Sure, sure you could go outside, get candy, dress up, go to parties, or other dangerous activities which will most likely lead to your demise, but we think buying your first copy of L4D2 or gifting it to a friend is the best and safest way to celebrate the holiday.

Building on the work from our last update, we are now releasing the entire set of older Left 4 Dead 1 models.

It was an interesting walk back through our content tree to find all the various pieces and versions. Depending on your definition of the old models, some of these may vary in some slight detail as we work in an iterative process and never internally defined a version of these models. They have always just been Zoey, Louis, Bill, and Francis to us.

As the workshop continues to grow we have been working with some members of the modding community to learn where the tools can be improved and to help remove bottlenecks to creating new content.

Instead of endless emails, chat, or Skype sessions, we thought summer was a perfect time to fly up one of the most prolific modders out there - Splinks, or as we know him Zander.

Ever see a screenshot and wonder - what in the heck Workshop item are they using?

Celebrating Left 4 Dead 2 s official release on Linux and America s Day of Independence, we re putting L4D2 on sale for a stunning 75% off!

We know people have a busy weekend ahead of them with BBQs, sack races, blowing fingers off, and other fun summer time activities, so we made it a little more enticing to give it a try this weekend. We are making L4D2 free until 10am PST Monday morning.

The Extended Mutation System, Linux support, and other features and fixes are moving to Left 4 Dead 2 proper. Thanks to everyone who helped test all the changes in the Beta Build. You can find a complete list of the change notes here.

Linux
The Linux conversion is ready for primetime so we are opening it up to more people and releasing it officially on Steam. This will let us get feedback on more builds and distros.

SteamPipe
Some of you may have noticed a quick update to your game last week. That was our conversion over to SteamPipe. For L4D2 it was quick and painless as our system was already using VPKs. What does this change mean? For server operators there is an easier update path and smaller downloads. For clients, we have improved the downloading experience and you can now install L4D2 on any drive. You can get more details on the support page.

This week we updated both the L4D2 Beta and L4D2. As we get closer to the Linux release, we will continue to merge in some outstanding bug fixes and issues we have been working on.

Thanks to everyone playing the Beta and helping us test. The update today consists of changes that were tested in the Beta. Check here for the complete change list for the Beta and the patch notes for today s L4D2 update are available here.

We have seen some discussions about some of the sample Mutations with shipped with the Beta. Some of these like Holdout are fully formed game modes. Others are tests or example code for other people to play around with.

A good example is with the L4D1 Mutation. It is a sample Mutation to show how easy it is to change the game. Don t like some of the choices? Change them. The code below is the script file for that mode 52 lines of script. You can see how simple, yet powerful the new scripting mode is. For more information visit the L4D2 EMS Wiki.