Pre-Order Giveaway Madness! Those of you who pre-ordered Left 4 Dead 2 (PC)on Steam or at participating retailers now have exclusive access to the momentous event they said would never happen. For the first time in history, two separate Valve universes collide. That's right: it's a Left 4 Dead/Team Fortress crossover! This is not fan fiction! This is not a dream sequence! The characters from Team Fortress 2 will team-up with Bill's hat from Left 4 Dead 1! More...
Re: Pre-Order Giveaway Madness! Does this count as a hat hat? (Since it's not a free giveaway) If so, it's my first
Re: Pre-Order Giveaway Madness! gonna preorder off of amazon in the next couple of days, screw buying it off steam, im not waiting forever to download the bloody thing. gratz to anybody who got the hat tho, its pretty awesome
/the shit i just prudced in the toilet cares How much more do you think i can rage about this game ?! Its L4D 1.5 (which means: an addon) that is been sold for the price of a full retail game, what else to say about that crap !? Ill buy it if they lower the price, make a weekend deal, or sth. ..... ill NOT put my money into Newells big fat ass, NO FUCKING WAY. But there are other games to hate arround, like Modern Failage 2 by Shitility Wart, adn since i put all my hate-affort onto this crappy game i dont really care about L4D2 now ..... maybee one of my annoying aunties will buy it for me 4 christmas, that way it wouldnt my fault supporting Valve in milking the players like a cash cow.
Mhhhh .... maybee ill connect my Webcam to the PC and make some photos xD Anyways: Another point a rage about: MAss Effect 2: Special Edition Preorder. Depending on the shop you buy it (Amazon/Gamestop) you get a special awesome looking armor or some kind of a black-hole-gun ....... crap, donno where to order :<
Oba, I think your underestimating the work that goes into creating something on this scale; Valve is a "For-Profit" company, it is in their interest to capitalize on their games, they chose the best way to this, with TF2 they decided it was best to perform continuous development to maintain sales revenue, with the L4D franchise they decided the best way was to make an entirely new game. Valve creates amazingly detailed and well-tested maps, I would estimate that the maps on L4D2 each received around 10000 man-hours of Design, Art, Drafting and testing and there are 25 levels. If we estimate that the average worker at Valve gets around $35 for each hour, that's around $8.75 MILLION spent on mapping alone. Now, consider that there's alot more to a game than just the maps, The BSP file format was updated, Director 2.0 was implemented, Thousnands of art assets were made and included in the final game, Voice overs, Sound track and development tools would of needed updating or fixing to work with this "new" engine etc etc. Taking all of this into consideration I would estimate that Valve spent around $25 million on design, they also spent a further $25 million on Advertising, bring the total to a huge $50 million which is more than amount that they spent on HL2. Now, lets make a very dodgy guess into how much profit they are going to make by September next year, Valve published that they had sold a 2.5 million units for L4D by September this year and L4D retailed at an average of $40 for that year, that's about $100 million in sales, Development cost is unknown, so we can't work out the profit. Now, let's apply roughly the same calculations to L4D2, Valve has said that L4D2 sales are over 4x that of the original so far, so let's put a guestimation at around 5 million units sold by next year and an average price for the year of $40, That's $200 million in sales, minus the $50 million from development, so around $150 million in revenue. That money will go towards the development of even more Valve games and expanding the Valve workforce, which means that we could expect more free updates for TF2 and L4D2, and the expansion of the STEAM platform, which is always a good thing, so it's not all bad, for a sequel that has a higher rating (so-far) than it's predecessor. Geit. P.S - My math is probably heavily flawed, don't take it too seriously, just take the morale of the story.
The biggest german game magazine, "Gamestar", just had a nice little report about L4D2, they compared it to L4D1, their conclusion: Valve totally failed at the first L4D, all the features of the second part should have been inside the first game right from the start, with L4D, Valve had released an unfinished game, that they brought out to get some fast cash, and now they gave us the game as it might have been intended right from the start. Just fits to what i am thinking: L4D2 IS L4D1.5, it fixes the game and makes it like it should have been right from the start, but the features itself that come along with this game are a bad joke for the price. 3 new zombies, a nice ammount of new weapons, 4 new characters, 5 new campaigns (containing 23 LITTLE maps [seriously - if you have the Engine, the Tools, the knowledge etc. it isnt that kind of a problem to build a few levels - 10,000 work-hours for a map ?! ye ..... >_>), thats what you can see what comes along with the new game, not so much that it would be worth the price of a complete new game. I rly wonder why there are even Addons available for the known Addon-price if it is really so much work to make that stuff ...... Addon-Developers must be bankrupt now. If Valve failed with the first L4D, and now really want to tell me that to develop the additional stuff to make it L4D1.5/2 they "need" our full-price money because it was so hard to develop that stuff i listed up there ..... sry, if that would be the case i have to say: Valves Developers SUCK. Its still the Source Engine, they dont have to develop a complete new gameplay like at the first part, many sounds are allready created for the zombies/weapons, the AI-Manager for Zombie/Equipment-placing is allready developed ..... - dont tell me, they have to put the same effort in this game like in a completly new one, all they had to do is make some new maps/character designs/sounds/music. Noone can tell me, that they had exploding costs there, and its not like this would be valve only income, they still have Steam, they get a bit money for every game you load from there ..... all they wanna do here, is sell us the same game as it should be, with addtional stuff for the full price. Or they just wanna be a bit more like EA ....... one new version of the game every year >_< And its not like i woul leech it now or so, i still wanna buy it, but for a more fitting price, instead of the 45€ they want here for 30€, which is in normal case the maximum what an Addon costs here.
Oba, The original L4D was packed full of features and community based fun, it kept me amused for over half a year, and is still played on an almost nightly basis by groups of our members. They also provided 2 (?) major content updates to it as well as numerous feature additions and bug fixes, which they are NOT required to do. If they were to provide the new content in L4D2 as DLC for L4D, it would weigh in at about 5GB (more than has been added to TF2). If it were Paid DLC, then it would probably cost about £5 per campaign and each campaign contained the new features (New SI, new UCCI etc) then it would come to a total of about £25, which is roughly what we are paying anyway. As for the difficulty of creation, Valve have said in the past that a single mapper works on a map, with a cabal of the art team at their disposal and with about 5 playtests a day (8 members of Q/A); For example, KOTH_Viaduct went through about 2500 playtests and had over 300 iterations. The hours and the development quickly rack up. - And, as Jaga has pointed out, the maps are much larger in L4D2. Considering the size and amount of code-base changes, it would be completely unreasonable for Valve to FORCE people to buy the DLC so they could actually benefit from the changes and play the original game, the changes are too great in L4D2 and would require there to be many different versions of the code to be made or many large and complex changes to be made to ensure compatibility in-between customers who had bought the DLCs and those who had not. You said that they are charging "Addon" price, and I agree, that's what it is, but it had to be classed a different game due to the incompatibilities it would cause (on a community based game) and it would have also needed reclassification due to some of these new features such as the increased gore. Source is an outdated engine, the amount of changes from Source to OB was huge, and from OB to L4D was fairly sizeable , L4D to L4D2 included a change to the BSP file format, something they haven’t changed since 2004 (HL2:Lost coast). And again, while it may not be a huge engine overhaul, it’s large enough that it wouldn’t have been suited to individual paid DLC additions. Final Argument – Making it a separate game gives them a huge bonus to their advertising Campaigns, if there were ads for L4D up again (And it wouldn’t have any dates on it), people would just go “Oh, I saw that last year” and not give it much of a second look, if the game name is new even if it’s only a slight change and a release date, it completely changes people’s view on it “Oh, That’s new, and something I can look forward to”. Anyway, none of this changes the fact that L4D2 is a great game and is a “Must have” for anyone who enjoyed the original L4D.
Battlefield 2142 vs Battlefield 2 - by your logic 2142 should have been an expansion to 2. Just like BF2142, L4D2 has a completely new set of everything that makes a game - the assets.
How about not changing the base of the Engine and producing higher costs for the players ?! I havent heard anyone complaining about the graphics in L4D1, and to be honest, i dont see that much differences in the graphics quality of L4D2, except the fact that its now daylight, which means: The maps contain a bit more colour, the texture quality is still pathetic, most walls are as empty as the ones on a random skyscraper and on many points the levels that i could see in the Demo seemed to be clinical-clear,. If they want to change something on the Engine and want to argue that this is one of the points what makes them asking for a higher price they shall really make a new Engine (Source one really IS old), and stop making such mini-updates, that only end up in making former fan-mods/scripts incompatible and on top of that doesnt present itself with a better graphics quality. If you rly want to tell me, that the game has to cost that much because Valve spend (/watsted?) so much payed-delopers-time at developping a few levels i would say that Valve fails at calculating how to use their ressources. It doesnt matter, if it is a great game, of course it is, an Addon for an allready good game should be great if it brings you long-missed stuff like mellee weapons, but I DECIDE what i am willing to pay for the delivered content, not Valve. As i said: If the price drops a bit to what an Addon is supposed to cost: Its mine. Well, maybee i never bought BF2142 because i havent seen any arguments for doing so except the new ice theme ?! If i wanna play some BF, i still enjoy BF2 with some Texture + "Bundeswehr" mods
