“With Left 4 Dead in particular we’ve found that word of mouth really is the strongest thing,” Lombardi told us. “With Left 4 Dead 2 we plan to do a demo before the game comes out that’ll have multiplayer in it. And hopefully we can continue the free weekends with the full game post-launch.”

It seems that Valve is hoping that the recent announcement of DLC for Left 4 Dead by the end of summer and the L4D 2 demo will help quell the angry mob of videogamers. Even though Valve is trying to show people that they have no plans to drop support for Left 4 Dead, some gamers still believe that the release of Left 4 Dead 2 will fracture the community. It does make sense; owners of L4D will have interoperability with L4D 2 owners to a point. The problem is that gamers who don’t have Left 4 Dead 2 will be unable to join their friends playing the L4D2 content.

Although, despite the outraged from the community and the gamers boycotting Left 4 Dead 2, a lot of people really want to play the game. Valve is reporting that pre orders for the sequel are doubled that of Left 4 Dead had from the same place in the release cycle. That is a whole hell of a lot of pre orders since Left 4 Dead had more pre orders than the Orange Box! It seems that most people don’t care ( and I am in that boat myself) that L4D 2 is coming out so soon. Yes, its only a year later, but I had TONS of enjoyment with L4D; plus all of the new content wouldn’t have been able to be shoe horned into the original L4D. The Left 4 Dead 2 pre release demo will give us a good idea of how much content is new.

In other news, I have to decide if I want to kill one or both of my Left 4 Dead dedicated servers and possibly make them Left 4 Dead 2 servers. I doubt the setup guide for a Left 4 Dead 2 dedicated server will change much from the first one, but I will post up my guide as soon as I get my hands on that L4D 2 demo. That is, if I’m not too busy playing it myself that is. Also, how did a cricket player and bat get into Left 4 Dead 2? It is a mystery.

i would love to hear your ideas and thoughts on Left 4 Dead 2, so why don’t you leave a comment?

“we don’t have any plans to support LAN,” he said and clarified “we will not support it.” The only multiplayer available will be on Battle.net.

Blizzard dropped LAN support for Starcraft II because they will be incorporating unknown features into Battle.net that will better serve their customers. I see it as a way for Blizzard to try and crack down HARD on piracy. So instead of being able to pirate and play the LAN mode over the internet with hamachi (or at a friends house); you will need a valid key to play anything. That is exactly the route that Company of Heroes took. When the game first came out you only needed an account (tied to a valid cd key) to play multilayer and pirates played over Hamachi. When Opposing Fronts came out, Relic changed everything so you had to sign in to do ANYTHING (single player, lan, etc).

No LAN in Starcraft II has fans up in arms and somebody started a petition (worthless since it doesn’t even verify your email). I figure that no lan in Starcraft II isn’t such a bad thing. Yes it sucks when you go to a friends house, and the port forwarding might be a bitch. It does also suck for all of the LAN Centers out there; I know that trying to get ports forwarded for 24 machines is a PITA.

On the flipside of the no lan for Starcraft II is the fact that the tech trees have been posted online! (Thanks to Giant Bomb). Even though the beta for Starcraft II is a few months off, you can start studying up the tech trees to prepare to kick some ass. Here are the screenshots of the Protoss, Terran and Zerg Starcraft II tech trees:

Starcraft II Protoss Tech Tree

Starcraft II Terran Tech Tree

Starcraft II Zerg Tech Tree

Taking a look at the video below will show you all forty seven achievements that are available in ODST. According tot he lis the “Vidmaster” achievements will show up in the game as well as the regular campaign achievements. There is no surprise that there will be campaign scoring and co-op achievements (yay skulls) in ODST either. There seems to be your usual complete map X and unlock X character. I thoroughly enjoy achievements names such as “Ewww Sticky”; double entendres are the best! If you don’t want to see spoilers, obviously don’t watch the video. As always, the Youtube comments are a goldmine of comedy (and stupidity).

There are nine new vehicles that can be unlocked in Big Surf Island; five of them are the big muscle cars and dune buggies. As an added bonus, the other four unlockables are the cars from the Legendary Cars pack from a couple months ago. They come back now as little toy cars; little adorbale cars that will smash your face into the guardrail when you least expect it.

So if you were too cheap to pay for the Burnout Paradise Legendary car pack, you had better pony up the cash for the Big Surf Island DLC. Pay up Scrooge McDuck!

• Toy Jansen P12 88 Special (Time Machine) – Hit all 45 Island Billboards
• Toy Hunter Manhattan Spirit (Ecto-1) – Hit all 75 Island Smashes
• Toy Hunter Cavalry Bootlegger (General Lee) – Jump from all 15 Island Mega Jumps
• Toy Carson GT Nighthawk (KITT) – Complete all 24 Island Road Rules (Timed & Showtime)

I will probably give the free to play version a try; I was very excited when Dungeons and Dragons Online first came out. I got fed up with the monthly payments and gave up after a month or two. Now with the launch of new content (even though some of it will be restricted to the VIP players). Here is a list of the details and an image comparison of them as well (thanks to Massively.com)

• Brand New Content & Features – DDO Unlimited will deliver a new class, increase the level cap, introduce new adventure packs including a new 12 player raid, major combat improvements and more!
• The Fiercest Combat – DDO Unlimited features an extraordinary and heart stopping combat experience that requires players to fully engage in the battle by relying on their wits and reflexes in real time. No more clicking skills and watching the action from the sideline.
• Mind-blowing Visuals – Explore a vast and dangerous online world, featuring the most advanced graphics in the industry, that is stuffed with the legendary monsters, glorious treasures, devious traps, mind-bending puzzles and endless adventures from the world’s best known RPG.
• Full-featured MMO – Experience sophisticated systems found only in the best games including auctions, arena death matches (Player versus Player), NPC hirelings, gambling, crafting, and powerful social tools for finding a group, forming a guild or planning an epic raid!
• Easier Than Ever! – DDO Unlimited gets you playing in minutes instead of hours, using new proprietary Turbine technology. Creating a new character is incredibly simple with guides and templates that speed you through the process. Features an all-new new player experience that gives gamers their first taste of excitement quickly while teaching them how to play solo or with a group of fellow adventurers.

“Left 4 Dead 1, like I said, had some of those fundamental things that we wanted to change about it, like the changes to the director, which took really long periods of time and a really long period of testing,” he said. “And so, those changes fell in line with the long period of time it takes to create characters and everything else. That’s why we’re doing Left 4 Dead 2, right?”

I would love to see it as DLC for Left 4 Dead, but no pricing for it has been released, and Valve says that the upgrades to the game can’t be shoehorned into L4D. Either way I am looking forward to the new storyline, weapons, and special infected. There is the new gameplay mode as well as the one they haven’t announced. I am really looking forward to the melee weapons (such as the chainsaw, axe, baseball bat and frying pan). For those who may have missed the promo video, you can view it below, or grab the high definition video through Steam. Remember, only five months to go before Left 4 Dead 2!

Video from That Video Game Blog.

It seems that Valve has changed the way you earn the new Team Fortress 2 unlocks. It used to be that after earning certain achievements, you would get that shiny new TF2 Unlock. Well, that way of getting unlocks was vulnerable to “cheesing” by the Steam Unlocker and people going to the achievement servers.

So Valve decided to change things so that the new TF2 unlock process would be entirely random. This way would drop the new unlocks and the old ones as well. Plus you wouldn’t have to play as whatever class that had the new udates; you can play ANY class and randomly “find” new unlocks.

It was a great idea on paper, but it seems something was wrong on their end. So drop rates for the new TF2 unlocks are absurdly low/messed up. It was supposed to prioritize the new ones over old, but after a good ten hours of playing this weekend, I (and many others) have ended up with few new TF2 unlocks and a TON of old ones. YAY, I have seven sandviches; I was getting mighty hungry.

Valve’s Blog has this to say about the drop frequency of the new Team Fortress 2 Unlocks:

When we were tuning this system we first looked at the average amount of time that players spend playing TF2 daily. From there, we set the goal of most players having around 20 items in their inventory after a couple of weeks of play. If you’re someone who plays a lot of TF2, you’re going to get items a lot faster than that. In the first few hours after the release yesterday, we had some issues that prevented the system from working properly, so that timeframe was not indicative of the system as it’s designed.

So what if you don’t want to wait that long to get your fancy new unlocks in Team Fortress 2? You could either join an achievement_idle server, make your own! Just make sure to grab the map first and then idle when you are away from your computer and try to get the new unlocks. This isn’t the ideal method, but I am tired of getting dupes and nothing new. Let’s hope Valve fixes the drop rate on the new TF2 unlocks.

Just run a local server. Create a file called script.cfg (or something) in your cfg folder, and then open the console and type “exec script.cfg”.

hostname “AGamingMoose is hosting a game locally”
sv_pure 1
sv_lan 0
sv_password “password”
maxplayers 24
changelevel achievement_idle
mp_teams_unbalance_limit 0
mp_autoteambalance 0
mp_idledealmethod 0
mp_idlemaxtime 0
mp_disable_respawn_times 1
sv_voiceenable 0

While you wait, check out the Meet the Spy video which was “leaked” early. I’m looking to see the new pistol for the spy and the jarate for the sniper. Everybody will be playing both of those classes… so time to bring out the Pyro and BURN THEM ALL.

I’ve been playing the new Left 4 Dead survial mode and sometimes I would think “gee, I wonder what this would be like with humans controlling some of the horde”. Well, I don’t have to wonder about it too much more. It seems that two modders put out a video detailing their exploits, and they hope to release the config files (if Valve doesn’t patch how they did it).

On one hand, this could be extremely fun, but survival mode is tough enough as it is, let alone having 4 special infected being controlled by humans. It seems that their mod also bring is four more survivors (I am guessing bot controlled ones) so there is eight survivors vs the horde and the special infected. Needless to say, the special infected go down REALLY fast. Check out their page for any updates!

From Frogboy @Stardock

If I wrote a post saying that Demigod sales were far below what we had hoped for and I said that the reason was due to piracy and that the answer was that we should have put some nasty copy protection on those DVDs to have prevented early piracy what do you think people would say?

I know what my answer to that would be. I would say that Stardock couldn’t blame poor sales on piracy but rather the fact that the game’s built-in multiplayer match-making was totally broken for the first day of release due to its underestimation of network resources that a mainstream game would take and even when that got addressed, the multiplayer match-making for two weeks and counting has been incredibly flakey which affected reviews and word of mouth. That’s what I would say.

But if you look at the charts for retail game sales, Demigod is #3 in retail (that doesn’t count online sales though). So even though Demigod was massively pirated at launch, they still were number three in retail game sales. Frogboy goes on to say that:

The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don’t buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary – our customers.

I really think that more business’ should get with this kind of thinking; there are people who simply don’t pay for games no matter what. A company can waste quite a bit of energy and resources “fighting pirates” and losing, or they can focus on serving their customers and making money. It seems more intelligent to focus on your customers than wasting time and energy on people that will never be one.