I Hate Mountains Forums

bpops

Member

Registered: 2010-06-07

My thoughts...

I really hate registering for forums to post a single comment, but to give thanks to the team for their time and dedication to this custom campaign is a totally worthwhile reason.

I'm not a 'hardcore' L4D player. I don't even own the second one, and I have 35 hours played. I even sometimes get kicked from online games for not being good enough.

But I have to say that this campaign was absolutely amazing. For my first playthrough, I played single player on normal. I've noticed some of the other criticisms on here concerning difficulty, lighting, pathways, etc., and I'd like to comment on them.

First of all: the difficulty. I did find the difficulty a bit higher than the traditional maps, but nothing that was overly frustrating. The multiple pathways did not hinder my progress as others have suggested. The only points I found myself being confused was for trigger events that weren't entirely obvious (it took me 2 playthroughs to understand where to go for the helicopter in chapter 1). The difficulty, for me, anyway, was in the slightly odd pacing, that definitely differed from the official campaign. But I actually appreciated this, in that it added some to the unpredictability of the campaign, providing another fear element.

The lighting was only a benefit in this sense as well. Yes, this campaign was dark -- but this is a fantastic thing! The point of a horror game should be to scare you, and to rely so much not only on your flashlight, but the orientation of your gun (melee and your flashlight no longer points at your target, but to the side), really adds to the atmosphere.

Concerning atmosphere, I really must commend you folks on your sound design. The added effects are very immersive, but the usage of official sounds, particularly the character voices are extremely clever. There were times I second-guessed whether Francis' comments were made specifically for this campaign! And the graffiti was fantastic. You took an element of the official campaign that was already interesting, and you added to and expanded on it. I'm looking forward to finding even more graffiti in my next playthroughs.

The size and openness of the levels was very impressive. As some others have noted, I enjoyed marveling at many of the details of the environment, though there is not much time to do so! I do not have a fantastic video card, and so I did have some severe frame rate issues, particularly in chapter 4, but these slow-downs were brief and not game-breaking.

The only bugs I noticed were related to teammate AI (which you may or may not have control over, I don't know). Again, nothing game-breaking, but my team sometimes did not want to go where I did, or they wanted to follow some small pathway that was unnecessary. In another case, they preferred to hold their ground than help me from a hunter attack. But I understand these sorts of things may be beyond your control, and they certainly didn't ruin the game. And obviously this game is not meant to be played with bots, so these points may be moot anyway.

So here's a breakdown from me (a casual L4D player):
Pros: level design, use of character voices, environmental sounds, environment detail, lighting (lack thereof)
Cons: some AI issues, pacing, lack of direction on crescendo moments (from another thread, I understand this is a limit of the SDK, and not your fault), some framerate issues (but I need to upgrade my graphics card so I accept fault here)
Favorite moments: helicopter crash, seaplane rescue!

All-in-all, I'm impressed this isn't official DLC. It has quality written all over it. I wish you guys the best. Your hard work has certainly paid off.

NykO18

Administrator

From: Montréal, QC

Registered: 2010-05-13

Website

Re: My thoughts...

I really hate registering for forums to post a single comment, but to give thanks to the team for their time and dedication to this custom campaign is a totally worthwhile reason.

You could have sent an email to the team if you preferred, it's publicly available on the 'Contact Us' section of the website!

I'm not a 'hardcore' L4D player. I don't even own the second one, and I have 35 hours played. I even sometimes get kicked from online games for not being good enough.

Hehehe, you made me laugh with this.
Do people really do that? That seems quite wrong.

The lighting was only a benefit in this sense as well. Yes, this campaign was dark -- but this is a fantastic thing! The point of a horror game should be to scare you, and to rely so much not only on your flashlight, but the orientation of your gun (melee and your flashlight no longer points at your target, but to the side), really adds to the atmosphere.

Only problem is, some people enjoy it because of this, and some hate it for the same reason. I'm afraid we'll have to find some kind of compromise in the later versions. We won't make it daylight of course, but I think we'll need to brighten it a bit. By the way, the issue is not entirely because of the campaign but also because people don't really tweak/configure their monitor's contrast and luminosity nor do they use the in-game gamma balance. I really don't have any problem seeing where I go and what's going on.

I do not have a fantastic video card, and so I did have some severe frame rate issues, particularly in chapter 4, but these slow-downs were brief and not game-breaking.

Well, I'm not really surprised, we also have some framerate drops on this level. It was just too ambitious to be properly optimized and we did our best to make it the best we could without having to ditch entire parts of the level.

The only bugs I noticed were related to teammate AI (which you may or may not have control over, I don't know).

Yeah well, like you said, we have very little control on the AI, the director and the AI system handle most if not anything. We can tell them where they can go and a bit of how they should react according the the locations, but not much more.

lack of direction on crescendo moments (from another thread, I understand this is a limit of the SDK, and not your fault)

I don't agree on this point, this is entirely our fault. We could have made it better but we just didn't knew how. I'll take the Left 4 Dead 2 example of the mall where there's this alarm attracting all the hordes and you have to run for it and switch it off. When we first played it, we where killed maybe 3 or 4 times without even knowing what we had to do. It's only when we activated the in-game instructor and saw the hints that we understood.

Sometimes there's situations where you can't entirely rely on level-design hints because you're actually trying to provide lots of possibilities. Problem is, we couldn't really make these hints and thus, couldn't provide this fallback solution.

Of course we could have used the lighting a bit more as a strong indicator, but there's situations where you can't really rely on lighting either, mostly when you can't properly lit an area because it would look strange/out of place. But we could certainly make it better, that's something we'll try to think about in later versions.