Entertainment Electronics Blog

If you’ll recall, when Valve released “The Passing” for Left 4 Dead 2 — a downloadable add-on that brought back the survivors from the first Left 4 Dead…except for one who died at some point prior — their plan was to eventually release a companion DLC showing the events that took the life of said survivor. Well now here it is: Valve has announced “The Sacrifice,” a new DLC campaign that will be available for both the original Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 as well.

Announced on GameTrailers TV, The Sacrifice will indeed show the events that L4D1’s group went through before meeting up with L4D2’s group in The Passing. And, yes, it will show how a certain survivor ultimately met their end.

But beyond that, while there is a certain canonical version of which character is supposed to die (a story that will also be told in a four-part digital comic that Valve intends to release before The Sacrifice), gamers will also be allowed to play out their own version of the events and choose which character they think should die in the end. And on top of the main new content, The Sacrifice will also add L4D1’s “No Mercy” campaign into L4D2 as well.

The Sacrifice will be free for PC and Mac players, but there will be a charge (not detailed yet) for Xbox 360 players. A release date wasn’t announced.

Valve has announced that Left 4 Dead 2’s next update won’t be out for another few weeks, but at least they let us know what to expect: Infected bots and auto-spawning tweaks in the game’s popular Versus mode.
Detailing the two major aspects of the update in a post on their official blog, the L4D2 team explained how both the bots and auto-spawning tweaks are intended to smooth out issues with the Versus mode. The bots will “help out the Infected when they are down a man or two,” the post explains, and “will also make 1v1 Versus a bit more fun.”

As for tweaking the auto-spawning in the finale events of Versus mode, Valve says one thing they’ve been experimenting with is disabling them altogether — and crunched some numbers to show why. “Across all finales in Left 4 Dead 2 currently, a single survivor has a 34.56% chance of escaping,” the post reads. “That includes the Concert Finale in ‘Dark Carnival,’ which boasts close to a 50% escape rate (and yes, a fix for everyone’s favorite cheese spot is coming). Remove the Concert Finale, and we see the average drop to 29.61%.”

Clearly, that’s pretty low. And with those figures, “we can measure the difference and see how much the change impacted the balance,” they explained.

We’ll still have to wait a few weeks to see what Valve ultimately comes up with, in addition to whatever other features, tweaks, and fixes the update brings as well. This is “not a complete list by any means,” the post assures.