RSHabroptilus: Man, people on GOG are so friendly until you mention Valve. I love Valve, and I'll always love Valve, but some of their business decisions are so greedy it just pisses me off. When the Orange Box was announced to be the only release of Episode 2 (was it available separately on Steam? I never thought about this until now...hummm...but I never bought digital copies until recently anyway), I was pissed off like a MFer.
Even though I'll surely get L4D 2--probably when it's on sale, either preorder or weekend deal--and love it to death, this is similar to the Orange Box bullshit. I remember being promised that we'd get many new campaigns for free from Valve to play on the first Left 4 Dead.
Also, not to knock my loveable Weclock, but Dead Air and Death Toll were never available for Versus mode officially until the Survival patch. On the PC version, the option to force it has always been present, but they didn't work too well until the official release.
I still want my free campaigns. I'm pissed off, yes, but even still, I've definitely gotten my $25 worth on L4D, having put in more than 25 hours and loving every minute of it. Even if I paid the full $50, I would have been satisfied with the amount of hours I've spent having fun in L4D.
Hopefully the SDK is put to good use by the modding community, but I'm having trouble seeing many maps compare to Valve's, especially since the characters interact so well with the environments Valve has given us. Will Francis still hate elevators on any mods? or Zoey comment on spray paint? Is that sort of thing easy to add with the tools?
I do agree about the survival mode....It was pretty weak.

Weclock: No, I joined random servers that were playing Dead Air and Death Toll on versus prior to their patch, I took videos to prove it.

PhoenixWright: I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but gosh, if that doesn't sound like DLC I don't know what does.

domgrief: (You know, that would have been a great post to add an OBJECTION!)
I agree.
The only thing that would really justify a separate title in my mind would be if they really revolutionised the AI director... say, taking a clean city and wrecking it randomly every time (different locations for trucks/cars/trains, able to cross the bridge vs. bridge destroyed and need to go underneath it, etc.). However, I don't know if the Source engine, with its pre-compiled levels, could support that sort of behaviour.

TheCheese33: Maybe it's not on Source. What if there's this whole new engine that they haven't even announced yet?

michaelleung: My PC Gamer subscription is already paying off..

TheCheese33: How so? I feel like I missed something big here...

michaelleung: Once upon a time, when gaming sites were just little crappy excuses to get into E3, magazines dominated everything. Now, before magazines even get their scoop, there's a high chance than somewhere, like Joystiq will have a whiff of a scoop like this, because they're not tied to a monthly publishing schedule.
But we've gone off on a tangent.

lowyhong: The game is still broken. Network issues are still widespread. I'm still getting viruses from some servers which have an iframe exploit on their MOTD. Matchmaking is still shit, making it impossible to get a good versus game going, where everyone has low latency. Still not being able to open server browser w/o using console = wtf are they drinking I want some too
Secondly, the first DLC was nothing more than a "patch" to add what they failed to deliver at launch - it was a funny situation, everyone was cheering "good ol Valve!" (admittedly, even me too because I was excited about Survival), and then when the hype died down, people realised that the 2 brand effing spanking new versus campaigns were what TRS forgot to add during launch. And Survival mode is nothing more than a series of camp fests, exploited to death by the L4D community with even more linear and dumbed down gameplay compared to the co-op campaigns
Thirdly, for $60 bloody dollars at launch, I'd have expected more. No shit bros, instead what I got delivered to my doorstep was the worst damn packaging I've ever seen - a printed envelope which you have to tear open to extract the disc and other contents. I don't know if anyone else in the world got such a cheapass packaging, but I did. Nevertheless, I was able to forgive that. A bigger problem I had, though, was that for less than $60, I've had games like Space Rangers 2, Galactic Civ 2 etc offer 5x more hours of content than L4D. The whole point of random generated hordes and weapons is to create a sense of suspense isn't it? Well what's the freaking point when the spawn points are still the same? What replayability is left after playing the same campaign 8 times? Besides trying to beat your time, none whatsoever. Sure the levels are well made, but it sounds like a cheap way out to tell your fans that they can expect plenty of replayability thanks to random hordes. Point is, once you know where to go, once you know where the good camping spots are, once you know how to take down a tank at Expert difficulty, the game loses its charm quickly.

lowyhong: Point is, once you know where to go, once you know where the good camping spots are, once you know how to take down a tank at Expert difficulty, the game loses its charm quickly.