Valve has announced the first piece of DLC for Left 4 Dead 2 entitled, The Passing. It will include the 4 survivors of the original game, and it “brings the original Left 4 Dead survivors down south for a meeting with the L4D2 cast, while delivering new single-player, multiplayer and co-operative gameplay,”.

“Set in a small town in rural Georgia, players assume the role of the L4D2 Survivors as they meet with the L4D1 characters.

“In addition to the new co-operative campaign and associated narrative, The Passing will include new arenas for Survival, Versus and Scavenge mode and introduce a new co-operative challenge mode of play. The Passing will also include a new ‘uncommon common’ zombie class, melee weapon, and firearm.”

It is set for a release in early Spring.

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has responded to the boycott group for Left 4 Dead 2.

“We want to wait and weed through the comments, I’m already getting e-mails, and I’m responding to them…

…Looking back, was the Orange Box a ripoff?…Give us a fair shake on this, read more about it, find out about it, we’ve already let people play it. After that, if you want to vent, post to the forums. We do read them, we read all the forums.”
He also mentioned that the Dev’s were expecting this kind of response to the announcement.

“We had some meetings about it, and we all talked about our ideas, and everyone was pretty focused and thoughtful, a lot of the same ideas were happening…We wanted the Director to be smarter, but to be smarter it needed more special infected in its stable…

…It just became very clear that this was a cohesive, singular statement we wanted to make, not a more slow update thing… too much stuff was tied together with too many other things…

“The Common Infected-now there is destruction in different parts of their body, to ship all the new Common Infected, even with an update, would be a huge thing.”

Read the whole thing over at Arstechnica

What do you guys think, are you part of the boycott?

The announcement of Left 4 Dead 2 has got gamers furious. An official boycott has been started on the Steam Community, which over 15,000 people have signed.

The group states that “The announced content of Left 4 Dead 2 does not warrant a stand-alone, full-priced sequel and should instead become updates (free or otherwise) for Left 4 Dead,” reads the boycott group description…

…Left 4 Dead has not yet received the support and content which Valve has repeatedly stated will be delivered…

…Therefore, we – the members of this Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott – promise to abstain from the purchase of Left 4 Dead 2 until our requests are addressed.”

The game is released in November and will include five whole new campaigns, dynamic weather effects, a new melee system, zombie dismemberment, four new characters, more special infected, 20+ weapons and a new multiplayer mode.

Sounds pretty good to me! What does everyone else think?

Microsoft kicked off this years E3 expo with an excellent announcement line up, check out our summary below.

Hardware/Services:

Xbox 360 Motion Control: Continue Reading