More than 2 years in the making, Dead Defore Dawn has been evolving from one map set inside a mall to a crippled beta on to a shining left 4 dead version, only to be made even more bad-ass for left 4 dead 2.
We had so much ideas that our full campaign could last over 3 hours when it was played in versus mode. So we had to make some hard choices when releasing the versions for l4d1 and l4d2!
An entire level was cut to allow us to have a strong contained story of events in a pretty digestable map that didn't totally wear out the players. We'd almost have to make a full game telling the Dead Before Dawn story with the ability to save progress. But of course we realized we had to adhere to the left 4 dead structure of game-play.
So the hard choices were made but the loss of that one cool extra mall level kept vibrating trough the development team and trough the community. Some of the players remembered an unfinished version of this map in the beta of DBD and demanded that we would bring it back somehow.
This is now becoming reality. With Dead Before Dawn - Director's cut, we would like to give those players that demanded "more mall" a little more areas to explore, while those who still remember the map from the beta will find it updated, refreshed and finalized. If you would want an immediate appetizer to the campaign you can watch our full story trailer here!
With this new version of Dead Before Dawn we made another sacrifice but you'll find this to be more lightly digestible than before because after all it's all about the mall right ? So we deleted our "Citylights" map and provided the second map with a nice cool intro you'd not want to miss.
We hope you'll have fun with this update and would like to thank everyone for their ongoing support. Happy zombie slaying!
This campaign serves as public update to "Dead Before Dawn Too" and has the following changes:
Changes final list: for dbd2 Version 4 (Director's cut)
- Citylights map (1) removed: Anna is gone is now map 1
- New map: Undead Center added as map 4
- New loadingscreen
- Fixed 3/4 version of the loading screen showing the outrosreen
- Fixed nposter tile not showing inside in-game sserver browsers
Map 1 Anna is gone:
- Created a new intro similar to our stylized credit trailer
- Deleted all explosion enities at the blocked tunnel, because some ppl get hurt there.
- Colored many props darker cause we had some lighting props
- Added a HUGE sign to warn player of the chopper blades
- First half of the map has now only t1 weapons
- Weapon spawn density increased by .500 pts to provide more weapons in the beginning of the map
- Magnum pistol spawns
Map 2 The Mall:
- Colored all props in the safehouse cause they were also lighting
- Equalized mall supply door opening event with approximate crescendo duration
- Added some gifts in dead end areas
- Changed the lighting in some areas
Map 3 Clean up:
- Added a slightly moving camera for the toilet scene
- Added more hints for player to know where to go
- The west gate "hold buttons" event is optimized to avoid glitchy button syndrome when playing on high ping servers
- North gate speed increased by 15%
- Nav optimization
- Empty battlefield to ease up too much zombies during north gate event
- Versus measures to ease up north gate event (director script adaptations)
- 1 more "event salvation" item in the locked gun shop
Map 4 Undead Center:
- SURPRISE! but if you didn't like the 1 millionst gate event, then you will hate this map :P
Map 5 New Dawn:
- Ammo in the start saferoom
- Fixed some nav problems
- Fixed FinaleEscapeVehicleReadyForSurvivors trigger delay (bots didnt get to rescue vehicle nav)
- Finale hordes are slightly bigger
so excited can't wait!
Done a release post for it here Modsentry.com already sounds like I'm going to love that new map!
awesome dudes played your beta map some time back enjoyed it it was great keep up the work hope you land a job after this
i must play next weekend
I repeat! CODE RED! Arr!
Your trailer is really pro. Good work guys.
Disagree with the removal of the first map... Now this may be a directors cut but removing 1 thing to get another isn't that great. I liked the townlight map very much. It had a great atmosphere in it.
Anyway awesome work probably the best l4d1 & l4d2 campaign ever made.. And most likely always will stay like that.
yeah, I understand it had it's cool mood. But it was also the least relevant map if you look at it from gameplay inside the mall perspective. We could either make the campaign endless by including all 6 maps or remove the map that was actually not so important because it didn't even have any connection to the immediate mall surroundings.