L4D Demo: First Hour - 11/6/08

The Left 4 Dead early access demo is up and running. It got off to a shaky start, with the dedicated server files only being released about 5 minutes prior to the demo. There was something wrong with them, so nobody could set up their own servers. At 11:13 AM (an hour after the demo was released) Jason Ruymen of Valve posted on the mailing lists that they had issued a fix:

A small fix for the Linux and Win32 L4D Demo Dedicated Servers have been released. Please run hldsupdatetool (with either the game parameter of l4d_demo, or left4dead) to get the new files. This should allow dedicated servers to run.

After this update somebody replied:

Patch just landed, servers are running!

My first hour was quite an experience. When the game demo was finally updated and running, I created a lobby and had three people join. No dedicated servers were available so we dared to try the LAN option where it would run off of my computer. As soon as the map started up, my game crashed out. I restarted my computer and we tried again, this time on Frogopus' computer, but the connections were terrible.

I created another lobby and the pings actually worked out. All three people had green bars and we were able to get through half the Apartment level on Advanced pretty nicely. As soon as we got to the streets, their connection bars all went to red and they were spiking all over the place.

We got to the second map, and then Frogopus exited out. At that time, Steam Community went down because they were doing something with the servers. This is what worries me - when Steam Community goes down, there's no way of inviting your friends to come play with you. Hopefully there's a way around this where you can just give them the direct IP, but we're not sure as of this time. We decided to call it quits on the multiplayer mode for a bit.

Earlier in the day I beat the demo on the Xbox version on Normal and it was pretty easy, one thing we've all found out is that the single player bots are BEASTS. They work very well as backup and follow you around.

So instead of messing with the multiplayer I decided to play the PC version on Advanced singleplayer. I met up with some zombies in the apartments:

I found out that when Hunters jump through fire, they burn and even their corpses continue to burn:

Louis got hit up by a Smoker:

And the scores at the end are very nice, especially when YOU DOMINATE. Buahaha.

Pipe bombs are awesome:

Hunters are not awesome:

Trying to take out a Witch with a Hunting Rifle at 2 feet is not awesome either:

Ended up getting to the mini-finale where a Tank was waiting. I ran backwards and shot, eventually killing him:

Survived the mini-finale with nobody dying, and victory was declared!

Please post your impressions on the forums, we'd like to hear! Sorry to everybody experiencing problems, be patient. Valve is working as hard and fast as they can to fix whatever problems you're having so they might not be able to communicate as well right now.