Left 4 Dead- Any way to improve it as a standalone mod?

[joe_dirt976]

I was thinking earlier, l4d was tons of fun, but competitively speaking, it's dull. So if there was a modding project aiming to improve it, or at least the concept of it, what would those changes be? Here is some ideas I can think of:

Weaker health, fewer zombies (i dont think the newer zombies should have made it into l4d2)
weapon customization like COD
zombie customization to counter weapons (as in, here is your basic zombie, after making so many kills, you can choose one unique upgrade, up to some number of upgrades and stacking traits of the same level is prohibited [imagine a stealth boomer that vomits tar minus the hoard, or the {now nerfed} flaming hunter with higher dps] the diversity of player choices would be interesting.
leveling up (borrowing from cod here)
more goal oriented action (king of the hill, escort, etc..)
model oriented graphics (brushes have no built in lod)
fewer and weaker melee options (katanas aren't in every house and a bat will not decapitate [assuming a normal person here])



thats all i can think of. Anyone else want to help get this ball rolling?

[Jordash]

Well the only way to mod L4D is with plugins, and I don't think they are powerful enough to do half of what you want. You wouldn't be able to use custom models without everyone joining the server having to wait for all of them to download.

Sorry dude, but if you're still into it have a look here http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki ... ad_Plugins I might be wrong

[joe_dirt976]

i guess my question should have been, "if you had the l4d source code, what would you change?" I know aboutthe plugins, but thats farshort of what I meant.

[source-maps]

competitivly speaking? you know that the core gameplay is about team work right.. vanilla versus is just a frustrating bore fest where the infected play no role and survivors can pick up any out of the 12 carefully selected medkits in the map.. if shit really hits the fan they can even be brought back to live with a defib

now if you want to play competitive, you should play the confolg mod... I personally like the realism variant of confogl because glows are build in wall hacks.
so if I had to improve it as a mod.. I would reduce the DPS of tier 2 guns BIG TIME and remove all the un-needed crap they added to the 'sequel' and also strip down the number of healing items.. because 12 medkits (parish 2 actually has/had this, on top of pills and defibs) is just an overkill and really making any coordinated infected attack against a decent survivor team a waste 3 seconds later

on top of that I would open up the roofs tops.. l4d2 stock campaigns are really designed with coop in mind and they just tacked Versus on like it was just a gimmick

sorry for the small rant I mixed with my answer.. but that would be my perfect l4d

on a non competitive side, I would love it for something like nmrih to be realized with the AI director.. or zombie master.. imagine you being the director

[joe_dirt976]

no that's awesome. That's one of my biggest gripes about the game. It has so much potential for improvement, but it's squandered away on nerfing the infected and making survival a requirement.

Never tried confogl mod. But what i mean to improve is this, say a standard versus match:

You spawn in the safe-room after choosing your weapon load-out (think COD) before heading out. A different loadout for different zombies or zombie situations.

The infected choose their infected load-outs (just like COD, but only certain perks for infected) to counter certain players.

survivors play their way through but they are slower, weaker, and have limited ammo. There are places topick up ammo, but its scarce. Sprint is a fatigue inducing event that impacts your aim. There are also fewer if none when it comes to med-packs, they are reduced to something like a death streak. If a survivor dies, they can be rescued but the player has to choose a different load-out. After dying so many times in a round (IE: campaign), the player is done. The rescue closet the player is saved from will be behind the survivors in terms of level progression.

Zombies are fewer but stronger and somewhat faster with customizable traits.
The best way to visualize this would be by nixing the newest SI and UCI's from L4D2 and reduce their elements into custom traits. Implemetation would be on a gain something lose something basis. Let's start with a basic hunter, add the armored UCI trait to him and add the higher DPS flaming hunter trait and sacrifice some speed and jump distance.
-Now add a rusher into the mix. The guy is by himself and the hunter is lethal in this capacity. No longer can he be offed by a cheap shotgun blast in the face. The hunter wont go down unless shot in the back, this creates a disincentive to go solo simply because the hunter would be no match against a somewhat coordinated group.

The thing that is frustrating me most about this game is the abandoned untapped potential. The UI is a clusterfuck, choosing a game is done through a retarded implementation. Things can easily be scaled back but they're not. Do we need so many game modes? Why can't we just have SP, Versus, and COOP with everything else added as a custom game setting. With so many maps to choose from, things go from full servers to a few people playing 1000 different game modes each. Really wish valve would have partially released the source code, there is so much that the community in itself would have improved.

On a side note, did Alien Swarm allow access to the AI director with the source code? Seems like the game can be reconstructed with all of these changes implemented.

[joe_dirt976]

I just updated my last post. I know it's asinine, but I want to mod something, and this game has many flaws I'd like to tweak.