As you may recall, Left 4 Dead 2′s cast and a bunch of special infected are headed to the PC exclusive No Mercy mode in Resident Evil 6. Are you baffled by that? I sure was baffled by that. Here’s a video of it in action which only makes me slightly less puzzled. Resident Evil 6 arrived on PC on Friday so if you like what you see, you know what to do. Meanwhile, Left 4 Dead 2 will also be the recipient of a content update, adding Resident Evil 6 material, but we don’t have an ETA.

Source: VG247

If you like shooting zombies, then you probably already own Left 4 Dead 2 and you’re interested in playing Resident Evil 6 on the ol’ PC when it launches this week. And so you’ll be doubly pleased to know that in Resident Evil 6‘s PC-exclusive “No Mercy” mode, you’ll be able to play as the cast of L4D2 — and shoot up a bunch of Special Infected, who will also be making the jump.

But that’s not all! Valve are currently working on bringing the Lepotitsa, Napad and Ogroman enhemies into L4D2 as well. The L4D2 character pack will arrive on April 5, free for all RE6 players. New RE6 enemies should show up in L4D2 “this spring”.

Source: Capcom

Fan-favourite Steam Workshop offering Helm’s Deep has been clasped to Valve’s bosom. The developer has added the map to Left 4 Dead 2′s official server rotation, so all you have to do to take part is subscribe, ensure it has downloaded fully, and load it via Survival mode.

Helm’s Deep is inspired by the eponymous battle in The Lord of the Rings, and has players keeping the castle secure until Gandalf’s return. Subscribe to the latest version on Steam Workshop.

Valve added the mod in celebration of a recent update hopefully eliminating issues with dedicated serves and Workshop content.

Source: Left 4 Dead 2 blog via Destructoid

Left 4 Dead 2 was, in many ways, the flagship for the R18+ campaign here in Australia — and now it looks like Valve may be moving ahead with re-submitting the game under the new classification.

Writing on the Steam forums, Valve’s Chet Faliszek says: “No need to flood us with emails. We have been exploring the options here and what we can legally do.”

“We will have more information on this when we understand the issues fully and how we are moving forward but don’t worry any cost associated with it doesn’t worry us, this is something we want to do.”

Good stuff, Valve! I’m sure I speak for us all when I say we’re very excited to see how this turns out.

Source: Delimiter

One of the most anticipated Left 4 Dead 2 mods on ModDB, ‘Back to School’, is now out. The campaign is designed around an all-new original setting that doesn’t alter or mess with the official campaigns at all, which gives it freedom to do some huge and insane stuff. Take a look at the trailer below, then grab it from our file library. Celebrate Halloween slightly late by playing this with three mates over the weekend!

Source: ModDB via PC Gamer

To celebrate Halloween this year, Valve are making Left 4 Dead 2 free-to-play, for this weekend only. Starting Thursday — so probably more like Friday here — the game will be free to download and play the whole weekend.

New players can pre-load the game whenever they like, ready for the weekend, but for older players, you might wonder what the appeal is. Apart from playing a sweet game with a bunch of your friends? Gosh, well they’ve also added a new achievement, if that matters more to you, called ‘Good Guy Nick’: “Plays games with free weekend players and helps them survive a campaign.”

So this weekend might be a good time to re-acquire the fun zombie shooter and help out some newbies with their zombie slayage.

Source: L4D Blog

If you enjoyed the limited-release-but-everybody-went-nuts-for-it Cabin in the Woods, and you enjoy a good bit of Left 4 Dead 2, you might have been excited to know that a Cabin in the Woods-themed piece of DLC was once on the way, before financial difficulties at MGM squashed any hope of release.

“We actually were going to do a downloadable L4D2 expansion pack, where you’d fight in the Cabin world, but then MGM went bankrupt so the delay squashed it,” said Cabin in the Woods director Drew Goddard in a Reddit thread. “But the people at Valve were still cool enough to let us use some of their monsters to fill the cubes in the background (I had a lot of cubes to fill.)”

“By the way — the game was gonna be amazing. You were gonna be able to play in both the upstairs ‘Cabin in the Woods‘ world and the downstairs ‘facility’ world with all the monsters. Believe me, I HATE all video games based on movies, they always suck, but porting Cabin into Left For Dead felt like the right fit. It pains me that it didn’t happen.”

Source: Reddit

Valve has announced that Steam Workshop support is coming to Left 4 Dead 2. The developer said the suite of mod and community tools will be compatible with Mac, PC and Linux, starting from “the middle of next month”, which suggests Steam’s Linux beta isn’t too far away.

Intriguingly, Valve said the Left 4 Dead 2 version of Steam Workshop will include an experimental feature designed to “allow content to appear in the L4D2 world even more seamlessly based on the community’s response”. Valve is also working on a new scripting tool to allow modders to really get their hands dirty building all new experiences. These scripted creations will be applicable to current and new maps just as Mutations are.

Source: L4D Blog

The irascible Gnome Chompski, first spotted in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and then later in Left 4 Dead 2‘s Dark Carnival level, has been spotted buried in the snow at the top of Battlefield 3‘s new Armored Kill map, Alborz Mountain — having presumably arrived there following the events at the end of Episode 2.

Sharp-eyed Redditors were apparently the first to spot the tiny traveller, presumably left in as a tip of the hat to a talented fellow developer by DICE and not, as some might wildly speculate, notice of an upcoming EA/Valve buyout/merger/love-in.

Source: PCGamesN

In a tech-heavy post on its still-new Linux blog, the team at Valve responsible for a potential Ubuntu-based Steam client dive into the details of porting Left 4 Dead 2 to the open-source OS family, with eye-opening results. On a fairly high-end gaming rig running Windows 7, Valve established a baseline performance of 270.6 FPS, but the Linux port managed to squeeze just a bit more juice out of the same hardware to run at 315 FPS. Well, after a an initial period of running at 6 FPS, but that’s just how porting works, apparently. The nitty-gritties are probably a bit too much for most of us on a Saturday morning, but Valve puts the increased performance down to the “underlying efficiency of the kernel and OpenGL”. It even took some of its new Linux sensibilities back to Windows and upped the FPS to 303. Most interesting.

Source: Valve Linux