I've played this map a few times through with a friend on expert over the past few months. We even completed it with just two survivors (I.E. no bots or other players). Here are my thoughts based on my experiences.
Pros:
- The music is good
- The environment is well designed. It looks like it could be an official map for the most part. The sky is also beautiful.
- The crescendo events are all well balanced and match the design of events in the official maps.
- The finale is enjoyable, for the most part. The scavenge bit is not too hard, and then it has a Swamp Fever-style finale afterwards.
Neutral:
- The maps are not really forgettable nor memorable. With some effort I can picture the maps and what takes place in each part. This is after completing the map several times. This campaign is better than most 5 map campaigns in that regard, but not as memorable as say I Hate Mountains, Suicide Blitz, Urban Flight, etc. Part of this is due to the terrain and textures never changing.
Cons:
- As someone who has played dozens of custom campaigns on expert and realism, I have to fully disagree about the spacing of supplies. Maps 2-4 are barren and dry when it comes to ammo, pills, weapons, etc. On map 2 in particular the entire team was limping into the saferoom at literally 1 HP. This might be fun for some people, but due to the length of the maps, having to restart that close to the end after a surprise horde is annoying. It's not that my team is incapable of playing the map, it's that there are literally no health items to use. Compared to other official and custom maps, there's no items. On map 3 on the highway, we went more than 66% of the map without finding a single set of pills or adrenaline; all we had was our kits from the saferoom. Map 4 has far too many empty rooms and dead ends with no supplies.
- The finale has crashed twice for me and my friend, months apart. In other words, yes, we wasted an hour and half on two separate occasions and the game crashed during the finale for no apparent reason. Additionally, once this finale crashes, music does not work on my dedicated server, even after multiple restarts. It takes a while for it to get "fixed". Presumably this is due to the custom music.
- Speaking of the finale, if you "use" the radio a second time before the game tells you to go get cans, the gates will never raise and you will be stuck there. Happened to us. Not the best design.
I hope you'll be able to pinpoint and fix the issues with the finale in particular. We cannot play the map anymore due to the risk of it crashing. As far as supplies go, I challenge people to actually play through the map on expert, perhaps with random people, to see just how little there is on maps 2-4. This map is better balanced for expert than most campaigns, but it's still not to a level where it can be enjoyed regularly, IMO.
A later playthrough of the map on our server did not crash at the finale. We quit afterwards so I didn't get to test the music. I do look forward to any future updates on this. I'd have to revise to 4 or 5 stars now if I could.
This comment was posted before the latest release.
Thanks for giving it another shot.
Now that you've explained it a bit more in detail, I might have an idea as to why the finale bugged out. The way that radio works is that there's a first button that triggers the initial speech. After that, it gets deleted and unveils a second button which was actually inside the first one. The reason the second button is inside of the first one is so that you can't accidentally hit it before hitting the first switch. There's a trigger volume stretched over that entire room that locks the button until all 4 survivors are inside of the room. If I had somehow forgotten to also make this trigger lock the SECOND switch... then that would probably be the issue right there. Just an idea though. I'll have to examine it more closely. In the end I chose to use this method because I noticed that a lot of other custom campaigns did it the same way, notably Suicide Blitz 2. I wonder if its possible to break the finale on that campaign as well.
Also what did you mean when you said you were able to get out of it by jumping off of the ledge?
I'm guessing you meant the raised platform right next to the radio right? And this is only happening when you start the campaign from the beginning and play all the way through? Strange indeed.
There's definitely less pills/adrenaline than there are in official maps, as I said in my other post above. In theory, having less wouldn't be a bad thing if they were spread out more, but in reality that's not the case. A lot of times items seem to spawn in clumps together, leaving some areas completely empty. That could be something to do with the radius I have set on the item density controller. For next update I'm definitely going to be trying to spread stuff out a bit more. I don't think every single room should have something, but I can definitely agree that having more than half of the extra rooms being empty isn't really ideal either, as this is a case a majority of the time.
I'm going to add a medicine cabinet at the crescendo on map 3 that has a bunch of pills in it, and perhaps one on map 2 as well, but I'm not sure where yet. I can't really see any imbalance coming out of it as you can never really go wrong with more health, and plus a lot of the official L4D2 campaigns do it anyway.
That's weird that you found an uzi on map 3 after the elevator. I probably have it set to any primary instead of T2 primary. Woops
The primary reason I haven't gotten around to updating this (aside from IRL stuff) is due to the fact that I'm currently working on a new campaign. I have some new stuff I'm working on for the new campaign that I want to actually integrate into this campaign as well. However I might just make an update sooner as I have quite a few other (misc) things to fix aside from the stuff we've talked about already.
This comment was posted before the latest release.
Zorbos, your reply is wonderful to see. I completely understand you wanting to address the criticisms. At most we have a team of three friends, usually two, playing custom maps; we don't claim to be experts either. I suppose a big part of it is how well you know the map. I plan to go through the campaign on single player and check out the spots you've mentioned to become more familiar with them.
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For example, whenever we play The Parish or Dark Carnival, we can typically go through the campaign and never need to use a health kit, and only a few sets of pills or adrenaline at most. (I also survived The Parish with my 100 health intact once, thanks to a few restarts.) My point is not to brag, but I'm saying I guess it's not fair to compare the map to the official ones since I obviously know those maps much better and know where everything spawns.
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We play on a dedicated server rented from NFOservers that does have Sourcemod and a few plugins. We've played several times a week on the server for over a year, with a variety of custom maps, and we've probably had somewhere from 20-30 crashes total, mostly due to GSP issues or certain maps or bad plugins. I guess I cannot rule out the fact that our server acted up twice independently of the campaign, but my point is that it's rare for that to happen. Most custom maps we play never have any issues. And when I say "crash" in this instance I mean the server resetting and all players disconnecting. The server is 99% stock, the plugins change bot behavior, and enabling the passing of grenades and other items. We can try the map without them next time. If Sourcemod is the cause of the crash, then that's out, because we can't play without Sourcemod. As for game mods, my game has a few mods in it, but the music and characters aren't really changed, it's like 95% vanilla. My other friends that I play with have 100% vanilla games, the only addons they have are maps.
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I'll look into what you posted and get back to you after we try the map again. Again, it is so great to see a mapmaker replying. I know you guys go through a lot of BS comments, I did not intend that to be what I posted. I've commented on many maps that I wanted to see improved, but I knew they were dead or would never be updated.
This comment was posted before the latest release.
Good campaign overall, some issues
This review was posted before the latest release.
This comment was posted before the latest release.
This comment was posted before the latest release.
This comment was posted before the latest release.