What made valve prefer Cold Stream over other community campaigns?

[Witch]

That campaign literally goes against l4d's design by adding a few STATIC AND GUARANTEED tank spawns along with 2 guaranteed laser sights (the game is meant to be replayable, static spawns just remove a part of the replayability), terrible pacing with a guaranteed horde at the end of every chapter, and on top of all that there's no witches at all for whatever reason. Just how in the world did valve pick cold stream to be added and not other community campaigns?

[XerXarii]

Yeah idk man even making Cold Stream at night imho makes it better. Such a garbage campaign, I don't even care to be an open hatin' hater lol.

I vaguely vaguely remember back in the day playing on Xbox 360 and seeing the Blog Post or whatever about the campaign. And then suddenly it was added as DLC to the marketplace I think? I remember even thinking then.. 'wtf'.

At least we are on PC and can avoid that dumpster fire of a campaign easier and can install custom workshop maps.`

[Shin Navideño]

I actually think we could add more custom campaigns into the game. As long it has the quality of l4d2 maps (not cold stream)

[Tsumugi]

I don't particularly mind Cold Stream, it's not great, or even really good, but I prefer playing it over Dark Carnival or Hard Rain when it comes to Versus, even with the potential game crash on the first chapter.

[Snekenjoyer6]

well cold stream was kinda like the test map for valve when adding community campagins, however when it was found it it had several stolen assets from other projects valve had to patch out themselves, it pretty much completely turned them off from adding custom maps officially

[Witch]

Originally posted by Snekenjoyer6:

well cold stream was kinda like the test map for valve when adding community campagins, however when it was found it it had several stolen assets from other projects valve had to patch out themselves, it pretty much completely turned them off from adding custom maps officially

they added the last stand tho, sure it's based on an existing official map but still.

[Enver Pasha]

anlıyorum

[nicks husband coach]

boys hate cold stream
real men love playing cold stream

[JAiZ]

Originally posted by Witch:

That campaign literally goes against l4d's design

Everything that Cold Stream does matches the designs of the other official campaigns.

Badly designed gauntlet event -> Dark Carnival 3, 4, and The Passing 2 have equally bad events (arguably even worse).
Death Toll 4, Dead Air 4, and Blood Harvest 3 and 4 also had gauntlet events shoehorned in when they were ported, and are just as poorly designed.
Cold Steam at least only uses 1 gauntlet event, whereas other campaigns do more, like Dark Carnival having 3 of them back-to-back, with 2 of them being among the worst-designed events in the entire game.

2 events in a single map -> Dead Air 4 does the same thing, and makes one of the two events an aforementioned badly designed gauntlet, so Cold Stream using 2 holdouts in a single map is far less egregious.
Blood Harvest technically does it as well, if you count the cornfield crows before the finale.

Scripted tank fight -> The Sacrifice does the exact same thing. There's also only 1 scripted tank spawn in Cold Stream, not "a few", unless you're including the regular Gauntlet finale tank spawn as a scripted tank, which The Parish does as well.
The Passing 1 also has another scripted boss, it's just a witch instead of a tank.

An event on every non-finale map -> Dead Center, Swamp Fever, and The Sacrifice do the exact same thing.

Static item spawns -> Almost every campaign has some static item spawns throughout, that's a normal part of level design. Dead Center's gunshop alone has more static item spawns than the entirety of Cold Stream twice over.
The Passing and Hard Rain have plenty of static item spawns as well.

Boring locations -> Crash Course, Blood Harvest, and The Sacrifice are just as boring location-wise, and arguably even more monotonous than Cold Stream.

No natural witches -> Cold Stream has witches, they're just exclusive to Versus iirc, so it was probably done for balance.
Plenty of the other official maps have tanks or witches disabled as well though; Such as No Mercy 1 and Sacrifice 1 disabling natural tank spawns, or Dead Center 1 disabling tanks for co-op only, and The Passing 1 disabling natural witches due to the scripted witch bride.

Cold Stream had it's issues, and it's not an exemplary campaign either, but it didn't innovate on bad level design - Valve made the exact same poor design choices in the other official campaigns, and plenty of novice mappers on the workshop do the exact same things over and over, so Cold Stream isn't anything out of the ordinary.

[or gang nick khan miss tree]

Originally posted by Witch:

That campaign literally goes against l4d's design by adding a few STATIC AND GUARANTEED tank spawns along with 2 guaranteed laser sights (the game is meant to be replayable, static spawns just remove a part of the replayability), terrible pacing with a guaranteed horde at the end of every chapter, and on top of all that there's no witches at all for whatever reason. Just how in the world did valve pick cold stream to be added and not other community campaigns?

Is the trick of skipping the barrel part fixed now?

[Witch]

Originally posted by JAiZ:

Originally posted by Witch:

That campaign literally goes against l4d's design

Everything that Cold Stream does matches the designs of the other official campaigns.

Badly designed gauntlet event -> Dark Carnival 3, 4, and The Passing 2 have equally bad events (arguably even worse).
Death Toll 4, Dead Air 4, and Blood Harvest 3 and 4 also had gauntlet events shoehorned in when they were ported, and are just as poorly designed.
Cold Steam at least only uses 1 gauntlet event, whereas other campaigns do more, like Dark Carnival having 3 of them back-to-back, with 2 of them being among the worst-designed events in the entire game.

2 events in a single map -> Dead Air 4 does the same thing, and makes one of the two events an aforementioned badly designed gauntlet, so Cold Stream using 2 holdouts in a single map is far less egregious.
Blood Harvest technically does it as well, if you count the cornfield crows before the finale.

Scripted tank fight -> The Sacrifice does the exact same thing. There's also only 1 scripted tank spawn in Cold Stream, not "a few", unless you're including the regular Gauntlet finale tank spawn as a scripted tank, which The Parish does as well.
The Passing 1 also has another scripted boss, it's just a witch instead of a tank.

An event on every non-finale map -> Dead Center, Swamp Fever, and The Sacrifice do the exact same thing.

Static item spawns -> Almost every campaign has some static item spawns throughout, that's a normal part of level design. Dead Center's gunshop alone has more static item spawns than the entirety of Cold Stream twice over.
The Passing and Hard Rain have plenty of static item spawns as well.

Boring locations -> Crash Course, Blood Harvest, and The Sacrifice are just as boring location-wise, and arguably even more monotonous than Cold Stream.

No natural witches -> Cold Stream has witches, they're just exclusive to Versus iirc, so it was probably done for balance.
Plenty of the other official maps have tanks or witches disabled as well though; Such as No Mercy 1 and Sacrifice 1 disabling natural tank spawns, or Dead Center 1 disabling tanks for co-op only, and The Passing 1 disabling natural witches due to the scripted witch bride.

Cold Stream had it's issues, and it's not an exemplary campaign either, but it didn't innovate on bad level design - Valve made the exact same poor design choices in the other official campaigns, and plenty of novice mappers on the workshop do the exact same things over and over, so Cold Stream isn't anything out of the ordinary.

In other words, cold stream may have terrible design, but it's design was nothing new and likely influenced and endorsed by valve...♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Thanks for the insight, made me realize just how bad some of valve's maps are

[Geebanger0]

Originally posted by JAiZ:

Originally posted by Witch:

That campaign literally goes against l4d's design

Everything that Cold Stream does matches the designs of the other official campaigns.

Badly designed gauntlet event -> Dark Carnival 3, 4, and The Passing 2 have equally bad events (arguably even worse).
Death Toll 4, Dead Air 4, and Blood Harvest 3 and 4 also had gauntlet events shoehorned in when they were ported, and are just as poorly designed.
Cold Steam at least only uses 1 gauntlet event, whereas other campaigns do more, like Dark Carnival having 3 of them back-to-back, with 2 of them being among the worst-designed events in the entire game.

None of these come remotely close to cold stream in terms of oppressiveness and lack of enjoyment. I have seen more restarts on cold stream alone than every other map you listed combined.

Originally posted by JAiZ:

2 events in a single map -> Dead Air 4 does the same thing, and makes one of the two events an aforementioned badly designed gauntlet, so Cold Stream using 2 holdouts in a single map is far less egregious.
Blood Harvest technically does it as well, if you count the cornfield crows before the finale.

Again, cold streams events are much worse.

Originally posted by JAiZ:

Scripted tank fight -> The Sacrifice does the exact same thing. There's also only 1 scripted tank spawn in Cold Stream, not "a few", unless you're including the regular Gauntlet finale tank spawn as a scripted tank, which The Parish does as well.
The Passing 1 also has another scripted boss, it's just a witch instead of a tank.

The sacrifice tank fight presents itself as a proper crescendo event, with a manual trigger, and the tank has to be killed before you can progress. Cold streams tank fight presents itself as a naturally occurring event that just so happens to take place in the exact same location every time.
- it triggers based on proximity, so you have no warning or time to prepare at the location
- the tank doesn't need to be killed and you can run past it
- the event is buggy, and the tank can oftentimes despawn before it makes it down the hill
- the boulder aspect feels highly stilted, and can at times result in several incaps before the fight even starts

Originally posted by JAiZ:

An event on every non-finale map -> Dead Center, Swamp Fever, and The Sacrifice do the exact same thing.

Again, all of these are much better than cold streams events

Originally posted by JAiZ:

Static item spawns -> Almost every campaign has some static item spawns throughout, that's a normal part of level design. Dead Center's gunshop alone has more static item spawns than the entirety of Cold Stream twice over.
The Passing and Hard Rain have plenty of static item spawns as well.

No other campaign has 2 guaranteed laser spawns, with an M60 right next to it.
Dead center is a tutorial map designed to teach new players the basics of the game. The gun store gives them the opportunity to test fire every weapon and figure out which one they like.
Cold streams static item spawns are a result of the map makers not knowing how to balance it properly, and instead of toning down the difficulty they just said "♥♥♥♥ it, place a bunch of powerful items right on the main path to make up for it"

Originally posted by JAiZ:

Boring locations -> Crash Course, Blood Harvest, and The Sacrifice are just as boring location-wise, and arguably even more monotonous than Cold Stream.

Subjective

Originally posted by JAiZ:

No natural witches -> Cold Stream has witches, they're just exclusive to Versus iirc, so it was probably done for balance.
Plenty of the other official maps have tanks or witches disabled as well though; Such as No Mercy 1 and Sacrifice 1 disabling natural tank spawns, or Dead Center 1 disabling tanks for co-op only, and The Passing 1 disabling natural witches due to the scripted witch bride.

No other campaign has witch spawns disabled for the entire map, and no other campaign disables them for no reason. The passing 1 has no natural witches because it has the bride thats guaranteed to spawn. Same as how the sacrifice 1 has no random tanks spawns because it has a guaranteed tank in the train. Dead center 1 has no witches because, again, its designed to teach players the basics, and introducing them to a witch when they have no reliable means of killing her, very few ways of avoiding her, and are already overwhelmed with a lot of other gameplay aspects, would be a pretty dumb thing to do. Same thing goes for No Mercy 1 having no tanks, since its the tutorial stage in L4D1.

Originally posted by JAiZ:

Cold Stream had it's issues, and it's not an exemplary campaign either, but it didn't innovate on bad level design - Valve made the exact same poor design choices in the other official campaigns, and plenty of novice mappers on the workshop do the exact same things over and over, so Cold Stream isn't anything out of the ordinary.

None of Valves maps make as many mistakes as cold stream does, and not to the same degree.
- there's plenty of bugs and playtesting oversights
- every playthrough feels identical due to there being no random witch or tank spawns, and an abundance of static item spawns
- theres no reason or option to explore since theres basically no side routes, and almost every helpful item is lying directly on the main path
- the pacing is awful due to constant running crescendo events with very little downtime
- some of the crescendos have a chance to kill or incap the player if theyre standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most are also proximity based, giving you no warning or time to prepare if youre not already expecting them. The hold your ground events are presented as running events even though they arent, which puts the player at a disadvantage.

There are other far superior choices on the workshop that could've been added instead of cold stream. Other community maps making the same mistakes doesn't excuse its flaws.

[-vűļçåņőqųąķė-]

Cold Stream is one of the worst maps ever approved. One of the worst decisions ever.

[Ayyoue]

i actually like all maps. They are content and i enjoy having it.
Some less, some more... But at the end of the day i just want to have fun.

[Witch]

Originally posted by Ayyo:

i actually like all maps. They are content and i enjoy having it.
Some less, some more... But at the end of the day i just want to have fun.

#600

[Ayyoue]

Originally posted by Witch:

Originally posted by Ayyo:

i actually like all maps. They are content and i enjoy having it.
Some less, some more... But at the end of the day i just want to have fun.

#600

Harassment, yet again? Unprovoked, AGAIN.

Seriously, what's your beef? You harass me without any provocation. Did i hurt you in the past? Maybe i did, but that's no motive for your continued stalking harassment.