Left 4 Dead Patched

Valve released an update to Left 4 Dead last night with a host of fixes and changes.

Quick aside: When did developers stop referring to  game fixes as patches and start calling them updates? I think this is a bit shady. An update, in my eyes, is new features or content. Making gameplay improvements, fixing mechanics, eliminating exploits, etc. is a patch. PR people probably don’t like the term patch because it has a negative connotation but it doesn’t necessarily have to imply that a game is bug-ridden. This release is a patch, the new content due out soon is an update.

I digress… a sampling of the more crucial changes:

Versus Mode Changes

• Tank melee can now hit multiple Survivors in one swing
• Fixes to ‘Tank parking.’ The tank will now run back and attack the Survivors if he becomes AI due to two players expiring the frustration meter
• The Smoker tongue can now target and grab victims through common infected
• Increased the cone in which a Smoker can grab a target
• Boomers that now explode in mid-air will now hit Survivors directly below them with Bile
• Tanks now have the possibility of spawning in a slightly different position for the first and second teams
• The order that the teams play as Survivors is now determined by which team has the overall higher score. The winning team will play as Survivors first

The last two alterations are really significant in my eyes and make me excited to get back to playing some Versus mode. It was incredibly frustrating that the team who played Infected first in each round would know where and when the Tank would spawn and could gameplan accordingly. Mixing up the location in addition to playing a ‘losers’ style round system should make things much more interesting.

There are a handful of other changes which you can view through the Steam client  after updating. For whatever reason, the Steam News post about this only lists a few of the least important changes.