It seems that the guys at valve are finally going to allow community content to be played by the mainstream user. Along with a non beta version of the sdk that is said to release next week the l4d devs are also going to be overhauling the matchmaking system to support “Add-on Campaigns” which will allow you to select campaigns that you have installed.

Because of the recent announcement of Left 4 Dead 2, a lot of fans are wondering whether it’s worth the trouble creating any custom content because the it may not work with the new game. I found this quote from one of the writers for most of Valve’s games which addresses the issue.

Chet_Faliszek wrote:One thing we do know for sure is we want to make sure that everyone making a Left 4 Dead 1 map now or campaign now it’s still going to work in Left 4 Dead 2. You will be able to start Left 4 Dead 2 up, you will have the new creatures automatically, you’ll have the new weapons you will have all of that in the world, if you want to do some of the new director stuff or some of the new ways we control item placement you can go re-do it and add that, but you can also just leave it the exact same way and it will work.

When I was first reading about this on the Left 4 Dead Blog I started thinking of playing de_dust with hordes of zombies which was apparently done in the demo but never released. But then I remembered that I only have the game for XBOX 360. In the few news reports that I’ve read I haven’t seen any mention at all of XBOX changes. If you read that blog Yasser Malaika talks about how easy it will be to install the add-on by double clicking the VPK file. More than likely Microsoft will make me pay for every custom map that is freely available for the PC version.