Skip to main content

Left 4 Dead 2 getting first content update in nearly a decade

After nearly a decade of inactivity, Left 4 Dead 2 is getting a surprising update. Valve announced that a new content drop called The Last Stand will hit the zombie horror game soon.

The revelation comes from the official Left 4 Dead blog and an update on Steam’s news page, which both posted a short description for the update.

“It has been many years since the infection first hit. Radio silence, no sign of life, nothing but lingering hopes… CEDA is not going to save us. But there is hope! A few brave souls have continued the fight against all odds, and soon we can all benefit from their resilience.”

A short teaser trailer doesn’t show much other than the foggy map, which includes a lighthouse. Fans who played the first Left 4 Dead game may recognize The Last Stand from that game’s survival mode. In the original game, The Last Stand was a wave defense mode where players tried to fight off incoming waves of zombies. Players could climb to the top of the lighthouse to fight off enemies. The map it’s to the sequel.

Left 4 Dead 2 - The Last Stand Update [Official Teaser]

Fans were originally skeptical about whether or not the update was official. The teaser trailer was uploaded by JAiZ, a fan Left 4 Dead YouTube channel, and doesn’t appear on Valve’s channel. According to Valve, the update is “created by the community, for the community.”

Valve is no stranger to letting fans create content for its games. Left 4 Dead 2’s third DLC, 2012’s non-canon Cold Stream update, was a fan-made update that ported several campaign maps from the first game into the sequel.

While Left 4 Dead 2 hasn’t received new content in nearly a decade, the developers are still somewhat active when it comes to rolling out bug fixes considering the game’s age. The most recent update came in July, which fixed an issue with the game’s authoring tools.

No further details were revealed other than the brief glimpse of the map. The teaser trailer only gives a vague “coming soon” as a release date. The Last Stand may be the closest thing fans get to a new Left 4 Dead game any time soon, as Valve confirmed earlier this year that it’s not working on a sequel.

Editors' Recommendations

Giovanni Colantonio
Giovanni is a writer and video producer focusing on happenings in the video game industry. He has contributed stories to…
You can still get a Thunder Shotgun in Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 2. Here’s how
Fortnite characters in a city.

Fortnite has received plenty of exciting new weapons in Chapter 4 Season 2, and in typical fashion, Epic has also vaulted some of last season's weapons to clean up the loot pool. Among the weapons vaulted for Season 2 is the Thunder Shotgun -- but weirdly, it can still be obtained, as it appears Epic possibly overlooked one NPC who drops it.

Anyone who wants to score the Thunder Shotgun in Season 2 can head over to Frenzy Fields and look for the NPC named Sunflower who walks around the farm. Simply eliminate her and pick up the weapon she drops. It's unclear if this is actually something Epic missed, or if the team just simply didn't want to bother changing up Sunflower's loot drops. Either way, it's currently the only way to obtain the Thunder Shotgun.

Read more
Dead Island 2 takes aim at Los Angeles culture, the rich, and influencers
A zombie crawls toward a player on a boardwalk in Dead Island 2.

Getting stuck in development hell often doesn't bode well for games. For every Final Fantasy VII Remake or The Last Guardian, there's an Aliens: Colonial Marines or Duke Nukem Forever. Often, the final releases lack a compelling design identity, chasing trends that popped up over the years and feeling like a mishmash of multiple developers' ideas of what the game should be. My biggest fear going into my hands-on demo with a near-final build of the oft-delayed Dead Island 2 was that it'd feel devoid of much creativity or lack a clear vision; thankfully, I was dead wrong.

Dead Island 2 - Extended Gameplay Reveal [4K Official]

Read more
Dead Island 2’s Amazon Alexa voice commands are novel, but limited
Dani lights a cigarette as zombies attack her from behind in Dead Island 2 key art.

I’ve always found myself interested in new technologies that could possibly enhance how we play or experience games. Whether it’s a computing innovation like cloud gaming or new controller features like the DualSense’s Haptic Feedback and Adaptive Triggers, I love testing those things out. That’s why I jumped at the opportunity to try Alexa Game Control during my recent hands-on preview experience with Dead Island 2.
When Dambuster Studios and Deep Silver’s Dead Island 2 finally launches on April 21, it will be the first game to support Alexa Game Control. By connecting one’s Amazon account to the game, players can use the voice-recognition capabilities of Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa to perform in-game actions like taunting zombies or equipping their best weapons. I was curious to see just how deep this went, but after some hands-on time, this first implementation of it proved to be little more than a novelty.

Hey, Alexa
Dead Island 2 players can toggle Alexa Game Control on when they first show up in Bel-Air after the game’s opening. It has a dedicated tab in the Options Menu where players can choose to enable or disable it, choose whether they want it to work automatically or with push to talk, set the voice capture threshold, and decide which microphone they wish to use.
After enabling Alexa Game Control, I immediately noticed a ring at the bottom-left corner of the screen. When I spoke, this lit up with blue and teal colors, like the top ring on an Alexa device, and text confirming whether it could do the action or not would appear. Not having to say “Hey, Alexa” also means it implemented itself into the game smoothly. At first, I tried to see if voice commands would work for basic things like walking, jumping, and dodging, to no avail. After this, I hopped to a save I had placed later in the game and opened its tutorial menu to see what Alexa Game Control could really do.
Reading its tutorials and lists of commands, the limits of Alexa Game Control became clear. It mainly provides quick shortcuts to save you a button press or two in the middle of playing. In Dead Island 2, Alexa Game Control has four main uses: setting waypoints, taunting enemies, triggering emotes, and switching weapons. The tutorial menus give a complete list of commands that work, although each wildly varies in its usefulness.
Oi, zombie!
The funniest use of this voice technology in Dead Island 2 is taunting zombies. Shouting something like “Hey, dude” or “Oi, zombie” to get the attention of enemies that hadn’t detected me always made me chuckle. It’s also occasionally useful; at one point, I got a bunch of zombies to walk into a large pool of acid and die after taunting them. While it takes the same amount of time as walking up to the zombie to get their attention, I see the potential in voice technology that lets you interact with the world like this.

Read more