https://talk.turtlerockstudios.com/t/warner-bros-interactive-entertainment-and-turtle-rock-studios-announce-back-4-blood/112397

Didn't think I'd need to make this, but I'll make it real quick.

Just because I released all of the assets to the public doesn't mean I want someone to continue the project after death. Learn from our mistakes, it's not worth your time. I also don't wish to see people re-uploading the work as their own or just re-uploading the work so people can download it outside of the Mega. I still don't authorize it or support it and I will still file take downs. There's nothing wrong in making personal installs and edits of the project, but reviving the project for attention sake or just credit thieving is still a garbage thing to do.

The assets are not guaranteed to work, and a lot of the work has major known issues. I will eventually get around to releasing the working content (or at least the stuff that mostly works) onto Workshop and GameMaps.

Here's a little addendum to my long winded rant on the L4D Zero page so any Reddit user can maybe get a little more understanding behind what happened instead gobbling Valve's ♥♥♥♥ like it so seems to be accustom to doing.

I had posted this originally only on Facepunch, but I thought the additional information may be useful to those only in the Steam group

If you missed the previous announcement, check it here.

A. It's your fault that you partnered with Valve and you shouldn't be upset that they shut you down because any other company wouldn't of allowed it to start.

Yeah, it may of been foolish to partner with Valve in the first place, but I was still under impression that Valve was still the company that gave us Half-Life. It doesn't help that Valve constantly led us on, directly or in-directly.

Every time I was about to call it quits on the project it just seemed like new content was at our door step telling us that everything was going to be okay. Even after the April 2018 official cancellation, some more ♥♥♥♥ ended up on our doorsteps from someone with a license with Valve as well. But at that point, we were just done, we wanted nothing more to do with the project.


B. You were working on a project with no guarantees, why are you so upset that it failed.

If the project stayed at nothing more than a trust agreement between us and Valve and they suddenly stopped all production on the mod, I'd be less bitter. Yeah I still wasted 4 years of my life on something that led to nothing, but they had us sign a NDA to make the partnership official. That was the kick in the ass, we made the partnership official, then Valve turns around and just boots us because some other fan project bombed HEAVILY.


C. HDTF is a scapegoat

No it's not, if it was, we likely would of announced the cancellation around the time of HDTF to cash in on the "woe is me, HDTF killed modding for me!!!" bandwagon. The ship has long since sailed away on the HDTF bandwagon, and mentioning it will likely bring more questions like "wtf is HDTF" than it would of if we announced it back in April.


D. HDTF only proved to modders that if they take themselves seriously are actually creating garbage and it was eye-opening for them.

what. A lot of mod developers are looking to get into the industry, they start projects out as mods so they can have works under their name. This whole argument is very flawed here.


E. Valve has the best documentation for modding their games than any other game developers, so they're the best treating to mod developers. Look at the Valve developer wiki!

That Wiki is maintained mostly by mod creators discovering a lot of the engine themselves. Any licensed developer for Source can tell you right off the bat that Source comes with very little documentation and finding anyone to help you at Valve is slim to none. At least as far as I've been told by licensed developers and friends of licensed developers.


F. Maybe if the files didn't get leaked maybe Valve would still be working with you.

We solved the leak issue with Valve very early on, in fact, the leak transpired more than a year before we signed the NDA with them. We were able to patch things up with them and continued receiving files. Sadly, other partnered mods weren't as lucky as we were. They weren't able to continue work on their beta restorations. We also provided details to Valve regarding who done it, and they even had rats in a lot of their servers. Valve never took action, but they were aware.


G. The bandwagon for Valve is now reverse and this is proof of it! It's only because they don't like the direction Valve is taking with games.

Actually the Valve love bandwagon never went away and this Reddit thread is proof of it. People are getting more aware of the nightmare it is to work with and for Valve.


H. You're only mad because you nostalgia glasses for old Valve is wearing out and you now just see that Valve has always been bad!

Maybe? I mean, I now know the hell Valve put Rogue Entertainment through and how they caused their company to go bankrupt because Valve was banking it on two developers that had left the team and never gave them a chance to continue production on CS:CZ. I know Valve royally pissed off Gearbox when they tried to pull a valvetime on Valve. I know Valve completely canceled Ritual's completed CS:CZ because it reviewed poorly. But at least Valve still had developers I respected and trusted there at the company during that time, so I knew the team was capable of good work. But now they're all gone and all we're left with is the bad.


I. You provide no further details about the partnership.

Yeah, because it's under NDA.


J. You're just blaming your leaks on HDTF.

No, as stated beforehand, we had patched things up with Valve regarding the leaks. Provided details to the other leaks and who did our leaks. HDTF is what caused Valve to be more protective with their IPs, which they should of been in the first place. But to punish us for their faults is quite humorous. They should already had quality control for these third-party projects in the first place to make sure it wasn't hurting the brand.

Also, if you want another project it has effected, check Missing Information. Missing Information is trying to get on Steam and Valve was fine with it. But now time has come to the Steam release of Missing Information and Valve won't even verify it onto the Steam storefront.


K. "This is a blatant lie. I've seen lots of mods getting updated and new mods coming up on Steam (Jabroni Brawl EP3 is just one example, Missing Information is another)."

JBEP3 is not even fully using the HL IP (or any Valve IP) and is done by people known from GMod/Facepunch Studios. (I wonder if it's using a licensed Source branch, haven't fully tracked the progress since the early days.)

Missing Information is stuck in limbo and no one knows when they will be allowed onto the platform. Last time I've check, Valve had yet to even talk to them about getting it approved for a Steam release.


Now that's over, I am publishing the most working content from L4D Zero onto Workshop and GameMaps when ever I get the chance.

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1372592884

I already have the Survivors uploaded to both platforms. Also wanted to make a note that placeholder works or works mainly filled with placeholders will be put in the TRS Inspired collection.

paste at the end of Mega's URL.
#F!US4QGLjb!vnGUw3TxMPQlU0iRFct9ww

(or go here: http://puu.sh/BDB3t/a170f9d3b2.txt)

Well, well, well. Kept you waiting, huh. Four years after creation of the project, we have folded, just like you all wanted it to. At least, the vast majority of you. But we had canceled the project for much different reasons than you may think. No, we never lacked the talent or man-power to make this project work. After constantly fighting with the community's death wish for all mods that got to partner with Valve, the project finally failed. Surprisingly, it wasn't even the community that was the final nail in the coffin. No, Hunt Down the Freeman was, it demonstrated that the community can not be trusted to do a partnered fan project with their IPs. Due to poor timing, we had finally got an agreement with Valve Corporation to actually make Left 4 Dead Zero a reality, but it was only months before HDTF was slated to released. Valve cut all communications with us after the release of HDTF, and we have internal sources that very much points to that being the reason why many licensed Source developers were no longer able to contact Valve, at least, as far as I was told. After years of just sucking up to Valve and proving we weren't like the community to them and that we had no intentions of leaking assets they decided to pull the plug on the partnership over a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ fan game that even the community hates. I'm not surprised by the action, not at all, they do the same with Steamworks. Every time one of those Greenlight scam projects abuses the system, Valve takes way a feature or seriously gimps a feature and only slaps the scammer on their wrist. They seemly are never fully banned from the Steam platform, they just have to pay another fee to get back in, which just repeats the cycle of Steamworks getting abused and actual developers getting punished instead of the scam artists.

But we're not here to talk about Steamworks, we're here to talk about Left 4 Dead Zero.

Left 4 Dead Zero was canceled sometime in April of 2018, which, as you're reading this, it's currently October of 2018 (unless you're an early bird and are reading this exactly on September 30th, 2018.) So why did it take so long for OP to deliver? Well, we attempted to salvage the project and release all of the assets we could in finished (enough) form. As you can tell, those efforts fell right on its face. Many factors go into this, people were busy with their lives, we lost interest in the project, not a lot man-power was left after we trashed the project, we have other projects to focus on, etc. So, instead of just waiting and waiting for everything to be finished so I can dump it onto Game Maps and Workshop THEN release all of the assets, I'm just going to release the assets. It saves me time and the less I have to deal with all of this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ drama from people who might of genuinely convinced themselves they created all of this work (and all of TRS' and Valve's work too.) But obviously they didn't, they don't have full backups of the dev archive from every year, but I do. They barely even have the sources to the leaked content from 2014.

All of the sources from Left 4 Dead Zero, whatever it be my personal works like the TRS Inspired mods, our team's new creations for L4D Zero, stuff Valve sent us, stuff TRS sent us, or just the general L4D Zero assets. It's all here. Obviously, not everything to L4D's development is here, but all of our development is here.

I had to go through every dev backup I had to get it to this point, which is harder than you may think it is. The backups were in a very sorry state, the entire L4D Zero developer drive has been deleted a total of 4-5 times just over one person getting upset at me or some random situation. But before he could delete the entire drive from existence, I would go in and back it up, but I never bothered to make separate folders for them during the first few times, I just dumped them all into the same folder. This led to various revisions of assets to disappear, multiple folders just full of the same assets, and more.

I also live by the rule that once the developer leaves, their assets shouldn't be used in the project to avoid drama, usually when I work on projects and someone leaves, I allow them to take their assets with them, but I couldn't do that with L4D Zero, as Valve only gave the project permission to develop with the files, so it led to those files to just sit in limbo. There was also a situation where someone else on the team had no idea how to write .QCs and would overwrite a lot of my .QCs with un-usable code, which led to me having to recreate those assets as well. So yes, that means, every time the dev drive had been deleted, I had to restart the project nearly from start again. Which is kinda why Monthly Updates constantly got smaller and smaller, there really wasn't a point to update everyone on me redoing the project again for like, the 3rd time.

There was also a point in time that the other developer in question would just fill the updates with fake development while no real development had actually transpired, which is also why when I had returned to the project, the updates were really tiny and we were struggling to even release updates.

I do want to make this clear, none of this content is from our license with Valve, they sent nothing and only promised us things. Everything here was sent to us by Valve as a trust agreement, along with a few odds and ends that we received from other third-parties.

We were given a rare opportunity to rub shoulders with legends in the gaming industry. I wanted to make sure they knew their assets were in the right hands and I wanted to the community to know the same. I don't think Valve gave a ♥♥♥♥ and the community just took it as me claiming I was better than them for having content that Valve had sent to me to work on. I was just another figure in a failed experiment that Valve wanted to try. At the end of the day, it wasn't my fault or Project-Beta's fault that stuff leaked, it was really down to the community wanting something they couldn't wait for and decided to attack instead of waiting for releases. But can you really blame them entirely? 4 years and we barely got anything for the project and when we finally got the license they instantly threw us away.

Attention seeking from a former developer who did literally nothing on the project, which is why he was removed from the project in the first place very early on. Our work was given by this person to someone who then sent the assets to VNN to receive a build of Portal Project-Beta that he had received for coverage of the mod. He did cover Project-Beta, but he never credited them and claimed he was the one who received the assets from Valve. The team also provided help for writing a video regarding the history of Portal's development, which he still managed to make a bunch of errors in despite the fact they were just feeding him the information.

Obviously, Portal Project-Beta was first to leak, being leaked publicly on Facepunch. You can see the thread still on the site if you dig enough, you can see the state of mind that the beta community was in at the time. Let's just say, some very nasty things were said to developers of that mod. The real shame about this whole situation is that Portal Project- Beta was seemly close to receiving the final files they needed to complete their mod, but obviously, due to the leak, Valve shut down the relationship to their mod and several other mods working to restore beta content.

Shortly after the Project-Beta leak, L4D Zero's misc files were making the rounds privately in the Valve beta community until it would end up in the hands of certain individual who created a certain L4D Zero clone using only assets we owned. He would publicly release these assets to people claiming it was "okay" because he would later credit me. I never authorized the assets to be released publicly and Valve never authorized for the assets they sent us to be released publicly.

He very much used these assets to his advantage, constantly trading people my team's work for things he wanted or needed for the project. He traded this work to several young impressionable children for achievement farming on L4D (and maybe other games) and traded the Zero assets for Beta Remake's assets from the person who accidentally got the project after Disa called it quits. If any of you still even remain from 2014, you'd know that Disa and others from the team had given me the rights to what made up the project. Meaning, the person in question had no right to grant the other person permission to use the content. I did get Disa's official word to show that these two people had no rights to the assets, but the person with the L4D Zero clone completely dis-regarded it.

Just on a side note, I do want to explain why exactly I ended up with all of the assets and never used any of it. The entire team was embarrassed about their work. They looked down upon it and didn't want out, and believed that anyone could just remake the assets and it would be light years better. Clearly, the L4D Zero clones never got that memo, or they just didn't care, and saw that it would be less work they would ever need to do with the project for a 1 way ticket to fame.

But, yeah we never used the assets for one big reason that we constantly talked about. We're a restoration, not a recreation. Anything in the mod that's a recreation was made solely as a placeholder, and whenever I do state that I had to make placeholders for certain assets people would state "THEN YOU'RE NOT A RECREATION THEN, YOU ARE HOLDING BACK THESE FILES BECAUSE YOU WANT TO BE THE ONLY PEOPLE WITH THEM." I would hope anyone with half of a brain cell would understand that a restoration isn't going to release assets with re-created assets and will call them un-finished and not suited for release for that exact reason. There's a reason the Survivors haven't released, they aren't done, we're missing assets from them.

Also, I still don't know where everyone got the impression that we'd release ALL assets for L4D1 and L4D2 before the standalone release of L4D Zero, we only promised the Survivors with a possible release of other assets AFTER the standalone release of L4D Zero. This would allow us to understand what L4D1 and L4D2 can handle from TRS' Left 4 Dead and allow people not to see L4D Zero as redundant before it even came out.

Well, as I stated in the beginning, HDTF. But there is many factors to this and why we will likely never return to the project even if Valve comes to us and helps us resume development. We lost motivation for the project completely. So much ♥♥♥♥ from the community, the constant ass kissing to Valve just to make sure we stay afloat, and more. Along with that, honestly, we'd just value our time and would rather give it to an original IP and not a dead IP that a backwards company owns. It would give us full creative freedom over whatever we want to do instead of being limited to the set rules of Left 4 Dead. We're actively trying to finish all of our mods based off of existing IPs, whatever it be setting actual target goals to force us into high gear to get something done or just outright canceling projects. After these mods are done, we'll likely try to do a few easy projects based off of existing IPs just to make sure our name is known in the industry so we can possibly get funding to do something we actually want to create, or we'll even go to crowdfunding to fund a new game done by us.

Not to hire anyone who may be mentally unstable or not in a mentally sound state to work on a project that could easily cause the death of your team's entire career. I also learnt not to advertise your project pre-maturely and at least wait until you're in the late alpha stages and not in the proof of concept stage. While coming out with the mod this early really saved us in a few eyes to prove that the leaked assets were genuinely ours, for the most part people just think we were asking for it from just advertising a mod this early into development and that we should of waited until the project was confirmed to continue in development and not fall on its face.

I've also learnt that no matter if you actively update or even go in-depth on certain parts of development, the community will dis-regard everything you said and just assume what they want to believe. I've seen so many people claim L4D Zero was dead around the time we posted updates when the project was still getting updates worth reading.
I've also learnt the monthly update format sucks, and I'll never do that again.

That Valve you loved died ages ago and that this community seriously needs some intense restructuring. A lot of the bad you might of read about Valve in recent years seem to be true. The Rich Geldreich situation has things stated in it that I saw first hand, and I have no doubt in my mind that everything said was true regarding Valve. Along with those details, I wouldn't be surprised if Left 4 Dead was redesigned solely based off of someone wanting a bonus and just claimed TRS had corrupted the entire dev drive to justify the re-creation of assets. Considering that everything I've had told by Valve or Valve contacts regarding why L4D was re-designed doesn't add up at all to what I've received, what I know about the files, and what I was told by TRS. I spent all of these years looking for an answer, and it really just feels like the answer is that someone at Valve wanted a little extra money on their paycheck and that Valve was genuinely never interested in the Left 4 Dead IP and just agreed upon the offer TRS gave to them simply because of the work they had already put in to help TRS and they didn't want the risk of L4D being canceled that late into development. In retrospect, I feel that Michael Booth should of held out until the game was completed and shipped before he offered the company and the IP to Valve.

Also, to those wondering about TRS' Left 4 Dead, in the eyes of TRS, Left 4 Dead was not finished when they had sold the game to Valve. But the game was finished enough where Valve could get away with never fully finishing the game and would be able to just ship what they had with a new coat of paint. L4D in early 2008 is basically just a differently balanced and prettier version of the L4D that came out, but if TRS actually got to finish L4D the way the intended, that L4D would of been different to the L4D that Valve released. More content, more game modes, and more polish. It would also had TRS providing future content to the game similar to the early days of CSS (which they were providing those updates) and how TF2 had handled updates in the later years.

I still to this day do not know the full reason why L4D2 was created. We have the stated reasons of Valve wanting to see how fast they could make a game, but there's still obviously more reasons to why they did it. They easily could of done it to any of their other IPs, but they chose L4D. Honestly, I feel it has something to do with further removal of TRS from L4D's brand and to cash in on the success L4D provided. But I still don't know these answers, and I will likely never find out until a developer comes forward and actually explains the full motives regarding the re-design of L4D so late into development instead of focusing on completing the game and why L4D2 entered production so quickly after release.

I would like to give special thanks to those who stuck around with us to the bitter end

The Left 4 Dead Zero Team was:
Theuaredead` - Project Lead, Texture Artist
Pyrew - Modeler
Murfey (Zen) - Texture Artist, Mapper
Keithy - Sound Design, Composer, Mapper
Seizetsu - Beta Testing

Cobalt-57 is:
Theuaredead` - Project Lead, Texture Artist
LeonelC - Texture Artist
Coolz - Sound Design, Composer, Mapper
Blue24 - Programmer
... and many more who weren't involved into the development of L4D Zero yet.

Special Thanks:
DoomMarine23 - Animator
Gyroic - Planned to Help with the clean up, but never got the chance.
Splinks - Giving us the opportunity to do the project.
Salad - Aid in getting various work completed when my tools had failed and we all lost motivation.

Gone But Not Forgotten:
Robertto - Modeler

Less than special thanks, but their work can be found in the archive due to working on the project before leaving and it would be a dis-credit to say they didn't do work on the project:
SilverMoon - Texture Artist, Modeler, Mapper
SinsterSpud - Animator

There's still so much more to say about what happened to L4D Zero, the community, and Valve itself. But really, all I have to say is that we got off Mr. Valve's wild ride. There's likely more details I should provide, but at this point, I just want to get far away from this community as possible. I don't want to be here and I do not like what it shaped into.

Fairfield Terror is a project by the team behind Days of Terror. We partnered with them to make sure this campaign became a reality. Now after a collective 2 years of development, Fairfield Terror is now available to play on Left 4 Dead 1.

Fairfield Terror is a remake of Turtle Rock Studio's original No Mercy, back when they still owned the rights for Left 4 Dead in 2007/2008. The original design of No Mercy featured a much darker atmosphere, had more detail, used brighter point lights, and in general, had a more realistic feel and environment. Even if you aren't a fan of TRS or beta inspired mods, there's still plenty in this No Mercy redesign for everyone to appreciate.

This will be a nearly accurate recreation of late 2007/early 2008 footage of Left 4 Dead, along with general improvements and "twists" done by us. The campaign also has full Versus support. We're working on new Survival maps inspired by the campaign as well, but will be released as an update later on after this mod's initial release due to some development difficulties.

Download Now:
https://www.gamemaps.com/details/18818

https://www.moddb.com/mods/fairfield-terror-trs-no-mercy-remake/downloads/fairfield-terror-trs-no-mercy-remake-v1