A couple of days ago we reported on the Portal 2 Summer Mapping Initiative, a competition held in honour of the frankly frightening creativity of the Valve fan base. If you enjoyed Portal 2, and who didn't, you might want to give them a go. The official winners and runners up created a big chunk of content, dumping easily a typical single-player game's campaign worth of playtime into your lap, for no pennies. I've been playing the top-rated co-op maps, because the stark terror of being trapped in a testing facility that mostly wants to kill you is best experienced with company. Let me tell you about it!
Best Portal 2 Coop Maps
The maps we played are MrTwoVideoCards' Redirecting Redirection, Skotty's Fast Bridge and Kosire's Fling Bridge, and it's a breeze to install them and have a go yourself. Both players need to download the .bsp map files, drop them in your Steam/steamapps/common/Portal 2/portal2/maps folder and join a regular Co-operative game. Once you're in the hub, the host needs to bring up the console and enter "changelevel nameoflevel" without the quotation marks, and the server will automatically load the user-made maps for the both of you.
Unfortunately - and this was a problem that many of the competition maps had, including the single player ones - that sense of scale frequently gets in the way of puzzle solving, especially if the challenge relies too heavily on the Thermal Discouragement Beam. Redirecting that sizzling red laser has always been the most tiresome aspect of Portal 2, and it's not especially invigorating to see map makers come up with even more convoluted and painstaking ways to employ them. Valve never really exacerbated the problem by simply having most maps that utilised them putting them all close together. If you don't do that, problems arise, as these user-made maps all-too-often show. The simple act of dropping a Prism Cube can bounce the laser off it's target by a few micrometers. Add in the unpredictable effects of dimensions and angles that Portals have on the beam (again a problem Valve usually fixed by forcing the specific laser puzzle portals to only work in a single placement, which seems like their own admittance that the mechanic is too unwieldy) and it's a recipe for simple irritation.
As Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 have shown, Valve have made a big show and tell in the past of including the best user-made content in official updates. I wouldn't be surprised if Valve later releases these competition maps reworked as fully-fledged campaigns, both for single and multiplayer. Goodness knows there's a fan base ready and willing for more time with the Portal Gun. It would be entirely in keeping with Gabe Newell's previously stated desire to develop the so-called Single Player Plus.
This is a guide on how you can test co-op maps alone. This also works for any existing coop maps. It does not require you to do anything special with the map file itself. Thanks to the early posters in this thread and various people on the Source forums for the information, I just assembled it all in one place.
Since that prolly wont do shit, try decompiling the map, i noticed most maps have these dedicated boxes with entitys for mp, im sure you could fiddle with those. to achieve support for both sp and mp (and i guess you will need them for proper functioning coop anyway)
This theme serves really only for plot advancement, so the scope for puzzles is somewhat limited here. Sure, there's the old 'portal over to that wall behind me' to traverse long distances and stretch out dialogue, but making actual puzzles out of this theme without making it feel contrived is kind of difficult. You'll see it done more successfully in co-op maps usually, due to the fact that the plot isn't quite as important and Valve tried to make the theme a puzzle rather than to leave an impact on the player. The exception to this is if you're making a full-blown mod, maybe even with a story; as aforementioned, these can make nice interludes, and the sheer multitude of destruction sequences available for the catwalks are brilliant for action scenes. Due to the nature of this theme, the huge vistas along with numerous dynamic elements it is recommended for users with advanced knowledge of hammer.
Portal 2: Peer Review was developed for Portal 2 and was released on October 4, 2011. The DLC was launched across all platforms (Steam, Xbox Live, PSN) free of charge. It continues the story of ATLAS and P-Body as they assist GLaDOS in finding a mysterious intruder in the facility, and adds a challenge mode for both singleplayer and co-op maps, allowing a player to race certain maps, trying to place the least amount of portals in the shortest amount of time, as well as compare their scores with other users.[30] 2ff7e9595c
Comments