http://www.l4d.com/comic/

This is a four volume comic that Valve actually put out. That said, I'm assuming this is cannon material. It picks up right at the end of the Blood Harvest campaign and supposedly ends the same way that the newest DLC for L4D1 did (which is titled the same thing as the comic: The Sacrifice). In it you will see flashbacks of the characters and their lives they lived before the outbreak.

Anyways, take a gander... it's really awesome. I downloaded the PDF version and read that instead. There's a link to it once you click on any of the volumes.

Great score, Lantis. I'm reading it now.

Edit: Amazing read.

Good that they had this, always thought his death was way too glossed over in the last DLC. Offscreen is no way for a badass to go down.

It also explains why Louis' leg was all busted up. Actually, the only reason Bill wasn't in The Passing was because Jim French, the voice actor for Bill, either quit or retired. If anything it says a lot for Valve to go this far to fill any plot holes in the L4D universe to compensate.

I thought it would be like four mini-issues, or even just four pages like the comics the Penny Arcade guys have done for games like Dragon Age. Silly me, forgetting how Valve actually does like to reward its customers with an overabundance of free goodness at times (not unlike the high quality and ever-hilarious Team Fortress 2 vids).

yeah, it's over 200 pages of comic goodness. Valve is about the only gaming company (or company in general) that genuinely seems to care about their customers and fans. They fought tooth and nail to get Microsoft to make the DLC free for L4D, but M$ just wouldn't have it. That's why it was only free on PC.

Anyways, I'm still trippin' on that one scene with Zoey and her father....

That comic, and the fact that I want to get that 800 points back deal and am still well short of the expenditure, prompted me to go ahead and download The Sacrifice now, instead of waiting for it to be a Deal of the Week like I did with The Passing. Overall, it was a good campaign; the original survivors with all the L4D 2 improvements, some unique elements gameplay-wise (being forced to release a tank, fighting your way up a giant mountain of...I dunno what it was, salt? Grain?), and then the actual sacrifice part, which was really the one low point. I thought it'd be a playable sort of thing, where they swarmed the sacrificial person and he got to try to take some down with him. Instead, as soon as you hit the generator button your character just takes a herky-jerky dive, the game shows 'em being swarmed, and it cuts to the "In Memory of" and the credits. Anti-climactic. All in all, the best of their DLC campaigns, though. And it also came with No Mercy, although I don't know how much I care about that since I own the first game.

You know, the fact that No Mercy comes with L4D2 makes me want to try it. It would be kind of cool to play those maps on L4D1 with all the benefits of L4D2's weapons and such. And from what I can tell, The Sacrifice is pretty much the same on both L4D1 and L4D2 (with regards to the weapons in each game).

Vavle hasn't ever done me wrong, so I may just get both on principle for their awesomeness.



This did a good job of getting me pumped for it.

Aye, it was easier to justify the price for their DLC when considering the comic goodness supplied gratis.