After a decade plus, Left 4 Dead 2 remains one of the most popular of Valve's games on the PC. With an active player base perpetually hungry for new content - most of which that comes from the community itself - the fact that this particular mod has managed to persist through development over the past nine years is only a little bit surprising.
Chernobyl is an all new multi-chapter campaign that sees ours survivors en route to the frozen arctic tundras of Siberia, where they believe that the spread of infection would have been halted by the area's extreme weather. They don't quite make it that far, and end up crash-landing their plane in perhaps one of the worst possible locations imaginable - the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
Spoilers: the place is swarming with infected, and our survivors are once again forced to shoot, pummel, and one-liner their way through hordes of blood-thirsty monsters.
Mind you, Left 4 Dead 2 mods are a dime-a-dozen. That much is abundantly evident just from searching through the Steam Workshop. Where Chernobyl differs from all the others, however, is the amount of time it has been in active development, and the effort that has gone into crafting a uniquely original campaign that can stand amongst its valve-made peers. According to ModDB, Chernobyl features over 400 new models and 500 new textures. On top of that, the team even brought in composers to craft an original soundtrack, hoping to provide the proper ambiance for a post-soviet power-plant-turned-graveyard.
While we should absolutely celebrate the fact that this mod is finally seeing the light of day, expectations should probably be tempered considering that only its first chapter has been released, and there is currently no word on when or if the rest will follow. Additionally, support for versus is scheduled for a future update, but again, no concrete details on when that will be. Best case scenario, the only reason its taken the development team this long with chapter one is because they simply needed to find their groove, and perhaps this residual momentum will see the remaining chapters materialize in significantly shorter time than the first. Worst case scenario, well, you know how mods go.
In any case, if you're like me and have just been waiting for an excuse to dust off the ol' Left 4 Dead 2 install, the release of Chernobyl Chapter One might be the best reason we've had in a while.
