Portal 2 Perpetual Initiative

I tried to post this last night, but I had shot a video that shows how the editor works, and tried editing the video, but the gameplay wasn’t working. So I tried to upload this video this morning but WordPress wasn’t letting me upload it. Basically pretend I posted this last night as opposed to this morning.

Well yesterday was the release of the Perpetual Initiative for Portal 2. What that means is that the Steam Workshop is part of Portal 2. In addition,  an extremely simplified map editor is out as well. When I say simple I mean simple. It gives you a basic cube test chamber and from there you can edit it. You literally highlight any area and hit the – or + to expand or bring in the area of the room. Also to add certain elements you can drag different items, such as buttons, turrets, and aerial plates, from the left side (in a window) and put them on the map. You can easily test the map out by hitting the Tab key. If you make adjustments after you test it you need to hit F9 for the test chamber to rebuild. Note, these are not permanent changes but are merely for testing out your creation, if you truly want to save your creation,  go to the top left area and click save.  Overall it is pretty easy and fun to use. Oh! By the way when making your puzzle make sure to put the little observation windows throughout your room. For some reason that is the only light source, without those it is pitch black.

The community has been hard at work and has already put a large chunk of maps on the workshop.Let me put this into perspective, the Skyrim workshop, which has been out for a few months now has about 7,000 items. When I launched the Portal 2 Workshop yesterday afternoon it had 8,000 items. As of right now the Portal 2 workshop has 27,000 items!!! I haven’t played too many yet but right now my favorite little set is a collection of maps called the 12 Angry Tests by CaretCaret. They are pretty challenging and are very well done. Another one I like, is called Aerial Plates. Though it is not really a puzzle it is a fun little map to load up. Overall I think this will add a much needed new life to this game. I had been waiting and waiting (did I say waiting) for Valve to release new maps but I personally think that this is better.  The community will always be putting out maps, and there will always be a new good batch of creative ones.  In a few months I am sure there will be some extremely awesome maps up as well as some tips and tricks for the map editor.

Down below is a trailer for the Perpetual Testing Initiative as well as links to the maps I was talking about.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/CaretCaret/myworkshopfiles/?appid=620

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=68510114&searchtext=

Notice partway through the video, when some of the people are working on the computers. One of them has what looks like fire  and Team Fortress 2 on his computer. There is a lot of speculation right now that that is Meet the Pyro. It sounds like something Valve would do, but who knows?

P.S. I tried to shoot a video on how the editor works, but for some reason I can’t upload it to WordPress. Oh well.