The overwhelming favorite for E3 2010’s best of show was none other than Valve’s sequel to the original smash hit, Portal 2. From Gabe blowing away us Sony fanboys when he walked out on stage at Sony’s Press conference to a trailer that stunned many fans of the series, Portal 2 was the talk of the town during gaming’s invasion of downtown Los Angeles 2010. We all know about the games take on your standard co-op mode, but what if I told you that Valve once had a competitive multiplayer mode planned for the game but ultimately scrapped it? Warp your way inside for this one!
Valve writer Erik Wolpaw explained the details to fellow gaming site 1up.com about how the team actually had a competitive multiplayer mode up and running, but scrapped it due to the shear amount of chaos that it created.
Along with co-op, [we had] the idea of sort of a competitive Portal multiplayer. We went down that path, actually, for a little while and had something up and running – the best way to describe it is sort of speedball meets Portal. It quickly became apparent that while it’s fun for about two seconds to drop portals under people and things like that, it quickly just devolves into pure chaos. It lost a lot of the stuff that was really entertaining about Portal, which was puzzle-solving. Cooperative puzzle-solving was just a much more rewarding path.
Aw man! That actually sounded REALLY fun and interesting. In this day of DLC, who knows if this mode could ever return in the way of premium DLC?
Valve promises the PS3 version of Portal 2 will be the ‘best version on any console’ once it launches on Feb. 9th, 2011. Will you take the cake or run?
