After having played about 30 hours of a combination of co-op campaigns, versus and survival I finally got around to playing through with the Developer Commentary turned on. This is a feature of all of Valve games after Half-Life 2; you can play through parts of the game and listen to the game’s developers talk about their experiences making the game.

While playing through L4D2 with commentary enabled, the zombies will ignore you unless you provoke them. This means you can wander through the level listening to the commentary without having to constantly fight off the hoards. The AI controlled survivors on the other hand still shoot anything without a pulse. It can get quite annoying.

Because of this, I figured out how a way to play through The Parish level without the computer controlled players so I could listen to the commentary in peace. Here’s how:

1. Enable the developer console under Options > Keyboard/Mouse > Allow Developer Console.
2. Press ~ to open the console and type the following:

   map_commentary c5m1_waterfront

3. You’ll be loaded into The Parish map with commentary enabled. Now to get rid of your teammates.
4. Press ~ to open the console and type the following:

   kill Coach
   kill Ellis
   kill Rochelle

5. You can now play through the level without interruption.
6. Note #1: Don’t open closets the survivors are in or they’ll just join you again and start shooting everything.
7. Note #2: You’ll have to type in the kill commands after each new chapter before you leave the safe house.
8. Note #3: Be prepared for a few fights. There are some sections where hoards are scripted to attack you, but the difficulty is easy so they’re trivial to kill. Just keep a melee weapon handy.

Hmmm, maybe there’ll be a beta. I would love to be part of that!

Part 1:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5THiN8szSKM

Part 2:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq2mZoKkqMw

Part 3:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGlyQmmvj0w