Valve: Portal 2 Originally Had Competitive Multiplayer

Portal 2

It was there, and then it wasn't. That's all you really need to know.

Okay, maybe we should elaborate: Portal 2 will be building upon the foundation set by the original title; it'll have a longer campaign and we'll even get an all-new co-op multiplayer option. It won't include competitive multiplayer, but did you realize Valve had - at one time - planned to include it? According to what writer Erik Wolpaw told 1Up, they actually had some multiplayer "up and running" but after a while, they realized that all the portal use just got chaotic. Said Wolpaw:

"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. You know, a sports analog. And 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."

Apparently, the multiplayer gameplay involved moving a ball from one end of a certain map to another with the help of portals. Your opponents would try to stop you by trapping you with a portal shot into the ground. Sounds cool, but it just didn't work out, so they nixed it and simply added the co-op campaign option. Yeah, we're good with that.

Related Game(s): Portal 2

Tags: portal 2, valve, portal multiplayer, portal 2 ps3

8/27/2010 12:28:33 PM Ben Dutka

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