While on a tour of Valve’s funtown, a fan managed to snap a picture of some rather odd concept art. It doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen in the Half Life universe before, if you don’t count that one dude with sticklegs.

Well apparently, looking through files in the L4D2 Demo to find references to both a “Miracle Pack” and “Apocalyptic Pack” to be downloaded from Xbox LIVE’s marketplace system. It looks like DLC may not be far down the road after release, which will be good, considering how frequent the previous Left4Dead was updated.

Owners of the PC version will have nothing to worry about, as Valve has stated time and time again, any DLC pricing is strictly done by Microsoft.

“On the consoles, they want us to charge money for [DLC], because that’s in their model, and our model is very much more to grow the community by giving out free updates,” said Valve president Gabe Newell last year. “That’s harder for us.”

There is also mention of the original Left 4 Dead maps, as well as mugshots of the original four survivors for character selection. Left over files from the first, or a possible clue to L4D2 supporting the original maps and characters, under the new engine?

Thanks to FPSBanana and G4 for bringing the story to my attention.

The original story can be found here, posted by Cordl3ssPen on the Rage3D forums.

Some russian dudes apparently leaked a video of them. Either they’re testers and they don’t mind getting on valve’s bad side or they managed to summon a beta version somehow using their cyrillic sorcery.

The most obvious unlock is the PDQ. Looks like something real nice to start the round with. The next part of the video shows the gloves of running urgently, though you can’t get a proper feel for their speed as the player keeps wobbling his damn view around. You’ll also notice a few subtler changes such as the heavy being able to toss his sandviches and a new respawning/spec hud that shows teammate health, class, and charge. Backpack changes, a fireproof spysuit replacing the revolver, whatever.

There’s also a change to the medic, the blutsaughter having a passive -3hp/s, while the medic’s self-heal ramp got changed from 1-3hp to 3-6hp. This means that you can trade active healing for passive healing.  I’m not quite sure if this nullifies being on fire though.

It appears that the Russian site HL-Inside somehow managed to get a hold of the officially unreleased achievement descriptions. While the page is in Russian, you can use google translate to get an idea of what each achievement is all about. Or view an alternate translation on the forums here.

Edit: Then again, Valve decided to go ahead and post the official achievement descriptions a several hours after the leak. Looking over them, it seems that the last scout unlock will be called the “Force-A-Nature”

There is also talk about the scout unlock being a breech-loaded shotgun with kickback. The kickback sounds strong enough to allow you to triple-jump.