Portal 2 Authoring Tools

 

Another Portal 2 related post so soon, sorry! But this is an interesting development. If you've ever played with the hammer editor for Team Fortress 2, you might recognise this screenshot. 

These are the tools that Valve used to create Portal 2 and they're now available to everyone who has Portal 2 on Steam. The one thing I was slightly worried about in Portal 2 was the re-playability, especially in co-op. I have a few friends I wanted to play the game with, but after playing through co-op once or twice the puzzles are engraved into my mind, and there's no fun or challenge in waiting for someone else to figure them out while you sit around with your thumb up your ass.

So, we can make our own Portal 2 levels? So what? While Hammer is unfortunately hard to learn, we'll see community content now - some that will hopefully dwarf the campaign content in quality. In other words, replay value, especially if we can co-op user created maps.

Valve official post: here.