Death Toll

Death Toll is the second campaign in Left 4 Dead, set in a small rural area. In it, the Survivors travel through the countryside, a rural village, and have a final fight at some docks awaiting a boat to rescue them. Valve has talked the least about this campaign.

Official description
Shoot, shove and sprint through a nightmare suburbia consumed by the Infected horde. The Death Toll campaign has your team of survivors making their way down a turnpike littered with abandoned cars to the nearby ghost town of Riverside—the site of a failed stand-off between the last of humanity and a limitless swarm of undead. Fight through the ruins of small town America to the waterfront nearby, where a rescue party can take you upriver to safety.

Campaign break-down
As with all official Valve maps, Death Toll consists of five chapters—the last of which being a finale. In keeping with the countryside-suburban theme of this campaign, the chapters are:


 * 1) The Turnpike
 * 2) The Drains
 * 3) The Church
 * 4) The Town
 * 5) Boathouse Finale

See those pages for more detailed descriptions and tactics.

Graffiti
Several safe houses throughout the campaign have writings of times of death and plans to move to other places such as Mercy Hospital and the airport. In one safe house, someone has spray-painted the words "Exodus 9:15". This is a Biblical verse which reads "For if by now I had put forth My hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, you would then have been cut off from the earth." This Bible verse, taken in context, is a message to Moses from God, telling Moses that he must warn the Pharaoh and the Egyptians. The plague was sent down and everybody who didn't heed the warning was killed.

Playing map in Versus mode (PC-only)
Although Valve Corporation will soon be releasing an update which will add Death Toll to the roster of available versus maps, for PC players who are more impatient, there is a way to make it playable before the update is released.

To make this map playable in versus mode on the PC, just make a copy of all of the map files
 * 1) l4d_smalltown01_caves.bsp
 * 2) l4d_smalltown01_caves.nav
 * 3) l4d_smalltown01_caves.lst
 * 4) etc...

And rename them so they begin with l4d_vs_...(example: l4d_vs_smalltown01_caves.bsp). This will make the levels playable in VS Mode using a Dedicated or Non-dedicated L4D server. All players likely have to make these changes as well in order to enter the game.

The reason adding VS Mode this way works is because all playable maps are located in left4dead\missions\mission_manifest.txt and the maps for smalltown_vs is in the file by default, despite the map not existing. This is just conjecture, but Valve likely intended to allow all maps to play in VS but wasn't able to due to some kind of restrictions. As with many games, this is likely due to time constraints caused in making the changes in the game maps necessary to balance it for VS mode.

These map changes can be seen in the finale map for No Mercy. The room where the Survivors hole up during the end is different. In Coop/Single, the stairs are enclosed while in VS they are around back and fully exposed.


 * NOTE:This also works for the Dead Air Maps as well. Also, copying the .txt files appears to prevent the chapters from ending correctly.  If, when you don't copy the txt files, the chapter ends before the survivors leave the safe room (this happened when I tested the map by myself) just type in the console sb_all_bot_team 1. This fixed the problem for me.

Additions
As of adding this, this change hadn't been tested yet with other players. So any consequences of making this adjustment are unknown. The game could run perfectly, it could cause Steam Validation Failure, or worse.