Thread: Purple / Black Checkered Error after Update

Hi all,

So my girlfriend is a big Left 4 Dead fanatic. After a long hiatus from L4D1 and playing a lot of L4D2, she decided to buy L4D1 again (GOTY), and play that.

Well, she noticed that monsters in the game show up as a big purple/black ERROR. This basically ruins the game, obviously, as it's not even playable.

I don't suspect it is a problem with the disc at all. Why? Well, her friend in a completely whole other country with his own disc experiences the same thing. Add to that, I took the disc, put it in my XBOX360 and played the game WITHOUT updating, and I had no checkered ERROR message. I then installed the update, and blam-o, I get the errors. I asked her to uninstall the update, and voila.. no more error.

However, as you guys know, if you don't install the update, you won't be able to play online.

Anyone know what the problem is? Is it really the update? Is there something else that could be conflicting (ex. L4D2 stuff?). This seems really silly that Valve would release a patch that doesn't even work for a damn and not rollback to the previous version. So I'm kind of baffled here.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, she even tried installing the game to her HD, but to no avail.

*snipped*.. thought someone else brought up this issue, but that was for L4D2.

Also, looks like this isn't an issue in single player either, just multiplayer. Server related or something??

So, big thumbs down to Valve. From what I can see, it sounds like they've intentionally screwed up the dedicated servers for L4D1 because L4D2 has the same maps in it, and they want to force people onto L4D2. I'm not sure the total reasoning behind this, but this is extremely disappointing, as in my g/f and her friend's cases, they both own both games and just want to play L4D1 sometimes (I don't have either, but apparently it is for character or weapon preference or something).

Anyways, if they force the game to play on their local server, it will work without glitch. Again, huge thumbs down to Valve for what seems like a pretty lame move on their part.

I apologize also if this is a thread that most people knew about already and thus why I couldn't dig anything up by hunting through the first 50-ish threads here.