Portal 2 News

The cake will still be a lie. Valve doesn't want to re-do jokes.

The new issue of Game Informer is out, and with it comes a slew of Portal 2 information. I thought I would share some of the key tidbits here.

Hundreds of Years In the Future

The game does pick up where the first one left off, but is also now far in the future.  You do play as Chell, the character from the first game, though.  So we assume that she’ll have been put into some kind of stasis at the end of the first game.

New Characters

This time around there are new personalities, but Valve wanted to make sure to leave out other humans in the game so they opted for Personality Cores.  At the end of Portal, the player encountered these little spheres in the room with the cake.  These each have their own personality similar to the little balls that fell off GLaDOS and will accompany Chell throughout the game as they seek assistance toward their own agenda.

GLaDOS is Still Alive

As evident by the song, GLaDOS is still up and kicking far in the future.  There is a quick meeting in the beginning of the game trademarked by some fantastically devilish dialog “…OH, it’s you. It’s been a long time.  How have you been?  I’ve been really busy being dead.  You know…after you murdered me?  Okay look, we both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.  But I think we should put our differences behind us.  For science.  You monster.”  This time along you will once again be a test subject for GLaDOS as she attempts to get Aperture Labs back up and running after years of decay and degradation.

Environmental Changes

We saw some examples of the environment being modified on the fly in the original Portal, this time around it’s a lot more prevalent and it seems that you will see entire test chambers re-configuring themselves before your eyes.  Along with this you will be forced to go behind the scenes, as in the first one, in order to get further in the game due to malfunctioning elevators and the like.  This will prove curious in how GLaDOS will willingly allow you back there.

New Technology

There are a number of new elements that make up Portal 2’s world.  We will see reflective cubes that will allow you to bounce laser beams into receptacles or drones.  Additions of elements like launch pads to elevate you faster into the air.  A big key addition is the ability to transfer physics through the portal.  An example of this is the addition of pneumatic tubes that suck up anything placed under them.  Place a portal under them and then another portal on a wall beside a drone and watch the drone get sucked through the portal and up and out of the chamber.  There was talk of being able to paint surfaces with different color paints that will give it different properties.  Examples mentioned are blue paint adding a trampoline like effect and orange paint as being an acceleration like effect.

Co-Op

Probably one of the most intriguing features is the addition of a co-op campaign.  This is actually going to be its own independent campaign with one character playing a personality sphere with arms and legs and the other playing a re-modified sentry drone with arms and legs.  The key elements here is that the puzzles will be a bit more challenging because of the vast numbers of ways you can think of to solve them.  Along with this Valve figured that two brains working together would be able to bounce ideas back and forth to really get past some of the obstacles in their way.

Overall the game is sounding fantastic and I can’t wait to return to Aperture Laboratories once more.