The new Portal 2 PTI has been announced officially. We knew it was coming for some time but I never thought that it would be just as awesome as it will be.

The editor is so intuitive that literally anyone who can play Portal will be able to use it. The upside of this is there will be thousands of new test chambers to play in no time at all. The downside of this is barely a downside: There will only be the one clean, crisp, Aperture style of test chambers, no broken chambers falling to pieces, no 1960’s Aperture. Not even any co-op maps to begin with. Though with every single player able to design their own professionally quality test chambers in a matter of minutes, I’m not going to complain.

For those who already know Source level design well, this tool will be an enormous time saver. Prototyping levels in minutes instead of hours (or even days) then being able to take the level into hammer and spruce it up (or tear it to pieces!).

I’m not sure I’ll be using it much myself as I want to move away from mapping for Source all together to explore other engines but it’s an incredibly exciting tool that has probably just quadrupled the lifespan of Portal 2 as a ‘current’ game.

What do you think about the PTI? Are you worried the Steam Workshop will be flooded with mediocre maps? Are you excited that we will have a universal platform for finding truly amazing test chambers?