An interesting set of bonus features are primed to be included with Portal. Beyond the levels of the story, Portal will offer users the ability to play a set of “Advanced Chambers" and "Time Challenge" maps. I hadn’t had much time to look at these maps, but beyond the lengthy primary game, these additional modes are sure to offer up hours of additional entertainment as you try to beat your previous best.
User created content might end up being the biggest draw for extending the length of playtime in Portal, and the Portal team is trying to make the process of installing new maps as painless as possible. Sorry, there is not going to be a means to download user created content through Steam, at least not yet (this is still a goal of Valve, but we may not see anything on this until 2008).
Instead, players will manually have to download their new maps. The SDK will package everything into one, easily distributable file. The user can place this file in any location on their hard drive after being downloaded. From the main interface inside of Portal, the player will be able to browse to the download location and find the file. Their new system will automatically move the files to the appropriate location and add an easily viewable shortcut to the user created content within the Portal menu.
This is very different from having to manually place the downloaded file into an appropriate folder and then having to use the console to load the map. Now, all user created maps will be available as if you were selecting a chapter to jump to in the main story (such as in Half-Life 2 and Episode 1). The only title I know that will have this is Portal, but I can certainly see this as becoming the norm in other titles such as Team Fortress 2. Only time will tell.
