Portal 2 DLC will be free

Earlier this week, Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi revealed that the company's recently released Portal 2 would be getting its first batch of downloadable content this summer. Today the developer gave a few details on the DLC, most notably that it would be free of charge to all players.

The first Portal 2 DLC pack will feature new test chambers, as well as single-player and cooperative multiplayer challenge modes. The pack will also add leaderboards and will be available for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, and Mac versions of the game.

The free DLC for consoles marks a change from Valve's last project. With Left 4 Dead and its sequel, add-ons were free for the PC but were $7 on the Xbox 360.

Released to critical acclaim for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC last week, Portal 2 is the continuation of the 2007 Orange Box pack-in Portal. The single-player portion of the new title continues the travails of human lab rat Chell, who in the original game used a portal gun to create interdimensional openings on ceilings, walls, and floors in an effort to escape the Aperture Science labs and thwart the diabolical artificial intelligence known as GLaDOS.

In addition to extending the story of Chell in the single-player mode, Valve introduced a new multiplayer cooperative mode. In it, players take control of two robots, named Atlas and P-body, and work together to tackle their own set of portal-related problems.