Portal 2: Community Edition promises to take the game's modding potential to new heights, and it's out in open beta now

Portal 2 is one of the easiest-to-recommend games in the entire medium, and part of that is down to the custom levels scene it's inspired for over a decade now. There are around a million on the game's Steam Workshop entry alone—and if you've ever tried modding it yourself and chafed at the game's limitations, you'll be pleased to learn about Portal 2: Community Edition, which released into open beta yesterday.

The announcement video is careful to clarify that this isn't a remake or an overhaul of Portal 2's core action or campaign, nor is it a campaign itself. Instead, it's a "community-maintained" build which adds new lighting tech, volumetrics, support for more detailed textures, custom campaign support with built-in UI, expanded scripting capabilities, and an overhaul to the Hammer map editor.

These things are possible thanks to Strata Source, a fork of the CS:GO engine, which P2:CE is built on and was used to make mind-bending Portal 2 mods like Portal: Revolution. You can find a breakdown of the changes in the announcement video, as well as a showcase of what people have done with it so far. The Steam page casually shows a custom level which squeezes all of Portal 1 into a singlemap, so I'm curious to see what modders cook up now that CE is available to everyone.

You can peruse the projects people have already made on the mod's workshop page (not Portal 2's, mind you, but Community Edition's). That includes Half-Life 2 maps now accessible from the custom campaign menu, a gallery of assets recreated with higher quality textures, and an original puzzle called Lesbian Kissing.

There may not be a ton of new playable goodies to pick through just yet, but it sounds like the team behind CE are working on an original campaign to go with the mod itself. Give modders some time, and I'm sure it won't be long before we're seeing custom maps that look like they're from a completely different game.