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Gabe Newell Understands Half-Life Fans, Not Promising Any Sequels
jones_supa writes Half-Life 3 is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated games in history. While Valve transitioned from the revolutionary series that brought the company most of its original success, to online games like Team Fortress, Dota and Left 4 Dead, people still desperately want to believe that there is more coming for Half-Life.
In a recent podcast interview he had with Geoff Keighley, Valve CEO Gabe Newell opens up the current situation a bit more: "I'm a fan of TV shows, I'm a fan of writers, I'm a fan of movies, I'm a fan of games and I certainly understand why people are like, you know, hey I remember this awesome experience and I'm starting to get worried that I'm never going to have it again. I am a fan of Terry Pratchett and he has Alzheimer's, it's like, Oh my god, I may never get another great Discworld novel. [...] We aren't going to go all retro because there are too many interesting things that have been learned. The only reason we would go back and do a 'super classic' kind of product is if a whole bunch of people internally at Valve said they wanted to do it, and had a reasonable explanation for why it was."
In a recent podcast interview he had with Geoff Keighley, Valve CEO Gabe Newell opens up the current situation a bit more: "I'm a fan of TV shows, I'm a fan of writers, I'm a fan of movies, I'm a fan of games and I certainly understand why people are like, you know, hey I remember this awesome experience and I'm starting to get worried that I'm never going to have it again. I am a fan of Terry Pratchett and he has Alzheimer's, it's like, Oh my god, I may never get another great Discworld novel. [...] We aren't going to go all retro because there are too many interesting things that have been learned. The only reason we would go back and do a 'super classic' kind of product is if a whole bunch of people internally at Valve said they wanted to do it, and had a reasonable explanation for why it was."
Just announce Half Life 2: Episode Three: Blue Shift 2. You once again play as Barney, this time explaining where he was and what he was doing in Episode Two. Everyone would love you for this.
Is he saying that they internally don't want to do it?
Or that they don't have a good explanation(story) for it?
Oh Gabe please be more vague next time.
How about... oh I don't know... to finish the story?
Can't respect someone as overweight as he is. If you don't respect your body enough to take care of it, I can't be bothered either.
But Gabe!....It's not the developers who pay the millions for the game...the devs will do whatever you tell'em to do. The Internet has been abuzz with insane amounts of comments from gamers begging for HL3 for years.....how can there not be enough evidence to make it obvious HL3 would be a monumental success...(if on par with previous versions)?
Maybe working on HL3 is what you need at this time of your life.....you know,...something to get those creative juices flowing ....it'll make you feel young again.....HONEST!
Just do it....you'll see!!
At this point, those gamertards are probably in their late 30's. Seriously, it's starting to be a long time now.
It very much reads like they have no intention of doing another one. Which is actually fine, but why play coy? It's not like they ended the series in any sort of final way. People like the series and wanted to play again.
Something makes me wonder if Gabe developed a personal issue with the series and just doesn't want to do another one. That or they have something big up their sleeve and want HL3 to be the flagship title for that thing, whatever it is.
There's an existing horde of people clamoring to buy Valve's sequel/product sight-unseen. They don't want a stupid VR headset or overpriced Linux gamerbox thingy, yet Valve is wasting resources at various dead ends, instead of updating the product category that brought them success and relevance.
With so many awesome games out now, plus the backlog of 2014 and 2013, I just don't care about HL3 anymore, and I suspect most gamers are in the same boat.
Secondly, it'll invariably suck simply because people's expectations are just ridiculously high after so much time waiting. Look no further than Doom 3 or Diablo 3 for evidence.
If we raise 1 million dollars, we can send a team of people to help Terry Pratchett write another Discworld novel, making Gabe so happy he approves work on Half-Life 3.
Well, Gabe, Half-Life 3 wouldn't be "Retro" if you hadn't WAITED SO FREEKIN LONG!
Yeah never mind the gamertards out there waving their dads wallets at you begging you to empty them.
They can empty more wallets by selling other people's games and taking a 30% (or whatever the actual number is) share of the revenue, and with their multiplayer/F2P games and microtransactions. Single-player only linear FPS like Half-Life is just no longer popular and profitable enough on the PC, and that is why a sequel is unlikely to be made.
Let's be honest... we love Valve because of Half Life, and GabeN's voice through the years.
That's been gone for a long time. They are a money machine now, and their Steam platform is basically a printing press for said money. Where are the improvements to the Steam platform? When you rank behind EA in customer service, you have to think that there's something amiss.
Don't get me wrong, I love Valve games, I love Steam not because it's a great platform (it's actually pretty shit), but because I have a whole bunch of games at a cheap price. The communication tools ingame are pretty terrible, the game updates themselves are pretty terrible (coming from a CSGO player), and they make exceptions to their marketplace to allow bots to trade, so they can keep a very shady betting scene from the likes of CSGOLounge/DotaLounge going strong. After all, they get a cut of every marketplace transaction. It's also the reason for the big push behind Steam Machines, which are positioned so that the likes of Microsoft and the Xbox/Windows integration to an app store (and games!) never competes. In short, Valve isn't that "indy" group of lovable "gamers who make games" any more -- they are a pretty ruthless business.
Long story short... I don't care about Half Life 3. That's about something that isn't even here yet. I care more about their attention to the games they have out now, engagement with the community (which is how they got this big to start), and a start to a conversation with the gamers. Half Life 3 will come when it comes; I am sure Valve wants to get it out too so they can cash in another big check.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
This is what happens when you have a cliffhanger ending that clearly sets things up for the next episode ... and then there's no next episode.
You don't have to go "super retro" to do something interesting as a follow-up. It doesn't have to be exactly as HL2 was before. For example, how about a co-op episode? How about throwing in the portal gun from Portal in somehow? Maybe have a co-op with two very different skillsets for the characters? Could you do it and not make a mess of things? Hard to say. But it would be different from "classic" HL2, that's for sure.
Valve doesn't have to do anything at all, but you leave fans hanging and yeah, they're going to keep asking about it. They're not asking for it to go on forever, just to finish what was started. I know TV shows, novel series, and all sorts of other things can be abruptly cut if they aren't popular or if the author suddenly dies, but Valve can't claim they didn't make money off HL2, so the only reason to end things is the greater benefit from other projects, I presume.
No real ending to their most successful product ever... No SteamBox...
Has putting out Linux and OSXs really drained them so much that they can't deliver on their most anticipated products in the last decade?
This really has me doubting any more money to Steam for any game. It seems the promise of a great platform developer and publisher is gone. They have enough of my dollars for the direction they're going.
I saw headlines that 50 Cent was shot dead last year and Terry Pratchett died this year. What? Are they BOTH alive?
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I'm surprised how inarticulate he appears in the OP. You would think a CEO would be able to talk in complete sentences expressing complete thoughts. On the other hand I've seen many so called reporters write inarticulate and incomplete articles from what I can only assume were hastly scriblled, hard to read, incomplete notes about something they had no personal comprehension of. On the gripping hand I've also heard of CEOs that expect hard working reporters to clean up and polish their otherwise incomprehensible ranting. Who knows?
I'd laugh if they made a game with 3 in the title, some stylized 3, and they only show that at the beginning.
Then make some trailer that almost looks like it could be HL3, 3 flashes on the screen, the entire audience gasp in excitement, "3 days" (or similar) shows on the screen, and it turns out to be not HL related at all, but a whole new IP.
The absolute rage that day would ripple through time and unexist reality.
"I am a fan of Terry Pratchett and he has Alzheimer's, it's like, Oh my god, I may never get another great Discworld novel."
It's dead, Jim.
We have passed the point where Half-Life 3 could be welcomed with anything except massive criticism no matter how good it might be. It has taken on a life of it's own and if it wasn't so good that just being installed on your PC made you see visions of Jesus riding unicorns firing rockets at Santa Clause riding sharks firing lasers it would be scored a 0/10 - IGN. Seriously, it could never be warmly received after all these years.
Gabe Newell Understands Half-Life Fans Not Promising
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I think they got conscious of their success and realized that they could not live up to the hype.
Look at Duke Nukem: the sequel took forever and... sucked. Well, not exactly sucked, but it was just mediocre, which was worse than sucking. It was supposed to be the Messiah of Games and ended up being a Wal-Mart bargain bin special.
Half Life, as a series, still has the same kind of aura that Doom and Duke Nukem had gathered about themselves. It hasn't been ruined yet: in fact, it's been augmented by the Portal series, which wasn't a sequel but rather a symbiotic addition. The words "Half Life" raise an expectation in the audience, and Gabe knows that HL3 would have trouble living up to that expectation. He doesn't want to be responsible for the next Duke Nukem Forever.
3 days? So you're saying Valve is developing a sequel to Majora's Mask!? Holy shit that would be so amazing.
HL2 ended with a fucking cliff hanger FFS! We were left thinking that it's time to take it to where the baddies live. What's so desperate to believe they intended to make a third installment? I always assumed that we'd see HL3 when they came out with their Source 2 gaming engine. Now Gabe's talking like HL is "retro" and the article makes it sound as if Valve has no intention to make new games that are single player. Personally, after reading that article, I hope they don't release a new HL. Gabe comes off as a major asshole who forgot that they set up the whole ending of HL2 as a segue to a sequel and is now acting like anyone who wants them to finish their story is a sorry ass loser. So fuck them. I don't buy many games, and haven't bought a Valve game since Portal2 and will make damn sure that's my last Valve purchase ever unless HL3 is released and they stop talking about their customers like they are worthless trash who are idiots for wanting a finished story when left with a cliff hanger.
The last installment was in what, 2007?
Arguably, it was in 2004, as the episodes are basically just DLCs sold as separate games. Half-Life 2 from 2004 is the last Valve game that is entirely focused on single-player, and has 10 hours or more gameplay.
DNF changed hands, was abandoned, resurrected, revamped, rewritten, etc. with the details in public before it ever got close to a release. The screenshots from 10 years before look NOTHING like the final game at all. At some point, someone just said "Let's push anything and live off the scam to at least recoup our money".
HL3 doesn't have that legacy. Same guys (probably not exactly, but near enough). Same software. Same engine. Same designers. Same artists. Same programmers. Same company. No hype. No feature promises. No screenshots, even. A company making money hand-over-fist outside of game development to invest into the game. It's a totally different scenario (which makes it much more frustrating).
At this point a HDR HL2 sequel that was written in the same engine, same quality of graphics and game style with a few gimmicks would go down just as well and you can just say "This is Episode 3, the same as Episode 1 and 2 but finishing the story somewhat, and Half-Life 3 will come out later".
That they don't do this makes me think they have something planned. SteamOS maybe? I don't know. But I'd rather they kept the HL universe alive with some "expansion" to HL2 than cocked-up HL3 in the same way as DNF. I can't imagine them doing either, though.
So a singleplayer FPS is now considered retro, 'super classic' and Valve has moved on to the "many interesting things that have been learning", i.e. Team Microtransaction 2 and Left 4 Edge. I see.
Can someone mod parent down for being an arse ? :)
Valve's recently announced VR peripheral. It's even in the start of the linked podcast.
Gabe Newell is simply uncapable of counting to three, he tried, boy he did! but the only words that came out of his mouth were "2 part 1"...
When you rank behind EA in customer service, you have to think that there's something amiss.
I don't take issue with most of your points, but citation needed here. As someone that has actually tried to play an EA game in the recent past, Valve is no where near as awful to their customers as EA.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/...
There are a hundred links to the article with a simple search, but just use "Valve customer service score" and search for dates in the last week or so, you should have a plethora. I just chose one at random.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Didn't they just release live streaming lately? And they developed the ability to run Windows only games on Linux. IDK what Steam platform you're talking about that doesn't get improvements, but the one I use has done some pretty amazing feats in the last few years. You may not like it, but the younger generation of gamers is really into watching others play vidya games, and that's one of the more recent add-ons to Steam.
Sounds more like you're butthurt that they're not focusing on writing video games any more. And yes, that means generating revenue from selling games and pandering to new customers(with things like the live streaming).
"I am a fan of Terry Pratchett and he has Alzheimer's, it's like, Oh my god, I may never get another great Discworld novel." he said? Considering how he sadly passed away on March 12th 2015, the chances are that you might well not get another Discworld novel.
--- To save space, would readers please insert their own witty comment -here-
Honestly, I see this as a wise move. There's an incredible risk of providing a game that won't meet the extremely high expectations; and who knows what kind of staffing and office politics might affect development and direction. Also if there isn't that divine spark of creation, that burning vision to create, then the result will be, at best, lackluster. Halflife and Halflife 2 were obviously projects of passion.
Without passion in your work, you're just doing the daily grind. That doesn't lead to an inspiring product. It leads to what 90% of game companies churn out every day. The same old crap.
I'd love a HL3, sure, but only if it is fantastic.
Love sees no species.
I really don't understand what he's saying. There is a place still for story driven, single player FPS puzzle solvers like Half Life. If nothing else, this would have made a great test show for Source 2.
With the success of HL, then HL2 and all the money that brought in and the variety of games that exploded around it, you'd think that Valve employees would be eager to start HL3 now. It's been so long since the last HL episode that a new engine would bring new life to a series.
The man needs to give a full, clear interview and / or be asked the right questions.
This is so lazy. It's what happens when some people get everything after achieving so much. I just hope of some of the talent there who still have fire to produce ever better masterpieces push to be given the ball and see if they run with it or not. At least try. And yes this a purely selfish appeal to get HL3. So whose gonna "COWBOY UP" and make that happen?
"I don't which is worse, that everyone has a price, or that the price is always so low"--Hobbes
People hate Valve's customer service, sure, but across my 5 accounts (including my kids accounts) I have never had a reason to need support on Steam. I have bought 3 EA games in the last decade and have had to contact EA support 4 times. They were helpful each time. But which company gave me better customer service? The one that made a system where I don't need support at all, or the one that forced me to TALK ON THE PHONE like some sort of oxcart driver in order to unfuck my Sim City singleplayer online game.
Customer service scores are great and all, but if I never need support at all, that ranks much higher on my hierarchy of ratings.
Have you read the Valve Employee handbook? http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
With the way they run their ship, if the people in Valve were ready to make another one it would just start happening naturally and at any time.
Or they could do both and make the most money dumbass.
So, HL3 confirmed as a "prequel", right?
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
Speak for yourself, prick. I use Steam and enjoyed Half-Life, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead, but I don't give a shit what that fat, disgusting tub of lard says or does.
So you claim there will be three parts, release a part 1 and a part 2, end part two with a cliffhanger and then bork up the sequal. Again and again.
And after waiting long enough with the promised sequeal you claim we don't go retro for no reason. Nice way to treat fans.
I'm a fan of games and I certainly understand why people are like, you know, hey I remember this awesome experience and I'm starting to get worried that I'm never going to have it again. I am a fan of Terry Pratchett and he has Alzheimer's, it's like, Oh my god, I may never get another great Discworld novel.
Gabe Newell announces he is declining mentally. "No new game in a wildly popular franchise without 'good reason'"
Your argument literally makes no sense.
Your argument:
1) Valve is only interested in money.
2) Half-Life would make shit tons of money even if it were the worst phoned-in POS game ever made, just off of name recognition and pre-orders.
3) Therefore Valve is not interested in making the game.
If they were only interested in money, even if they didn't want to make the game they could just sign on as the producers and let some new development team create it (you know, like the original Portal).
That's what I want. I could care less about HL3.
SKYRIM showed us that giving up a successful franchise is fiscal negligence.
A new HALF LIFE game, done well, would basically operate as money printing press.
Could humans seek revenge on the Combine ?
Turn the tables on their home planet ?
Continue to explore new dimensions Beyond Zen ?
Can we once again feel the awesome power of the mighty Crowbar ?
For goodness sake:
Cross over Apature Science portal gun into Half Life 3.
Many questions remain about cell, the testing center, and the big wide world beyond...
Simply put: failing to create the next Half Life game & next portal game would be criminal - a loss of entertainment & profits.
Weak Aimless Leaders will kill Valve faster than any competition.
The Duke Nukem release did do at least one bit of good for the community: It got everyone to stop talking about Duke Nukem Forever. Apparently some people just need closure.
I read the internet for the articles.
"They seem me trollin'"
At least finish the god damn story.
We were promised 3 episodes, you released 2. FINISH IT.
Gabe's interview is him basically writing his own termination papers.
His mental weakness is thinking the world sees the world the way He sees the world.
Hal Life & Half Life 2 do not exist In The Past!
Half Life comes alive fresh & new with each new player. Some of its best fans were barely born when it was released.
Give customers a well written dramatic story, SciFi F/X awesome graphics, empathy creating characters, and action with challenging puzzles & fun game play - and they will give you respect, and mountains of cash ...
Any leader who abandons his fundamental roots, undermines the future profitability of the company.
But most importantly:
CUSTOMERS WANT IT.
THEY WANT IT NOW.
Not many businesses can say they have paying customers pre-ordering products before they are produced.
Valve needs a new leader.
>When you rank behind EA in customer service, you have to think that there's something amiss.
When a company locks you out of your account unless you agree to mandatory binding arbitration, that's when you realize they're anti-customer service and jettison your assets from them.
Why anyone keeps using their service, I don't know. It comes as no surprise they'd institute such a draconian rule with an "F" score, though. Suckers.
Valve have finite number of employees, and it is more profitable if they work on multiplayer games that are played by more people for longer time, produce extra revenue from microtransactions, and are better suited to Valve's "games as a service" model. Even the original Counter-Strike from 2000 still has more active players than all of Valve's single player Half-Life and Portal games combined. It is no wonder Valve no longer care about single player gaming.
Sure sounds like hey have no interest in making anymore HL games. That's a damn shame.
I hope you both DIAF.
War.
War Never Changes.
At least Bethesda does not suffer with a Lazy CEO like Valve.
Sure, you want to make it good.
So good people call off work & kids skip school just to play it.
Not doing another ? Just Lazy.
Call it lack of vision, call it incompetency,
ignorance, short sightedness, ineptitude, whatever. Gabe's just Lazy.
Valve needs to find a leader that knows how to create good products, crank up that pipline, and keep hitting popular hon runs.
Asleep at the wheel, Valve needs a hard working CEO.
You could say Half Life 1 was Star Wars, and Half Life 2 was Empire Strikes back. They made a crap load of money off it and said let's skip making Return of the Jedi. It makes not sense. Are they not answerable to their stock holders?
Gabe et. al. should just release a horrible sequel where all the main characters die and the story goes no where. That way people will never, ever, ask for a HL sequel again. Gabe would be free to pursue is passion of My Little Pony cosplay.
Valve has no commercial interest in making Half-Life 3. It's not that the game wouldn't be profitable. It almost certainly would be - lots of people would buy it. But it would risk the wider strategy they've been pursuing for a decade now.
Valve's income these days isn't from making and selling games; it's from charging other people to sell games via Steam. Seriously - you buy a game on Steam and a big slug of the price you pay goes straight to Valve. Sure, they have hosting costs, but there is a lot of pure profit in there.
Ever since Steam started to be a big thing, Valve has focussed on more niche games rather than big-budget fpses. It does not want to be seen as threatening or a rival to its biggest business partners. EA have already taken their toys and gone home to Origin; Valve's dominance of the PC gaming market relies on keeping Activision, Ubisoft and others on board.
And a big part of that is not being seen as a competitor. If Activision wants to pay Valve a lot of money to plaster the Steam front-page with a huge Call of Duty advert, then that's good for Valve. But Activision might get nervous if they worried that the platform they were using was run by a company that was actively pushing a game in competition with theirs.
Over in console-land, Sony and Microsoft's first party exclusives are generally put out there to sell consoles (not always a profitable activity in itself). They build up the installed base to get the third parties interested. The only platform-owner to really emphasise first-party games development is Nintendo, who, surprise surprise, have terrible third-party relationships.
Far easier for Valve to allow other people to put the effort in to making money for them, rather than take the risk of investing in games development to make direct income from sales. Particularly now that Steam is so ubiquitous as a platform that it doesn't need first-party games to grow the installed base.
I'm a gametard with my own money. I work for a living. I have since I was a teenager. Don't stereotype people.
I think you misread it, then.
Valve is generally only interested in money. So I think HL3 is going to come, but it will come whenever it comes. The problem is that at Valve, Steam is the real moneymaker (even if they released HL3 tomorrow) and their focus is on the cash cow.
I never said Valve wasn't interested in making the game, I just said I'm not interested in talking about things that aren't here yet.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
But this is a single instance where you don't. I don't either, for that matter. But the fact that when you do, or you might, that their customer service sucks beyond EA's... that's never good.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
That they don't do this makes me think they have something planned.
This failure to continue the series is pretty much the only source of hype surrounding Half-Life. The expectations are so low, it seems like the only reason to not make HL3 or HL2 ep3 is that they must be planning something amazing.
Episode 3 could have easily just been a continuation of episode 2 with the portal gun or HDR. Hell, they could release that right now and it would be very successful. The actual story in HL has always been pretty tepid anyway... so does the Combine take over Earth or not? No big deal either way. This isn't like Mass Effect, where the story was actually epic and central to the series. They could just lead up to another cliffhanger and they'd be fine. There are almost no expectations for a mind-blowing Episode 3.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
But I'm sure he wouldn't be able to hear me over the sounds of his maniacal laughter as he counts all the money that Steam rakes in.
Why should Gabe or anyone at Valve give two shits about a dead franchise? Half Life and Half Life 2 were the best of the genre. Anything they create in the franchise now would pale in comparison, because, frankly, they just don't have the talent to exceed their previous works. Now, they're primarily a game distribution company that profits from every game, in-game micro-transaction, Steam Workshop purchase, and trade on Steam.
Using car analogies, per Slashdot tradition:
Car Manufacturer 'Automative Darts' has cars that break down ever 10k miles on average. When they break down, they need parts and service that cost on average $500. There are tons of garages that have these parts though and service is prompt, easy, and efficient.
Manufacturer 'Valvo' has cars that break down every 200k miles on average. *When they break down* it's massively inconvenient because they cost $2000 to fix and there's only a few garages who have the relevant know-how to fix 'em and parts are not always in stock so sometimes service takes a day or two.
Which part has a better customer experience? Which car manufacturer would you buy from, purely from a service perspective? The one that has worse support you need once every fifth of a million miles, or better support you need monthly?
I personally prefer Steam and Valve over competitor EA's offerings because even though the service sucks, the product is solid enough that I might have to only interact with service once a decade (using steam since Orange Box released, have purchased dozens of games, haven't needed support yet - and this is pretty much business as usual for Valve). Using EA's crappy Origins, I needed support for the 1 thing I ever purchased with it.
The best stories have no "ending". Because a wrapped up sort of endings always feel a bit cliche and thin. But with so many possibilities open, it allows for user/player interpretation.
DNF changed hands, was abandoned, resurrected, revamped, rewritten, etc. with the details in public before it ever got close to a release.
This. I can give you a list of DNF promises that were broken as long as my arm just off the top of my head. Also, Duke3D didn't end on a cliffhanger.
Half-life is not the same, the only thing we've ever been told is that the story isn't finished - the only broken "promise" is the "episodic gaming" idea - short games, regular releases - which others have done successfully. They should just finish the goddamn story already. It's really not that hard.
That they don't do this makes me think they have something planned.
...and this is where our opinions part ways. Steam is their cash-cow now, so they don't actually need to do HL3, and they just don't give a shit about the fanboys who got them where they are. Valve have learned that in the corporate world giving a shit is a disadvantage - their plan is to crap on you over and over again until people get fed up with it and abandon steam. They'll only release HL3 when they need to. Basically this is as close as you're ever going to get to Gabe actually admitting "We just don't give a shit anymore".
Hasn't just got Alzheimer's. He's also caught a little DEATH.
There were twelve years between the release of the first Starcraft and it's sequel, yet it was the fastest selling strategy game of all time with millions of copies sold in it's first month. Four more years difference between the release of HL2:E2 and today. So, you were saying?
What Gabe really means is that Valve has gotten fat and lazy by collecting their percentages from the Steam store. Why do all that haaaard worrrrk (/dubbya) of putting out a game when you're making money hand over fist just sitting on your ass? Since I'm such a "fan" of sloppy reasoning I'll mock it some more:
The obvious responses - DN4E, Crystal Skull, and Phantom Menace - aren't arguments against sequels. They're arguments against sloppy, half assed sequels - big difference.
On the other hand, we DON'T want another "duke nukum forever" ....
Back when HL came out I had a buddy whom was a real life Army Ranger ( with thirteen missions on his coin) . He thought video games were for , " geeks and eggheads " . I dragged my game machine to his house and forced him play a bit of it ....several days and almost no sleep later , he came to me and said, " that was fucking AMAZING, i want to play more games like that , show me more games like that...",
and I had to hit him with that horrible gut punch ," sorry man , that's all she wrote, there aren't any other games like that ".
If you go back and play HL ( or better yet the awesome 'Black Mesa' ) and then play HL2, you will notice the trouble inherent in creative success when you jump to ep1, ep2. It's hard to remember what was the lightning and what was the lightning rod back in the beginning that forged the HL goodness.
I mean HL was based on the supposedly 'true' story of a guy claiming to be a guard ( where the idea of Barney came from ) that escaped the secret Dulce military base in New mexico . True or not some damn fine source material to work with .
In HL2 they basically explord the logical aftermath implications of the first game and added some cool bits ( mostly borrowed from other obscure places like: the gravity gun; "inspired" entirely by how the character in the game Trespasser handled objects ).
But in ep1&2 the original magic is gone, some of the levels were mind numbingly bad ( like, how many hours do I have to play in poorly lit or totally dark jump scare tunnels, or the "someone got CS:GO in my Half-life" style levels where you had no way of not being at a tactical dis-advantage as you criss-cross the same landscape again and again ).
So in Newell's case he has to say nothing. If the magic is dead and lightning cannot strike the HL franchise a third time , then he needs to keep millions of raving fanboys at home polishing their homemade gravity guns , and not say, storming his castle ( or constantly hacking steam servers ) and burning all his stuff down. Alternatively if , by some magic they were producing another lightning infused HL game ( and not just something grossly self-indulgent ) how could he possibly say anything that could be squeezed between HL3's expectations and the hype ceiling that already exists?
Perhaps he should just sell the rights to HL3 to TakeTwo or rockstar It would be interesting to see what they could do with it
And they developed the ability to run Windows only games on Linux
Bullshit. Streaming from another machine is not the same as "running on linux"
IMO, it is far worse to outright lie to customers (think SimCity isn't failing to start because of DRM, oh wait, that is exactly why you can't start it) than to have spotty customer support. Especially when, as others have stated, I have had to contact Valve support all of 0 times in the decade I have been using Steam or playing Valve games. This is, like, my opinion, man. YMMV.
There's a solution to this, it's called the humble store. Cut off valve's money-making machine and suddenly they'll start caring again.
Conversely, I really haven't had any issues with Origin's service either. And I play a bit of BF4 not to mention Mass Effect and some other games.
Granted my usage of Steam is far higher.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Or Microsoft's app store -- which is poised to compete with them in the combination of Xbox into their marketplace.
Will be interesting times, regardless.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Well, I wouldn't exactly condone giving microsoft money either, but to each his own.
GOG is another games retailer with ethics.
I'm not condoning it, but I don't really subscribe to Steam for the "ethics" of it -- I just want cheap games easily accessible.
If Microsoft can do that and provide some nice social tools to boot, then I will give them my money. Or GOG, or Humble, or anybody else. (thought the irony is with GOG/Humble is that they are usually Steam activated).
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I'm sort of wondering if there's a movie deal or something that would supersede the game...
There is gameplay and there is story. There is story and there is art. There is business and profit and legacy.
Why do we want HL2E3? It isn't gameplay (for the most part). We can get that anywhere. Do you pull out HL2E1 or HL2E2 (or even Black Mesa) every now and then? Yeah. It is story. It is borderline art (though my artist-wife would guffaw to read that).
Story, give us story. If no one is interested in completing it, is it because no one is interested in the story, or because no one is interested in extending the gameplay? Would it be a fulfilling experience to take their existing framework, give it to new devs as an experimental/toy playground and treat it as a "have fun" environment? Would they be able to entice a team into a non-profit-driven, do-it-for-the-fan-accolades pro bono/cover the cost experience?
Do it, Gabe. How you sell it internally ("another game release in our catalog" vs. "art and glory for the ages") HIGHLY influences how it appears to potential team members. You can sell product outside, I'm sure you can sell it inside as well.
The vibe I got from the podcast was basically Valve has built an ivory tower atop a mountain of cash and thinks its on the path of where the PC games industry is going, they are banking heavily on existing money making platforms (Windows) going full-on Apple and building a restrictive wall around Valve's primary source of income, so they're building their OWN hardware (but with hookers and blackjack). The flavour of the month that has their devs all excited is VR, which is going to be an extremely hard sell (like 3D television sets nobody wanted) but they've always trusted their devs sense of direction and are letting the tail wag the dog.
To me Valve has hit that stage of corporate life where they're not really hungry anymore and don't feel like they owe anybody anything kind of like early 2000s Microsoft, which is fine, but its hardly endearing to anyone most of all the folks who pay the bills.
In a few years time they'll be hungry again when the pendulum swings the other way and people move on from DOTA and Steam-like competitors have caught up and surpassed what Valve offers
And make the damn game. You know you have the money
GOG is another games retailer with ethics.
Good one. Their only ethic is making money.
Honestly, Freeman portaling around to take on the Combine isn't innovative enough for HL3? So hire some decent writers, figure out how to make portals work in Halflife, and go to town. As long as they don't totally cock it up it'll make millions and the fanboyz will settle down for a few more years. Everybody wins!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
No HL3 no cake!
That's more lucky than good though. Steam does very little to make sure shit works. Older games are notorious for problems whereas other services (like GOG) make sure they are fixed to work on modern systems. If you ever do need support, Steam is a nightmare.
I agree that needing less maintenance is better than having good maintenance support, but you need a large sample size to be able to tell if that is the case or if you just got lucky. For example I have needed maintenance on precisely zero of my LG appliances, whereas I have needed maintenance on one of my Kenmore appliances... thing is I have owned a grand total of two LG appliances and one Kenmore appliance. That doesn't tell me anything, we are WAAAY below any sort of statistical significance.
On the other hand at work I can say we use Seagate and HGST enterprise drives because we have had zero failures across about 200 drives, as compared to WD RE drives which have had about 40 failures across 400 drives. That is a large enough sample set that the results are meaningful.
I've needed Steam support precisely once, and was unable to get it. I've needed Origin support zero times, but not necessarily because it is problem free but because I have been lucky.
It's easy to write off customer service and praise a brand if you've been lucky and never had problems, but you discover how very important it can be when a problem does occur, and nothing in this world is problem free.
Yes DOTA 2 and CS:GO are very popular, but innovative they are not. CS:GO is just Counterstrike. New graphics and some tweaks, but same game it ever way. DOTA 2 is just another MOBA, one of very many, not the biggest out there (that's League of Legends) and it borrows heavily from other games. They are popular not because they are amazing new titles doing never before seen stuff, they are popular because it is the same shit people like, well executed and pushed on the most popular PC game store.
Not hating on that, but this idea that Valve is some sort of amazin' developer that only puts out revolutionary titles is a false one. Lately all they've "pumped out" are rehashes that are popular for doing what has been done before and people liked, not because they moved in a new direction.
Valve is one of those devs that can do no wrong in most people's eyes. They'll get high scores because of who they and, and because of what people want Halflife to be.
You want an example of shit like that happening? Look at Civilization 5. It wasn't a great Civ game. It wasn't BAD, but it was a step down from 4 in most ways. Realistic scores would have been 7/10 or so. However all the reviews were glowing. Why? Because reviewers WANTED it to be good. They love Civ, have loved it for a long time, and have an emotional investment in it being good. So they reviewed the game they wanted it to be, not what it was.
Unless HL3 was complete shit, it would get off the charts good reviews because people want it to be good so badly.
TIL Half-Life 2 is a 'super classic' kind of product.
"and had a reasonable explanation for why it was"
MOOONNNEEEEYYY. Alright, project approved.
If Microsoft can do that and provide some nice social tools to boot, then I will give them my money. Or GOG, or Humble, or anybody else. (thought the irony is with GOG/Humble is that they are usually Steam activated).
Minor correction:
HumbleBundle games often offer titles through the Steam platform, which requires you to activate their titles online first, which can be a surprise for someone who buys a game through HumbleBundle not expecting that sort of inquisition.
GOG.com never does; their chief claim to fame is that that their titles are DRM-free and are not tied down to any sort of online activation. Yes, offering products that are DRM-free as well as providing access to otherwise abandoned titles.
Erm, their two claims to fame are no DRM, great old games... and low prices. Three! Their three claims to fame are no DRM, great games, low prices... and getting those older titles to work on newer hardware. Four, no... amongst their chief claims are, erm, such elements as no DRM, great games...
Look, I'll just come in again, shall I?
Then it became a Steam exclusive and I didn't care as much any more. As it turned out, HL3, at least what came out as one game (part1) was underwhelming compared to the original and the advances made by its competition in the meantime, so it looked a good move to have not bothered.
Same with Diablo 3: really looking forward to it. Online only, gave up wanting it. Turned out to be quite shit. At least until the expansion, apparently, where several game-breaking problems were solved.
Same with X-Rebirth too: really looking forward to it, steam only, so give up wanting it, turns out to be really crap.
It seems like the best indicator of whether you should want a game is if the agreement you have to sign to play it is more than "Pay us the money and you'll get to play the game", then the game is likely not going to be worth the hype.
I think this is indicative of the leaderless model that Valve loves to talk about. It leads to some interesting innovation -- and, arguably, more passionate workers because they're working on whatever they want to work on. But they're ignoring something that the fans want, because their people would "rather" work on another multiplayer clone. The Half-Life universe is rich with possibilities. I feel like if they'd just get started, then the interest among their staff would spread like wildfire.
... if a whole bunch of people internally at Valve said they wanted to do it ...
He's being quite literal there. Valve doesn't force people to work on particular projects. If nobody wants to do it, it wont get done.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
"I am a fan of Terry Pratchett and he has Alzheimer's, it's like, Oh my god, I may never get another great Discworld novel."
The difference is that, as far as I am aware, Terry Pratchett finished every single story he published.
I have 3 brothers, back in the day we played Doom, Doom II, Duke Nukem, Quake, Quake II and Unreal coop with 2 to 4 of us doing the whole game. Half Life came along and Coop was out the window, we fired up "Multiplayer" and found ourselves in a warehouse with a bunch of guns, no monsters and no way out, like, WTF do we do now!???
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
it's called "The Last Of Us"
Humans infected and turned into zombies? Check. Underwater collapsed buildings? Check. Army out to get you? Check. Filing Cabinets, Crates and Bins to climb on? etc.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I'm a gametard
You fell into his cunning trap there.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Can't respect someone as overweight as he is. If you don't respect your body enough to take care of it, I can't be bothered either.
Boy did you pick the wrong forum to post that.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"I am a fan of Terry Pratchett and he has Alzheimer's, it's like, Oh my god, I may never get another great Discworld novel." he said? Considering how he sadly passed away on March 12th 2015, the chances are that you might well not get another Discworld novel.
It's just vaguely possible that the interview was filmed before March 12th 2015.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Car analog - Is Hyundai better than Honda because they have better warranties? NO, of course not.
Excellent customer service when a failure occurs is worse than no failure occurring. A LOT worse.
Gabe Newell is my Terry Pratchett, if something happens to him, I may never get to experience HL3! I think this is enough reason...
I'll keep the faith, It's going to happen, and it will be amazing
That's bullshit and I can prove it.
Back in 1999 I bought a nice adventure game called Outcast. Even back then, it could be a pain in the ass to get running well, if at all, not to mention the extreme difficulty getting it to run on a modern system. When gog.com got it, I bought it again just to be able to easily play it. The five bucks it cost was worth it.
Some time later I noticed that gog.com had an update for the game called "Outcast 1.1". It turns out gog.com obtained the source code for the game and modified it to work with modern resolutions, along with fixing the UI scaling and adding texture smoothing. This could not have been a trivial task, considering the game is not 3D accelerated but rather a custom voxel engine. gog.com provided this update at no additional cost, even though they easily could have and nobody would have complained.
Of all of the online game stores, gog.com is by far the most ethical, easiest to use, non-intrusive and respectful of the privacy of their customers.
And it's not like the people that finished DNF, Gearbox, have the best track record.
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
Thank you. :-)
Mod points +11, -12.
So I lose but also had the opportunity to collect +11 mod points. I'm not sure how that affects my karma, but since I've had excellent karma since before most of you started shaving your pubes and hanging around bus station toilets, I'm pretty sure I'm gold.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Conversely, look at Prey. I remember seeing screenshots for Prey back in 1994 or 1995, when it was "soon to be released". The engine looked very similar to Doom, though it had a few visual improvements. Fast forward eleven years to 2006 when the game finally got released and was met with critical acclaim.
Long development time does not automatically mean the game will suck or be poorly received.
Agreed. Even after all of the shit DNF went through, I still bought it because "it's Duke Nukem". I even played through and enjoyed moments within the game.
The exploration aspect was pretty much gone, but all of the interactivity and Duke "witticisms" were there and, aside from the closure, that was all I really ever wanted.