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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Gabe is absolutely right on this. If it doesn't completely recenter the first person shooter genre, it's not really a half life game.
Valve really only releases things that shake the industry up. I've been playing through Alyx for the first time this weekend and oh my god is it good.
Valve buys up dev teams that are about to shake the industry up. Valve hasn't actually been the ones to make something new in a long time. TFC, CS, Portal, DoD, L4D, Alien Swarm, Dota 2... were all made by outside dev teams that Valve absorbed and put their name on. The only things Valve have actually made, themselves, in the last 5 years are Alyx and CS2, neither of which brought anything new to the industry (although they are wonderfully-executed games).
Personally, I'm not a fan of this practice, because I feel like Valve inadvertently stifles these studios after they bring them onboard. For instance, the team from DigiPen that Valve bought for their Portal tech? Imagine if they were still able to make games. Imagine if they were still able to stretch their creativity and create new tech and ideas. Instead, their intellectual properties are all tied up at Valve and they got to release two whole games in the last 20 years. Who knows what we could be missing out on from these guys if they were able to actually still make stuff.
Valve does seem to contribute substantially to the development of their games, at least. Turtle Rock's Evolve and Back 4 Blood had nowhere near the success of L4D/2, which is still going strong 15 years later.
I think it shows that Valve has built a strong culture for creativity that’s hard to replicate. Their approach to play testing. The “flat” company structure.
What’s evident from the HL2 documentary is that there’s no single mastermind behind the game. There’s no Hideo Kojima or Will Wright. It’s the creative output of many individuals.
A lot of studios develop with the intention of being absorbed and/or bought out. The plan is usually to develop some niche incredible tech that's only around PoC quality and then be acquired.
They didn't get crushed by the big man here. That's simply how the reality of the market goes.
It's like pharmaceuticals. No one starts a new pharma company expecting to compete with Pfizer or Merck, the whole game is to develop a promising drug and then get your company bought out by one of them.
Plus, the actual creatives aren't gone just because their studio stopped making games, they usually keep working in some other role. It's hardly ideal, but it's wrong to frame this as a loss of their future contributions.
To equivocate a little, a great team is bottled lightning and having them disbanded because of market dynamics is a loss.
I mean, that's the entire point they have at valve. They want to get the people with talent recognition and resources. That's why they did all that stuff with the tf2 asset store. Fuck it, the community is better than us than making maps. let's get them to make maps, sell a thing that puts money to the map maker's hands.
Oh, these kids are awesome, they would do wonders with more money and an audience. Fuck it, here you go. Oh BTW, old man murray was an awesome site, let's get the writers behind that a steady paycheque and have them write the story for these kids and their wacky princess portal wall thing.
What's that, they want to use our cornerstone IP universe? Eh, fuck it, why not.
We can't make shitloads of games, let's just make it so that when people want to sell games, we can host the games. Fuck it, we just cornered the PC gaming distrobution scene.
Microsoft might fuck people over with their OSes? Fuck it, let's extend and contribute to linux in a symbiotic way, then people don't have to rely on MS to game on PC.
etc, etc.
valve isn't about making games, it's about extending the pc gaming ecosystem and making it so that people with talent get money, and people who want to play games can play them, and to bridge the gap between the two.
They're still at it, they bought Campo Santo (Firewatch Devs) in 2018 and now their game In The Valley of Gods is never gonna happen, they worked on Alyx instead.
They poached a bunch of folks from Hopoo Games recently too.
You speak of developers as if they have no agency.
The Hopoo folk left because they didn't want to work on RoR anymore.
Well yeah, Hopoo sold the RoR franchise to gearbox 2 years ago.
Moving from a small indie studio to Valve they are giving up a lot of agency.
Isn't valve's structure essentially that they allow any dev to work on any project they want?
That's the fantasy. It's full of politics and informal power structures though.
Alyx is the only reason i ever consider getting into VR. You might be right on everything else, but I do think Alyx is what put VR on the radar for a lot of people like me and i think that's a considerable shake up.
Episodes 1 and 2 were fun but they in no way “recentered the first person shooter genre.”
Neither did Op For or Blue Shift.
They hoped the episodic delivery of games would be the future. Especially alongside a digital distribution platform like Steam. I suspect they realized episodes wasn’t the way after the release of Orange Box, so they moved on from that.
They didn't try. They did one then it was years before episode 2.
You have to actually make episodes before declaring it a failure.
I watched the full documentary now. It’s clear they were burned out of Half Life when they started with Episode 3. The idea to deliver a new episode every 12 months wasn’t creatively sustainable. So they put it on hold while they worked on L4D and other projects.
It's a weird argument for them to make: We are too exhausted to make a short game so instead made an entirely new full game.
When they started with episode 3 they’ve already worked on Half Life 2 for more than 8 years. Most good ideas had already been explored, and they struggled to come up with new ones.
At that point it’s easier to start with something fresh where they’re not confined with the expectations of what a Half Life 2 should be.
I assume that's how creativity works? Making new different things gets you more ideas than doing similar thing over and over.
This is such an irrational bar to surpass
I wish they didn't feel this pressure to push forward the industry with EP3. Full Half Life 3, maybe, but I would have preferred a closing chapter with the tech and features available.