MNM wrote:RefaelBA wrote:I played 3 masterpieces from BioWare in recent years, while no games from Valve
2007-OB
2008-L4D
2009-L4D2
2010-Portal 2?
that + loads of TF2 updates and such.
Play them then.
Please read the previous posts... I don't usually play multiplayer games only and I don't intend to spend money on L4D. OB is hardly what you call recent time - it was three years ago and it was too a masterpiece. But you can't play the same awesome game for 3 years (if you can, good for you! I can't).
Zipfinator wrote:Your post has a ton of holes in it... Valve doesn't release a game every year because they spend time polishing their games and making sure the gameplay and story are at very high standards. Sorry to use such blunt language but you're stupid if you think Bioware polishes their games to the same level as Valve's in their 1/2 year release windows. While I enjoyed Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 very much, they both had a ton of visual glitches, bad story plots, lack of interesting gameplay at times and just overall terrible looking environments due to a lot of outsourcing. I'd much rather be loyal to a studio that releases a game every 4 years but polishes it to where it's as enjoyable as it can be than a studio that outsources most of their artwork and puts all of their work into flashy dialogue systems.
I don't mind your bluntness, in fact I've seen you do a lot worse. Valve's games might be more polished, but that doesn't stop BioWare from releasing games that are the epitome of the industry in a dazzling rate. So what if Portal was more polished? It was a 5 hour campaign, while in Dragon Age the slightly less polished, I went through a 70-hour epic adventure that I am sure to remember for the rest of my life. Never before in a game did I get so closely attached to game characters, and actually to this very day I keep pondering the choices I made, and whether or not it's worth it to stick with the Ultimate Sacrifice ending that fits my character so well. You can't expect a game of 60+ hours to be perfect, like you can't expect every page in a book to be absolutely perfect - but the overall experience is more than the sum of the game's parts. And I never found BioWare's game to be lacking in gameplay or plot - I honestly credit them as the superior masters of RPG and currently, gaming in general...
Portal was fun and polished, but in the end the thing I will remember most strongly about it, is the song in the credits and the companion cube. Can't remember more than three puzzles from the game. Portal is history, while Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 are concurrent.
Now don't get me wrong, I never said Valve made bad games, I just said they're not making anything I'd like to play for quite a while. I hope they ship an excellent Portal 2 title and that Ep3 will come out eventually - but bottom line, I wouldn't notice anything if Valve closed tomorrow.
