Free Yourself

[F0xHunter]

http://store.steampowered.com/news/3872/

Looks like there will be support for all episodes simultaneously

[Dr. Delta]

Well it's not like the content has to be converted too? Only the engine right?

[nub]

I was kind of disappointed that they didn't recompile the HL2 maps so they had HDR lighting. I mean they did for the 360 version that came with the Orange Box.

[coder0xff]

Correct me if I'm wrong... but isn't this video pretty old (no I don't mean whatever it's referencing). I've seen this video long before the 25th... or maybe Valve (or blink ) was just trolling.

[YokaI]

Correct me if I'm wrong... but isn't this video pretty old (no I don't mean whatever it's referencing). I've seen this video long before the 25th... or maybe Valve (or blink ) was just trolling.

I think you are thinking of the screenshots they used from this in their "decryption" puzzle they added to portal 2. I do remember seeing this before, but never video format.

I wonder if that means we'll have video style TF2-Ipod commercials / L4D2-apple commercials in the future. That would be quite some fun to wait for!

[Valar]

Just wondering out loud here...how economical supporting the HL2 fan base as it were really is?
How crossed should we keep our fingers at a time when the old style FPS games are long deceased and most of what you see people playing online nowadays is COD and such war games..heck even L4D is all but died out and L4D2 is quickly following, having no league and decreasing fan base.
Wondering if ep3 isn't a pain-in-the-neck type of debt Valve "owes" its community, it's "fan base", placing it all the more further down in their to-do list.
All i see, and don’t confuse, this is a huge Anything-Valve fan here, is a race to the next hit title. Where a new one would hit every 3 to 4 years only a while back they now hit every year.
Porting all ep1 games for example to OB clearly takes a few decent coders and a reasonably short period of time…still it never happened although Valve’s repeated confirmation a-la “intended however no ETA”. Now we see CS:S being ported and one can only see why. Just wondering if money issues+the complete change in gamers’ taste over the last few years have pretty much sealed the doom on what most of us here would like to see. “We” being the minority I fear.
Again, I will always welcome anything new from Valve but meh I guess I just miss the oldskool games.

[YokaI]

Just wondering out loud here...how economical supporting the HL2 fan base as it were really is?
How crossed should we keep our fingers at a time when the old style FPS games are long deceased and most of what you see people playing online nowadays is COD and such war games..heck even L4D is all but died out and L4D2 is quickly following, having no league and decreasing fan base.

The wording of this statement is kind of hard for me to follow, but if what I think you are saying is actually what you intended, I agree that valve's games lose their appeal shortly after release.

The problem lies fundamentally with the idea "what makes a game played for a long time?" and it's a very difficult question to answer. I think the real thing to observe is that games with a strong aspect of competition are the ones that are still being played today, but I don't think they're the only ones. I could lie and say that, much like blizzard does, valve needs to frequently change stats to further balance their games for a more logical competitive aspect ("Everything is overpowered" mentality, every player "class" has something that almost seems game breakingly good, but in the end it works to be a more balanced end product.) For example, 2fort has been unchanged since the release, and while people will say "valve doesn't want to tarnish a classic TF map", it should be noted that in competitive TF2, 2fort is considered a joke. It works well for casual play, but the problem is that casual play only lasts so long because of the casual gamer mindset / mentality : "if it's not new, I won't play it."

Maybe this is biased coming from someone who still plays Chrono Trigger on a regular basis, and enjoys every moment of replaying old megaman games and trying to beat my last record, but there's definitely a problem with games that only tend to try to capture the hearts of the "casual" gamer. Valve has always been the company that bridges casual gamers and hardcore gamers, while it isn't very recognized that this is really the case. Hell, you don't know how many kids I heard cracking portal jokes in my high school, or saying things about how they play a lot of counterstrike in between their football practice and their daily drinking sessions. (No really, this is all true.)

Let me pause right here too to highlight my feelings of what it means to be a "hardcore gamer", because quite frankly I hate that term with a passion. What does that even mean? I've seen people who play tetris attack like it's nobodies business, and someone may not consider them a hardcore gamer for what reason? Because it isn't a first person shooter? Frequently, I hear this term thrown around for the console debates, saying that because someone buys a wii they're instantly refered to as a "casual gamer"

To me, there's only (roughly) two types of gamers.

There's group A -- The Trend Gamers, or Casual Gamers works fine for this classification, the ones who buy every game that's released and frequently play a game until that game is considered out of date, the ones who fund the developers because of their on the whim purchase mentality. They don't try to max as many hours as possible into a game or try to minimize their play time to a point of ridiculous-ness (MCR's Ustream speed runs of Zelda: LttP comes to mind), instead they play a game for a few weeks, and move on. This is an important audience to attend to, and I feel this is the audience Valve appeals to mostly and it works well for them financially. Think TF2 for a moment, the way they continue to have their audience is by constantly adding new content, the way they add events for holiday specific events or even events that change the game play experience slightly or implement sub games within the game (I.E. The Demo vs Soldier Event). These changes brings back this audience, and the only reason why TF2 continues to have an audience is because new content is added frequently to once again capture the appeal of the casual audience.

And then there's group B -- The Dedicated Gamers, the ones who spend their whole time trying to maximize or minimize their hours logged within a game. They'll replay a game to get 100%, or to get specific achievements that would be daunting to most players. Or they even just don't care for most games, and decide to play the games they already have frequently and replay the same story countless of times because there's little or no need for any other game that's better. Dedicated gamers can also be the "play to win" crowd, the ones who attend tournaments yearly for games as old as starcraft or quake 3, and continually try to become the best regionally, or even internationally. The reward from this audience is a bit unpredictable. On one hand, you can do an amazing job adding so much content that players never find the time to ever stop playing the game (World of Warcraft) but unfortunately you can also have a game with a bunch content but the game isn't played because it just isn't a good game. You can attempt to make games which appeal to the competitive audience, however it's been noted even by the competitive players that they are very hesitant of change, for example koth_viaduct is a map now considered competitive in TF2 standards but it took AGES for people to recognize it as such. Another example is how Starcraft 2 has a audience base which thinks that all the "new maps" suck, while the irony is that many of the "new" maps are slightly modified layouts of the original broodwar maps.

The best way to appeal to the mass market while still having lasting appeal is finding some way to mix the above two gamer interests into 1 specific gaming experience. I think World of Warcraft does an amazing job doing so, and the statistics of that can help back up that point. There's an audience who plays WoW who are "dedicated gamers" who play every raid, every instance, get every achievement, maximize their professions, maximize all of their weapons skills, play the game competitively via WoW's arena / battleground features. On the other hand, there's the "casual gamers" who will spend their time playing the game once an expansion hits to see the new areas, experience the new quests, get to level XX before they decide that the game has become old or some new game has hit the market (which they will label as "The WoW Killer").

Valve did a great Job with this on TF2, but it still isn't there for the dedicated gamers in my opinion. There isn't a strong audience of players who want to play TF2 competitively as much as Starcraft, Warcraft, DotA, Street Fighter, etc etc. The reason for this is the lack of changing things due to the demands of some of the dedicated gamers, and it MORE IMPORTANTLY has to do with funding. Street fighter is a good example, Street Fighter 2 was balanced like shit. There's plenty of characters that were awful. However, the community itself found a way to make that competitive. I feel like valve tries to do that more, however I feel that there's a catch there. In order to have a community take a game to the competitive level, you need to be as willing to change the game to their liking as much as possible, and hope to appeal to their needs through additions and changes. Blizzard hosts their "World Wide Invitationals" every year, rents out a huge arena in which players play competitively against eachother. If valve were to have some sort of "Valve-con", in which they hosted CS tournaments, TF2 tournaments, hell even HL2 deathmatch tournaments, they would not only support the competitive audience to continue playing those games (since they all will want to aim for the prize pool), but they will also get first hand "beyond betatest" examples of what things they need to change and what changes they could make to make the game an even playing field between all the player choices.

I guess that was quite a lengthy post, so I hope it actually is related to what you were talking about, but it's something I've always wanted to discuss. It could even make for an interesting serious discussion sometime, but "meh". All I hope is that I'm not shooting myself in the foot posting these types of things, I don't want valve to think I'm some sort of hater who's gunna hate.

[source-maps]

wow, just wow... were do you find the time D:

[YokaI]

wow, just wow... were do you find the time D:

It only took me 10 minutes. :/ Plus, I really fucking love video games. (Duh) I could probably write a book, except it would be some of the worst writing known to man. (I'd really need some sort of editor)

[Dionysos]

This short answer might be a bit of an injustice towards the larger posts above, but I don't think the "big" games nowdays, MW2 etc, sell because of their lasting appeal, they sell because of hype which relatively quickly drops off.

[YokaI]

This short answer might be a bit of an injustice towards the larger posts above, but I don't think the "big" games nowdays, MW2 etc, sell because of their lasting appeal, they sell because of hype which relatively quickly drops off.

Hype is generally used to sell a product at launch, what's important to note is that there's still a LOT of players who play MW2. The "Prestige" system appeals to long hauls and massively large play hours.

[vcool]

There are a ton of players who play CS and CSS and TF2 as well.

[[JFG]Propaganda]

Steve Jobs with his mouth tightly wrapped around Gabe Newells cack for making the Mac into a gaming machine.

And an extra large greasy pepperoni pizza with a couple of 2 liter bottles of pepsi.