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Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

(www.half-life.com)
573 points Philpax | 4 comments | 15 Nov 24 22:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.835s | source
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eknkc ◴[15 Nov 24 23:18 UTC] No.42152405[source]▶
20-25 years ago a handful of companies had a weird hold on me. I’d jump on anything Google made back then. Blizzard could sell me any game they came up with. If it was from Blizzard, it was gonna be great.

Lost all of it obviously. Not a single company has my loyalty anymore.

Except if valve were to release a mystery black box with faint lambda symbol on it. I’d pay whatever they asked for it.

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keyringlight ◴[15 Nov 24 23:34 UTC] No.42152534[source]▶
My theory is that there's a period when a studio has huge early success (plus in the case of Valve, they started with huge amounts of money from being former MS employees) that lets them devote themselves to their mission of making games, before either mission creep or dilution with new hires occurs over time either from staff naturally changing over time or expanding. Another factor is that when aiming to 'go big' and realize what they can do with lots of resources, they need to partner/join with others that don't work the same way and will influence them.
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ramesh31 ◴[15 Nov 24 23:40 UTC] No.42152589[source]▶
Valve is still a top tier org, but they simply make too much money in the publishing business to bother with game development anymore. Any sales would be peanuts to what they are making through developer fees and the marketplace. This is why all of their releases in the last decade have been F2P.
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ethbr1 ◴[16 Nov 24 00:00 UTC] No.42152778[source]▶
Also, supposedly the whole radically flat org structure thing.

Which I imagine doesn't lend itself to doing hard things like making Half Life 3...

Why would any game dev choose to go through a death march to perfection, if they had other project choices?

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1. ranguna ◴[16 Nov 24 09:38 UTC] No.42155513[source]▶
> Which I imagine doesn't lend itself to doing hard things like making Half Life 3...

Does it lend itself to do other hard things like half life alyx?

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2. keyringlight ◴[16 Nov 24 10:41 UTC] No.42155723[source]▶
Alyx wasn't just another HL game in isolation though, it was related to their adventures in VR along with developing hardware and APIs for it, and exploring how it works in a game
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3. pxoe ◴[16 Nov 24 18:11 UTC] No.42157911[source]▶
>it was related to their adventures in VR

Which also shows yet another one of Valve's problems with making games, they treat their games like they're "tech demos", so unfortunately they're not as interested in actually moving the stories in their games forward or bringing them to a conclusion. They do a "tech demo", they move on from that tech, leaving the game and it's world and community behind. Plot? What plot? Perhaps they're also stalling on making continuations or even new releases in search of some "gimmick technology" to pair a game with, instead of just telling a story through their games. For those people that do like the narratives and the worlds in their games, it sure is tough luck. There's more to a game than just 'tech', but alas.

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4. keyringlight ◴[16 Nov 24 21:33 UTC] No.42159552{3}[source]▶
For a while I though you could explain Valve best by thinking of them as a gaming technology lab rather than a 'simple' game developer, and most of their hit games have been acquired. The thing that sours me on where they've ended up is outside of steam which has become PC gaming infrastructure their projects have had little influence. The big standout project besides VR has been the deck, which I think is less important as a portable device and more as a baseline for low-spec gaming