By the way, is Yahtzee still slumming it on the Escapist, or has he done the Patreon thing like Jim? He always seemed too good for that place.
And for a long time even after it became a website, they had a weekly magazine with some really good articles. But that gradually got pushed further and further out-of-focus in favour of more videos until they basically stopped doing it entirely. And then of course they lost most of the worthwhile video series and now it's just a bland gaming press site with Yahtzee.
His early videos seemed to be interesting, but these days every video is an excuse to rant about clueless game company execs and overweight manchilds.
He does that sometimes, but certainly not every episode.
Now, you have to ask if HL3 could ever hope to meet the expectations of the modern gamer, many of whom were probably just born when HL2 was big and have no real connection to it. What do they have to gain from it? What do they have to lose? I'd argue that they're making so much money now they don't particularly need the expense and risk of developing a game that, even if it is quite good, stands to potentially harm their reputation.
Aside from Steam, Valve (the developer) seems to be putting a lot of focus on esports right now. Many of the recent updates to Dota 2 seem to be new features and quality of life improvements for casters and spectators.
There is no way in hell they could release it as a VR game and not as regular FPS game. That would be just really bad move from Valve.
Wait, why is that? Isn't this 2016 where any game or movie that is even a little successful, must inevitably have successors?
How could valve motivate not making a game that would sell like hotcakes no matter how terrible it is? Sure, it would have enormous expectations, but that's true of all movie sequels (yet most suck). Is the value of Valve currently based on a game they'll never make, because it' can't live up to expectations? That would be an odd situation!
Even if Valve decides against ever doing HL3, could they afford not to sell the franchise? It must be worth a TON to e.g. Microsoft who could use the title it to push xboxes or VR headsets or whatever.
If they were to sell the HL franchise they risk losing a lot of customer support overnight. They would no longer be game devs, whose blunders can be excused because of their amazing games, they are money grabbers willing to whore out their franchises for short term cash grabs. The risk to the Steam platform just doesn't seem worth it.
If they were to sell it MS would be one of the worst destinations for it. If I were in their shoes I would likely explore having a smaller studio build it. A sale to MS could only be viewed as financially motivated and the quality of the game produced is almost certain to suffer.
However if I were them I would keep it as an ace up the sleeve to bring the masses to a new H/W platform Valve bring out. Such a release could seal the platform that wins its generation of consoles.
So the next generation of consoles or so they release a steam machine with VR tools and their 'next gen' games.
So still PC, but packagable for console users
I think it mostly boils down to Valve being a privately held company that is not under pressure to meet arbitrary quarterly financial targets. The article is quite clear that Gabe Newell gutted HL a few months before the original release date rather than deliver a game that wasn't quite "there" yet.
Additionally, if Valve have maintained their notoriously flat structure, HL3 will need to acquire critical mass /buy-in within Valve before it can make it out the door.
> Even if Valve decides against ever doing HL3, could they afford not to sell the franchise?
Yes, as long as Steam remains a money printing machine, they will not be desperate.
Ah well, maybe he'll finally use that free time to make a proper version of Cell. Because the demo of that game was really cool.
Here is a playlist with the full series.
Uggh. This whole forum is full of sheep. I'll probably be downvoted by people who don't understand this gag. I get no respect.
Unfortunately, my prophecy seems to be self-fulfilling. GPP is down from +3 to +0.
I felt much the same way about Marathon, which ended up being under-appreciated by virtue of being Mac-only. A shame.
I've been re-playing the Metal Gear Solid series. The second and third game are better than the originals because of a control scheme update that was part of a bigger 'HD' update. But they still suck compared to the controls of the fifth iteration of the game, 'The Phantom Pain'.
MGS5 has some of the best controls I've ever used in a (third person) game. For lack of a better description, it made me feel almost like how I felt when I first played Mario64.
And I can't help but wonder why 1) it took three iterations to get here even though 5's controls could be realized even in earlier iterations of the game, 2) why other similar games don't just use the same controls instead of more dated approaches.
I mean, I get why, but it feels strange. I understand how the development of graphics, physics, AI, etc. is limited by technology but as long as you don't need a controller update for your new control scheme, such a limitation shouldn't be there. And yet it is, apparently.
OTOH, there are some old games that control fine. Megaman 2 still feels great to play, as does Quake with +mlook and WASD. But yes, control affordances matter. For the large part, Doom can only be played comfortably by modern audiences because of the work Source Port developers undertook to allow for rebindable keys, and sgtmarkiv's Brutal Doom, which allows for proper mouselook, if you really want to be that guy.
I've been doing Ludum Dare for a while now and it has only deepened my respect for games with good controls. For the last jam, I didn't spend nearly as much time on control feel as I usually do and I got a bunch of negative feedback for it.
For another example, people criticize Unity for games with poor feel, but what's really happening is that Unity has enabled a bunch of new developers to make games with less effort, and that includes spending less effort on getting the controls to work well. All Unity did was lower the bar to entry.
Take a look at Quake III, in bg_pmove.c PM_Accelerate
https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/c...
This is the code that translates player input into acceleration for the physics system to handle. Notice the code blocked out with #if which fixes a bug but the fix isn't used because it "feels bad". The bug lets you accelerate to ridiculous speeds with the right pattern of movement.
That's not true, look at the code. It does something else. You can also check out the .plan from Jun 3, 1999:
> When I tried fixing the code so that it just didn't work, I thought it changed the normal running movement in an unfortunate way.
It simply delivered one of the best modding possibilities ever.
You bought HL and every week you could buy a gaming magazine with 5 new mods. Most of them crap, for sure, but it felt like paying once and getting new stuff all the time.
I never had a game installed for so long and played the "main game" for such a short time.
HL², on the other hand, I played for the story only, never installed any mods or something, but maybe I was already to old to run after this half finished games, haha.
Like I said, I got most of my stuff from gaming magazines before I had Internet, and I almost never saw any Quake mods on their CDs.
On the other hand, I was rather young when Quake was "a thing" and just started with PC gaming. I found out about these magazines a few years later.
I only worked on mods for UT and the original Jedi Knight, and I've only heard second-hand that UT and Quake (3? 2?) were easier to mod than HL1, so I might be wrong.
And compared to Jedi Knight and its only editor(s) being user-made, all these games were easy to mod!
Team Fortress, Quake Chess, AirQuake, ThreeWaveCTF, Xonotic (kinda, sort-of)
Think of three Half-Life mods, as fast as you can:
TFC, Counter-Strike, Natural Selection, Sven Co-op, Science & Industry
Think of three Quake 3 mods, as quickly as possible:
OSP, CPMA, ThreeWave (again), OpenArena
Think of three Doom mods/mappacks, fast:
Memento Mori, Brutal Doom, Batman Doom, Russian Overkill, The Sky May Be, Tech Gone Bad, and so many more
Think of three Minecraft mods, as fast as you can:
Thaumcraft, IC2, Buildcraft, Forge, FMP, Thermal Expansion, Better Than Wolves, RedPower, NEI, Ars Magica, Applied Energistics, Aether Mod, Tinker's Construct. You want more?
Think of three UT mods:
Ummm... Errrr... Ummm... If you count mappacks, somebody might have made a version of Aerowalk for it?
Now, that's just me, but I doubt others would have dissimilar responses.
True. Also I just learned that he actually finished the whole game. I used to follow this series as he was producing it, and I thought he gave up halfway through.
Likewise, if you've played Half-Life 2, you owe it to yourself to read Concerned: The Comic of Gordon Frohman
It's a collection of innovations and feelings that few other games have been able to capture.
On an unrelated side-note, if you've played Half-Life, Freeman's Mind is a must-watch: it's an astoundingly funny bit of comedy that is just so brilliant.
Yahtzee Crowshaw's (yes, the very same guy I mentioned above) LP of the game (Let's Drown Out All Of Half-Life), while by no means a must-watch, is also reccomended.