#1
(lame, but hey!)

i mean its a kind of perspective. valve can be laughing, others not so much.

especially id.

looking at the games id put out you may suggest by the low effort and massive income they made i'm pretty sure they laugh at the gamers too.

I'm becomming a bigger fan of Valve with each passing day.

Not only am I a fan of their approach toward the single player experience (cinematic, episodic) and their obvious ingenuity with the advent of the gravity/portal gun, something which ID was quick to rip off mind you. I also appreciate there dedication to their work.

TF2 might not be the most highly regarded game around these parts but it acheived what I imagine was its goal, that being: sell. And after that they didn't just leave it up to the community to nestle out the complications, rather they continued in-house post-release development. A far cry from something any other developers have done (if there are others, I'm just ignorant of their existence!)

I would continue on about Steam but I can't be arsed, due to my reckoning that even if I presented a rational arguement for what I believe are steams many (many) benefits I'd just get trolled to death :Z.

Go Valve.

ur right on mikey - i work for large pc manufacturer and several executives in the company have used the steam distribution model as an example when talking about how investment in the right technology can exploit new, albeit, obvious markets.

they make the game and have drastically lower distribution costs, happier customers (in general) and built in community. so friggin smart

Exploitation of people is not exactly considered ethical. Just so you know.

exploiting a market is how companies make profit.

i think your brain only understands exploit in a negative connotation.

Exploitation, however you would twist and turn the word around, has a negative connotation, like usurpation. You exploit = natural resources, workers, "markets", children, and so on and so on. It might sound less negative to exploit a market than people, but when you exploit a market you also exploit the people who rely on the market.

Releasing games that cost 45 euros or 50 dollars that last only a few days is exploitation of a market and the consumers (mainly youths with low or zero income) is something that Valve is very good at. You wouldn't buy a rusty car with a halfway broken engine for full price, because you have choice. But when it comes to software, people seem to be somehow more willing to settle with just that.

valve is the shit.
/runs off to play some Left 4 Dead

Quite a few of the changes to TF2 has made the game worse IMO. Sniper is still a good at long ranges, but useless close up since the lesser skilled players couldn't handle people scoping and headshotting them close range (which takes a lot of skill due to the narrow FOV). Soldier now needs to run around ammo packs while demoman still is a spamming machine with lots of easy kills. Taking out a turret often takes 4-10 rockets (depending on if you need to take out the engineer or not), while soldier has 20 total. The classes they nerfed did not really need nerfing, while they left the ones that overpowerd traits alone. Being able to have 8 sticky bombs as demoman is way too much IMO.

The amount of maps in TF2 and the variable quality of them made a lot of people lose interrest. They did a 5 minute job to make well into a CTF map and took them about 4 months to release badlands which I find rather boring and 7 months to release goldrush which is just ok. If you are going to release a game with only 6 maps, atleast release a minimum of 1 map per month after that.

Handicap didn't help either. It's just ridiculous to be punished with lower weapon damage because you are doing well. Criticals are hit and miss. IMO the game would be better without them as it would be more skill based and less luck. Last part that made me lose interrest in TF2 was all the clueless players camping when they are on the attacking team or attacking enemy spawn on defence while opposition is capturing last CP.

clangames are without crits

I know, but that doesn't help when you are playing in pubs.

if you look at the total map pool of quake 3 for instance, how many of those actually get proper play time? hub, dm6, ztn, and t4? not to mention only 2 of those are stock maps. the same goes for ctf or other gametypes, theres maybe 3-4 maps that really get any significant playtime. their reasoning behind keeping the map selection small and putting a ton of effort into each map is something other fps designers should take note of. its about quality, not quantity.

the rest of your post is just opinion, and the last part is you just getting frustrated with pubs, but that somehow makes the game bad right?

T4, T2, DM6, DM7, DM13, DM14 and CTF2 were all used in competition (some with minor modifications) and several other maps were played in pubs in addition to those. That's more maps than TF2 launched with in total and TF2's maps are spread over several gametypes as well. T4, DM6 and DM13 are still used in duel in refined versions.

Their "reasoning" is more like an excuse for not spending more time on making maps. There are three different gamestyles in the original map selection, however CTF got one map, two for attack defend and the other three were CP style maps. That's a very limited selection if you only like one game-style, which valve should have recognised on release. If you like attack defend you only got 2 maps, if you liked CTF you were stuck with only one map etc. which makes the game becomme old really fast.

Nah I don't get really frustrated with pubs, just a bit bored when players on both teams are terrible. If the game was good I would have ignored the clueless players, however in it's current state it is mediocre which didn't keep me interrested in the game. TF2 is the type of game that is really fun for a short while and then you lose interrest. Most of it is thanks to the mood and the artstyle of the game, which feels fresh. The different classes also helps keep the interrest for a few weeks since there is quite a bit to try out. The gameplay was decent but as usual valve manages to change it's mp game for the worse (not that surprising when you look at their history).

the maps out of that list that get the most playtime are identical to the ones i listed. sure some others have been used in competitions, but we both know what the major stock maps are and which get played the most.

as far as only releasing a few maps being an excuse, that isn't true at all. they just released more content and a new map for free. when has id ever done anything like that? your issues about gameplay and it getting boring is opinion and we can agree to disagree, but blasting them for being lazy is just wrong. maybe if they had just released tf2 as it was and didn't keep pumping out free content for it, and releasing new maps then you'd have a point.

List is not identical, you said maybe a few others, I listed 7 stock id maps. As for when id did something like release maps for free, just look at the 1.3 release of Q4 where they added lots of maps to the game.

Valve has barely released any maps for TF2. It pretty much comes down to badlands and goldrush. They should have prepared more maps for the initial release instead of taking 3-4 months to make and release a map. CTF verison of Well doesn't count as a new map since it's pretty much sticking flags on an existing CP map.

i said dm6 and t4 were the most played stock maps, which is what i meant by identical. you listed a few other maps that saw action in competitions. must we argue semantics? the definitive dueling maps of quake are t4 and dm6 which eventually were even changed from stock maps to pro-dm6 and pro-t4 because id didn't get them right the first time. there isn't even an arguement, those are the 2 MOST played stock maps quake 3 has seen with troubled waters being the only stock ctf map worth a damn.

my whole point is that they released quality maps from the get go, which most gaming companys do not. they even take the time to offer more content and support for their game after launch for FREE which is not the norm at all. sure it may take a couple months for them to do it, but at least they put thought and effort into it, instead of gathering a bunch of bad maps together and basically saying "take it or leave it, or make your own".

don't get me wrong either, i'm not an id basher. i love id and i've never had more fun when i've played quake, but they really need to take a few lessons from valve, because regardless if you want to believe or not, they're doing it right.

I don't consider all of the maps in TF2 quality maps (afaik all but hydro, granery and goldrush are remakes). IMO the quality maps are gravelpit (remake) and dustbowl (remake). Hydro and granery are ok while well (remake) and 2fort (remake) are rather boring to play IMO. If releasing only a few maps at launch were most are remakes is the way to follow, then I fear for the future of MP gaming.

id did try the valve aproach with having raven try to port Q3Arena to a modified doom 3 engine. Valve has released two big mp games since HL (not counting mods which later became valve releases). One is CS-source the other is TF2, both are remakes of existing MP games and atleast in CS:S' case it is a dumbed down version of CS. Didn't play too much TFC/TF so I can't say for certain that TF2 is a dumbed down version of older team fortress games, but from the videos I've seen with conc jumping etc. and comments I've read about gameplay that seems to be the case.

Valve has released a total of 8 maps for TF2, which of 5 are remakes. Only delivering 6 maps on launch when 4 are modifications and re-skinning of old maps is not an example I want other developers to follow. Thankfully I didn't play too much TFC otherwise I would prob be so familiar with the maps on launch that I would be bored.

do you realize how many people play dustbowl regardless if it's a remake or not? people still play aerowalk and that map dates back to quake 1. they can remake all the maps they want as long as they're good, and thats all that matters to me. in fact, with all the mapping talent from quake games, maybe they should start using these maps or hiring the people that make them.

I'm the direct opposite of you, at first TF2 waned very quickly. Now however, I put in hours a week and thats only pub mind you, I think it's a fucking blast to play.

Portal was based on game made by some students

if u played the original 'narbtacular drop' you would see that while valve cant take credit for the idea...they completely transformed a neat idea into a fucking awesome game. not sure what the point of ur comment is anyways - its always someone else's idea, student or otherwise.

Portal is Valve's professionally developed spiritual successor to the freeware game Narbacular Drop, the 2005 independent game released by students of the DigiPen Institute of Technology; the original Narbacular Drop team are now all employed at Valve

Oh yeah, valve are certainly the most innovative developers out there.

Half-Life is a classic, Half-Life 2 is monotonous, boring and devoid of actual innovation (Oh wow, physics!!!!!!!LOLOL).

Everything else is just stuff they have bought up in the first place.

they innovate and they capitalize on existing IP as well. it's how you play the game. id does it too, *gasp*

the guys who created the concept were recruited by vavle whiel they were in school - at least valve was smart enough to get that kinda talent onboard.

you might not like their products personally, but critical acclaim and revenue aren't on your side here.

I don't care about id. What "innovation" have valve done, ever.

"Critical Acclaim" these days is pretty much as good as saying "PUBLISHER HAS LOTS OF MONEY" so......

It sold well, yes and it wasn't a BAD game it just wasn't innovative or anything special.

I wouldn't say they were hired when they were in "school" either but that's nit picking, the basic idea and core concept had already been made and was known about before valve got involved and hired them, same thing happened with CS, TF, DoD etc.

yes and they were hired by Valve to make Portal, silly pole!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narbacular_Drop#Sequel

Yes, that valve employed that whole group of students so they could create Portal.

portal for me was fun because they presented it in such an awesome way and gave a nice twist to it

indeed excite alpha i think.. it no worky no more, like garrys mod (the free one) ):

let me plus you sir because you are right!

Get real, the concept of moving objects around is ages old.

Valve only took it to the next level because they were one of, if not the first dev to incorporate the Havok/Physics API into their game, which in turn made the idea an obvious reality.

The company is over 160 people now--it was 20 people when we shipped Half-Life.

Now I know how much people it takes to ruin a game.

wich one? Half-Life 2 was pretty decent and TF2 is pretty strange compared to the original ;D

...was pretty descent and after a while the whole physic demonstration gets boring. hl2 wasnt a good game. i had no fun, i never played it until the end.

Yeah, HL2 wasn't even the shadow of HL

7% pluses for such a dumb comment?

Valve specializes in remaking bug-ridden noobified versions of old mods made by modders completely unrelated to Valve.

Enjoy your shitty unoriginal bug-ridden iteration of Team Fortress.

Id Software > Valve because they created quake and Doom. While Doom3 and Quake4 may have sucked ass, Id still wins in my books because they birthed a genre and e-sports in general. Valve just rips from the work of others.

im not even going to bother typing all the problems with your totally silly sentiment.

complete

and

total

fail.

No.

Valve games appeal mostly to new gamers who werent even born when the original Doom came out.
You probably wont understand what TF was like back in the day and you probably think CS started on the Source engine. So yea, please dont reply.
I give credit where its due, and Id has done some pretty revolutionary stuff in the past where valve mainly copies ideas and dumb them down for a general audience.

I'm sure they all died a little bit inside when they made their first million dollars

you can salute id all u want for being innovative - ill keep buying games that are fun to play. they dont have to be mutually exclusive, but sometimes (more lately than ever) id's 'revolutionary' products have not been as much fun as others.

and your assumptions about my experiences as a gamer are another bag of fail, as i have been around long enough to remember the original days of fps games through the various mods - including the original beta of CS pre commerical support.

this is a pointless argument because:

1: u are wrong

2: think the quality of a game is based on something other than how fun it is to play

lol, fail.
I have never said that Valve games were more fun than the older Id games (Q3 and below). Your intrinsic bias towards newer, easier games is obvious.

If you are implying that games that dont appeal to a wide audience are inherently not fun to play and hence not as good, then you are very very bad.

One of the reasons Q3 trumps TF2 is because it has a higher learning curve and isnt utterly stupid and one-dimensional. I have the orange box, and the only game i liked was HL2. Portal and TF2 are complete garbage. I find myself returning to older games that werent consolized for a dumb pre-teen audience.

have you ever heard of Half-Life, motha fukka?
one of the best games EVER.

have you seen a garpy demo for HL DM? then stfu.

HLDM sucks

oh nose

I laugh at valve laughing, everyone is lulz.

Steam is a godsend to PC gaming imho. Physical media is what's on the way out, not pc gaming. Steam as a distribution/ updating method is beautiful. If you don't believe me, go buy the Orange Box. Then reformat your computer. then see how much work is involved with reinstalling Q3 off of cd, (like I do), vs clicking on a button with Steam to get those games back. It's great.

yep, i just wished steam was a base for all companies to follow and distribute their games as the ones of valve, its just the way to go imho.

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein

they are getting there, as companies like epic and id are now distributing via steam (as well as heaps of other companies). MS games for windows is the only company with a similar distribution technology that might compete...but thats really more console focused and is fucking shit compared to steam

"how much work is involved with reinstalling Q3 off of cd"
same clicking plus puting a cd/dvd of the game ? you know what I can even instal [game] this way without an internet connection
not mentioning steam is a bugged intrusive pos

lol keep clinging man. People like you are why PC gaming is dying, not Steam.
You're really gonna tell me that you can click one button ONCE and then wait til it's done and hop in a server... you can do that with Q3? Really? Also, how in the hell is it intrusive? It's not like it's PnkBstrA/PnkBstrB.

CLING
hu yes I can instal q3 and patch it (omg 2 clicks, no wait 3 as you have to dowload it. maybe even 4) and play
"clicking" a bit more (hahahahahahahahaha, "the number of clicks is twhoo high *sob*"... ok die already, even if it was 10 millions of clicks) and have the game on a real support without needing any internet connection ? good to me
and from my own personal experience steam is a bugged intrusive pos, poor chance to make me change my mind on this

imo real games (I mean "not the little progs a bunch of guys did in a basement on their week ends") will remain sold on dvd and such, and maybe when they'll move their big slow fat ass they'll put some autopatching features for the lazy asses (and also force these autopatching for mp games, for the sake of us, having one uniq player base per game)

With steam speeds a reinstall is 20 hours of download unless I spend like 2-4 hours once in a while having steam make backups of my content files. If their content servers had decent speed I would get those 28 gigs in 6-7hours and don't even have everything installed. DVD install takes 5-15 minutes depending on the game. Even if you had 100mbit line it would still be faster to install it from dvd, so keep clinging to your "steam games are so fast and easy to isntall". It takes a long time to get down HL2-EP2 and Portal if you have no steam files on your computer when you begin.

Steam blows.

Valve make their games for the players, not for showing tech demos. That makes them succesful.

It looks to me like the PC market is only dying for companies that are unable to adapt to the changing market place and have too small a financial base to just bull through the complications of said marketplace.

exactly what i thought...darwinism for pc game development houses

i laugh at valve to make competative orientated games, rather than pretty ones for the mass market

now that they know how to market games, they should create good one, could be a plus to sell
cause only hl1 and portal, in nearly 10 years that's not a lot

Portal was a great game (even if the escape part wasn't really my cup of tea). HL2, HL2-ep1 and HL2-ep2 were all quite good (not great though). The thing with valve is they always deliver a quality game even if they only have on classic under their belt (which IMO still stands among top 10 PC games of all time). Valve's status comes from the consistency, which no other developer except IW and Blizzard can match.

You know you will atleast get an above average title whenever you pay for a valve SP game. I do consider the HL2 range to be overrated by critics and quite a few fanboys, but it's still a set of quality titles in my book.

from my pov : boring gameplay, technically ok (no major bug)
if I had to choose between this and good games full of bugs I would go with this last one

Gotta agree with you, valve are at least solid with all their true games. That's far superior to most developers.

I hate Valve for starting to implement big in-game ads though. But yeah steam is a very useful program.

The "PC gaming is dying"-sentence only comes from guys failing at their work:

Epic: UT3 - the core of the game might be good, but that's about it. The rest of it is a buggy, unfinished, ridiculously hardware-eating, depressive mapped piece of a graphic demonstration that is not even able to put a 10 year old gameplay into something fun.

Crytek: Crysis - mostly graphics again, but this time you don't have a multiplayer. so what do you have? a good looking game you can play through in under 10h. is it worth 60bugs? no! and everybody knows that, except the console kids and their parents. no wonder they can't sell it, it's just not worth the money.

Infinity Ward: CoD4 - well, i can't believe they didn't make good money with this game. they just made alot more on the consoles and now, while looking like this: $_$, they think PCs suck.

don't get me started on id :>

i personally think Valve's doing great and risked alot in the past with pulling out steam and games like TF2 or Portal, but they were rewarded for it. and while others put out the same old stuff every few years, they actually try to make something that is new AND fun, the two most important things in a game to become successful.

gaming industry, look at Valve, they arrived in the 21st century! you didn't.

I'm pretty sure Blizzard would beg to differ with that last sentence

Blizzard by and large doesn't produce shit. It might not be your cup of tea, but you can't argue that what they do, they do pretty effing well. It also makes them boatloads of cash-money by appealing to an immense crossection of people.

I see reading comprehension isn't your forté

hm cod4 pc is exploding with multiplayer servers. they all must buy a cdkey original - exept a few cracked server without key authentification.

> The "PC gaming is dying"-sentence only comes from guys failing at their work

[+] for truth and for saving me some typing. :P

I'm surprised by the COD4 "complaint" too, tho I think IW (understandably) have quite an axe to grind about PC piracy.

As far as Crytek etc goes tho? No question. Here's a clue for them: make a game that isn't UTTER FUCKING GARBAGE and maybe someone will actually buy it.
We've got this intarwebs thing now: paying LameSpot etc to give you 10 stars doesn't actually fool anyone any more...

edit> "review site" name changed to a completely arbitrary made-up one that has nothing to do with any real organisation, especially not one that fired a senior staffer for failing to understand how bribes work .
"allegedly..."

142fps? :p

I don't know the scene at all I'll admit, but just looking at it I'd suggest the big issue with COD4 on pc versus console is it's a lot easier to convince your friend, your friend's friends and all their friends to go buy a copy hop online and play at night on Xbox than it is to lead someone through the steps of achieving the same experience on PC. Sure it can be done but it's a helluva lot more work, possibly more the reason COD4 sells less on PC than on Xbox?

"As far as Crytek etc goes tho? No question. Here's a clue for them: make a game that isn't UTTER FUCKING GARBAGE and maybe someone will actually buy it."

Crysis has sold over a million copies worldwide: http://crysiseu.com/Crysis-News/EA-Crysis-Sal...tions.html

Crysis sold ~86,000 in the US in its first month, and it's been downhill since then.

Crytek are (sorry) crying about how bad their sales are.

Somebody's either VERY confused or lying through their teeth.

" Saturday, 02 February 2008

According to the Q3 2008 Electronic Arts Earnings Conference Call, it came to our knowledge that Crysis has been a strong performer with sales, with it exceeding expectations. As EA, reported that Crysis has reached the platinum mark, making it clear that it reached over 1 million copies sold worlwide."

Doesnt look like it went downhill, seems more like their sales picked up. Also, i wouldnt say that EA is lying about the sales. If it did do poorly (like the PS3 version of Orange Box) then they would not have even mentioned the sales numbers.

Also, Crysis did pretty well in Europe, topping the charts in Germany, and in Japan. So i guess that explains how they hit a million.

The COD4 devs are also crying about how badly the PC version is doing, would you say the game is bad? I wouldnt.

indeed!
imho pc game developers put too much weight on graphics and too little on gameplay.. on console games it's way more balanced.
if the pc game developers would create their games for pc with as much gameplay percentage in it as on the console games, then there would be way more $ in there for them.

seriously, if I spend 1000 bucks on a new pc, then no wonder the number of games I can buy is limited.
If games would focus more on gameplay, instead of trying to push me to buy a new pc, then I would be able to buy more games.

Dont make me laugh. PC games have better gameplay by default because you arent forced to use a lousy gimped dual analogue controller.
Console games are limited gameplay-wise because they sacrifice good gameplay (i.e. mouse and keyboard controls) for better optimised graphics. So if good visuals are all you care about, consoles are for you.

You're quite confused about gameplay..
input devices for console are indeed the worst thing ever, pretty much the only reason why I don't own any console.
but gameplay is not the interface you have to the game, interfaces might be parts of gameplay, but I'd say the bigger part is how the game works, the things that make it unique and fun to play.
consoles have way more coop games, although consoles are not in any way better for cooperative gameplay.
consoles focus more on story, player behaviour, weapons, riddles and fun than most pc games do.

i laugh at gabe newells gut