BlemboTheThird

BlemboTheThird, miesiąc temu

I’m not sure I believe that Valve ran out of ideas for HL3. That’s clearly the image they want to project, and maybe even what they tell themselves, but judging from the ideas they did have for Episode 3 they showcased in that documentary, there was more than enough to justify releasing a game. Certainly there was as much or more new stuff than there was for either EP1 or 2. I think it’s much more likely they simply decided their other projects at the time–CS:GO, DOTA 2, even TF2–had way more moneymaking potential. And I mean, they were right! They made a ton of money off of lootboxes and cosmetics for their multiplayer titles. I don’t think Steam had totally taken over the market yet, so they were hedging their bets on multiplayer microtransactions.

I dunno. The whole “it needs to be new” philosophy they constantly espouse to hasn’t really been true at least as far back as Portal 2. Even Alyx wasn’t particularly revolutionary as far as VR titles go. Maybe doing that type of design was new to Valve, but the only standout features that distinguishes Alyx from other games are the graphics and the (genuinely very good) grabbity glove object pickup system. Pretty much everything else is several steps behind other VR shooter games in the name of Accessibility™, from movement to weapon selection to the painfully dumb AI.

They didn’t run out of ideas. The movement FPS genre is alive and well for a reason, even today: there’s lots to be done. They just lost interest in it themselves, and I believe the reason for that is primarily monetary.

BlemboTheThird, miesiąc temu

They do often talk about “it needs to be new,” but for the most part the things they release don’t actually follow that philosophy. Artifact was trying to follow the likes of Hearthstone. CS2 is a glowup of CS:GO. DOTA2, League. Deadlock is the closest they’ve come to something genuinely innovative in at least a decade, but even that is still following on the heels of MOBA/FPS hybrids like OW and Paladins, just taking more elements from MOBAs.

And the “not caring about money” thing wasn’t true in 2008. They were probably getting to that point around 2012, as Steam began to turn into a money printer and their microtransaction games took off, but that wouldn’t have been until after HL3 had been cancelled at least once. At some point Valve talked about the difficulties in selling Portal 2 (I think it might have been in the dev commentary? Idk it’s been years) and one of the points they bring up was how even a huge success like that game wasn’t living up to their other titles. They tried to implement microtransactions with the co-op mode, but they learned lessons about how that model only worked in bigger multiplayer games. One of the big stories they tell in both the HL1 and HL2 documentaries were the troubles they ran into with funding, and I guarantee they were not looking to repeat those experiences by continuing work on a game that had far less potential for return on investment. Again, that might have changed by 2012, but by then the momentum was already gone.

BlemboTheThird, 3 miesiące temu

The key to having fun with the gonarch fight (and other huge chunks of Xen too, like the Gargantua chase and Nihilanth) is to discover that the jump pack is broken and if you hold your crouch key, it tricks the game into thinking you never touched the ground. So you never lose momentum and can infinitely slide around at a thousand miles an hour, boosting your speed every time the jump pack recharges a bar. If you’ve never learned Source airstafing, the wide open first stage of the gonarch fight is a great place to start.

I do agree the gonarch was changed to be a ridiculous sponge though. Its regular health bar is set a bit too high anyway, but on top of that it’s actually invulnerable through the whole sequence between the first and last stages of the fight. Which would be fine, except they didn’t do anything to communicate that to the player! It still bleeds, it still makes pain noises, and the only way to figure it out is to waste a bunch of time dumping ammo into it. Very silly oversight.

BlemboTheThird, 3 miesiące temu

Ain’t no way that’s a real person, who tf could possibly type that out and click post without a moment of introspection

BlemboTheThird, 4 miesiące temu

Valve has made attempts to take down projects that follow those rules. TF2Classic is the example that comes to my mind since it’s the main one I’ve played, but I know there are several others. In TF2C’s case, they tried contacting Valve to find out why they’d been hit with a C&D, never heard back, and eventually quietly resumed development.

Some kind of miscommunication between legal and the devs? Maybe internal drama? Maybe they didn’t really pay attention and still aren’t aware TF2C is back up? Who knows. Still happened tho.

BlemboTheThird, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

Leaving it to rot for 15 years was far more unjust than a slightly less “revolutionary” game. And the concepts they show in the new doc are cool as hell! I would have loved to shoot at blobmonster! They just decided singleplayer FPS games weren’t as profitable, and that’s fine, I guess. They’re a company, they want to make money. But pretending they were somehow doing us a favor by leaving the cliffhanger for so long is utter nonsense. Especially since they wound up simply retconning it so the whole wait was pointless anyway!

Edit: y’all they literally said in the doc that if they’d kept working on it for 1-2 more years they would have been able to complete it, but they were more interested in multiplayer games and went to go work on that. But if you really want to drink the self-aggrandizing bs that Newell spouts, go right ahead

BlemboTheThird, 7 miesięcy temu

When I look at the steam store Portal has a price tag of $9.99.

Portal didn’t come out until 2007 with the orange box, which also had hl2: episode 2 (and tf2), but the base game of hl2 came out standalone in 2004. This giveaway is a celebration of hl2’s 20th anniversary, so maybe they’ll do a portal giveaway in 2027.

BlemboTheThird, 7 miesięcy temu

They’ve admitted to cancelling ideas before, getting to various stages of production before going back to the drawing board, but always (and appear to still) insist that it is in development on some level. That’s why Newell’s responses to questions about hl3 are usually some form of “we have nothing new to share.” Valve doesn’t like sharing until they’re in the final stages of development, and hl3 has never made it that far.

BlemboTheThird, 7 miesięcy temu

99% sure Lemmy has a higher average age than any social media other than maybe facebook

BlemboTheThird, 11 miesięcy temu

Agreed. High res is not the same thing as good graphics. The Halo 1 remaster is another great example of that; the og graphics look SO much better

BlemboTheThird, rok temu

In my experience steam will still give you s refund if the game is rendered literally unplayable

BlemboTheThird, rok temu

They’re still taking something they didn’t make and selling it as though they did. I have every right to write and film a Batman movie, spend as much time I want making it professional, and then show it to people, as long as I don’t charge them for it. That doesn’t give Fox or whoever the right to take my movie and charge for it instead. Even if I did break the law by making people pay for it, the actual owners would only be entitled to that money, not to go make mroe money off of it themselves. It’s still my work even if it uses concepts invented by someone else.

There’s a reason every franchise under the sun has mountains of fanart and fanfic without the companies that own them trying to take control of it: it’s blatantly illegal.

BlemboTheThird, rok temu

And here I was just reading that AMD GPUs showed much better performance in Starfield. Maybe it’s because they’re just not rendering stuff at all lmao

BlemboTheThird, rok temu

Xbox emulation looks underdeveloped compared to PlayStation and Wii, but from what I can tell Xenia has come a long way in the last couple of years. If you’re willing to give it a go, you could try ripping the games off your discs and just play on PC