I played L4D2 over the weekend. There were dozens of games available to join. I played Helms Deep for a couple hours and we were never without 4 humans, even though several people left from time to time. I’d say L4D2 is still fairly active.
I have no problem with Valve not updating it. There are lots of mods yet to play.
That’s good to know, last few times i tried playing it there wasn’t much activity and i hadn’t gone back to it since for the past few years.
There’s been some more recent criticism about their internal development culture that i’ve read from this past year. There’s likely some good merits to how they decide what to work on, but without a real agenda it seems that it’s lead to constant work, not much to show for it, and little communication.
I’m happy to give Valve whatever time they need to come up with quality products, and they don’t necessarily need to have constant communication about everything they’re doing. However at any given time all i see from them is VR and Steam sales.
… or you could go outside, maybe for a walk or take up some hobby away from the keyboard.
To be fair, I only looked at Survival games, not Campaigns, etc. But my two friends and I often play Campaigns, and always get a 4th to join us.
No, we’re not talking about World of Warcraft.
“völkisch consumerism”
Huh? What?
Well, that was more or less my reaction to reading the reveal. “New Valve game? /perks up, excitedly. DOTA-based card game? Groan.” Everyone is making fucking DOTA-style lane-pushers and card game spin-offs, right now (and even card games based on lane-pushers). The last thing people really expect from Valve is a me-too game that’s extremely late to the party and doesn’t benefit from Valve’s development resources.
I wonder how true that is, still. I really can’t imagine that the project that got Valve developers excited was a DOTA-based card game. That kind of game always feels like more of an easy revenue generator than passion-project. Although perhaps it simply required so few developers to get on board that it was the only kind of project they could actually get enough people to finish under that kind of work environment.
This to me seems to be a fairly likely scenario. So… synergy, as companies are wont to do. It complements their current cash cow DOTA2 so i see why there’d be motivation there to provide related content for that demographic.
I’m not huge on DOTA style games and not usually into card based videogames so it’s mostly lost on me. If the game turns out to be great good for them, but it’s hard to get excited over something i’ll never touch.
Same here. I can’t see using my quad-core cpu with my 1080 graphics card to play a card game.
I enjoy the occasional indie game with interesting game mechanics. If a small developer came up with a similar concept but with a neat premise that wasn’t “DOTA card game” i’d be intrigued. However from Valve i would have expected something much more interesting, regardless of the scope of the game.
It must be hell trying to get games made there, really. I know of some studios where the financial pressure was off because of a previous big hit, and it was a matter of working on what they wanted to work on, with the end result being that the studios all ended up closing because they couldn’t get their act together. Valve has Steam, so the financial pressure is off for good - they can release small games and fiddle around with VR projects that will never be profitable all they want. Larger projects may be limited to partially-made games they picked up from other teams (e.g. Portal, Left4Dead, DOTA). They may more or less have the same problem that hobbyist teams do - that unless it’s an existing idea that people are already into, it’s hard to generate the interest to get people to work on it. I suppose some Valve employees were fans of the other card games and since DOTA was an existing property with a fan base and art assets they could use, etc. it made it that much easier to do it.
Lane-pushers don’t really interest me all that much and the card games really don’t - it doesn’t help that both seem to be fairly interchangeable from one game to another, without a lot of variation and innovation. DOTA at least was fairly early on in the lane-pusher craze, but at this point there are enough spin-off card games that it feels weirdly superfluous.
I second that confusion. The fuck what?
@beschizza, what on earth do you mean by that? This sounds awful, but the connotations make it horrible to the N-th degree.
well, i mean. They announced a card game they’re making. No one seems too happy about it, but what’s this about not making games? and this thing about little to no support for existing games doesn’t really jive either. What you mean is that the 2 or 3 games you care about most aren’t under as intense of active development as you’d prefer, right? They’re definitely fully supporting their most recent games, and once you go really any further into the past than CS:GO then they are all games that are either rightfully considered ‘done’ or old enough that any reasonable person would agree they would be justified to put them waaaaaay on the back burner (looking at you, TF2). I mean I get that I’m talking about game(s) you love and want to see more of but how much resources do you honestly expect them to devote to a 10 year old game?
There’s an important piece of context they’re missing which helped increase the disappointment before: the way that valve announced this before the announcement was saying that “have news that isn’t related to dota or counter strike” (For those not in the loop, DoTA 2 and CS:GO are really the only things that valve has given a shit about since…2012?). People were, because of this, expecting with reason hl3, portal 3, l4d3, tf3 (jesus they’re not kidding about valve and 3’s are they?) or a new IP. Instead the news was related to DoTA and it was a card game based on DoTA. The speculation shifted to “is that why Day9 was brought on for commentary?” Day9 being a prominent hearthstone player who in the last year or so has had a popular Twitch series about learning DoTA.
By that I mean when the object of consumption becomes the glue of a community with peculiarly völkisch qualities: a fabricated and exclusionary folklore, a resentment of progressive liberal values and institutions, a fraternal identity that takes on a nationalistic intensity over time, the prevalence of folk heroes over organized leadership, and so on.
In the context of gamers, it’s the culture of marketing-driven gamer identity sold to an army of marginally middle-class kids who became desperate for fraternity as failure loomed over their lives. This all fed into gamergate and various harassment campaigns (often taken as a prelude to Trumpism and the so-called alt-right), and publishers and advertisers are still quite unsettled by it. They are generally loathe to prank, troll or otherwise infuriate this audience for pleasure, because the audience doesn’t get it and is always ready to salt their seats.
Consumerism is the secret ingredient of all of it and they’ll be killing everyone soon. It’s not a life, it’s a lifestyle!
They are currently still actively making money off TF2, so as long as it is in development and making Valve money i would hope that they would make decisions that would best serve the community that is supporting it. That hasn’t been the case on Valve’s part.
As a frequent player of some ancient Valve games, I think that people confuse “updates” with “fun new content”. They do constant updates to run with contemporary hardware and OS, optimizations, network and rendering tweaks, anti-cheats, client-side prediction/latency adjustments. A few years ago I was willing to jump from using Linux experimentally to full-time - in part because Valve got back into OpenGL and started porting their games. One time when the Rift was new, I found an error which prevented some Source games from working with VR over the network, I contacted Valve, and they had it fixed within a few hours. I really can’t fault them here.
But updates are not the same as shiny new content for existing games. Sure, they maybe only make money now from DOTA2 and TF2, but that is also a consequence of concentrating their efforts on those games. There are games which could see more love. But at least they still work, sometimes nearly 15 years later, and that isn’t nothing. Unlike other companies, they do at least encourage the community to make new assets for the games.
