RIP In the Valley of Gods(AKA WTF VALVE).

[Dalisclock]

https://www.polygon.com/2019/12/3/20994257/valve-in-the-valley-of-gods-campo-santo-half-life-alyx

So I rather liked Firewatch and was looking forward to In the Valley of Gods. Now, with Valve putting it on hold so the team can work on "Other Projects", very likely we'll never see it, just like HL3 disappeared into the Aether a decade ago.

I'm a bit salty, because Valley of Gods was supposed to be finished in the next month or so which implied it was fairly close to completion, so why Valve isn't letting them finish the game they were working on both baffles me and rubs me the wrong way. It's Valve time from here on out, so either delayed forever or outright canceled(But you know, without the courtesy of a cancelation notice).

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

That sucks, I love the visual aesthetics of the game and was really interested in it.

 

[Hawki]

There's probably a joke to be made somewhere about Valve making (proper, yes, I know that's elitist) games again, but apparently at the expense of Valley, but if so, I don't know how to phrase it.

 

[SupahEwok]

I'm a bit salty, because Valley of Gods was supposed to be finished in the next month or so which implied it was fairly close to completion, so why Valve isn't letting them finish the game they were working on both baffles me and rubs me the wrong way. It's Valve time from here on out, so either delayed forever or outright canceled(But you know, without the courtesy of a cancelation notice).

Well, the obvious answer is that it wasn't actually a month away from completion. Nobody throws away a 90% completed project for little reason. Month away means the game should actually be basically finished, with QA and polish in full swing. Things that don't require the full dev team. So there's probably trouble with the game behind the scenes.

The quote in the article you linked makes it sound like the devs drifted to other projects on their own. Whether that's that particular person trying to save face as his devs migrated to other projects they found more interesting (for whatever reason), or Valve interfering with the studio, is up to reader interpretation. Given Valve's notorious reputation for letting their devs work on any project they want (which is what I think is the main thing that keeps Valve from getting games made, they'll get halfway through a project and have finished with all the fun conception and prototyping stuff, and folks don't want to do the boring stuff of cobbling it all together into a working, polished whole), my bet is on the former, but it could go either way.