Stardock Boss Thinks Steam Is Holding Back Half-Life
- Thread starter Logan Westbrook
- Start date
You can, its called offline mode. The only prerequesite you need to play in offline mode is that your games must be updated. And its really RARE for they not to be when youre in offline mode. Also, yes offline mode is a little bit yiffy, but its reasonably yiffy. I play everyday in offline mode cause i spend a part of my day in a place where internet is....non existant.Ldude893 said:
Wardell is secretly a big fan of Half-Life and he hopes that by telling Valve they're doing a poor job, they'll put it out and go like, "Ha. Proved you wrong," which he will then have to publicly apologize for, but secretly he'll be going, "Ha HA. I win!" Makes perfect sense.
See, that doesn't make an ounce of sense. Working on Steam and working on a game are two radically different skills. All of Valve's "best people" are the writers and artists and level designers, and there's no use for people like that on the staff of what is essentially an online store. Either this guy has about as much idea how to run a business as the average chimpanzee, or he's just flinging his poo around to attract the attention of the slack-jawed onlookers, hoping he can turn them against Valve.Logan Westbrook said:
Wait, it's WHAT, now? I think somebody messed with your autocorrect for April Fool's Day and you missed one.draythefingerless said:
Well, Valve does a bunch of experimental stuff like biofeedback testing and eye-tracking movement for FPS controls, etc. Much of which doesn't see the light of day for the consumer or their end products, but it's something they do for their knowledge and to see if they can implement it in their games. Some of that undoubtedly factors into the extremely long dev cycle for their games. And if you listen to the dev commentary on their games, they test and iterate over and over and over again. The amount of polish and tweaking on their games is ridiculous, but it all adds to a longer development time.
On top of that the group of people working on Steam are definitely not the same people that develop their games. It's a little silly to think that a designer is going to be the same person making the business deals and programming for the Steam platform.
Stardock, while a great PC developer (barring a few recent mishaps), had a lot of problems with Impulse, and they're nowhere near the size of Valve, nor do they have the same amount of capital. And Wardell has said some silly stuff in the past, plus he's almost exclusively focused on business, so I'm very inclined to take what he says with a large helping of salt.
On top of that the group of people working on Steam are definitely not the same people that develop their games. It's a little silly to think that a designer is going to be the same person making the business deals and programming for the Steam platform.
Stardock, while a great PC developer (barring a few recent mishaps), had a lot of problems with Impulse, and they're nowhere near the size of Valve, nor do they have the same amount of capital. And Wardell has said some silly stuff in the past, plus he's almost exclusively focused on business, so I'm very inclined to take what he says with a large helping of salt.
Look at the Diablo Team for Blizzard. Released in 2000 (Number two)? Rumors for D3 were around as early in 2004. Now, its finally coming out. Hopefully, 4th quarter.
From what I've gleaned from various interviews, it sounds like there actually is some overlap between the Steam people and the game people, but the Steam team is small enough that it's not a big deal.lumenadducere said:
If a AAA game like Portal 2 only took 30 people (and Dota 2 is presumably much smaller) then I think it's a safe bet that a large chunk of the 250 people there have been quietly chugging away at a Half Life game for quite some time. Valve knows that the bar has been raised since Episode 2 came out, and I'm sure the long delay is because they want the next chapter to be as revolutionary as HL and HL2 were.