For what it’s worth, Robin Walker and his team are working on the next half life after Alyx. Will that ever come out? I have no idea and I’m not expecting anything. Deadlock however is a game designed by one of the grandfathers of the moba genre, and has had over 20k concurrent players at any given time, and it wasn’t even announced with it’s existence only known through word of mouth. That’s insanely impressive and shows how huge the moba genre really is and how those players are thirsty for a new game from a big company. It sucks and I wish we had more sp valve games but I’m content with the work they’ve done on proton, steamos, the steam deck, steam itself, and half life alyx. They haven’t been sitting on their hands not doing anything, they’ve been putting their focus on more technical areas versus making games and that’s ok.

I’d much rather have a game like deadlock developed out of love and passion than some suits dictating to the devs to make games they don’t want to. That’s how we get Avengers, Redfall, Gotham Knights, etc…

but they do have all the money in the world, no external pressure, no publisher to shit on them, it’s just their developers and artists and a vision.

I think that’s part of the issue. Supposedly they do have multiple games in development and a large percentage of their employees are working on them. But they are content to let the creative and technical processes play out, without announcing too-ambitious release dates which inevitably get pushed back and still have a buggy game released. And sometimes they even cut their losses if a long term project just isn’t working out.

Why does this billion dollar company not do exaxtly what I expect them to😡 They made great games because those are the ones I like and now they make shitty games because I dont like them.

Dude, where have you been? Look how little good single player games rockstar is putting out.

It’s just harder and less profitable.

I rather have one great red dead 2 than 5 forgettable ones; looking at your assassins creed, used to be one of my favourites and I haven’t played anything after black flag.

If I ever get VR stuff, I would want to play Alyx but if they had 5 okayish games instead, it would be a nope from me.

I still haven’t even played black mesa even though i bought it, I like fewer but better choices especially since I’m more busy in this stage of life.

Valve doesn’t want to make a buy to play game unless it’s something that pushes the medium forward somehow, which is the only reason Alyx was made. A PvP moba can be a source of continued revenue like all the other games they still support (and one they don’t).

Isnt Icefrog one of the lead devs? I guess he likes this style of game. How many Total Wars, 4x and CoDs were released while Valve made one more Dota-like. Valve has some cool people working, vut O don’t see a Suda51, a Raphael, Swery or Co, who has the focus to develope such a single player experience. If the flat structure with ‘at will’ project focus is still a thing, than sp games have probably a problem getting devs.

Weren’t there just credible leaks on a sequel to Half Life Alyx that may or may not be Half Life 3.

Got access to it a few days ago. I played it for a few hours. Here’s my take:

It’s just a tps dota

Now, I don’t mind that too much. My problem is with the plethora of issues combat has

1. Despite there being damage falloff, you are directly decentivised from fighting in close range. This is because you both have little minions on both sides that attack the enemy and heal you. Why would you jump into that? Why would you give up your source of healing?

2. It’s way too easy to retreat. So you just poked and prodded the enemy for 3-4 minutes, finally got into a favourable position, pushed in, and they’re already on the zipline out of there. Sure, this is good for you, you can attack their sentinel. But attacking their sentinel isn’t fun. It just stands there and attacks your minions. You’re punished too much for dying, why would you risk it?

3. The stun abilities are atrocious. Picture this: you and an enemy found each other without support. You’re deep in a close range firefight, having fun for once in the game. Then this rando pokes their head around a corner, stuns you, and you’re dead before the stun ends. Why is this in any game?

4. Most hero weapons feel like you’re shooting wet paper towels. The majority of them are fast-shooting, but not in a good CS way. More like “I sincerely hope this is changed and these are just placeholders” way. The few that actually feel good to play (such as the girl with the green arm or the greaser dude) either lack damage in general or damage in mid-long range fights, the majority of the game

The most fun I had in this game had nothing to do with objectives or lanes or teamwork. It was when I was going between lanes and found an enemy doing the same, causing a close ranged battle. Makes me wish they just made this as another TF2

Anyone have an invite for Deadlock?

I remember them saying that they dont want to do another one in the series because they are looking to innovate and make something truly original.

I don’t remember them saying this, but I remember people speculating that this was a reason. The truth is, if you look into The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, they prototyped a bunch of different single player games that were cancelled because they just weren’t working, including Half-Life 3. Post-Alyx, in recent weeks, we have evidence to suggest that Half-Life 3 may be imminent.

It’s true they’ve always been distracted with multiplayer games as well, things like Counter-Strike or Team Fortress and I did play them for sure, because I was a kid and I had all the time in the world.

These days I’m not a kid anymore and so when I game I tend to look more for memorable experiences instead of mindless grinding.

Boy, I miss the days when multiplayer games didn’t mean mindless grinding. I play fighting games, and the mindless grinding in recent releases is siloed off to a separate mode that I don’t have to think about; otherwise you’re playing the game because it’s fun and/or because you want to get better at it, not unlock the latest costume. I would love nothing more than for campaign FPS games to come back–the kind that postdated the designs of what we now call boomer shooters–and to come with a deathmatch/CTF mode made out of levels recycled from the campaign, playable online and local. You’d play that multiplayer mode for maybe 5 hours or maybe 5000 hours, depending on how much magic they managed to capture in it, but you absolutely would not have some expectation that the devs must keep updating it. Those were good times, and I didn’t appreciate how good we had it.

The laws of captialism entropy:

Any organization that sees success will attract profit-driven leadership, and will become such over time. The soul from the original founders will be watered down, dampened, or ejected.

A profit-driven organization will over time become more and more profit-seeking, never less. Once this reaches a certain threshold, we start to use phrases like “enshittification”. Valve hasn’t gone shit yet imho, but their soul and passion doesn’t seem to lie in games anymore.

The next excellent product comes from new, growing organizations or small teams that may grow into such.

It is best to just treat it as any other law of nature and so we move on from Blizzard, Google, EA, Valve, Epic Games, Unity, etc and go swim in the wonderful vibrant indie scene.

My immediate emotional reaction is to dunk on you. Boo hoo, a company won’t make a game you want. But you’re missing the valve you grew up with, and gaming is worse off now. Multiplayer games with subscription models and microtransactions have become the default, and we all feel it.

For me Deadlock has great characters, lore, new interesting mechanics, and only surface level similarities with DOTA. I’m not upset about it really. Just happy Valve is making anything again. Maybe I’m worn down, but so many big companies take but shits everyday I’m just happy to see one building good shit. (And it’s free!)