Halflife 3 is going to be amazing you guys
Valve can’t count to 3 though.
Expect after the Steam Deck 2 for its successors to be Steam Deck 2: Episode 1 and Steam Deck 2: Episode 2.
Steam Deck: Alyx
Just stay away from the knockoff Steam Deck: Kill the Freeman.
That was the Steam Deck 64GB: Kill the free space (with shader caches)
My Deck64 was turned into a 1tb before you could even buy them like that though. For anyone who had extra 2230s lying around and was going to use a screen protector anyways it was a no brainer.
I modified mine too but I tried to go the 512GB SD card route first and just install everything on that. Yeah still filled the internal storage. 1TB SSD is worth it. Now i just use the SD card for emudeck+roms.
It would be free marketing if they went with that approach. I can already see the headlines: “Why the ‘Steam Deck 3’ is called the ‘Steam Deck: Episode 1’ and other 5 things with origins on the memeverse”
Yep. I consider HL:Alex to be HL:3. It’s that good.
But I still want another HL game.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is gonna be perfect.
(Actually, knowing those devs, it might.)
Their problem is they already made a perfect game. Now they have to do it again. Doing something perfectly once can be chance, doing it twice is massively more difficult.
I can’t wait for my great grandson to play it
Here you dropped this: "great "
Not sure why we’re arguing this quote with the same two games over and over. Nms and cyberpunk are great games, but they’re a rarity.
Game Dev crunch is a plague in th industry, we suffer as consumers who cop bad releases on release. The whole industry could learn from its roots and delay things for a better initial product.
Defending the current practice of redevelopment in post is almost consumer gaslighting.
Plus, the base game itself should be good. It shouldn’t need updates. Post-game launch updates should be enhancements, not fixes.
Seriously, we need to return to pre-internet console mentality. You put out an N64 game, it better be goddamn finished. Companies rely way too much on “ehh can just patch it”.
I mean, modern games are many times more complex so the idea of putting out a “finished” game these days is more like “this is an acceptable level of bugs/most players won’t hit this.” The problem is that the acceptable level has shifted way too fucking far in the wrong direction to the point where in some cases we’re barely getting an alpha, much less a beta. In general, I have no problem with companies putting out good games that get better, like tuning for performance so you get better FPS, it’s player on lower spec machines, etc. I don’t like the idea of paying to be a beta tester for two years, and not getting the good game until way later.
I’m not arguing in favor of companies putting out shoddy gamesor the practice of games needing patches to fix glaring issues, but suggesting that the 90s and early 2000s were the days of totally flawless games seems like a result of survivorship bias.
We remember the great games from those days, but there were mountains of shovelware games releasing with all the problems we see today.
Even many good or great games from those days have problems that either remain unfixed, or have only been fixed years later by fans.
The fact that it’s only the same two games is more of an argument against than for, honestly. With all of the awful launches people can think of two games that were redeemed.
That’s bad.
I would even say NMS is a good example of this sentiment. The game has been good for years now and has had tons of free updates. There’s a lot of people out there who just don’t care and you can see this in forums whenever the game makes news. People still show up to decry the game for how terrible the release was.
Public sentiment on the game and the studio is still pretty mixed
I’m not defending the need for post-launch patches to fix glaring issues and I’m not defending crunch, but suggesting that buggy releases and crunch haven’t been with gaming since the earliest days of the industry seems like putting on rose colored glasses. There is a lot to damn about the current industry, but painting the root days of the industry as free of those same issues just to make the comparison seems unrealistic.
This is true, but gamers are so impatient. I am in early access with my Virtual Reality Theme Park and have been busting it for 3 years as a solo dev, and of course it is not a full Theme Park yet. What does exist has put me into the top 10 on the Meta Quest App Lab store, but I get bounced out of the top 10 now and then as I will get 3* saying new rides are not coming fast enough. People are so impatient just like shareholders.
Make sure you put in the description you are a small one dev team. Most people are reasonable and understand you can only do so much.
People are way less patient with asshole AAA studios that crank out garbage because they waste time implementing micro transactions or bullshit DLCd
Game of Thrones agrees with him.
Time was not the issue with HBO Got. The show runners ran out into the ground so they could move on and be done with it.
Time was the issue. They ran out of time waiting for GRM, so they went their own way. If they had waited… We’d still be waiting, but wouldn’t have gotten the suck.
You mean if they’d been competent show runners in the first place.
The show was great when it was based off of good writing.
Then it got sketchy as they had to rely on GRRM’s notes.
Then the notes got more vague, and season 7 and 8 turned into garbage.
Conclusion: D&D were mediocre show runners who couldn’t hire competent writers, and thought game of thrones was about subverting expectations instead of strong character arcs.
Justifiably, it lost them their next gig.
HBO was willing to wait for good seasons. But D&D wanted to get into a Star Wars contract with Disney. They rushed season 8 out the door with lazy writing to get that Star Wars deal.
After season 8 traumatized GOT fans and bombed in reviews, Disney backed out of the deal, and D&D have fallen into obscurity.
Duke nukem forever says hi
That game was both late and suck
Apparently it managed to get worse. The leak of the 2001 build that people are patching up actually looks really cool.
My understanding is that the released game was not a “descendant” of that 2001 preview. The game was totally scrapped and then a new iteration was started years later which is what eventually was released. So it’s not like the game was actually being worked on for a decade. More like the released game (which was only built over a couple of years) had the same name as a scrapped game from a decade prior.
That is precisely what happened.
I was merely framing it that the 2001 build was seemingly on the road to being a good, or at least faithful Duke Nukem game but management kept dictating changes to it to keep up with gaming fads. Eventually Gearbox just shoved an entirely different build out the door.
The 2001 build was victim to a lot of start-stop-start-stop development.
Suck is forever
“Hard disagree.” – person who played FFXIV before the realm got reborn
The memories are fantastic though.
Yeah, but there’s only so much delays can fix. Sometimes suck is sticky.
Duke Nukem Forever PTSD
Perhaps. I suppose saying: “Delaying a game which is making coherent progress is better than forcing devs to cut their work short.” is a much less catchy quote.
Duke Nukem Forever suffered both from not giving the appropriate development time to a single workflow, and from the related problem of upper manglement constantly demanding changing the game so much it was like starting over again and again.
The leaked 2001 Duke Nukem build is promising. If the devs had been supported in focusing on that rather than constantly retooling the game to chase trends, it may have at least been decent.
Daikatana PTSD
If only there had been a 20% higher cocaine budget for John Romero.
It can also be difficult to determine when a game has had enough development time. Pretty much every game considered good or great has had some content cut for development time reasons. At the end of the day, somebody does have to be the person who reigns in the excess.
Sometimes cut content would have been better if left in, sometimes cutting it was clearly a good choice.
And then there’s the simple reality that a studio that delays too much risks going under, which kills that game and all future games by them, so when is good enough good enough to ship a game?
There’s only so much delaying can help a badly designed game, delaying only really helps those games that need that extra polish and likely won’t be receiving it afterwards.
Duke Nukem Forever took 11 years to develop and is considered the greatest narrative since Jesus rose from the dead
Really? I heard it was a disappointment.
Woosh
I will wait for Silksong like a good little boi, if it ends up as good as the original.
The art is a fair bit more detailed, but I’m fascinated with whatever might be taking them so long. The original took about two years to finish and is ridiculously polished, so doubling the development time is wild. Is Hornet’s movement system just terrifically prone to breaking? Is the game simply gargantuan? Did they make a game of sneezing into each other’s coffee and lose a few years to the kitchen camping meta? All equally possible.
Why don’t they just not bother with a release date and release it when the game is 100% ready
A lot of the time in the industry, developers are using money loaned by publishers. Things like getting more development time, which means asking for more money is a negotiation that the devs aren’t guaranteed to win.
Valve is one of the successful developer & publisher companies that managed to survive. The 90s were a much smaller time for video games, and a small startup like Valve could compete with the big names out there. They had more freedom in a sense, but they also were taking quite a gamble. Other companies tried the same and didn’t survive.
It’s easy to simply say “only release a game when it’s 100% done” but it’s a lot harder when you’re watching money that keeps your company afloat dwindle with each delay. Also, “100% done” is a very flexible concept. Games almost always have to cut content or make concessions in some way, so figuring out what a done version looks like while working on it can be difficult.
The modern version of a small Valve style startup would be something like a Kickstarter funded development. Again, unless you are (for some reason) a Star Citizen dev, people are going to stop giving you money and you have limited funds and thus limited development time.
And just because you delay to try and release a superior game doesn’t mean it will be a smash hit.
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Also it’s fucking expensive to market things so people are aware you just released it. Or at least it used to be, before wish lists, early access, and so on.
Mighty GabeN is getting pretty deep into his wizard years, I best prepare myself for his passing.
The dude is 61, not even retirement age in the US. You don’t need to be dramatic just yet.
Before anyone gets their “um actually” comment in…
Yes, he would be eligible for retirement, but your average retirement eligible american isn’t expecting to retire until 65-70.
He’s been significantly overweight for most of his life, though, although a bit better than his worst these days… The beard makes him look older than he actually is, though.
Yeah I don’t know why you’re getting down voted. Obesity shortens life expectancy by around 10 years. Life expectancy for men in the US was at 79 years before covid (it is now down to 73 years). Gabe is currently 61 years old so he can be expected to die by the end of this decade.
Fantastic advice, as a guideline in a vacuum.
No game should be shipped broken, but sometimes concessions are a reality.
Even Half-Life had to make concessions. Xen is infamously less polished and fine tuned than the rest of the game. Valve didn’t have infinite resources and time to keep tinkering. Would the game have been better? Maybe. But time is money, and Half-Life already ended up selling huge. Would taking time to fine tune Xen have boosted sales? Were people in the 90s avoiding the game because of Xen? I don’t think so.
The profits from Half Life allowed Valve to make more games and be successful. Is it worth trading off a more fine tuned Xen in order to have Valve exist as we know it today?
In the documentary, they actually expand on that, they delayed the core game until the story and levels worked out and specially left Xen to the last as if they were not having fun before, they would have given up
I know. Perhaps I was not being clear in my point.
Xen was made last, and Valve never could quite get it to the same quality as the rest of the game.
If we follow the logic, which many commenters have, that “games should only be released 100% finished” then Half-Life should have been delayed indefinitely until Xen was as polished as the rest of the game.
I was making the point that Xen is an example of Valve deciding part of their game is “good enough” and shipping it, rather than continually extending development.
There are realities of game development that even Valve isn’t immune to.
And a canceled game is never bad
Okay but Gabe, you’re looking like a grandpa nowadays. Maybe you’re waiting just a little too long.
HL2 EP3 any day now boyz.
