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I'll be honest, despite all their other issues, if there's one person I'd trust with a business plan to take over the world, it's Newell. I think they may be eyeing Star VR, given their long-standing unusually simpatico relationship with Starbreeze.
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Sep 18, 2017 16:02
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Discendo Vox posted:I'll be honest, despite all their other issues, if there's one person I'd trust with a business plan to take over the world, it's Newell. I think they may be eyeing Star VR, given their long-standing unusually simpatico relationship with Starbreeze. I loving wouldn't, Valve's business "plan" is to shrug their shoulders and do nothing
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Sep 18, 2017 16:52
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Discendo Vox posted:I'll be honest, despite all their other issues, if there's one person I'd trust with a business plan to take over the world, it's Newell. I think they may be eyeing Star VR, given their long-standing unusually simpatico relationship with Starbreeze. That would presume Valve isn't just staffed by lazy cats.
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Sep 18, 2017 17:28
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When valve could do no wrong, there was an article by some "games journalist" who managed to interview some valve employees. The writer reported that he was lucky to even get anyone to show up to the building since no one really works from there. They more or less worked from home, and only went to work if they had to. It could be a lazy feral cat lair.
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Sep 18, 2017 17:36
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The White Dragon posted:all this is one thing but otoh isn't it hard sometimes to discern between what's just an amateurish labor of love that took years to complete and something that was slapped together in a few months in rmxp or gamemaker? like for instance part of me can't tell if minherino adventures is a weird south american asset flip or my kindred spirit's outsider art
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Sep 18, 2017 18:43
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Uncle w Benefits posted:It could be a lazy feral cat lair. I'm now envisioning a new employee being told "The desks are on wheels! You can move them anywhere!", and then promptly wheeling the desk out the door and into the back of their car before driving off.
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Sep 18, 2017 19:58
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Dapper_Swindler posted:other then running steam and pumping out the occasional update for dota2 or tf2. what the gently caress does valve even do. half life is dead as is left 4 dead and i doubt they will make any new IPs. artifact *mild disappointment mixed with clapping*
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Sep 18, 2017 20:49
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Improbable Lobster posted:I loving wouldn't, Valve's business "plan" is to shrug their shoulders and do nothing Correction. Their plan is to follow the whims of Newell/whoever can convince Gabe their idea is good, finish it, and abandon it after 8 months if it goes nowhere, such as the steambox. Or be stuck babysitting whatever it is for an indefinite amount of time if it takes off like DOTA or VR.
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Sep 18, 2017 21:05
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Dapper_Swindler posted:other then running steam and pumping out the occasional update for dota2 or tf2. what the gently caress does valve even do. half life is dead as is left 4 dead and i doubt they will make any new IPs. A charismatic dev will start a project by envisioning a game that will continue to make lots of money after the release and that's impossible to pull off with a single-player game as the failed Portal 2 microtransactions have proven. Good luck convincing dozens of people in that office environment to commit a few years of their careers to a single-player game for a lower income forecast. That's the actual reason why Half-Life 3 will never be made btw, it has nothing to do with Valve being afraid of the number 3 or the game being too hyped not to disappoint. Gabe is also perfectly fine with that as creating projects that make maximum profit has always been the core company policy - remember that he left Microsoft and started a game studio when he learned that the only application outselling Windows at the time was Doom. What I'm writing is also not a jab at Valve - I find Steam great and I've been using it for years as Valve absolutely gets that the most effective way to sell a product is to give its customers exactly what they want which includes big sales. They always knew that a tactic of building a loyal customer base will work way more effectively in the long run than cutting corners or walling things off. However, remembering that Valve will always be very strictly business-oriented can help understanding most of their ideas including Greenlight, Early Access, opening the flood gates to low-quality games or focusing on the store instead of developing new titles. Not all of those ideas worked of course but what lies at their base is always the same thing - the pursuit to maximize profit. Palpek fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Sep 18, 2017 |
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Sep 18, 2017 21:20
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Palpek's describing basically what I had in mind. The main reason I think Valve continues to produce games at all is because it gives them incredible control over the direction of the field of games development. Like Blow, valve can create entire genres of copycats based on a single product. Unlike Blow, they get a cut of virtually the entire generation of imitators that follow.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Sep 18, 2017 |
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Sep 18, 2017 22:10
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Johnathan Blow or cocaine?
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Sep 18, 2017 22:28
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:Johnathan Blow or cocaine? por que no los dos
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Sep 18, 2017 22:33
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Fil5000 posted:I don't know if they've even got anyone left who can write story or code games these days. Do they even license out the HL2 engine any more? In theory? Yes. In practice no one other than Valve wants to use the Source engine these days, and even Valve has used Unity rather than Source for a few of their smaller VR projects lately. The last company to licence Source that I know of was Respawn for the first Titanfall and they apparently did enough work on the engine for that game that they got upset when people talked about it running on Source, or something like that anyway. No idea if Titanfall 2 still has it's roots in Source.
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Sep 18, 2017 23:50
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:Johnathan Blow or cocaine? The former. It was positively bizzare seeing Talos Principle badly aping the style and design of Witness more than a year before it was released, based on Blow's blog posts, talks and screenshots.
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Sep 19, 2017 00:35
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Valve hasn't had the genre influence you're suggestion in years, if ever. Half-Life 1 and 2 were their only games with significant influence that weren't an already existing mod. Left 4 Dead is the closest modern Valve has co.e to that kind of influence and what games aped it? Evolve?
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Sep 19, 2017 01:45
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Vermintide is a massively unsubtle Left 4 Dead clone with equipment drops. Payday is similarly inspired. Dead Island also tried to copy a lot of L4D's magic in an open world format... badly. So they're out there. Evolve was made by some of the same devs, I don't know if it's fair to say they "aped"... themselves?
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Sep 19, 2017 02:50
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Maybe don't go giving Valve credit for Left 4 Dead when all they did was buy it and then polish it up. Turtle Rock was 95% of that game.
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Sep 19, 2017 03:37
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In the same way Valve just bought and polished up Narbacular Drop, sure.
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Sep 19, 2017 03:39
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:Truth be told, as much as I hate them and think they're garbage, the porn games are a niche and sell. A lot are incredibly low quality, but they're honest in their own right. My biggest complaint are the things lowering the marketplace bar. Asset flips, games asking for money off the books for achievements, the ten thousand achievement games, all the poo poo that actually is questionable and should be moderated against as scams literally have no consequence to taking advantage of and further breaking the system. Do any people from this thread do Steam Prophet? It seems like a really interesting glimpse into what games are actually dropping each week, and also has a big focus on seeing if you can predict which ones sell. It's my first week and it feels like there's a real possibility knowing what games actually sell on Steam is going to break me.
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Sep 19, 2017 04:01
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Olive Garden tonight! posted:In the same way Valve just bought and polished up Narbacular Drop, sure. From what I've read, Turtle Rock did most of the work and Valve brought their particular brand of polish to it so that it didn't end up like Evolve. There's a chance Valve may have done more than I've seen but what most of what I've seen has basically said Turtle Rock was just renamed Valve and did what they were going to do for the most part.
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Sep 19, 2017 04:57
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Discendo Vox posted:The former. It was positively bizzare seeing Talos Principle badly aping the style and design of Witness more than a year before it was released, based on Blow's blog posts, talks and screenshots. ???????
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Sep 19, 2017 05:50
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Discendo Vox posted:The former. It was positively bizzare seeing Talos Principle badly aping the style and design of Witness more than a year before it was released, based on Blow's blog posts, talks and screenshots. Talos Principle imitates The Witness in so far as they are both first person, and the player sometimes looks at panels.
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Sep 19, 2017 07:23
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They also have puzzles, I guess
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Sep 19, 2017 07:25
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I'm going to assume that was a facetious statement making fun of the idea than Jonathan Blow's games could be at all influential, for the sake of my sanity.
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Sep 19, 2017 07:30
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Arrhythmia posted:They also have puzzles, I guess their names both start with "The"
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Sep 19, 2017 14:01
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One is about a puzzle -solving robot trying to prove they can be a robot, and the other is about a human being trying to prove they can be a puzzle-solving robot (they're both good, though I enjoyed The Witness a lot more)
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Sep 19, 2017 14:56
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Eela6 posted:One is about a puzzle -solving robot trying to prove they can be a robot, and the other is about a human being trying to prove they can be a puzzle-solving robot I agree. Both are great FPS-Puzzlers. gently caress that puzzle in the flooded basement in The Witness though.
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Sep 19, 2017 15:10
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I wonder if Aximand shows up in black legion. I think he's the only surviving member of the mournival aside from abaddon, and I remember reading about him in a shirt story. Little Horus 
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Sep 19, 2017 15:52
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I'm not talking about the writing or the subject, I'm referring to the design (Talos Principle's writing was inserted most of the way through development, anyways). Other companies rush to imitate/use anything Blow says or does- and his "magic moment" speeches on compressed player instruction in puzzle design were particularly influential, coupled with early footage. Talos Principle was developed entirely during Witness's interminable development cycle, to a timeline that fits development responsive to Blow's early promotion of the Witness. The design of its puzzles are heavily built upon Blow's discussions of element introduction, and the environments match his early promotional hub walkthroughs- grass floors, arcing lines, minimalist head-high walls. I'm not saying Croteam somehow traveled forward in time and got a copy of Witness from 2016, I am saying that, like many developers, they paid attention to what Blow was saying, saw early footage, decided "we want a piece of that", and set out to do what they could with it. To say nothing of Antichamber, or Kairo, or Fract...this isn't an approach that was popular before Blow began promoting first person puzzle games that combined environmental integration with an unstructured, natural aesthetic. First person puzzle games were instead in the tightly structured Portal vein (where Croteam got a lot of their other design elements), or the disjointed exploratory Myst vein. People saw the early grassy panel puzzle footage and a wave of similar games got announced. Sakurazuka posted:I'm going to assume that was a facetious statement making fun of the idea than Jonathan Blow's games could be at all influential, for the sake of my sanity. It's not like Blow being massively influential in the development of independent game making is news, or anything. Braid launched a thousand imitators, and Blow's had a say in the public promotion of most of the majorly influential titles through his role in the Indie Fund. He's really good at getting coverage.
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Sep 19, 2017 18:43
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I think Talos Principle was better than the Witness - though I do like the Witness a lot - but if anyone asked me for a recommendation for something like either game, I'd probably recommend the other one and Portal, so while they are very different games in a lot of ways there are definitely similarities in the basic design. Having said that, I think it was the phrase "badly aping" that people are taking issue with, it's a weird way to throw shade at a game most people consider very good. In what way do you think Talos Principle badly apes the Witness?
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Sep 19, 2017 18:54
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who else but Jonathan Blow is visionary enough to pioneer the grass floor
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Sep 19, 2017 19:43
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i'm just awaiting the amazing dev that shatters the grass ceiling
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Sep 19, 2017 20:38
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il_cornuto posted:Having said that, I think it was the phrase "badly aping" that people are taking issue with, it's a weird way to throw shade at a game most people consider very good. In what way do you think Talos Principle badly apes the Witness? Visually speaking, Talos Principle mimics closely, with its early development environments, the environments and features of the Witness's early development-particularly from early videos that showed Witness using lightbeams as communicators, and where Blow discussed having puzzles integrated with the environment (something he was taking in a very different direction, not that anyone knew it at the time). On puzzle design, Talos attempts to apply the pared down, education model approach that was a big part of Braid's influence, and its subsequent evolution with Witness. Braid tries really hard to introduce elements individually, and gates progress behind puzzle design that requires mechanical understanding to make progress (with its common issues, such as green floors and Fickle Companion, being infamous). Witness was being hyped as a game which would renew first person puzzle design by applying these elements in the really challenging first-person setting, in particular designing toward the "eureka" moment of mechanical understanding and progress. Talos PRinciple doesn't achieve that. Where Talos fucks up puzzle design, briefly: 1. It's not sufficiently well-organized in communicating puzzle elements and design, such that the discrete education components doesn't work. A consistent issue for players, for example, is counter-intuitive puzzle element stacking. Some of the elements get taught in discrete spaces, but other interactions are bundled with repeated mechanics from previous puzzles. There's definitely an attempt at limiting repetition and blending of "lessons", but it's not enough (in part because Croteam aren't nutty rich people like Blow and willing to spend ten years polishing every iota of design). 2. Talos has really terrible conservation of detail in its puzzles. There's a lot of set dressing that appears significant, and usually is, except when it isn't. This prevents players from developing a consistent set of heuristics for knowing what winds up relevant in a puzzle (something made worse by the number of easter eggs Croteam threw in, some of which break level geometry). Witness bypassed this issue by going full bore with panel puzzles and limiting the scope of interaction, which wasn't something anyone knew about the project when the first videos came out (then it inverts it with the bonus scenery puzzles, but those crucially don't actually unlock anything). 3. Puzzle structure itself runs into the problem that Witness and Braid both are built around avoiding, sequential logic puzzle design which can let players either (a) mash everything together until something works(not knowing why), or (b) figure out the entire puzzle without touching anything via geometry clues. The latter was a huge issue for Portal 2 btw, due to valve's super-emphasis on player cue communication (another valve design pattern that virtually everyone has taken to heart, to mixed ends). In portal 2 people would solve puzzle elements completely without thinking because valve got so good at breadcrumbing them to portal positions. Croteam's not got that problem, but when you go into a level in the first half of the game (with like 2 exceptions I can think of), you can work backward from the objective and the geometry to identify all steps of the solution. This remains the case until they start using the multiphase puzzles (which have a related set of issues, because you can usually see the multiphase connection in advance). The net effect of these is that Talos Principle attempts to introduce new elements in discrete structued environments and attempts to capture the same aha/eureka moment design that Blow was hyping from day 1 of Witness development, but falls into most of the conventional traps of first person puzzle games instead, primarily those having to do with the challenges of player education. It does some tutorializing well, some of the individual bits using character permutation are clever, and of course a lot of the sound and environment design is gorgeous. The rest feels like an FPS company's idea of what a high-minded puzzle game should be. I'm setting aside the writing, which was what ultimately drove me from the game in the penultimate section. I know that area's contentious. Zetsubou-san posted:i'm just awaiting the amazing dev that shatters the grass ceiling Good News! Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Sep 19, 2017 |
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Sep 19, 2017 21:11
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Alternative theory: Myst and Riven were really good and sold a billion copies back in the day and people keep going back to that well.
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Sep 19, 2017 21:37
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Arrhythmia posted:Alternative theory: Myst and Riven were really good and sold a billion copies back in the day and people keep going back to that well. This theory doesn't say ANYTHING about Jonathan Blow being the smartest and most influential game developer ever so clearly it can't be right.
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Sep 19, 2017 21:40
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Discendo Vox posted:It does some tutorializing well, some of the individual bits using character permutation are clever, and of course a lot of the sound and environment design is gorgeous. The rest feels like an FPS company's idea of what a high-minded puzzle game should be.
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Sep 19, 2017 22:12
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Ikari Worrier posted:This theory doesn't say ANYTHING about Jonathan Blow being the smartest and most influential game developer ever so clearly it can't be right. That's because it's Phil Fish so the theory still stands.
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Sep 19, 2017 22:15
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It's a metaphor for an atomic bomb.
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Sep 19, 2017 22:16
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il_cornuto posted:Alright, I don't agree but you've clearly put a lot of thought into this. For me, Talos Principle provided the most, and best, moments of epiphany where I felt really smart for figuring something out. The Witness had quite a few of those too, but in a way it did too good a job of teaching me to solve it's puzzles, and often they ended up too easy. I also don't think anything in Talos Principle was as unfun for me as the sound puzzles (the maze excluded) and the puzzles in the ruins. I can't really challenge you on any of your specific points though, so I'll leave it at saying that you may well be right from a critical, game design perspective but I still had a (slightly) better experience with Talos Principle overall. Totes fair, different strokes. Neither game fits this thread. Dark_Swordmaster posted:That's because it's Phil Fish so the theory still stands. Palpek posted:It's a metaphor for an atomic bomb. Phil Fish is a fantastic metaphor for an atomic bomb.
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Sep 19, 2017 22:26
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Just for that he went ahead and cancelled eight games you didn't know he was working on.
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Sep 19, 2017 23:23
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