Valve are awesome. They’ve made a string of excellent games, many of them including elements that have significantly progressed the medium, like the Half-Life series’ in-game storytelling, Team Fortresses class systems, Portal’s FPS without guns and Left 4 Dead’s reinvention of the co-operative gameplay experience (yes, I know some of these became Valve when they absorbed other teams, but they had the vision to nurture and promote them). Then there’s the fact that they’re almost single-handedly helping to keep PC gaming relevant in the modern world with Steam. It may have had it’s problems initially, and some people don’t like the lack of resale value on games, but there’s simply no other system as slick as it for getting content and updates, and connecting with friends on PC, and the opportunities it offers for independent developers is fantastic.
It was just announced that the Left 4 Dead Survival Pack will be free, both on PC and 360, which is great and another reason to say ‘yay Valve’. The one criticism you can level at Left 4 Dead is that it’s a little short on content, given that a single playthrough of the entire game could maybe take you 6-8 hours. Of course the replay value is great though, very much like Horde on Gears 2, which we’re playing a ton, but more content is always welcome (note: this pack doesn’t include new campaigns, but a new play mode called ‘Survival’ and enables Versus mode for the 2 maps that didn’t have it – not that we play Versus). Multiplayer games have always had this benefit of course, but in my case I haven’t been a fan of playing against other random players from around the world for a few years, simply because I don’t want to burn lots of time practicing, and in that case the experience is too unpredictable to guarantee a fun time, every time – I really don’t want to have a 50:50 chance of being frustrated every time I play. Conversely when I play co-op with friends against the AI in Horde or Left 4 Dead, I can guarantee that it’ll be fun every time because we can peg the difficulty the way we like, and still have fun as a group.
For this reason I don’t feel bad that I’m buying my 3rd copy of Left 4 Dead this week. We already have 2 copies on PC, but we decided to buy the 360 version too so we can play with non-PC owning friends. These games definitely work best when played with real-world friends rather than ‘randoms’ (as we’ve come to call them) from the Internet, and the sad fact is that more of our friends play on 360 than PC these days. We’ve had so much fun on Horde lately we want to have another similar experience to alternate with.
February 12th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
The xbox 360 version of Left 4 Dead arrived in the post yesterday (as did The Orange Box) so I look forward to having a bash soon! I’m currently completely immersed (could there be a more appropriate word for Bioshock?!) in the world of Rapture…just come across the plot twist…wowsers, seriously good game! Having been out of the world of gaming for some time I can thoroughly say that the 360 has been fantastic since I got it in October (the achievement system has been used very well in some of the games as well, particularly Bioshock IMO) – I’m intrigued as to why it’s a “sad” fact that more of your friends use the 360 rather than the PC for gaming? Is it because the 360 is getting closer to being a PC (what with all the patching required after a new game is released…..heck, and the occassional crashing in games as well!) or the premium slapped on-top of a 360 game compared to a PC game? Right, I’ll shut up now and go back to thinking about Bioshock…sorry, I mean I’ll go back to working now!
February 12th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
It’s a little sad that we’re seeing the move away from open platforms – consoles are great and all, but the fact that developers are often excluded from publishing content on them makes me sad and I think stifles creativity. Sure there are some games which support user generated content (highly moderated), and there’s the XBox Community Games channel, but it’s all far too sanitised, limited and centrally controlled for my liking. The PC is the last bastion of completely unconstrained creativity in gaming that used to be the norm in our childhood (in Britain almost every gaming machine used to be open to all to make things on – the concept of a closed console is really a US / Japanese thing), but is now increasingly slipping away in favour of closed, corporate managed processes. Imagine if on YouTube you were only allowed to upload a video if you were pre-approved by a company, or could only make your video with a limited set of tools that someone else defined. That’s what consoles do to gaming.
So I don’t mind that consoles are popular, but I do lament that many people don’t know what they’re losing in the process.
Good to know that L4D arrived!
February 12th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Ahhh, I see your point! I hadn’t thought about the shackles being placed upon development/innovation…I grew up with a Sinclair Spectrum which had, at the time, some awesome games made by a whole……err……erm……spectrum of people (ouch, sorry!) I guess because I don’t know what I’m missing on the PC I’m perfectly happy in my coocooned 360 world (but with GOW2/Bioshock/Orange Box/L4D it’s a comfortable cocoon….I’d add Brian Lara’s Cricket to that list but you, and 99% of the 360 community, would probably disagree….although the fielders sometimes do move like zombies though!)
February 12th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
I wouldn’t expect most consumers to really care *directly* about it either. But when people complain about the number of sequels, branded franchises, and reminisce about those quirky games they used to play, this is very much a factor.
Luckily there are lots of fantastic games to play on the 360 anyway, and sometimes what tends to happen is that smaller developers get started on the PC, often on Steam (like Audiosurf, Tower/World of Goo and Darwinia/Multiwinia, Crayon Physics) and can then make the leap to consoles later once they’ve garnered a following. But it’s a much longer road with lots more hurdles which means lots of other things never make it. It means ’sleeper hits’ from unknowns that emerge on consoles first are pretty rare, almost unheard of in fact – they need the PC enviroonment to thrive. On the one hand arguably that means that the consoles only get the cream of the crop, which could be seen as a positive, but if people then move totally away from the open platforms, who is going to play and create the buzz about these kinds of games in future?
February 12th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Their offices are two blocks from my house and I walk past their building every day. I need to figure out how to get a tour
[)amien
February 12th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I recommend stalking.
February 15th, 2009 at 12:10 am
I like to buy and download games because of delivery time (1-2 hours) and the fact that you always have a backup sitting on their servers ready to be downloaded. But recently Valve decided that €1 = $1, so now we pay about 30% more than before, retail shop prices are below Steam prices now (funny because it is more expensive to distribute physically to shops than to distribute digitally).
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=770231
Example from that thread:
Call of Duty 4
(Germany)
49,99 US$ = 34,72 €
49.99 € = 71.970603 US$
February 15th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Yep, this is true and they need to do something about this. It’s silly that you can buy a physical copy of the bigger games at Amazon cheaper than you can get them direct. It’s only been quite recently that this is the case and I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
February 15th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
You’re right in that L4D is short but I just can’t get my head around it. I’m addicted to this game. I must have played the same level around 200 times now and it’s still fun.
The extra content pack is just great and I can’t wait. I was willing to buy it straight away but that fact that they’ve made it for free is just amazing.
I can’t pin it down exactly why I love this game so much. It must be the combination of all the systems coming into play at just the right moment (music director, AI director, etc) that creates a great play experience.
I’d just like to point out that I’m blaming you Steve for mentioning L4D on your blog and ruining my productivity.