Poll: Anyone else beginning to lose patience with Valve?

[UltraXan]

Valve certainly is taking their sweet fucking time on episode 3, but I'm not complaining. I know it'll be good, pretty much all Valve games have great quality, so I'll wait. What is kind of annoying me, though, is the truck loads of content they keep adding to tf2. I mean sure, yeah, variety is the spice of life, but now it feels like it's starting to get ridiculous... Now when I try engage is a good ol' game of 2fort, I can't help but feel like the game has become a cluster-fuck. Anyone else get that feeling?

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

I mean ok they tried this with L4D and that went down like a tonne of bricks falling on a small duck, with the whole boycott, but it's just driving me nuts at the moment.

It went down more like a truckload of fluffy down pillows. The boycott didn't matter in any way: the complaints were silly, the sense of entitlement was thick enough to cut with a knife, and almost no one actually followed through with the boycott.

More OT: Not in the slightest. Valve has been nothing but upfront about its release schedule forever. They joke about Valve Time just as much as we do and whenever they put up a tentative date it's always surrounded by gigantic warnings that it might be delayed. Hell, they don't even bother with projected release dates anymore just to make this even less an issue.

If they were effectively lying about when things would come out repeatedly that would be one thing, but I do not feel in any way entitled to have a game come out in a particular amount of time nor will studios taking a while to release a game (just like they said they would) in any way change my opinion of a studio. Of course I want to play Ep. 3 sooner rather than later, but it doesn't really hurt me in any way for it to come out later.

 

[Jovip]

i think i'm one of the only people in the gaming community that just doesn't suck valves dick. Don't get me wrong they produce great games (except tf2 because i'm a single player type guy and that game plus the absurd fan base just never mad sense to me)

But half life and lead 4 dead portal are all good games, well made. I just never really cared for them beyond games. I cannot plausibly fathom as to why people are putting the company into such a deity like position.

So yes, i am losing patience with valve and their fans. Neither are making sense, valve needs to rewrite that old source engine already, and the fans need to move the hell on. There are more games in the world, better games in the world.

(Sorry to anyone i offended, i find valve has very aggressive fans and obsessive ones. I do not believe overt amounts of fandom are healthy so it annoys me vastly.)

you really don't get what their doing with the source engine if you honestly believe they need to get a new one.

EVERY SINGLE TITLE THEY RELEASE is them pushing the engine even further, making it do more and be better at what it is, from l4d to tf2 to portal. And if you can honestly say to anyone that portal is a bad looking game, then your standards are unrealistic.

Or is it perhaps that your playing them on consoles which can't take too much shininess, in which case play them on something which can.

Don't get me wrong, i play on pc and portal is a great looking game. Just the code of the engine and the mechanics of the games are getting old. You can only add so much in before it just becomes tedious. They all control the same and they all feel the same. I don't want half life 2 portal 2 edition or what have you. Something new is always nice just to give it a change.

 

[ACman]

"Beginning" to lose patience? You should have spoken to me a couple of years ago. It's not even that I'm dying to play the games, it's that Valve really doesn't have the industry firepower of the Big Companies to pull this shit with "oh it'll be out next month DID WE SAY NEXT MONTH we meant next year ha ha". No, I'm not dying for Episode 3, and I'm not going to keel over without DLC for Portal 2, but I think they're still just a titch too minor league in the grand scheme of things to be spitting on their fans like this.

Spitting on their fans?

So you want Valve to pump out some dumb shlock just to appease its whiny fan-boys?

Okay smart guy how would you wrap up the Half life story? Any Ideas?

I'd rather that they take their time with it and it was awesome than have them piss away a perfectly crafted storyverse with a cliche ending and repeated action from the previous episodes; which is what you're asking for.

It's nice to be left wanting more for once.

Plus they have two totally original pieces of IP in the pipes that I can think of off-hand but no all you can do is whinge that the Half Life 2 trilogy is taking too long. Fuck off back to F3ar and Call of Duty.

Oooh, cute generalizations, tough guy. What part of "I'm not dying for Episode 3" did you not understand (that was, ah, Half Life 2 Episode 3 if you were just incapable of drawing that conclusion), or are you not in the habit of reading someone's entire post before flying off the handle because of one comment? They can take however damn long they want to, but they should chill out with the release statements if they're not going to stick to them. Release dates are a DEADLINE. In the real world, telling your boss a project will be done by Friday and then saying you need three more months because it's not working exactly the way you thought wouldn't fly with your boss and would probably get you fired.

Look, I'm sorry, but you're an idiot who is apparently incapable of reading more than the first and last few words of a statement. (And the Call of Duty and F3AR assumption just got you lumped into the "whiny fan-boy" group. Congrats.)

Well that's just the point isn't it. Valve don't have bosses to have DEADLINES for. They don't even have to release anything to make a profit since they have Steam; so any investors aren't hurting.

But COD/F3AR/Gear of War storytelling is what is standard in games and if you want games at regular intervals that seems to be what you get. Valve are a major cut above this and I believe that this is a result of them being perfectionists and taking their time.

After waiting 6 years for Half Life 2 after the original Half Life I've come to take Valve release dates as vague conjecture than anything concrete.

 

[darksakul]

Valve don't owe me anything. The games will be out when they are done. I can wait.

Well spoken my friend. Valve will release the next Half Life Game when they are ready to release and not a day earlier. Who nows, maybe Valve will do a really sweet bundle like they did with Orange Box.

 

[mezorin]

I'm suffering from this syndrome not so much from Valve, but other game publishers. At least Valve actually delivers games on a fairly steady basis, *and* continues content for TF2/Left 4 Dead 1/2. And Valve also brings us many pleasant surprises just about out of thin air that have been great games (read: TF2, Portal, Left 4 Dead).

If anything, Blizzard and Bioware are the two biggest "Valve Time" abusers right now.

The worst offender here by far is Bioware/EA's The Old Republic. Where the hell is Star Wars: The Old Republic? I have an Origin pre-order for that game and I have yet to see a peep about a beta in my in box, and its already September (read: 2 months to "holiday season" window they talk about). A beta, which I signed up for in 2009. And wasn't TOR supposed to be out by May this year? The fact that they refuse to put an offical release date on the game worries me that we won't see that until at least 2012, if not 2013.

Honorable mention for "Valve Time" goes to Blizzard. Where's Blizzard's new great MMO? Starcraft 2: Zerg/Protoss? Diablo 3? Project Titan? I somehow doubt Blizzard can walk-the-talk on that four Blizzard Titles being out by 2014, unless those titles are WOW expansions. Or two WOW expansions, a count down clock site, and either Diablo 3 or the next Starcraft Expansion.

EDIT: The best way to go through life is to not give a shit about a video game release until you see the disks in your hands, or a Steam Download you can play that day. Beyond the context of this rant post, I stopped caring about TOR months ago. I suppose that right there would count as "Valve Time Fatigue", except not for Valve.

 

[Twilight.falls]

Valve have proven time and time again they care about the community, and I've never been disappointed by a Valve game. Plus, I'm a very patient person. The wait is a non-issue.

I look forward to Dota2, as my avatar may imply.

Long live Valve.

 

[Something Amyss]

They take their time as they refuse to release tripe.
If you don't understand this, you don't deserve their games.

My response: Chinese Democracy. Time=/=value.

 

[The Pinray]

I almost lost my patience. Then I stopped caring. When a release date is announced I'll pay attention again. But I'm not going to set myself up for disappointment (a la Duke Nukem Forever). So I'm expecting it to be nowhere near worth the wait. And just not too good.

That way, if it is good, I'll be pleasantly surprised. If it's not, then whatever. No harm done. Moving on.

 

[Arcticflame]

They take their time as they refuse to release tripe.
If you don't understand this, you don't deserve their games.

My response: Chinese Democracy. Time=/=value.

A witty response perhaps, but altogether useless when valve clearly take their time as their development cycle emphasises prototyping, and heavy user testing. - A long development cycle.

Chinese Democracy emphasised Axel Rose's distance from Guns n roses glory.

 

[Arcticflame]

Double Post, delete meh.

 

[Something Amyss]

They take their time as they refuse to release tripe.
If you don't understand this, you don't deserve their games.

My response: Chinese Democracy. Time=/=value.

A witty response perhaps, but altogether useless when valve clearly take their time as their development cycle emphasises prototyping, and heavy user testing. - A long development cycle.

Chinese Democracy emphasised Axel Rose's distance from Guns n roses glory.

And most of the above. Minus user testing, of course.

Making excuses=/=valid reasons.

 

[Epona]

To quote Shigeru Miamoto (Or however you spell his name), "A bad game that gets delayed is eventually good, but a bad game that isn't is bad forever". He said that to justify the countless delays on Ocarina of Time, which is frequently stated to be among the greatest games ever.

The N64 couldn't get patches so once a game was released, that was it. That isn't true for PC games.

 

[GonzoGamer]

Publishers are moving features onto DLC, then using that to justify bad launches, then not providing it - there should be laws governing DLC. Maybe the first DLC should always be free, Valve do this already but it might set a presedent... we are sick of waiting for DLC, it would be great if publishers weren't allowed to release commercial DLCs until that first free one is released.

Not just features. What about something like New Vegas that was completely broken for several months after launch.
I hear they're still patching it and it's nearly a year old. That's shameful.
OT-
I?ve actually started gaining more patience with valve ever since they stopped complaining about how hard it is to make ps3 games; that bs made them sound like a bunch of hacks.
Also, at a time where it seems like publishers are trying to pick out any bit of game content they can sell seperately as dlc, it?s hard to get impatient with a company that has good content that works at launch AND even considers releasing more content for free.
It?s the one thing that made me not completely write off Criterion after Burnout Paradise was another disappointment.

 

[Beryl77]

It can be a bit annoying sometimes, especially when they're still not talking a single word about the next hl game but they have no obligation whatsoever to make a game we demand. They could also just completely stop developing games and we wouldn't be able to anything about it.
The people at Valve are really creative and they also really enjoy what they're doing, that's why the quality of their games is always so high. At Valve there is no hierarchy, everyone can work at whatever he wants to. Even Gabe would never demand from an employee to work on a specific project. Everybody can decide by himself what game he wants to work on and the results from this freedom can be seen when you play their games.

Of course this also has its negative aspects, like Valve-Time which you mentioned, or that they suddenly release an unexpected game, like DOTA 2, CS:GO or L4D2. Hell, if someone could gather enough people then they could also make for example Ricochet 2 and there are some people at Valve who are interested in making that game.
They don't think the whole time about how to make money, otherwise they'd just release one hl game after another and they would probably sell really well. They just want to enjoy their work.

So whenever I'm getting frustrated with Valve, I think about those things and I'd never risk the quality of their games for more frequent releases.

 

[Gorilla Gunk]

All I have to say is, The Passing and The Sacrifice weren't worth the wait.