Akalabeth said:
Call of Duty, hey there's another franchise that gets regular releases with both single player AND multiplayer more frequently than Half Life or Valve's other games. Another franchise which does more than Valve.
Regular releases. Get it?
Deflection. You're eschewing the point.
Call of Duty is one franchise. One franchise made by
several different companies. Companies comprised of hundreds of employees, all working on one game, for a dev cycle of two or so years.
Much like with Bungie, who's entire team (comprised, again, of hundreds), spent all of their time on
one game at a time, and took years to make.
Valve is split into several, smaller teams. All working on disparate projects.
The Left 4 Dead teams were comprised of maybe two or three dozen designers, in total. Same goes for most of their other games. Portal 2, for example, had a "whopping" twenty eight members.
Even so, Valve
still churns out more quality, best-selling titles than any of those other companies do in any given year.
Left 4 Dead is NOTHING BUT MAP PACKS. That's all the game is. Four characters, a few enemies, and a bunch of maps. No story. No depth. No nothing.
The community by the way is irrelevant. Don't give a company credit for the work of their fans. That's absurd.
Nothing but map packs? Clearly, you're someone that rarely, if ever, plays the game.
Since release, we've gotten numerous campaigns, a plethora of new game modes, new matchmaking and hosting systems, a completely revamped competitive system, and a host of other content and features.
A sight more content than many games get.
As for content added by the community, I don't mean random maps you download from ModDB or some such place. I'm talking content and feature-sets conceived of and added to the game as part of a collaboration between Valve and the community. There's a big difference there.
A guy says he doesn't want to sign the EULA. Valve's response is that they'll deactivate his account.
There's no difference.
That response was an automated message. I've seen it before. One that was improperly sent, in this case.
If you actually look into the story, you'll find that most people that chose to decline the new TOS were still able to access their accounts. They just couldn't use the Store or other online features.
But I guess it's easier to take something at face value, instead of actually taking the time to look into the facts of the matter.
You do realize that everything you've said is pure speculation?
Give me a game title, and a release date, and I'll start to give a shit.
Idle fantasies by ardent Valve supporters don't interest me.
Well, aren't we just rude and insulting? Funny how it's often the Valve haters that are the first to start tossing around insults and to start acting belligerent.
Speculation? It's speculation when Gabe Newell says, and I quote
(which I shouldn't have to, but you clearly didn't read the article linked): "Everyone who was working on Ricochet 2 continues to work on Ricochet 2.?
And the crux of the article is, he's not talking about Ricochet 2.
They made three seasons of Sam and Max. Three COMPLETE seasons. As in, they STARTED a game, and then they FINISHED it.
And Valve made three COMPLETE Half-Life games. Episode 2 is the only one that has yet to have it's cliff-hanger resolved.
Besides, each season of Sam & Max can, quite honestly, be played independent of the other two. So using them as an example of a "completed" series is disingenuous at best.
I don't care what the reasons are for TT finishing Walking Dead, they point is they finish it. They deliver.
In both instances they don't create 2/3rds of a game and not finish the thing.
Moot point. The Walking Dead
isn't finished, and in the case of S&M, again, each seasons is independent of the others. So, in that regard, they're not different than Valve completing each individual Half-Life game. (or any other game or series they own)
I don't care who owns the IP. I care about content being delivered in a timely manner. I care about playing games. If a company creates half a game, and doesn't finish it, they don't get my vote of confidence.
I'm still not getting how a finished game, that is part of an unfinished series, is considered half a game? Was Mass Effect 2 half a game before Mass Effect 3 came out?
You seem very hypocritical in your stances. You're angry about certain design choices when Valve does them, but okay with those choices if
other developers do them.
That seems to be a constant with most Valve haters on this site. Actually, with most "haters" in general. I've seen the same kind of hypocrisy from Bioware or Bungie haters.
The fact that ANY game requires steamworks to be active is bullshit.
I bought Half Life 2, and the Half Life 2 Episodes FROM A STORE, on A DISC and with ONLY that disc I could not play the game. Because those discs didn't have the full game. Valve sold an incomplete product, that didn't work. I needed to install Steam to get the last 5% of the game.
And THAT is bullshit.
If I buy a game from a brick&mortar store. It should be a working game. It should not be a gateway to a storefront. DRM disguised as a store to enable me to spend more money at their stupid store when the products I've already spent my hard-earned money on are incomplete and don't work out of the box.
Is it bullshit when you buy a game for your 360, and have to download a patch when you put in the disc? For that matter, is it bullshit when you want to play, say, Gears of War and you have to buy it for your 360?
No? Than how in the hell is it
ANY different with Steam? If a company makes a game that is specifically designed for Steam, and someone complains because you have to play the game on Steam, that's the only bit that's bullshit. Bullshit, and hilariously hypocritical.
It's the same as someone buying a PS3 game and taking it back to the store and complaining to the clear, "Hey! What gives? This game won't run in my Gamecube! THIS IS BULLSHIT! THIS IS ONLY HALF A GAME!!"
So yeah, Steam is JUST DRM.
I don't have to walk into Best Buy every time I want to play a 360 game I bought from them. I don't have to walk into Future shop when I play a 360 game. But if I want to play a Steam game I have to loadup Steam so it can hold my hand and make sure I'm not a criminal and try to push a bunch of stupid shit I don't need in my face in an effort to take my money.
And you don't have to "walk" into the Steam Store every time you want to play your games. Loading up Steam is NO DIFFERENT than powering up your 360, putting in the disc, and scrolling to the "play" button. Seriously, how is this even a complaint at this point? Talk about reaching...
And yeah, I can turn off advertisements but I shouldn't need to. If I BUY a game, I should not have any advertisements stand between me and my game. Every time I quit a game like Terraria on Steam, some stupid advertisement pops up for some game I don't give a shit about.
I go to stores to buy games, I don't play games to buy games. Keep the store and the stupid advertisements out of my game playing experience.
Funny, as the last time I loaded up my 360, I was accosted by nothing BUT advertisements, all over my dashboard. Adverts that I CAN'T TURN OFF.
And yet you ***** about the occasional...OPTIONAL...sale alert pop-up from Steam?
Yeah, there's clearly no biased, unfair criticisms going on here. Nope. Not at all...
