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Half Life recently got an installment with Alyx, and just got a free remaster 25 years after release, with the whole non-VR franchise is perfectly playable for dirt cheap on any old system. Portal has received spin-offs. Team Fortress isn't getting the attention it deserves, but is perfectly playable on modern PCs and has aged like fine wine while receiving bugfixes and new community-made, Valve-approved content every so often. Afaik Dota 2 still has an actively supported pro league. CS got an overhaul, for better or worse.
Valve is unique in that they are one of the few developers that understand that sometimes you don't try to fix what ain't broke-- this is why TF2 outlived Overwatch, and will almost certainly outlive Overwatch 2 as it has many other games.
Valve doesn't hold out on releases out of intentional neglect, but are instead painfully aware of how hard it is to meet growing expectations and continue to improve on what many would already consider to be near perfection. That's why we don't have HL3.
HL3 would have to be a revolutionary game, one to set the expectations for games for a decade. because anything less than that would not live up to what HL1, 2 and Alyx did to the industry.
I strongly disagree.
First of all, what did Alyx do to the industry? It was higher fidelity than most other VR games at the time, but that can hardly be called revolutionary the way HL1's environmental storytelling or HL2's physics systems were. Very few VR games have attempted to follow in its footsteps at all, because lookin' good is more about dev hours than it is creativity and game design. Other than convincing a few extra people to buy VR headsets, it didn't do anything at all to the direction of the VR market. Games before and since Alyx have used much more interesting, immersive movement controls and ammo management systems.
Second, the expectations for HL3 don't have to be All That. If it were a fun game at all, it'd sell like crazy and people would be happy. It's Valve's self-imposed roadblock of new games being "different" somehow that stops them from finishing anything. But even then, I'm not sure they've been accomplishing that. Beyond CS2 being little more than a glow-up and Artifact being... ill-received, I'll stick to HL and beat up on Alyx a bit more--it was just fine, But what little story it had shat on the 12 year cliffhanger in the least satisfying way possible, its weapon selection was just sad, and there are a hundred smaller things I could bring up from the sound design to the repetitive puzzles that stop actual gameplay every 2 minutes. Everything from the movement to the combat was dumbed down to the point where it might be accessible for a first time VR user, but at the cost of being extremely repetitive for anyone playing through a second time (though I will grant them props for including tools for community mappers to make much more interesting encounters).
Yet people hail it as some industry changing turning point. Don't get me wrong, for all its faults, I enjoyed playing it, but it's not this new Valve masterpiece that so many people make it out to be. It's just fine. And the way it's been lauded for the last 4 years proves that "fine" is good enough for Half Life.
I've agreed with this for the past decade. But considering the scope and costs of games made today, I think that sort of expectation is far too high for Valve to achieve anymore with the type of company they are. The size of development teams has ballooned at every other studio to keep up and budgets are many times higher than what Valve has spent on any game ever.
Sure, Valve makes loads of money from Steam and they could conceivably pour untold millions into hiring a massive team of talented developers to try to produce a worthy new Half Life title as a passion project for Gabe Newell. To what end? It likely still wouldn't live up to the hype and the process would irreversably upend the way Valve has operated very successfully for decades.
Valve doesn’t hold out on releases out of intentional neglect, but are instead painfully aware of how hard it is to meet growing expectations and continue to improve on what many would already consider to be near perfection. That’s why we don’t have HL3.
What Valve doesn't understand is that not every game needs to be technologically innovative. Sometimes we just want the rest of the goddamn story!
has aged like fine wine
This has nothing to do with your actual points, I just wanted to share a neat fact about wines and this common phrase. The quality of wine has little to do with it's improvement with age. In fact, most wines - fine ones included - are intended to be consumed within a year (Usually less) of bottling or being sold. Wines typically have to be designed to age over long periods with a number of different small ingredients that can affect it. Most wines will start turning real vinegary after a year and be basically all vinegar by year 3-ish. Though wines with metal screw-caps will last longer, though not receive any of the benefits of the aging process should they be "age-able" as small levels of oxygen that leaks in through corks are essential to the aging process.
More to our actual point, I remember hearing a theory once when Alyx came out that Valve releases new large games like that when they have new technology they want to show off. Half-life showed off the physics engine. Portal used the physics but showed off the portals. Alyx showed off the VR tech. And they only do it when they know they can do it well. Since their goals aren't direct game sales but to just make a really good game that uses a specific tech, they succeed but have no intention to milk the franchise.
Actually, after writing that I looked and found an interview with Gabe after Alyx was released where he outright stated that the series was meant to be used this way and not to sell games.
Newell said “Half-Life games are supposed to solve interesting problems,” and explained that Valve doesn’t want to just “crank Half-Life titles out because it helps us make the quarterly numbers.”
Not doing it because you’ll upset fans is a terrible reason, you modernize it and gain even more. Just as many fans want a new game and they are upsetting those ones already.
You’ll never please everyone, that’s impossible and just because you’ll upset either new fans or old fans is no reason to not try. It’s an excuse to not do it, no more.
I disagree. Valve has no shortage of money, and would only end up burning goodwill by putting out a subpar product. From their perspective, it's better to have a loyal, if rabid, fan base rather than the backlash a bad product would generate.
But they have all that money to NOT put out a subpar product, but instead they hoard it for themselves.
It’s a strange argument to make in this world, the corp should keep the money instead of spending it putting money back into the market through hiring and wages? Making a product for people to buy?
They already get bad backlash from the lack of updates and content, they clearly don’t care about that, they want their hoard.
We crave more of the things we love, but it almost never lives up to our expectations.