Interview: Valve on 13 things they’ve failed at
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Last month I was at Valve HQ in Bellevue to play Portal 2 and interview seven of their key staff. You can read the resulting preview and feature in the current issue of PC Gamer in the UK, and we’re also putting an interview up every day for a week here on the blog. Yesterday MD Gabe Newell, project manager Erik Johnson and marketing director Doug Lombardi explained their history of surprising decisions, and teased three more major surprises in the next year. Today, I innocently ask them if there’s anything in their history they see as a failure, and get thirteen different responses.
Interview: Gabe on Valve’s big surprises
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Valve are surprising. Half-Life itself was surprising enough, but then they surprisingly scooped up Counter-Strike, sprung Steam on us surprisingly, turned Half-Life 2 surprisingly episodic, then took surprisingly long on the episodes. When I flew out to visit them last month, I half expected to find they’d moved to the moon and turned themselves into a yacht manufacturer. And since they hadn’t, I was, again, surprised.
I was there to play Portal 2 co-op for the preview feature you can read in the current issue of PC Gamer in the UK, and interview seven of their key staff for a profile on Valve themselves to go with it. But they told me so much cool stuff that we’re going to be putting up an interview a day for the next week. Today’s is from a marathon chat with MD Gabe Newell, project manager Erik Johnson, and marketing director Doug Lombardi, and I start by asking them the question I’ve wanted to ask them for about three years.
Elemental: War of Magic review
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I need 1,300 gold immediately. The latest bit of military research I’ve unlocked lets me make teams of things, and one of the things I can make teams of is my killer hell dogs from hell. This gives the resulting unit six times their enormous health, six times their enormous damage, and for reasons that aren’t really clear to me, six times their enormous armour rating. So even though it’s just six hell dogs from hell standing next to each other, they take 36 times as long to kill. 1,300 is a lot of gold – or Gildar as it’s pointlessly renamed in Elemental – but for 36 hell dogs from hell, it’s a steal.
Elemental multiplayer delayed to next week
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As I mentioned last week, Elemental: War of Magic is now stable. But the advertised multiplayer, which is listed as a feature on the game’s box, still isn’t working. At launch, Stardock said it would be ’switched on’ this week. Now, staffer Neil Banfield says on their forums that it’s been delayed again, to next week. He says their priority is to resolve performance problems and other issues with the game at large first, and they’ve posted a 5,000 word list of bugs, problems and improvements they plan to work on. Multiplayer is not mentioned.
Elemental now works, old savegames now don’t
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Elemental: War of Magic was updated to version 1.06 this morning (UK time), and I’m happy to say the game is finally stable. I haven’t encountered any crashes to desktop since the patch Tuesday night, and the last major issue with the game on our systems is finally fixed. But finish your current game before patching. Unlike the other patches thus far, this one invalidates your existing savegames, including all your progress through the campaign.
Valve were making a fairy RPG before Left 4 Dead
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Speaking to us in an interview earlier this month, Valve MD Gabe Newell described an action fantasy RPG Valve were once making – about fairies. The next issue of PC Gamer in the UK is a Valve spectacular, and part of that is a huge interview feature on why the company keeps making such surprising decisions. I sat down with Gabe, project manager Erik Johnson and director of marketing Doug Lombardi and asked: “Are there things you think you’ve failed at?” Their response was long, and that’s how they got onto the fairy game.
Elemental’s disastrous launch: stay well away
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Elemental: War of Magic was released in some stores and for pre-order customers on Monday, a day ahead of schedule. It’s a mess. As PC gamers we’re used to launch day patches and bug fixes – that’s part and parcel of gaming on our platform. However, the scale of Elemental’s pre-patch problems is appalling and we want to warn you to stay away from the game for now.
Elemental is one of the most exciting game ideas for a long time, but it’s been shoved out months too soon. It’s a turn-based fantasy strategy game in which your sovereign is a character in the world, one who can take on quests and level up. The concept is magnificently grand: you can build an army on the strategic level to help your hero defeat a dragon on the questing level. You can meet an alluring adventurer to recruit, marry, and even reproduce with. And when they grow up, you can marry your kids off to other empires to improve your diplomatic standing.
At PC Gamer, we think it’s part of our job to warn gamers away from games that don’t justify their asking price yet. We’ve held off from finishing our review because of the launch problems, but felt this warranted an early warning. The game you actually get in the box, or in the initial download if you bought it digitally before today, is riddled with bugs. You should not buy it.
Interview: Valve reveal their new Left 4 Dead DLC
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On October 5th, Valve will release a new campaign for both Left 4 Dead 1 and Left 4 Dead 2. It’s The Sacrifice, a story which bridges the gap between the two games, and explains the mysterious events of previous downloadable campaign The Passing.
As a special treat for Left 4 Dead 2 owners, they’ve also carried the original game’s No Mercy campaign across to Left 4 Dead 2. And everyone will get a huge 190 page comic beforehand, leading up to the events of The Sacrifice. I spoke to producer Chet Faliszek about, like, what the hell.
Valve on the future of Team Fortress 2. Part Two
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Team Fortress 2 has updated all nine of its classes now, so everyone’s curious about the future of the game. I posted myself to Mann. Co headquarters in the hope of wrestling Saxton Hale for answers, but when I arrived I found only project lead Robin Walker, in his throne room at Valve. Disappointed, I clambered out of my box and interviewed him nevertheless.
He talked about where TF2 can go from here, how many people are still working on it, what they plan to include in the next update, why unlocks work the way they do, why they might start a new TF2 beta, and what the point of hats is. Accordingly, the interview is long. This is part two, part one is here.
Interview: Valve on the future of Team Fortress 2
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Team Fortress 2 has updated all nine of its classes now, so everyone’s curious about the future of the game. I posted myself to Mann. Co headquarters in the hope of wrestling Saxton Hale for answers, but when I arrived I found only project lead Robin Walker, in his throne room at Valve. Disappointed, I clambered out of my box and interviewed him nevertheless.
He talked about where Team Fortress 2 can go from here, how many people are still working on it, what they plan to include in the next update, why unlocks work the way they do, why they might start a new TF2 beta, and what the point of hats is. Accordingly, the interview is long. This is part one – part two is here.
