Why can't the most profitable game company in the world make a proper sequel to their flagship franchise?
Why can't the most profitable game company in the world make a proper sequel to their flagship franchise?
Why can't the most profitable game company in the world make a proper sequel to their flagship franchise?
expectations too high. if it didn't turn out to be the new best game ever made people would lose faith in valve.
>expectations too high
No they're not. Everyone enjoyed HLA.
half life alyx is not half life 3
Why not you stupid bastard
it's a spinoff, gay
newbies
moron, alyx ends literally exactly where episode 2 ends, they simply retconned it slightly.
>slightly
For the same reason Episode One and Two aren't
Because it still ends exactly where Episode 2 ended you stupid Black person.
No we got to see what happens a few seconds later in a new timeline.
because they went into it knowing that it was just a spinoff VR tech demo, not HL3
Look it's really not that hard to make a good game if you're valve and the rest of industry cares more about destroying the west and being puppets for global elite.
go away /misc/
YWNBAW
>Everyone enjoyed HLA.
I didn't play it 🙁
1. not really, everyone's already moved on and stopped caring
2. nobody has any faith in Valve anyway after the way they screwed over the Artifact fanbase by cancelling the Artifact 2.0 beta without even allowing users to invite friends like they said they would in January 2021 and does not deserve your financial support for these gross consumer-unfriendly practices
for fricks sake
I keep seeing this pasta but I don't know what artifact is
Valve tried to make a Dota themed digital TCG but accidentally gave the cards real money value, meaning gambling law enforcement started lubing up their veiny wieners to frick Gaben's fat ass raw. The game was unceremoniously canned as a result.
>1. not really, everyone's already moved on and stopped caring
And yet this thread exists and people are still clamoring for it.
>2. nobody has any faith in Valve anyway
Then they have no incentive to make it.
Based Artifact autist
Artifact was a digital trading card game Valve launched to compete with Heartstone. It was absolutely unfun, had an idiotic "all cards have to be bought with real money" monetization scheme and died almost immediately. I think it literally existed for less than six months.
>Repeating the same moronic joke makes it funny
So that's how it works?
This. It's decades of hype we're talking about
>expectations too high.
HL isn't a well known and popular IP anymore. I'd even say it is somewhat relatively obscure at this point and the only relevancy the series has is through GMod.
HL3 announcement will genreate 0 (zero) hype nowadays.
one could have said the same thing about baldurs gate. i strongly disagree with your assessment.
>HL3 announcement will genreate 0 (zero) hype nowadays.
not even remotely true. it would generate obscene amounts of hype and traffic.
The last proper game (not counting Alyx since only 0.1% of people played it) was 16 years ago and the world has moved on since then. HL is totally foreign to zoomers outside of again Gmod, so aside from a few boomers who would be hyped for it?
It would spread like wildfire anyway. Think about how many content creators and streamers would talk about it, too. That would get the zoomers talking about it, maybe they'll even get interested in playing hl2.
You could say the same thing about the Dead Space remake and BG3 but they were both massive successes. You could say that nobody but boomers cares about, say, TF2, but the second even a scrap of content was released it exploded in playercount.
Do you actually think that all those people that played HL2 and CS aren't still playing and buying games. It wasn't that long ago, millenials are a significant amount of the consumer base. Especially with Steam.
>You could say the same thing about the Dead Space remake and BG3 but they were both massive successes.
Dead Space remake rode on the wave of RE remakes success and the failure of Callisto Protocol and BG3 was in Early Access for 3 years prior to the release.
>You could say that nobody but boomers cares about, say, TF2, but the second even a scrap of content was released it exploded in playercount.
TF2 has a huge cultural presence to this day thanks to memes, SFM videos and the whole Overwatch rivalry plus at the end of the day it's the only quality class based multiplayer shooter on the market.
You're a dumb fricking moron
>lose faith
noone has any faith in Valve as a game designer because they don't design games anymore
This.
Tbf both hl are outstanding games and it will be an ultra risky endeavour with basically no way to get it right. Why risk Z money to make sum X when you can make sum X with less risk than Z?
Short : valve has no incentive to publish hl 3
They became lazy since they no longer need to make anything and just collect money freely off others.
I lost faith in Valve years ago and resent them a little more with every shitty UI update. Half-Life: Alyx was OK and gave me hope since they claimed it made them want to finish Half-Life or make more singleplayer games again but years later and we got jack shit still.
>but years later and we got jack shit still
It hasn't even been a decade anon, relax.
I'm pretty sure this is literally the only reason. I've read A LOT about the development of HL2, and it appears Gaben is a perfectionist who's truly passionate about games. It seems to me this is something personal to him, he really loves games to that point.
It's probably why Valve never releases any 3 too
>I've read A LOT about the development of HL2
Then you should know that Gabe didn't work directly on HL2, he worked on Steam instead while trusting the HL2 project to others.
He still had the final word, though, and he demanded nothing short of absolute perfection from the team. He also gave them a virtually unlimited budget and deadline as long as the game fulfilled his expectations
Half-Life was never good.
What a bullshit statement. That's why they launched Artifact, right? I think it's because Valve is both shit at an organizational level and because they got too complacent.
This. They're making bank doing absolutely nothing. Why dump those funds into the most memed and requested game ever and risk it not living up to those fermenting sky high expectations?
This, mostly. I don't think they're worried about people losing faith in them. I think if they released what was basically HL2 but with better graphics, and address some of the complaints about the gunplay and pacing or whatever, then people would love. It's the standards that they have set for themselves that they are afraid of. They need to make a game that's at least a 9/10 and that game needs to make people say "this changes everything." I think they were waiting on VR to be that paradigm shift, but now think it's going to remain niche for the foreseeable future. If I had to guess they're going to try to incorporate AI into HL3 in a big way as their "this changes everything" thing.
The expectation wasn't high, the expectation was that episode 3 was already in the works when they released episode 2, and that they had planned the story ahead, because that's what they said they did.
My expectations would be higher for Left 4 Dead 3, than Half-Life 3.
That being said I am perfectly content with L4D2, I just wish we could get a few small bug fixes to some stuff that's been broken for a long time but the game's still basically perfect.
They're too scared that if the game is bad it'll damage their reputation and lose them steam shekels. Look at Artifact.
That might've been true 5-10 years ago but the standard is so low that all they have to do is make a good game and people will 9/10 or 10/10 GOTYAY it.
At this point having an established franchise seems more important than a game being good. It's like nobody wants to speak against something established so they just roll with it.
Because the world has moved on, get over it. Why isn't there a triple-A high budget Ms. Pacman sequel? Same reason.
Half-Life series had its time in the sun, now its time to move on.
Actually, Pac-Man recently made a proper comeback after the embarrassingly bad reboot killed his franchise in the 2010's.
The only issue is Ms. Pac-Man is stuck in legal hell and they heavily dropped the ball with her replacement. You can thank ATGames (yes, that ATGames) for the legal bullshit.
it's been too long. just let it fade away.
its not that they can't, its that they don't want to and have no reason to
they aren't hurting for money thanks to steam, csgo, dota 2, and tf2
Why would they need to make a game when they make a gorillion dollars off of just running a store?
The only reason Alyx existed was because they wanted to push VR
Because they no longer make games and they are far more profitable in selling a distribution platform to others to sell their games on.
i don't want them to. i just want them to quietly stay as they are forever because they are the only good thing left in video games
Because they don't know what tech is still needed.
Every mainline HL entry offered something influential.
I mean they finally developed something and it's for CS2. They don't know where to go and I'm pretty sure it feels like you're stagnated.
Like exploring isn't possible anymore because we explored the world already
because not every thing needs endless sequels.
its fine for something to end anon.
think about how many sequels never lived up to expectations and turned out shit.
valve would rather experiment with new things instead of risking tainting their legacy.
It probably is going to happen. They had every opportunity to wrap up the series somehow with HL Alyx but it ends on even more of a cliffhanger than Episode 2 originally did. I believe in Half Life 3 more than I probably ever have after playing Alyx.
They have no idea how to finish it properly.
Most of the talent behind the series is either dead or has left the company.
They all figured that it's best to leave the franchise where it is instead of having it end on a sour note.
its left on a sour note as is
kek can you imagine how cucked the series would end up being if a modern writing team that's half black and trans got ahold of this? lmao.
I wish video game writers were contract based so that we could get some actual writing talent and not just same old identity politics shoved in. smart people don't become writers anymore, there's money. but if you could convince random smart people to write on contract in their spare time you could find talent.
because HL1 and 2 were just tech demos for revolutionary new graphics engines
we're not getting a 3 until there's some crazy new tech that they want to show off
not that anyone actually wants a HL3, 2 was ass and 1 was just a modding platform for better games
Jfc how contrarian can a Black person be.
>hl2 bad
>hl1 just a modding platform
Seriously Black person?
yes
i know im a chad and you know i'm correct
HL series is overrated as frick
They are making it. And they pretty much confirmed it in the post-credit scene in HLA.
>Spend 8-10 years to make the most awaited
fps ever only to be trashed everywhere for not being "up to date with modern standards" and "graphically outdated" and "not at all that impressive"
It's a financial suicide on top of giving fuel to steam detractors.
Half life 3 will be an american civil war IRL.
>thread one
>anons agree that throwing money at the game won't make it good
>thread two
>anons wonder why isn't company throw money at the game
Also I doubt Valve are most profitable. Fortnite bux and GTAonline bux make mad money.
This would make sence if they didn't already make half life alyx.
Half Life 3 will come when Valve makes revolutionary changes to their Source engine. There hasn't been enough development in the engine technology to justify it yet. My guess is they are waiting for some new AI tech or a massive improvement in graphics rendering before they will develop a new Half Life.
A lot of the key developers who worked on Half-Life are no longer at Valve, and most of the remaining Half-Life era developers are no longer interested in Half-Life and have moved on to other things. (Gabe himself is an example: he worked a lot on Half-Life but then switched to working on Steam instead of on Half-Life 2).
Marc Laidlaw and Kelly Bailey are the most often-cited examples because their names are attached to specific fields (writing and sound), but the list is way longer than just them. A casual reading of old interviews can turn up a sizable list of names of people no longer at Valve: Ted Backman, Jeremy Bennett, Ken Birdwell, Steve Bond, Dario Casali, John Guthrie, Jacob Nicholson, Bill Van Buren. And no doubt there are loads more who didn't get in the spotlight for those interviews.
they lost a of talent, high expectations, a big portion of the story got leaked in 2018-2019 if i remember right, a game like that would be hard to make in modern times (look at Deus ex who its in the grave because they frick it up )
They could try to make it, 100 million + for the budget alone, for the marketing less than 50 million, the memes alone will make the campaign a success, but why would they? they print money, 8-9 billion or more revenue per year, because of this, they don't bother anymore making games and i hate them for that
>a big portion of the story got leaked in 2018-2019 if i remember right
It wasn't a leak, the former writer Marc Laidlaw just posted an unofficial plot summary to give fans closure after leaving Valve.
Laidlaw even tried to emphasize that it wasn't anything official and a real game would have been drastically different because the plot would have changed to fit the game's needs (just compare his early drafts of Half-Life 2's story to what actually shipped), but of course no one paid any attention to his disclaimers.
They can't make Half-Life 3 because they never finished Half-Life 2. It is mathematically impossible to make a 3 when you haven't even finished 2. You might as well be asking why they can't make Half-Life 4 or Half-Life 5.
Where is Half-Life 2 Episode Three Gabe? You said it would be out by Christmas 2007.
> Why can't the most profitable game company in the world
Apple
hero shooters are old and stale anon. that's why they made portal 2 and HL:A instead. it doesn't matter how "good" HL3 would be, if it follows the same formula of cutscene - shooty bit - puzzle - repeat, it's dead in the water.
>Half-Life
>hero shooter
???
gordon is the hero and the game is a shooter
And Castlevania is a survival horror because it got monsters and you have to not die. Right?
>made portal 2 and HL:A instead
>same formula of cutscene - shooty bit - puzzle - repeat
That's literally the formula of Portal 2 and HLA
yeah but with an extra gimmick.
what's hl3's gimmick?
Half-Life 2's gimmick was the gravity gun.
Fully immersive VR. HL3 won't come out for as long as you're not able to walk in a game and pick something up to feel it in your hand as you would IRL.
I think you're right, hyperbole aside. alyx was their prototype, HL3 will be for the next gen of VR.
Every copy of the game is personalized but real this time.
The better question would be:
Why would you?
Why take the risk of making a game that can turn out good or bad, if good, great, you lose nothing, you gain a tiny profit margin.
But if its bad, you not only lose a small profit margin on the game, but faith in your brand as well, losing far more than the sales in the one game.
Financially it makes little sense.
The only games valve will ever try to make again is just small projects to have fun with, nothing hyped up or high stakes like a new real Half Life sequel.
>But if its bad, you not only lose a small profit margin on the game, but faith in your brand as well, losing far more than the sales in the one game.
Explain how the frick would the "losing faith in the brand" matter when they're NOT FRICKING USING THE BRAND?
he means "valve" the brand not half-life.
valve still have never made a wrong move in the public's eye even though dota2 is complete shit and L4D is awful.
>valve still have never made a wrong move in the public's eye
Artifact, and to a lesser extent, Underlords
what the frick is underlords?
Underlords is basically Artifact 1.5
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1046930/Dota_Underlords/
>valve still have never made a wrong move in the public's eye
Umm... the paid mods fiasco?
because sequel means 2, not 3
Sequel generally means the continuation of previous work.
Their flagship franchises are fricking mods, dota all stars and navy seals, albeit with different engine, l4d and portal was not their effort, only funding and supervision, half life and tf2 are only gems that valve did themselves (tf2 almost has nothing similar expect classes with quake fortress or brotherhood of arms, so it's their own creation) and look how they treat them, tf2 is dead, half life is dead and forgotten after vr flop, so their next bet is neon prime, they're gonna try to compete with both apex and fortnite at the same time, I really hope they still know how to make good games
>l4d and portal was not their effort, only funding and supervision,
How does buying out and hiring the developers make it "not their effort?" It's akin to walking up to some Valve employee and telling them that they are somehow not really a Valve employee.
Valve should give the video game rights to Crowbar Collective and fund them to make it in the source 2 engine just like Half Life Alyx was.
this is unironically the best outcome that could happen
>Crowbar Collective
Frick no, Black Mesa was ass.
They completely missed what made the original great.
This. Crowbar Collective was pretty much a bunch of artists who wanted to make fancy-looking art. They never really "got" what Half-Life was about or trying to convey and just wanted to make stuff that they thought looked cool.
Cope
Half Life was never good
only a 435 year old redditor thinks Black Mesa doesn't blow HL1 out of the fricking water.
>that image
fricking lol imagine defending the image on the right kek saved so I can show people how wrong they are when they say Black Mesa isn't good.
Other parts of Xen have skyboxes, meaning the use of a black void instead of a skybox is a very intentional choice that means something. Crowbar Collective didn't understand that and replaced it with visual noise just to look pretty.
Valve would never trust their video game rights to anyone else, not after HDTF
What's this obsession with one off events? Why do you think a bad business is so traumatic? Not even the japs are this autistic.
Valve's had too many "one off" events when dealing with organized community content with invasion
Valve can't afford them shitting up half life 3 since they're obviously incompetent without very close monitoring
Name them, I'm not aware of anything beyond Cuck Down the Freeman.
I would argue that community content is what has made Valve what it now: Counter Strike, Team Fortress and Dota. What would be Valve without that?
what has made Valve what it is now is them cherry-picking the good community made content and adding it to their own
the TF2 Invasion update was such a disaster with infighting and mismanagement that TF2 no longer gets community controlled updates, only community contributed ones
they will keep everything in-house because letting another studio handle it would be a disaster waiting to happen, let alone giving them the fricking rights to it
hl3 will be the first game on their brain-computer interface
Same reason that they can't get their employees to follow company policy: Gabe is too nice to fire people.
>Gabe is too nice to fire people.
Is this a joke? Do you not know about Valve's regular firing purges? Or how Gabe had to personally fire Jeri Ellsworth because he hired her and made it company policy that the person who hires has to be the one to personally tell someone they're being let go?
why not just make a new HL: Deathmatch game and go from there?
I want to know who will be genuinely excited about HL3 in the current year if it does get announced?
Watch the next game be Half-Life 4: episode 6 instead.
hl2 wasn't even good, it just shipped with a great engine that was pitifully underutilized for the "flagship" franchise, every other valve developed game was superior even when taking the extra episodes into account
Epistle 3 is as close as we'll ever get.
volvo is a tech company
gaming is not their primary concern
They were always a mediocre game developer. Half Life is way overrated.
Valve knows vaporware will have astronomical expectations like The Last Guardian and Shenmue 3, and at some point it's not even worth attempting it. Theoretically, they could make Half-Life 3 a VR game to be the first truly killer app VR spectacle but Half-Life Alyx proved not that many people played it or give a shit about VR. So back into dormant it goes.
But why don't they develop more shit? It's bizarre to me how they could be churning out games or publishing stuff but they rather wank in a corner and do weird shit with Musk.
They do develop tons, but the vast majority of it never sees the light of day.
The employees actually do work a ton, because Valve doesn't tolerate dead weight. You can't slack off unless you're Gabe himself or else an influential board member.
Virtually the same. In fact, even worse, since you are actually torturing people with game development for naught. Overall Valve needs to get nuked.
There is no point in doing anything if you literally have infinite money forever.
it can't just meet everyone else's standards, it has to meet their own standards as well which are way higher than the public's could ever be
the only chance it really has now is through AI
At least Duke Nukem Forever actually came out.
Your point? This game sucked donkey wiener
Better something that nothing.
Uh, no?
You have terminal autism.
Not the REAL Duke Nukem Forever. Although that leaked and some fans are trying to complete it.
They said they would make Half Life 3 when Linux hit 3%. Its at 2% now. If you still run Windows, and you seriously want HL3, it is time to upgrade your OS. You only have yourself to blame.
>Why can't the most profitable game company in the world make a proper sequel to their flagship franchise?
They did. They're called Portal 2 and Dota 2. HL isn't that good, and far from being their flagship franchise, despite how much the vocal minority spergs over it.
Half-Life 3 is the real world, idiot. You are playing it right now.
>jump the shark at the end of HL episodes
>no way out of it and steam is more important
>years later
>writer leaks the shit plot you had planned
>years later
>new side game reveals worse plot
>company who's admittedly not confident enough to make a new game still thought they would dominate any market they make a game for
not gonna knock valve more than that but half life is a dead series it will be a sad day if HL3 is ever released because it'll never live up to any expectation I'd rather see team fortress on source 2 and something new
Half Life story sucks ass, it would be better to start from zero with an actual good story of Alien invasion apocalypse.
Because all the people who knew how to make games retired. The only people left are web devs and economists minmaxing their hat revenues. Valve is far more interested in large scale industry-shifting projects than they are in creating individual games. They can just buy developers who've already made something they want for that purpose, which accounts for the majority of their IPs at this point.
Cause now there all hippies who can sit on there massive float of cash and never have any quota to work towards and they just collectively shrug there shoulders and move onto something else to
shrug over
>There entire treatment of anything tf2 where any other company would be shitting there pants for a GAAS this long running
>There dozen or so half life 3s unfinished attempts that they themselves admitted there way of handling projects actually sucks when it comes to finishing them
>Trying to chase the card game trend only to be extremely late to it and frick it up, say your gonna overhaul it then give up
>Make Dota underlords and then walk out like a black father, last update was 3 years ago
>There entire treatment of anything tf2 where any other company would be shitting there pants for a GAAS this long running
the fact that TF2 simply refuses to fricking die and even outlived Overwatch TWICE now despite Valve being apathetic at best and outright trying to finish it off at worst is absolutely hilarious to me
When exactly did it all go wrong?
TF2 turned out to be a really good game, and now Valve is allowed to just sit on their asses while drooling moron Soldier mains buy thousands of keys to get Unusuals for their troony Medic "gfs". No need to work on games anymore since they have a literal money printer.
you mean Dota 2, right?
Idk, I never played Dota 2, just seemed like shittier League, which should be saying something considering how shit League is.
Dota 2 is shit, but it's more popular than TF2
CS:GO is the most popular game on steam while Dota 2 is second
Ah well, whatever the same point still stands, regardless of game. People can't stop paying for the fricking microtransactions, so Valve doesn't actually have to do anything.
is shart life really their flagship franchise now? i don't think a single person outside of Ganker gives a single solitary shid about shart life.
portal is their flagship franchise now.
should have been l4d, though, honestly.
2 did its job it forced you to install the trojan storefront on your computer turning everyone into serfs to feed the fat frick so theres no need to make 3
Because it's too late. Back then it was fresh and new. Now it would be just another single player FPS.