We got talking today about what Steam could become, and what else the main drivers of PC gaming might be planning next. These, roughly, were our thoughts.
Tim
Valve: What happens after Episode 3 is the big question. Part of me thinks that we won't be seeing them working on grand single player experiences. The effort required is just too great - why work for four to five years on a single game, when you have no idea how the audience will react? Why tie yourself down for that long?
For me, 2008 has belonged purely to Team Fortress 2. Not just because we play it daily in the office - but because with each content pack, "Meet the..." movie, and Achievement unlock, my love for the game has grown. How often do you really pine for something you're already playing.
I can only see Valve building on that. Valve confirmed today that Left 4 Dead will be backed up in a similar way with movies and content updates. And I think whatever they do next will have to follow a similar pattern.
But, I'll be happy to be surprised. To be honest, though, Valve's every move is a surprise. Portal came totally out of the blue. Team Fortress 2's reveal was a dramatic shock. Left 4 Dead came completely out of left field.
Maxis: Maxis are good at simulations with an educational purpose, and they've occasionally stated that they're interested in exploring games as educational tools. One idea I'd love to see them try is a SimEarth style game that lets players mess with ecologies and ecosystems and see the effects on life. Spore does this a little, but with apocalyptic violence - you can drop terraforming devices to bring barren rocks to life, or drop planet-busting bombs to wipe out life. I think they can do something subtler.
But I do wonder how they can make a game like that appealing for younger players.
Blizzard: Visiting the Blizzard development headquarters in Irvine is slightly terrifying. Mainly because of it's scale: three four storey buildings, each housing developers. The WoW team take up just one floor. I'd wager the Starcrat 2 and Diablo 3 teams are on a similar footing. Presumably, they've got a /lot/ more games in the pipeline. So what will it be? I reckon they're developing a shooter.
Why? I think of Blizzard as the 'inevitable' company. They plant a flag in a genre, and then own it completely. They are the king of MMO gaming. Their RTS games are legendary. Diablo is forever synonomous with action-RPGs. And they're always playing the most popular games - always looking at what players love, iterating on those ideas until perfect.
The shooter is the last great genre they haven't conquered. I think I know why - shooters have tech heavy system requirements, that necessarily impact on the coherence of the art, and the interesting dynamics that all Blizzard games have. If Blizzard made a shooter - every weapon and every action you took would have to have to have different properties and effects, and those properties and effects should look and sound distinct on every PC, low-end to high-end.
Until recently, I didn't think the tech could handle that.
But that's changing - and two games lead the charge: Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield: Heroes. You can play both on a decent laptop, and on any PC down to something two or three years old. They're super-easy to get into, but deep enough to keep you playing night after night.
Frankly, I find the thought of a Blizzard shooter terrifying. Because if they combine visceral first-person violence with WoW's compulsive magic, I might never stop playing.
Craig
Valve: post Left 4 Dead I can see Valve going quiet, really quiet. Then one day I'll load up my PC and find that Windows has been replaced with a Valve OS, skinned to look like Steam, and they'll episodically update it to be better than Microsoft's effort over a long period of time. Valnux will be fully functional in 2012. Alternatively: Portal 2: The Holey War.
Maxis: I think Will Wright will turn his sights on creating his own religion. DOSques will spring up everywhere, with emergent hymnals and customisable beliefs. EA will then release expansion gospels every other month, with new rules to live by. No-one'll really want them, but they'll be popular nonetheless.
Blizzard: They'll buy Australia and turn it into a live action RPG. You'll pay £8 a month to live there and kill Kangaroos. The end boss will be Russell Crowe.
Tom
Valve: The remaining six class packs, and god knows how many new maps, will keep TF2 growing and exciting for at least another eighteen months. Overlapping with that will be Left 4 Dead, and the new campaigns they roll out for that on a regular basis.
For more and more gamers, first-party Valve games on Steam are going to be our staple playing diet: the games we come back to each time we're done with the latest 20-hour singleplayer game that took three years to make.
Less frequently but more significantly for non multiplayer gamers, I think Portal is going to roughly follow the Half-Life 2: Episodes release schedule. And after Ep3, I really don't think we're going to get a completely new 16-hour monolithic Half-Life 3 that takes them three years to make. Valve are just burned out on that, it's not worth it compared to the success they've had with regular episodes. Episodes keep them in the news, they're smaller investments, the team don't get sick of the project and can cycle out to other games, as Robin Walker did from Episode One to Team Fortress 2.
I think instead, they'll step back and rethink their design goals for the series. Half-Life 2 focused on characters because people responded so well to Half-Life's security guards, and on physics because technology enabled it. For Half-Life 3: Episodes, I think they'll focus on single-player co-operative experiences, since players have responded so well to Alyx's help. And I wouldn't be surprised if the technological angle they focused on was something that allowed them to create more epic battles, with hundreds of characters or creatures in much larger areas than we've seen so far. I think that's one of the few respects in which Half-Life is still straining against its technology to depict the scale of the story it's trying to tell.
The amazing thing is that the guys churning out regular additions to these four games are half of Valve. The other half are working on Steam, constantly. I think they're working towards a situation where Steam is as ubiquitous among PC users as Xbox Live is for 360 players. I think the next time you reinstall Windows, you'll just download Steam and click the "Install My Favourites" button, whereupon everything from Firefox to Team Fortress 2, from the new nVidia drivers to Portal, all your screenshots, savegames and control configs, essential drivers, preferred software and Garry's Mod creations will all stream down onto your hard-drive, powered by peer-to-peer bandwidth for the more common stuff, ordered by priority or preference, and minimisable to the system tray while you get on with whatever you like.
Maxis: Desperate to recoup the enormous investment they've made in such a risky, experimental game, they're going to try and bring Spore to everything: phones, television, Facebook apps, your dreams, your family, the sky, the water supply, and tennis. There'll be Spore ads burnt into the moon, tattooed on your skin when you wake up, Spore mini-games you have to complete before you can open your fridge, and installing Spore will cause the off-switch to drop off your PC and the power cable to fuse into its socket.
The trouble is what I want from Spore is a reworking, rebalancing and reintegration of the existing game: to dip back into the Cell, Creature or Civ stages from the Space stage to solve problems on a smaller scale. I don't want extra content - the whole point of the game is that players make the cool stuff, and they're already making more of it than even Maxis anticipated.
There right about spore. It needs to go into a more realistic and harder version. When i first heard about the genesis device i was against it. Terra forming a planet is about careful balancing of all the gases and plant life required to keep it going. I would rather have 1 single hard earned planet than 1000 easy to get; drop big bomb; done. I also wouldn't mind them losing some of the aesthetic things about spore. It has become more like sims castaway. It isn't about surviving anymore, its about looking good. At least if an expansion does come out ,which it will because of ea, i want an expansion that makes it realistic.
There right about spore. It needs to go into a more realistic and harder version. When i first heard about the genesis device i was against it. Terra forming a planet is about careful balancing of all the gases and plant life required to keep it going. I would rather have 1 single hard earned planet than 1000 easy to get; drop big bomb; done. I also wouldn't mind them losing some of the aesthetic things about spore. It has become more like sims castaway. It isn't about surviving anymore, its about looking good. At least if an expansion does come out ,which it will because of ea, i want an expansion that makes it realistic.
The Genesis Device - it's called the Staff of Life - is rather hard to come by. Normally terraforming is a case of tweaking gas and temperature then setting up ecosystems.
Trouble with a realistic simulation on a galactic scale is that it's outside the scope of modern supercomputers. Granted, you can bodge a simulation to do that (which is what Maxis did), but realism wasn't the point of Spore, I take it? Sim Earth was already very impressive, and that was released several years ago.
That's a bit upbeat for you, Aircool. Unless... wait! You weren't attempting sarcasm? Oh hoho. You nearly fooled me you little scamp. Nearly slid a mean little aside through. I'm on to you.
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Craig that was great
