28-May-2002 Valve Software's Doug Lombardi chats Steam, Half-Life, Counter-Strike on Xbox and the fabled Team Fortress 2 Counter-Strike. Who, by now, has not heard of the world's most popular online action game? Well, maybe your granddad. But if you're into playing games rather than chewing gum, then you'll be well aware of the multiplayer shooter that has rocked the planet. It's massive.
Which is, in part, the problem. Fans of Valve Software's 1998 first-person shooter Half-Life are not only itching to hear new information about its team-based multiplayer title, Team Fortress 2, but also news about a new adventure for Gordon Freeman, which must surely be on the cards. Yet all we currently seem to hear from the mouth of the developer is Counter-Strike - Counter-Strike this, Counter-Strike that, Counter-Strike the other. Continually updated in its mod and retail form, it will soon be available as a single-player title courtesy of Condition Zero, and will now also be heading to Xbox Live. It's a big cash cow, and it's providing more milk than Unigate.
But for those fed up with hearing about terrorist/anti-terrorist antics, there's some good news in store. We recently managed to catch up with Valve's Doug Lombardi to quiz him about the goings on behind the developer's doors. As well as talking about Half-Life, the new Steam broadband delivery platform and Counter-Strike on Xbox Live, he also let slip a little gem and informed us that we'll finally, finally be getting new Team Fortress 2 information in the not too distant future. Well, here's crossing our fingers and toes.
Does it surprise you that many still regard Half-Life as the best first-person shooter of all time, even though it's now nearly four years old?
Lombardi: I'm happy that you say it's still regarded as the number one shooter [laughs]. We were amazed two weeks after it came out how people reacted to it, and now three and a half years later we're still amazed at the place it holds in a lot of gamers' hearts and minds. Someone was asking just the other day whether or not we get tired of hearing about how great Half-Life was, and no, we don't. It's like someone telling you you have a lovely child - you can never hear that enough. Are we surprised by it? Yes. Is it awesome? Yes, of course.
When development of Half-Life was drawing to a close, could you stand back and look at it objectively and say to yourselves, "This is awesome"?
Lombardi: The funny thing is, E3 1998 in Atlanta was the first time that people from the industry started to set it apart from the crowd a little bit. That's when the momentum from the sales and the press really started to take off. But internally I don't think it took off until that first cut of the train ride through the experiment gone wrong in what we call The Chamber. When that came on and everybody played that for the first time, there was an unbelievable buzz around the office. It was rough, and a lot of the voice acting wasn't in it, but you still got it, you knew where it was going and it was cool. The goal all along was not just to make it a shooting gallery, but to make it an experience so players could feel something about what they were doing within the context. When everyone played it and it worked, that's when things went crazy - that was roughly September '98, about two months before it was done. It gave everyone a real charge, and suddenly it was, '14 hour days?! No problem!' [laughs].
Because of Half-Life's huge success, is it a concern or worry that your next game has a lot to live up to?
Lombardi: Yes. I mean, it's an issue with Condition Zero. Counter-Strike is the number one online action game in the world, so just doing anything to follow up on that generates a huge amount of anxiety as it's got to be at least as good as this - and we try to pride ourselves by saying, 'It's not only got to be as good, but it's got to be a whole lot more to make it more interesting.'. More of the same really isn't interesting, it's not an interesting challenge to try and aspire to.
Team Fortress 2. You started off by releasing shots and movies, and then suddenly everything ground to a halt. Why? What happened?
Lombardi: When Robin Walker, Yahn Bernier and John Cook - who are some of the leaders on the development team - first started going toward the path they wanted to with Team Fortress 2, toward the game that they wanted to make once they'd defined it, it became clear that the Half-Life technology base was going to be pretty limiting. It has been said 'on the record' that there's a new internally-built engine, and TF2 will use that. So rather than showing more old screenshots and stuff that's in development while we're building the new engine, we decided to put it back into the pot and cook it a bit more. We'll start showing it again once it gets to a certain point, and we're now getting very close to that point... and that's where I have to cut it [laughs].
There are a lot of rumours flying around suggesting that it's never coming out, but it's absolutely still in development, and when people finally get to see it they're going to understand what we've been up to and why we've been busy doing that rather than other things.
So is Team Fortress 2 going to blow us away?
Lombardi: I think so. I hope so. We hold our quality bars up really high, so I think it's going to be exciting - it's certainly exciting for us. We're really anxious to start showing it to folks.
You've always been keen to support Half-Life mod developers. Will you continue with this sort of support with future Valve products?
Lombardi: Definitely. I think we've done a fair job of continuing to grow the scale upon which we do the mod support with. First we put out the level editor and the SDK, and we continue to update the SDK, and then we do the mod Expo and we've also taken Counter-Strike to retail. Any way that we can find of extending that we will, from this point and in the future. When we release Condition Zero we'll update the SDK once again so that you can make single-player Condition Zero experiences of your own, and take the new higher-poly-count models and use them to make total conversions. It's definitely a 'get what you give' kind of thing, and there's this incredible community of guys and talent, and if you turn them on and empower them a little bit, you'd be surprised at what comes back.
You've just announced Counter-Strike for Xbox Live. Do you see it being as much of a success on the console as it is on PC?
Lombardi: Yeah, CSX [laughs]. I see it being an incredibly interesting experiment. I think that Xbox is the most well-positioned console to actually do something in the online stakes. I'm sort of this old gamer who's been around and I remember the Saturn net-link and all that stuff, which were great tries but disasters as an end result of trying to take consoles online. The broadband connection and hard drive built in, Microsoft's experience in the networking world - these things give Xbox the best shot at it.
The Dreamcast was cool and had some of these features built in, but apart from Phantasy Star Online, what can you actually point to and say that it worked. It's too bad Sega was unable to carry on going in that direction, because I think that it was in a good position too, but I think that Microsoft has a really good shot at it. It's up to us to develop a title that retains what makes Counter-Strike such a great online game, but also deliver it to the console guys so it makes sense to them and it feels right with the controller in that kind of resolution.
Having to switch control methods from mouse and keyboard to controller is interesting. What sort of changes are you going to have to make to Counter-Strike to accommodate this?
Lombardi: With the PS2 version of Half-Life we did a fair amount of work to address this issue, with having a first-person shooter on that kind of interface. I think we did a pretty good job and we definitely learned a lot. Not to knock Sony's controller, but I think the Xbox controller gives us a lot more of what we need to do a better job of developing first-person shooters on that kind of platform.
Since we know we've got the controller, we're going to have to fuss with the aiming and view perspective and stuff like that, or else we're just going to have a horrendous experience. So we'll start here, but like we did with the PS2 version of Half-Life and like we were attempting to do with another port that never shipped [laughs] - another platform that had online capability - we will do things to make it as native as possible to that experience.
Is the Xbox version of Counter-Strike going to be the same as the PC version?
Lombardi: On a high level it will be the same thing as the PC game, we'll start with Condition Zero - single-player and multiplayer skirmish modes, the whole lot. Since we know that there's an nVidia chip in there, there's lots of graphical things we can do as well. Again, it's the balancing act of keeping the magical special sauce - if you will - of the Counter-Strike online experience, but also making it native and comfortable to the console player and the console interface.
So if Sony was in the same position as Microsoft with its networking experience, would you have considered bringing Counter-Strike to PS2 as well?
Lombardi: Sure, because we already have that code built [laughs - a lot].
So was Microsoft's background in networking one of the major reasons for you taking it to Xbox instead of another console?
Lombardi: Not really. To be honest, the major reason is that Microsoft came to us and said , 'We really want to do this with you guys, and we want to make it a lead title for Xbox Live'. And we said, 'Yeah'. [laughs]
Could you tell us, in layman's terms, how your Steam broadband deliver platform will operate?
Lombardi: Right now, Steam is in beta with over 125,000 users. When we released CS 1.4 we removed the wall between the beta and the public, so those users playing with Steam could play against the other one and a half million gamers on Counter-Strike.
But, there's a little bit of confusion that I'd love to clear up [laughs]. The Steam underlying service is not going to introduce a pay-to-play model. I like to think of Steam in two ways. First, there's the underlying service or version control, that is, patches and upgrades, anti-cheating, the tracker, the instant messaging service. This part is free if you own any of our games already. Second, there's the commercial part of Steam which is, for any of our games you don't own - or if you don't own any of them - you can go online and set up an account to play them. What we haven't quite worked out yet is that, do you pay $30 to $40 for Condition Zero and then you own it forever, or do you pay $9.95 [presumably per month - Ed] to get access to everything from Valve when ever it comes out. We're looking at both of those models right now, and one may make more sense now and the other may make more sense in the future. We may try both, but it's up in the air at this time.
Hopefully that should make the distinction between Steam the service, and Steam the distribution mechanism for delivering new products.
The plan was that with CS 1.5 we were going to roll everybody over to the Steam, free underlying service. We're a little behind, so 1.5 will basically be like the other updates that we've done. Those who are on Steam will get it automatically, so I highly encourage anyone on a broadband connection to join Steam, for free [laughs], and get their updates that way. Otherwise you're in the position of looking for the patch and making sure you've got the right version, the right language version, then waiting in line for the server to download. Steam eliminates this headache. It's looking like 1.6 will be the time when we roll everyone over to the free Steam underlying service.
So you'll still release products to retail in the traditional sense?
Lombardi: Yes. I believe that there are those who want to get everything online, but I also think there will always be people who want to have the box and have the physical media.
Counter-Strike aside, you've been quiet in regard to your own unique titles since you stopped releasing media for Team Fortress 2. What can you say now that will allay peoples' fears and frustrations? Why should we "keep the faith" in Valve Software, and what else have we got to look forward to aside from TF2?
Lombardi: Hmm, well... that one's better left. [laughs]
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