Quake "champions"

[frag.machine]

[toneddu2000]

showing 2 ( I guess ) professional players playing. Characters don't seem to talk too much

[Dr. Shadowborg]

[toneddu2000]

[frag.machine]

@Shadowborg: well, HL2 had the falling grunt and sprint breathing, but I never considered those noises "speaking"... But otherwise I pretty much agree with you.

At this point I am convinced we will NEVER see a proper single player, lovecraftian themed remake of the franchise; it will either be this MOBA-oriented arena gameplay OR another "d-day... in spaaaace!" against Stroggs. And just like HL3 I kinda accepted I won't never see this dream to become reality.

[toneddu2000]

[frag.machine]

[toneddu2000]

You mean by trasforming themselves from "producer" to "distributor"? Yeah, that could be possible, you could be right. Anyway, if I were Newell, I'd have left a small team of devs and artists (maybe 10 or so) to produce high quality, not-AAA (at least as AAA is intended nowadays by the industry) cult videogames, produced in a more "passionate" fashion respect the rest of the trash we see in the market now (COD15, FarCry 75,BF2100, etc), using Id motto: "When it's done".
Because, from my point of view at least, Valve games are Valve games (probably even more than how Id games are Id games)

[frag.machine]

[Dr. Shadowborg]

[frag.machine]

/me stares wide eye opened
Dude, I don't know what are you smoking but... Can I have it too ?

EDIT: OK, sorry, I was - well, I AM - a bit drunk when I wrote that. Bear with me. Seriously, now.

About Microsoft: yeah, I know them for a really long time (long enough to remember and and also among several other examples) to NOT trust anything - ANYTHING! - coming from them. Make no mistake: they trully are the archetype of "evil corporation" that you saw in every flick Hollywood coughed up in the last decades. TL;DR = and are right. period. Free Windows 10 ? Yeah... no, thanks. But I digress...

About HL3: IMHO Gabe is hostage of the "flat management" bullshit he created at Valve. Consider this: it's not a matter of lack of money (HA!) or authority (Valve stills a closed capital, sole owner company). It's really nice to be able to join a project - or even start one, from scratch - of your personnal choice, as long people are aware they HAVE to do what the boss wants FIRST (see Google's "20% of work time available for personnal projects" politics). And I think he's just unable to force people to do what he wants because it would be against what he preached in the past. The sad reality is: just paying people sometimes is not enough for them to do what you want. You need to make it clear you are the boss, and if people wants that fat check in the end of the month they better please you, and just do as you say. Yup, sounds nasty, but hey, omelet and breaking eggs - you know what I mean. So, in a nutshell: right now the only chance of HL3 to exist is if GabeN opens another studio, totally unrelated to Valve and their flat management pipe dream, hires a bunch of talented people, throw money at them and say "I command thee to bring Half Life 3 to life". Heck, he doesn't even need to create a studio from scratch - buy MachineGames! Give them the money and the IP and they would make a kick ass Half Life 3.

[Dr. Shadowborg]

[toneddu2000]

Apart from every person point of view regarding Valve's business model (btw if you look at you see that Gabe is a little step among every other employee, so.. it's not completely flat)..imo the only disappointing move Valve did was not to make things clear in 2007, after Episode 2 release. They could have written a post on their projects page or new page simply saying:

"Due to business overhaul, Valve company has changed its core business. We're now focusing on releasing a more powerful, better platform to gather gamers and developers, blah, blah....(imagine millions of useless good words)... Game development became not our priority anymore and now, after Half Life episode 2, we decided to shut down game development sector. A talented small group of artists and programmers will remain to continue giving support to CS:GO and DOTA2 (CS::GO and DOTA has been released after 2007 (2012 and 2013) but you know what I mean) but NO new Half Life episode will be produced. We definetely think Half Life path comes to and end. Sorry to probably disappoint someone but's that's the way we see it. Good bye mr Freeman and Good luck"

Instead, they do this,

and this

And, honestly, this kind of ***king prankster acts by a billion company makes me piss off a little. Just a little.

If someone wants to punish Valve for this behaviour, probably best thing to do is to stop buying steam apps until Gabe clearly speaks about Freeman's future!

[toneddu2000]

Plus, I've never noticed they already talked about ep3!

[revelator]

Can't say i disagree with the comments about microsoft windows 10 could have been a killer if they adopted some of the linux philosophy like opensourcing non critical system components, instead they opted for big brother by taking your entire PC hostage. Granted you can get around some of the incessant spying but even at the lowest level it still sends heaps of data to MS and that's just telemetry. What is really appaling is that you basically have to give them the keys to your bank account and forfeit any work you consider copyrighted because the eula specifies that they can read anything you type if they so please i mean W...T...F....

To me this all smells like NSA has had a rather large finger in regards to MS writing holes they can exploit, atm it seems atleast only XP and older OS'es are hit, but i would bet a million dollars against them if they think it wont affect newer versions of windows in the future, especially with the money involved.