Why Valve Is Still Number One
There's a reason why Valve has so many fans.
— MuddyDido
The gaming community has come a long way in the past five years and has blossomed into a healthy, vibrant and competitive industry. The beauty of this community is that it combines work, play, leisure, and communication, stuffing it all into a desktop for easy consumption by the frag-hungry masses. Not only are you guaranteed to escape the day’s hustle and bustle by delving into a 3D accelerated world of mayhem, but the multiplayer component offers you a chance; to frag your buddies, meet new people and ultimately the opportunity to contribute new material to your game of choice! That is why people feel so passionately about the three main rivals in the computer gaming first person shooter genre; Valve, Epic and Id Software. The fans tend to be rabidly loyal to their software developers, errrh, at least until something better comes along which brings me to the point of this article. I am very disappointed in the latest offerings of Epic and Id. I feel that they have let the community down by not paying close enough attention to what the community has hungered and voted for en masse with the incredible success of Valve’s Half-Life.
I have the dubious honour of not entering the gaming community until the release of Half-Life. It was the second game I ever owned, the first was a boxset of old LucasArts Star Wars titles, but we won’t hold that against me, right? ;-) I missed the Quake and Quake II era, but was utterly blown away by Valve’s offering so I decided to check out the former. I wound up being disappointed at the lack of imagination that went into these games as there seems to be very little in the way of strategy, tactics or skill. To master QI or QII, you need only practice and then, the only thing that can hold you back is the boredom that sets in. Having slammed the two most important games that founded the modern day fps gaming industry as we know it, I feel I must also point out what was good! Besides being the first massively popular 3D accelerated games (where would we be now without our Voodoo’s and nVidia’s), the fans and users of the software realized the Quake series’ potential, took the ball, made it their own and ran with it. A community was born, and for that, John Carmack, I will love you forever. The following years saw the advent of amateur developers contributing maps, mods and models to an ever growing list of fan dedicated sites that follow the developers moves as though they were world leaders. How is that? Do you feel better about me slamming the fps gaming guru? I hope so, as it is not my intent with this article to slam or discredit Id or Epic, as their releases are truly outstanding, but to contribute some constructive criticism to the fps software giants. I want to see this industry remain vibrant and healthy but feel that a step backwards was taken with their respective releases, so let’s keep reading, shall we.
Half-Life gave us a much brighter world to escape to, one in which you could actually see the enemy before they started shooting, but most importantly, they listened to the gaming community and took note of what it liked. They ported over the wildly popular Quake mod, Team Fortress and renamed it Team Fortress Classic. It was a move that endeared the fans, won over the loyalty of many Quakeheads, and drew in many mod developers to further solidify the popularity of the game. Heck, Valve even threw in a copy of WorldCraft on the Half-Life CD to encourage the further development of the game. This has allowed the addition of such mods as Counter-Strike and Action Half-Life, both of whom may have remained Quake only mods without Valve’s extra efforts to secure a loyal fan base. I believe this is Valve’s secret to continued success, they keep their ear to the ground and offer the gaming community what it wants; solid and diverse multiplayer action that melds a balance between mayhem, strategy and tactics. That is why Team Fortress 2 will be another wildly successful release, which may threaten to eclipse Epic and Id completely if they don’t start paying careful attention.
What truly amazes me is the short sightedness of Epic and Id during the development of their latest titles. Both Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena have incredible game engines, beautifully smooth netcode and the potential to blow Valve’s Half-Life into the nether regions of has-been, but they don’t and nobody seems to be talking about why? First off, both games out of the wrapper cannot be played easily without hours of research on how you can tweak them to get your frame rates up to a playable level and by the time you are finished, the game really doesn’t look that much better than Half-Life. It is as though they assumed that the masses would all have PIII’s or Athlons stocked with 256 Mb of RAM and a high speed internet connection by the time their games were released. I have 224 Mb of RAM and Unreal Tournament uses every single Mb during it’s start-up! I truly feel sorry for the average gamer stuck at 128. It is also a gross oversight to assume that the gamer is going to use the same config files for single and multiplayer, why aren’t these easily configurable and separate? All gamers are on a quest to have the lowest ping possible for internet play so why not make the process of lowering your ping and latency user friendly? It is a simple idea isn’t it? Why not include a simple interface to create config files? Everyone knows Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament were designed to corner the online multiplayer market, so why such an oversight? By the way, have you ever opened your QIII config file? It takes at least 15 minutes to line it up so that you can read it and then if you don’t make a backup copy outside of the QIII folder, you will have to adjust it again the next time you open it. Who’s bright idea was that? My last criticism is, once again, the lack of strategy, skill and tactics. I hate to beat a dead horse, but joining a multiplayer team play game of QIII or UT is like being thrown into a tornado of blind mayhem. For starters, the game is so fast paced that it is nearly impossible to use the communication functions for fear of being fragged and therefore near impossible to set up defensive or offensive strategies. I recently read a UT strategy guide that recommends you leave on the auto-taunt function so that you would know what your teamates are doing! Every time I join a game, I feel that I am playing with a bunch of bots that are out for themselves. It kills the point of playing online. I really enjoy reading the players spontaneous taunts, setting up a tactical defense or a cooperative offensive with complete strangers while honing my skills to rack up the frags. I still find that the only place I can get this diversity of enjoyment is by playing Half-Life’s multiplayer games. These components are nearly completely lacking in Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena. It is also beyond me why they would not include different player classes with different abilities for their games. They were, after all, designed to be played online, right? This is a glaring oversight but alas there is hope, as this may be easily overcome. We are a community that has the power to be heard or to change what we don’t like with our own modifications. I know that there are two mod developer groups designing classic capture the flag for Quake III Arena and I am waiting anxiously for their releases. They truly hold the potential to put QIII over the top but it is beyond me why Id would leave this task up to independent developers. Unreal Tournament, on the other hand, has a slight advantage over QIII due to their ingenious and growing list of mutators to keep the game interesting but this is not quite enough to make the game a fulfilling multiplayer experience and I have not seen any plans to modify the game to include a diversity of player classes or abilities, which disappoints me.
The above reasons, my friends, are why Half-Life still rules the multiplayer roost. Whether you are a loyal fan of Epic, Id or Valve, you need only open GameSpy 3D and check the total online player count for the three games to see which one is still the king. Valve’s Half-Life is still the only game offering the complete multiplayer experience, an experience that balances mayhem, strategy, tactics and, perhaps most importantly, communication. Hopefully Epic and Id will catch on soon as, in my humble opinion, their latest offerings, Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena are presently, nothing more than eye candy and wasted potential. I hope this message will be heard and acted upon as I am a fan of all three game developers and look forward to the release that manages to knock Half-Life from its perch, from whoever the developer may be!
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