A threadlock for Deadlock, Valve’s new third person shooter action MOBA in a hellboy-type setting.
If you want an invite, let me know and add me on Steam and i can invite you
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i need that new icefrog and i need it now!!!
(my multiple ex-inlaws working at valve refuse to speak to me even after i was so generous as to send them my 250-page paper designs for half life barney)
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I wanna live in The Cursed Apple.
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My favorite character is the bat
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Everyone loves Ivy, she gets the vast majority of fan art lmao
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saw some article or another about this last night – i dont really know that much about the game itself but still find it pretty interesting that for all the press it’s getting its still ‘unannounced’. it seems valve has been resting on their laurels with steams’ grip on the market, which makes me wonder if this is intentional and they are just gonna try setting it on the frontpage of the storefront to see how it does, one day. like evidently they don’t even need to so much as say they are making the game to get people to talk about it, or apparently play it now?
it is honestly a bit scary to think that any one developer/platform actually has the safety net to allow a strategy like that, esp. given how risk averse the rest of the industry currently is
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yeah this was something someone else brought up: Valve has a major uncompetitive advantage owning the platform the game is on
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nobody knew about it until like 3 months ago when uncle dane (the tf2 influencer) leaked it by streaming on discord. since then they’ve gradually been opening up the alpha. the “informal nda” is clown shit considering everyone i know is talking about it lol
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Aside from whatever Rockefellerian market abuse strategies are enabled by Valve owning Steam, Steam also means at a basic level they have infinite money. They don’t need to make any games, much less profitable ones, so if and when they do, they can just sort of mess around and do whatever. Blessing and a curse for the end product, imo.
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@hellojed thanks for the read… i completely forgot artifact was something that even existed until this mentioned it lol.
The bits about the ‘NDA’ or lack thereof are really really wild to me. it seems like its kind of shredding apart trust between valve and the journalists here.
yeah i think this is really what i’m thinking about. they really don’t have an incentive to make games now, so i imagine when they do the purpose is mostly to test some other new strategy. ‘shadow dropping’ games is not really a new thing any more, but valve is in a very unique position to test out this theory of combining that with also “0$” invested into marketing? but if this doesnt turn out in their favor hopefully at least valves weird calvinball corporate structure lets the folks who worked on this at least keep their jobs
i also bit the bullet and pulled up some footage from the current test. just looking at the UX of it alone this really doesnt feel that close to being done honestly, which is kind of making me doubt the previous things. im positive valve at large knows this is going on but for 23,000 people to be playing this right now seems really off for the state its in, so either they are getting drastically experimental with this or there are a couple fires they need to put out this week
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Makes me wonder how many other valve projects have never seen the light of day that got to this state
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you don’t want to know
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Your ex in laws really work at valve huh.
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Valve resembles academia or something like Microsoft Research where projects are constantly started (in earnest, replete with passable art, writing, so as to playtest, etc.) without any expectation that they’ll be finished, to explore technical or design problems or player psychology insights or whatever, and brought to 50-80% completion with a team of ten to twenty before being scrapped for parts, made into little crown-jewel kernels that sit on shelves for a decade, waiting to be integrated into a Real Project (something started by someone with tenure). Like maybe someone in a technical art role figured out they needed to make a runtime tool that generated animation-syncable audio waveforms on the fly to have running during the recording booth sessions, and that’s the only notable thing that survives from whatever project folder that was from, but it was worth it. People are always working on games, at breakneck, faster-than-Agile speeds, knowing it’s all just raw material for something better.
In 2011-2013, they were working on a Half-Life 3 built on Source 2 which had a new physics system named Rubicon. One of its features was its voxelized collision models that could transition between rigid-body, soft-body, fluid-dynamic, and particle-shatter states, presumably because they were making a game in a cold place where you could freeze and melt things. When that project fell apart, the technology sat dormant within the engine, occasionally popping up in that Portal-themed moon VR game that actually got released, and there are some objects in Alyx which use the soft-body state when using the pressure-sensitivity of the Index controllers. They spent two years trying to make a Minecraft game out of Rubicon. Most recently it’s been used to shoot through the smokes in Counter-Strike 2. Most of the time, that’s how it goes, for a company that’s spiritually like 80% engineering, in search of a design application for a groundbreaking technical marvel or shiny disruptive psychologically manipulative player habit discovery (hats, et al).
They spent two and a half years making a class-based Left 4 Dead 3 in 2015-2016 on Source 2 that they were internally playtesting on LAN before the engine had functional netcode. Years of art and intricate game design work went into it, including interesting asymmetrical ideas where a Game Master places zombies ahead of the players from an overhead view, which were inherited from early VR/AR experiments using L4D2 in 2013 (they used L4D2 for so many experiments, including ones involving biometrics circa 2011). The game took place in Morocco. The project was well beyond a level of completion that most Early Access games would ship in. The project hit a wall when no one wanted to finish the netcode for Source 2. There were about 35 people working on the game. Half of them wanted to switch to Unity (mostly designers), while others thought it was better to invest in finishing Source 2. This ended up killing the project. Some of the art from the Moroccan landscapes appears in some Counter-Strike maps.
Right now they’re working on a single player game that can integrate procedural spaces into authored maps. They first created this technology in 2015 on another Half-Life 3. It didn’t pan out. For a while they thought they were going to use this technology in Deadlock (which started life as Citadel in 2018 and was in development with ten people for years). Citadel was going to be a kind of Valve metaverse, its characters based on all the different alien and robot species of the Half-Life, Portal, and Dota worlds. In 2022, it was pretty much art-complete, with a retrofuturistic aesthetic, before they decided that multiplayer games with that aesthetic aren’t successful, and it didn’t seem to be popular with playtesters. They rebooted it and redesigned a lot of the worlds and characters, and replaced trains with skyrails. It was in danger of being another Left 4 Dead 3 before one of the higher-ups with enough clout demanded people return to it after people began peeling off it when it got the stench of doom. They actually kind of still don’t know if they’re going to finish it. Which I think might be why they got mad at The Verge. They still want to be able cancel at the 95-yard line if they can. Every so often you see somthing like Dota Underlords slip through, which is how you know a twenty-year vet was involved on it.
Half-Life Alyx had a completely different story they spent years working on with a Real Writer. It had hours of AAA-quality mocapped HL2-style “cutscenes,” including one where a Combine officer woman executes your best friend in a train yard splattering a blood effect onto lens of your vision. They only realized years in that this story was way too dark, so they threw out all the story work they had done (but retained the meticulously-playtested design) and replaced it with a man on a radio telling you Erik Wolpaw jokes because the game had to ship Or Else. That train yard survives as a cool combat encounter. That’s Valve.
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it’s a very fascinating case study in hoarding genuinely talented people and never ever having to go public
Alyx was great and I was impressed it actually shipped but it was literally the last VR game I cared about after 3-4 years of interest which is a hilarious way to go
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what the fuck
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good reminder to post this thing i found
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Half-life 3 should be about multiverse hopping through all the half life 3 prototypes.
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My nose wrinkled so much when I read these words
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