This seems really neat - why did @tomchick “hate the shit out of it”? I can’t find his review on the front page, who did he review it for?
Contrary to what wumpus said, I don’t have any opinion about this game because I haven’t played it and it’s not even out. He might be referencing what I thought about Firewatch, which I didn’t hate:
We should know by now what videogames can and can’t do as a medium. When they’re not aping movies, they can tell riveting environmental stories in contained settings with gratifying payoffs (Gone Home, Bioshocks 1 and 2, Portal). In the context of...
Est. reading time: 8 minutes
-Tom
That was a really cool article; thank you for sharing that. I kinda hope some version of that tech makes it out into the broader game dev community going forward :)
That makes a lot more sense. I read that line from @wumpus and was very confused. Thanks for the clarification!
wumpus
April 10, 2018, 9:03pm
25
Calling a video game “not a videogame” … IDK that seems like you hated it, to me.
Where did I say it wasn’t a videogame? That was my whole point! I took issue with it specifically because it was a videogame !
As for whether I hated it, I refer you to the Quarter to Three rating system. :)
-Tom
LMN8R
April 21, 2018, 9:40pm
27
This game is now a Valve game! :-O
Well, I guess everyone can shut up about Valve not making any single player games.
Remember when Valve hired Clint Hocking and we got that awesome Valve-published immersive sim?
krayzkrok:
You mean Half Life 3 - that was great wasn’t it!? You did play it, right?
And apparently Tom hated the shit out of it.
Did I do that right?
You kids and your memes.
I don’t know how you can say that. We’ve been through this. Tom gave Half Life 3 three stars. That means he liked it.
John Walker asks and they answer, the big question, as far as I’m concerned:
RPS: Talking about being a team at Valve, historically, and I think I’m right in saying this, every complete team that Valve have brought in has never gone on to make another game together. Is that something that you’re cool with? That idea you’re going to go and make Valley and then just sort of dissipate out into Valve, or are you going to try and stay together?
Sean Vanaman: I don’t think there’s a specific reason for that and also I know people who – I don’t think there’s a specific reason for that. I don’t think a good company optimises towards breaking up teams. I think…
RPS: Oh no, I’m not saying they’re going to go and do it aggressively! I’m just saying historically that’s how it’s always worked out just because, I think maybe, because of that rolling desk nature of Valve. That everyone goes, ‘Oh, actually I’m quite interested in working on Half-Life 3 for a bit’ and off they go. But are you going to try to keep your team together?
Sean Vanaman: I would say, ‘To what end?’ If we think it’s emotionally and culturally valuable to keep the team together to make another game then – that would be the outcome of a bunch of people’s individual choices. Which is not dissimilar to what it would have been at Campo. At the end of the Valley of Gods you look around and we sit down with everybody and go, ‘How you feeling? Are you in or are you out?’ We did that at the end of Firewatch. We don’t really have the ‘got to keep the band together’ mentality. We have the we’re a bunch of super senior highly motivated folks that are driven by different things and things that change over a lifetime.
Nothing could have pulled me off of Firewatch because it was important to me to be a big creative voice on an independent new IP game and see what that was like. That’s what’s important to me now and I think that’s pretty – this is me speaking personally – right now I want to be a writer/collaborator on a big sprawling character driven adventure so that’s what I’m doing. I don’t really know what my personal ambitions will be at the end of the game and how those personal ambitions might line up with what’s going on here.
A large chunk of the way I spent my time at Campo over the past five years was working with other indies and reaching out to folks and helping them get their studio set up or helping them find financing for their games or trying to talk indies out of taking crappy deals. I mean hours and hours and hours and that’s something that’s directly – I could directly apply that skill here. Something that we take really seriously at Valve is in the outreach and it’s something that I’ve already dabbled in here. So it just kind of depends. No one on the team that I’m on would begrudge me pursuing those things if it was what satisfied me as a human being and also what made good sense for the enterprise as a whole. I love working with this group of folks and I don’t see that changing so it’s too hard to say.
Also, I notice there hasn’t been any Campo Santo podcast since the announcement, as I was worrying about in the other thread. Hoping its just moving madness, but not encouraging.
Well, they picked a good time of year to move to Seattle at least. Enjoy the sunlight while you can, Californians. Mwa-ha-ha-haaaaa …
LMN8R
May 9, 2018, 9:39pm
37
Sean and Jake did a great job providing reasonable answers to John Walker’s cynical questions.
I really loved Firewatch. Sad that Valley will be their last game before Campo Santo transitions to working on trading cards and Counterstrike gun skins.
You meant hats for TF2, right?
Vesper
May 10, 2018, 3:26am
40
This is my primary concern. Idle Thumbs shows are a highlight of my week and I was a kickstarter and am a Patreon backer. I sure hope the shows survive.
I’m worried that ItVoG might well be on indefinite hiatus as the announcement they were joining Valve was the last blog post made either on the game on for their journal.