Gearbox Software suspended development of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero in July of 2002. Counter-Strike: Condition Zero introduces single player gaming to the world’s #1 online action game. Valve Software has overseen development since July. Gearbox is aware of and endorses Ritual Entertainment’s involvement. After developing several Half-Life games, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 and James Bond 007: Nightfire, Gearbox Software is refocusing its efforts on future technology and more interesting and innovative game play. Gearbox Software will be discussing Halo: Combat Evolved for the PC and our vision for the future of interactive entertainment at The CPL’s December 2002 event in Dallas, Texas.
If the future of interactive entertainment is in horrible ports of console games, then count me out. I’m sure their speech at CPL will be oh so very interesting.
Woah, that’s interesting, hadn’t heard a peep about that. Ritual makes the third developer to touch CZ, it started with Rogue (RIP). I guess the people working with Valve now inherit Valve’s inability to actually ship software. Or maybe Gearbox got tired of carrying the moneybags to the Valve offices.
It seems more likely to me that Gearbox was canned, similarly to Rogue. I’m speaking in ignorance here, but it seems reasonable to me that Valve would work with a contract guaranteeing total control over a project like CS, where as if Gearbox split, they’d have a major lawsuit on their hands.
But man, what the hell is wrong with Valve? Can’t they churn out even one of these 9/10th already-completed mods they’ve soaked up the rights to? Team Fortress 2 has been in the works since 1997, for chrissakes - although I think everyone knows by now it is vaporware. The Gunman Chronicles was embarassing. I remember somebody from Rogue on the EA forums basically saying that Valve’s arbitrary decision to pull the CS project from them basically resulted in the death of the company. Now Valve are pulling it from Gearbox.
What with these sort of bone-head moves, and ridiculous projects like Steam and whatever that one was that John Carmack himself gave a thumbs-down to, what the hell is going on with Valve?
Never mind my conspiracy theory above - I was just skimming. Gearbox claims to have stopped working on the title six months ago, and the wording seems to indicate that it was they who quit the contract.
I wonder if the AI for the game just isn’t working out.
I’ll second the WTF is Valve doing anyways? Yea they are supposedly doing their own custom engine, but they have to be getting somewhere by now. I wonder how much in resources they have blown on that gaming on their gaming technology pet projects, STEAM and the gaming networking thing(can’t remember the name) they were touting a cpl of years ago. That sure went nowhere fast…
WW2 themes are rampant in AAA games and mods - I’m not sure what TF2 could offer me now that I haven’t already had, especially in BF1942. 1942 seems to have covered the specific ground that TF2 was going for : fun but not strictly realistic shooter with vehicle dependence and a strong reliance on teams rather than individual scoring. Now there’s such a glut of WW2 games, another one would probably just turn me off. I think Valve missed the boat. Maybe they’re going to wait about 7 more years until WW2 themes go out of style, then they can start a renaissance :)
OTOH, what appealed to me about HL was not its originality (really, we’d all done the lone gunman vs alien hordes FPS thing before) but its quality. So I don’t much care when it’s released, as long as it’s worth it, which is easy enough to doubt.
DN:F should be on its 6th sequel by now. Its legacy is a cheap, low brow, extremely fun thrill ride with scantily clad women. How that could take 5 years is beyond me. Croatian guys are doing it in 7 month cycles.
Is Valve writing a new engine for TF2, or still planning to use a revamped Quake/Half-life/whatever they call it engine? The reason I ask is because after playing stuff like BF1942 (or Tribes 2 for that matter), I want wide-open spaces. Please, no more levels made strictly of corridors, streets, and locked buildings. The screenshots released so far don’t look any different from CS/DoD/other mods. I’m spoiled after playing maps like Wake, where I can start inside a carrier, climb up to the flight deck, get in a plane, fly to the island, land, and walk into another building. If you must have buildings, then I now expect something like the Berlin or Stalingrad map where it is a mass of intertwined buildings, streets and alleys. Linear maps that simulate that don’t cut it anymore. There are many well-known chokepoints in DoD maps, but there aren’t many in BF1942 maps since they are open enough to allow flanking of enemy strongpoints.
It’ll be interesting to see how far they move from their origins in the Quake engine. Granted, it was so altered for Half-Life it effectively became Valve’s engine, but I don’t ever they removed/repaired the limitations of displaying exterior environments. (Id always seemed more comfortable with interiors.)
I had checked a bit about what engine they are using, but if I had bothered to read past the screenshots link under “The Latest in Team Fortress 2” section at Planetfortress, I would have seen that they did switch to an internally-developed engine, and no new screenshots have been released since then.
The news story below that quotes Doug Lombardi to say, “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.”
I’ll be interested to see what Valve comes up with, but I think they are letting other developers run past them.
I do think they are working on it, but so little that they are being constantly eclipsed by other games. They make a lot of noise about TF2 being innovative & high quality, so they probably have to redo a bunch of stuff everytime something else is released. It is more of a morbid curiousity to see what crap they eventually decide to stuff in the box.
I also have a secret belief that the guys working on TF2 and DNF have each other on their ICQ lists, and spend most of the day sending Fark links to each other.
What has Valve done since Harrington (i think that was his name) left? Nothing. I think Gabe has some big concept ideas, but their goto programmer left and they seem to have been spinning their wheels ever since. It seems a company like that really needs one super programmer guy, otherwise the best they can hope for is mediocre crap that Raven is famous for.
