I hadn't played it either until it came out for Linux a few years back, and... well, it hasn't aged well. I can see its brilliance, and how it must have been a revelation at the time, but it's obvious that it's from the early days of doing this kind of game in 3D when people were still learning how to adapt. There are parts that are needlessly confusing, things it could really do without, and in the end, although - I'll stress this again - I did enjoy it a lot, I just gave up.

And that worries me a little about the sequel. It has the potential, like so many other sequels that have been a long time coming, to be a massive disappointment by either remaining so close to the original that it retains all the flaws long-time fans had forgotten about (or gloss over), or by updating it for modern sensibilities to the extent that they feel it's been “dumbed down”. There's a fine line to walk there, and it isn't easy.

I hope I'm wrong. As I say, I did like Psychonauts. I'm looking forward to more of it in a modern engine. But this is Double Fine we're talking about here. They've got quite the track record when it comes to let-downs.

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Cool. I love the way Paradox aren't afraid to make major changes to gameplay after release. But (heh, paradoxically) this is also the trouble with owning too many Paradox games. You're just getting into one of them when they release a big update on another and you have to check it out. :)

Someone gave me Surviving Mars the other day as an early Christmas present (way better than expected, by the way; I think my reservations about replay value may be unfounded, especially with the DLC), and now I'll probably fire up Stellaris to see the new stuff and forget all about it.

Still, it's a good problem to have, right?

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Very cool, but it's a pity it needs a Pi 3. I have some old 1s and 2s sitting around doing nothing, and I expect I'm not alone. It would have been nice to be able to put them to use. I assume it's a hardware limitation and there's nothing that can be done about it, though.

Oh, well. Santa is coming soon. :)

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Quoting: ageres

Quoting: kuhpunktWhat else do you think those developers are doing?

Probably this:

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No, not necessarily. A lot of their existing games need maintenance, especially the online stuff, although even HL2 has seen updates surprisingly recently. (And, to be fair to Valve, they've released updates and patches for their offline games when other developers wouldn't have bothered.) And they ported everything to Linux. You don't have to be making new games to need working devs.

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Quoting: kuhpunktYes, some people left, but also a lot of other people joined them. And some of the people that left actually returned to Valve.

Which was my original point. Valve are returning to game development with things like Artifact (not that - I suppose I have to spell this out - they ever dropped it completely). That's good.

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Quoting: kuhpunktThey LITERALLY just released a game this week.

Yes, and I mentioned it in my original comment.

Dota 2 wasn't bought in. And just because you don't know what happens behind closed doors doesn't mean they aren't working on games. What else do you think those developers are doing?

I said “effectively”, and admit that wasn't a good way of putting it. But IceFrog was hired for Dota 2. What I meant was that it didn't originate at Valve, from a Valve creative team. Of course their own people did most of the work on it.

But even that was five years ago. Clearly their eyes have been off the ball. They've let a lot of developers, especially on the creative side, go over recent years. It's one of the reasons many fans have lost hope of ever seeing HL3 or Portal 3.

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Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: DuncThat's why abandoning game development to concentrate on Steam was a mistake.

What are you talking about?

It's true they didn't abandon it completely - maybe I should have said new game development - but Portal 2 is almost eight years old, and Left 4 Dead 2 is nine. Dota2 was effectively bought in, and TF2 hasn't seen a major update in a long while. It's pretty obvious that Steam has been the priority for the best part of a decade.

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Quoting: LinasI grew up here!

ETS2 is a great example of what I was saying the other day about getting real places right without having to slavishly copy every detail. While obviously the city layouts are much, much smaller than the real locations, they feel right. Again, in my home town of Glasgow, I get a genuine impression of the old industrial areas near the Clyde around maybe Stobcross or Kingston. You never actually cross the river in the game, which feels a bit off since the motorway does so right in the middle of town, but it's forgiveable because the impression of “being there” is done so well.

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Considering Epic's launcher is the only place on Windows to get Fortnite, they could have a pretty huge pull

That's why abandoning game development to concentrate on Steam was a mistake. Valve leveraged the draw of Half-Life 2 to establish Steam in the first place. It's understandable that they thought simply carrying everyone else's games on the platform would be enough to keep it afloat, and, to be fair, so far it has; Steam's taken a few punches lately, but it's still the 800lb gorilla. However they should know better: if they could do it, why can't Epic, if it has a big enough exclusive? I hope, for their sake (and for the sake of freeing PC gaming from Microsoft) Artifact is just the beginning of a new Valve.

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Quoting: Mountain ManI gave up on this on this game when the developers never bothered to fix the Steam Controller bug in Linux. I emailed them, they acknowledge that they were aware a bug existed that prevented the Steam Controller from being recognized, and then proceeded to do nothing about it. I'm still kinda pissed off.

Yup. The bug's still there. Or was a couple of months ago. They're still making noises about being aware of it, and a recent update claimed to have fixed it. It didn't.

I got heavily back into it for a while (with my XBox controller)... until I bought Fallout: New Vegas. :D Tempted by some of the DLC that's on sale right now, though.

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