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I was wondering the same thing. HL3 is possibly the most anticipated game ever, and so working on it surely involves a lot of pressure. Yet TF2 gets new updates

by city41 12y ago

I was wondering the same thing. HL3 is possibly the most anticipated game ever, and so working on it surely involves a lot of pressure. Yet TF2 gets new updates all the time. I'm curious if Valve's structure helped lead to this. I admire Valve, and think their approach is interesting, but I can't help but feel sometimes a little hierarchy is necessary to force the crummy stuff that needs to get done to get done.

k__ 12y ago
When I work on my own I tend to do easy stuff more often than hard stuff. So maybe because everyone likes TF2 and creating new content is easy, more teams tend to work on it.
rifung 12y ago
I think that it doesn't just involve more pressure; it's just really difficult to make a game that could live up to the extremely high expectations people have. It takes time to come up with good ideas after all. I completely agree with your point that a little hierarchy is necessary to get things that absolutely need to get done finished. On the other hand, as a developer I can also see how you wouldn't want to release something unless you are confident it'll be great. The difficulty is finding that balance, but given that they intentionally chose to stay private, it seems to make sense the company culture is to focus on the quality of the product. I'll admit I kind of admire the freedom from time pressure they have.
CamperBob2 12y ago
No, HL3 should be built by a strong team, led by (and composed of) people who can't imagine doing anything else. Treating it as "crummy stuff" that someone needs to be forced to do will just result in a bad game. We can get bad games from any number of other publishers.
- city41 12y ago
  I didn't mean to correlate HL3 with "crummy", I was commenting on two separate things. For example: I understand that Valve's Steam customer service is pretty hit or miss. Possibly a result of no one at Valve really wanting to own customer service.

by city41 12y ago

k__ 12y ago

When I work on my own I tend to do easy stuff more often than hard stuff. So maybe because everyone likes TF2 and creating new content is easy, more teams tend to work on it.

rifung 12y ago

I think that it doesn't just involve more pressure; it's just really difficult to make a game that could live up to the extremely high expectations people have. It takes time to come up with good ideas after all. I completely agree with your point that a little hierarchy is necessary to get things that absolutely need to get done finished. On the other hand, as a developer I can also see how you wouldn't want to release something unless you are confident it'll be great. The difficulty is finding that balance, but given that they intentionally chose to stay private, it seems to make sense the company culture is to focus on the quality of the product. I'll admit I kind of admire the freedom from time pressure they have.

CamperBob2 12y ago

No, HL3 should be built by a strong team, led by (and composed of) people who can't imagine doing anything else. Treating it as "crummy stuff" that someone needs to be forced to do will just result in a bad game. We can get bad games from any number of other publishers.

city41 12y ago
I didn't mean to correlate HL3 with "crummy", I was commenting on two separate things. For example: I understand that Valve's Steam customer service is pretty hit or miss. Possibly a result of no one at Valve really wanting to own customer service.