Doug Lombardi Talks to CVG
Valve PR honcho Doug Lombardi spent a while talking to CVG at EAs Games Showcase event in London last week.
Doug talked about a whole load of things to CVG ranging from Left 4 Dead and Counter-Strike to Valve wanting to see a Wii game and much more. Some of his comments are really quite interesting.
[Source Engine] It’s great, particularly for older PCs, but some say its starting to show its age. Do you have an intended life span for it - a time when you think you’ll need a complete refresh?
Lombardi: It’s really a conscious decision, on our behalf, to make sure that our games work across a wide range of systems. And I think that we’re investing more in the gameplay, AI and design than were are in textures and rendering.
If we wanted to we could beef up Source so that it’d not run on an older PC anymore, but that really wouldn’t be a good decision.
That may work within the industry, and it may impress some people at trade shows, but I think when you get that out to Joe-Average, who has a two-year old PC and doesn’t have £2000 to buy the latest hardware to run a game, it’s not so good. We don’t want that disconnection.
This is a great attitude for Valve to have, while graphics will always be an important part of many games, Valve have had great success over the years with their focus on the story, innovation and in getting the player emotionally invested into their games.
I would prefer they keep along with these goals while keeping Source up to date without pushing it beyond the capabilities of the majority of PCs out there at the moment.
You guys are taking your time with the Half-Life episodes, too. How’s Episode Three coming along?
Lombardi: Well, the gap between Half-Life and Half Life 2 was six years. It’s not quite four years since then and we’ve already released two follow-ups that we’re really proud of. We didn’t milk the cow, so to speak, and pump out more of the same content.
While the word ‘Episodic’ conjures up this idea of TV where episodes are aired every week, maybe that’s not the best term to use for this. I do think that we’ve hit upon something that allows us to have a more enjoyable development experience - to spend six years on the same game is kind of a death march.
We’ve hit with episodes around every 14-16 months. It won’t be another six years until you see Freeman, but it won’t be next week. I think we’re improving our ability to produce interesting new content in a more timely fashion.
Maybe it won’t be as long as Half-Life 2, but hopefully it’ll be just as good and just as innovative.
Valve’s use of the word ‘Episodic’ was I think an error in judgement, a different name would have been better. I think that many people see Episodic gaming as being regular once a month release, or at least around that time frame.
While the Sam and Max games may not have been the best games out there, they have been a great example of what to do with Episodic gaming.
Valve have found a mid-point between Episodic gaming as seen with Sam and Max and the release cycle of big AAA games. They have been really successful with what they have done, but at the end of the day they chose the wrong name for it.
The whole interview, which is really in-depth and well worth a read can be found here.
Tags: CVG Interview, Lombardi, Valve