Portal 2 Co-Op: Fun, but Unenlightening
Apr. 28th, 2011 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOmaha and I played a little of the Portal 2 Co-operative Mode during lunch. If this is it, I'll be very disappointed if Valve gives up on epic narrative. That's been the story for a while now: Valve makes so much more money as a game distribution company via Steam, and a licensing agency via Source, than it does as a game production company, that it doesn't make sense for Valve to maintain a production team to make high-end games like Half Life or Portal 2. Hell, they bought Left For Dead, prettied it up and released it in record time. It has very little narrative: "There are zombies. Survive them." It has awesome AI, but so did Half Life 2, especially the later episodes.
Valve's only reason for producing high-quality games is to provide a test bed for Source. It would be a shame if the kind of brilliance that brought us Half Life and Portal would be shunted off, in favor of commercial success. Valve has that. Sure, it costs a lot to make a triple-A game. It costs a lot to make a blockbuster movie. Iron Man cost $135 to make, and it sold 35 million tickets. Half-Life 2 sold 12 million copies, but its list price was four times a theater ticket; arguably, Half Life 2 was a bigger seller than Iron Man.
Valve's only reason for producing high-quality games is to provide a test bed for Source. It would be a shame if the kind of brilliance that brought us Half Life and Portal would be shunted off, in favor of commercial success. Valve has that. Sure, it costs a lot to make a triple-A game. It costs a lot to make a blockbuster movie. Iron Man cost $135 to make, and it sold 35 million tickets. Half-Life 2 sold 12 million copies, but its list price was four times a theater ticket; arguably, Half Life 2 was a bigger seller than Iron Man.
