www.eurogamer.net/images-leak-of-valves-next-game-and-its-an-overwatch-style-hero-shooter
How quickly we have forgotten Monday Night Combat
I miss MNC
Right?!? That game was so FUUUN. Man, I forgot about that game.
I'm pretty sure it's backwards compatible on Series X!
it's been completely dead for years and i'm sure the killing of the xbox live market soon will not help matters
Doesn't it have a single player mode too?
You can play single player in the co-op defence mode, it's playable albeit painfully boring. I anticipate the servers will stay up for the foreseeable future as it can't be very much, but you basically will need to get a full lobby of friends together to try anything interesting
killing of the xbox live market soon will not help matters
MNC will still be purchasable since it's a backwards compatible title. Not that it will really make a difference for its player base though.
Absolutely criminal how it got erased from the general conscience.
Brink still gets mentioned ,but theres a few MP titles from that era that got the same treatment of being completely forgotten (Battlefield Heroes,Fuse,Shadowrun...)
Battlefield Heroes went full-on pay-to-win and deserves to be forgotten.
For sure, just sucks that a fun game had to die by the early days of f2p monetization. I can still whistle the main theme, funny to think how overwatch has a lot of the same elements of it (gameplay that is).
Brink. Sigh. That first trailer was fucking amazing.
brink crawled so titanfall could wallrun 😔
Battlefield Heroes was so much fun as a kid.
Both MNC and SMNC were great. I'll never forget them!
Sadly, multiplayer games just die w/o players and there is nothing we can do about it.
I still have a Monday Night Combat Gift voucher in my Steam inventory that I received from some promotion or event over 10 years ago. I don't even remember how I got it, but every time I look at my Steam inventory, it's there at the top.
MNC never had Battleborn's peak CCU unfortunately and it peaked like 13 years ago vs 8. So yeah, forgotten for sure.
And Super Monday Night Combat. This game is a straight up copy of SMNC, and I am SO excited for it.
So sad that game didn't reach enough people, it was good enough, just hard to get people to find out about your game back then.
Way ahead of its time. Fortnite crowd would have loved it.
Battleborn, in spite of its innumerable flaws, did so something interesting by combining FPS and MOBA gameplay. It's one of my most played games of all time. Battleborn failed for a lotta reasons, but I'd always hoped someone else would try make a blend of those two genres again.
Yeah I agree, that's why I actually hope this game is good.
It got absolutely Horizon'd by Overwatch. It was doomed from the get go.
Monday Night Combat and its sequel did so way before Battleborn, its main issue was that it came out too soon, when mobas weren't even popular, and people just wanted simple shooters and not have to worry about abilities, builds, pushing lanes, etc. So they were too overwhelmed and quit.
The sequel also sucked. MNC was great but the sequel just felt off, all the time.
I can't help but wonder how MOBAs would look in first person/VR. Gotta imagine the level of play would drop and the entire game would need to be tuned/balanced completely differently, but that just seems so much more interesting to me than overhead.
As far as balancing goes, snipers become pretty broken. They go from just dealing a lot of burst damage in a top down to being able to help defend lanes from other lanes. It was a big issue with battleborn's beta. They really have to restrict sightlines.
A fog of war in an FPS would be pretty interesting if implemented properly. Make warding a thing.
Battleborn had full PvE campaign missions and they were actually really fun. They had this ages before blizzard completely failed to deliver on something similar. I thought the game was great and half of why it failed was because it released next to overwatch.
It's also full of Borderlands zany humor. Gearbox put a lot of work into the game, but completely failing to find an audience likely damaged the development team heavily, having an impact on Borderlands 3 development.
i became a huge fan of overwatch as soon as it dropped, but that battleborn beta had me absolutely hooked.
game was actually great. but of course it was going to die immediately. they fucked up so hard on the release date.
Apparently this was Icefrog's pet project for the longest time. For that reason alone, I'm willing to give it a shot. Also, I find it funny how everyone is saying it's "Overwatch-style" when from everything leaked so far it's more like Smite. Like a weird amalgamation between TF2 and Dota.
Oh and more importantly, if Deadlock [formerly known as Neon Prime(formerly known as Citadel)] is actually real then it gives massive credence to the other half of the leaks/datamines the past few years that hint at another Valve team making a follow up Half Life game to Alyx. So look forward to whenever that releases if it ever does.
Its even more funny when you realize that Overwatch is heavily inspired by TF2.
So calling a Valve project a "Overwatch-style" game is kinda ironic.
How funny would it be if they were calling it an "Overwatch-style shooter" and it turns out it's Team Fortress 3
You think Valve can count to three? I don’t think I’ve seen it yet.
Valve would rather make an entirely new IP than count to 3
They would invent an entire new way to count before getting to 3
Half Life 2 episode 1… ep 2…
Half-Life 2: Episode 2: Chapter 2: Part 2: Volume 2
Steamdeck launched with Steam OS 3.0 actually, so someone at Valve figured out what comes after 2.9.
Team Fortress: Miss Pauline
Team Fortress 2 episode 2
It's the same thing with when Valorant was announced, and tons of people were calling it Riot's attempt at Overwatch.
It's really just the wc3 mod from CS 1.6
Man I miss that mod. I used to play after school, and in a server that had really fun custom classes and items apart from the vanilla (blood elve, night elve, shadow hunter, scourge...) ones. It was all the CS fun plus the rpg side
Man, memories unlocked! Undead ftw. Lifesteal was so good.
Human with a knife out corner camping
There was always a few players who had their brightness turned right up and just saw you instantly.
I loved playing Orc for crit strike to occasionally 1-shot people with the scout
I'm guessing the one in CS: Source was similar to that?
I only got into PC gaming just Source came out ~20 years ago but I put a lot of time into WC3 and RPG mod servers on that game.
I was tricked into thinking it was an overwatch clone (which I’m ok at) but instead it was a counter strike clone (which I suck at).
While it’s actually been a counter strike ripoff the entire time
It was literally called a tac shooter since the first moment it was announced by riot and literally everyone else.
It's like calling a Doom game a "Duke Nukem clome"
Same thing when original spiderman on PS2 introduced specific fighting style that Arkham games made popular. THen new ps4 spidey game was said to mimic Arkham style.
I would not be opposed to a Half Life Alyx 2. And then Half Life Alyx 2 Episode 1, and then Half Life Alyx 2 Episode 2
Or I guess they could be boring and just make something simple like Half Life 3
Calling it Half Life 3 may alienate those that never played the first three games. Better to go with a clever subtitle like Half Life: Decay
I will riot if they make Half Life 3 and then not call it Half Life 3.
They should just go straight to 4.
Half life 4: the search for half life 3.
Half Life IV so you will be eternally annoyed every time you look at your game list.
...Honestly, that could be a cool if confusing premise for a story like Half-Life where the main character spends years in stasis sometimes.
You missed the last great crisis, but part 3 still happened in the backstory, and people had to scramble themselves to do their best without the hero. Now they're all mangled for part 4, but the hero giving them such hope has returned...
Not sure if Half-Life is the vessel for that type of story, but I could see an interesting idea there.
5 is right out.
I've been saying that for years
I mean honestly, I'd argue they absolutely did
You make Half Life Decay with visible decay on the lettering and then half way through the game the subtitle decays and reveals a 3 and everyone shits
Or something with R. Like resurrection, revelation, resurgenceange.
Half-Life: Remake
- Half-Life: Remake
- Half-Life: Reboot
- Half-Life: Remaster
The true trilogy has peen prophecised.
That covers everything to 2050 ish.
Half Life Revengence. Gordon better bisect a 20 story tall Combine Mecha...
It reminds me of predecessor.
you mean paragon?
Predecessor is a "remake" (?) of the original game Paragon.
When epic shutdown Paragon they released all the game assets for free, so many different developers tried to remake the game.
Predecessor is the most successful one, it's a great variation of a moba with a dash of third person shooting. The beta is currently open for consoles and pc. Game seems to be consistently growing too.
Oh man, those remakes all released around the same time, and i bought one on steam because of my love for paragon. I hope it was predecessor
its free to play now. if you "bought" one a while ago it was probably fault though.
Ah man, well if it was predecessor, hopeful i get some cool stuff for paying the release price
You get a couple heroes and a skin iirc
It actually sounds more like Super Monday Night Combat, which, funny enough, is a game that was inspired by Warcraft 3 Dota
There were quite a few "why not Dota as a 1st or 3rd person shooter" games.
I don't understand why people keep comparing them with Overwatch, when Overwatch deliberately shunned the laning mechanism that people assumed they were going for early on, and rather made "TF2 with more ulties" (I remember debates about "why make a hero shooter when you can just class switch all the time -.-"
Battleborne for instance got constantly compared with Overwatch, when it, too, was a Moba at heart.
But the thing is, weirdly all the shooter mobas do badly (or not well enough). I figured the Moba audience doesn't like shooters, and the shooter guys REALLY REALLY hate teamplay of that kind.
Almost all the games I liked and would have been great if you EVERY got into a match where people WANT to play the game instead of "having fun" (which is code for turn brain off and go solo berserk while complaining about how bad the game is.......)
But yes. Monday Night Combat was one of them. And one of the earlier ones at that.
It's just one of those hybrids (like RTS shooter hybrids) that sound good on paper, but playing them is a huge pain because you need 10 people who ACTUALLY want to be into that thing instead of wanting to play an entire different game and just being in the wrong one.
I find it extremely strange that battleborne wasn't given WAY more rope to use to reform the game into something more appealing.
It's clear that it suffered heavily from launching near overwatch and some basic issues like poor UI (too much shit on screen).
The core concept sounded great to me and I was looking forward to playing it when it went on sale.... then it just POOFED out of existence...
Bizarre one for sure.
man, I miss Super MNC. That was a lot of fun, shame how it went
feel the same about Savage
Weird as hell when Predecessor leaks to the main stream.
It's getting popular
You have to realize that most of the Valve "leaks" aren't leaks in the traditional sense, it's not someone working for an ad firm leaking marketing material before E3, the vast majority of Valve leaks come from people combing through the updates for Dota 2 and CS2. In that sense, it's almost public, just not widely publicized.
The stuff regarding Half-Life: X and Neon Prime weren't really leaks or speculation, it was people peeking at update strings and piecing a picture together. Given that, is Valve working on a new Half-Life? Yes, and we know it's internally referred to as HL:X, but this is Valve we're talking about so it will probably never see the light of day, but it 100% exists as of right now.
Same thing with Neon Prime. There were never really leaks, just strings that let us know certain mechanics. Like AI monster behaviors and trains, which seem to be those rails seen in the leaked pics.
Icefrog owns my soul.
The biggest gameplay problem with most MOBAs or hero shooters is the lame attempt at balancing, Icefrog's way of doing it has always lead to crazier moments and deeper counterplay.
I think it's less a lame attempt and more it's just super difficult. Apex legends which has very weak and long cooldowns relative to ow, still has characters constantly broken and strict metas despite damage being uniform due to weapons being available for all characters.
Yes it is super difficult but most companies attempts of balancing are "lame"; they often basically pick some nebulus target and hit abilities with a nerf hammer or a buff till winrate and DPS keeps to average.
Dota2 balancing is about niches and counters and counter is not just "a hero with kit that counters theirs" but a specific build or item. A lot of it is also about timing, like some characters being strong early and others needing farm to really shine so the balance shifts across whole match rather than being just "we picked wrong heroes, gg, lost"
The biggest problem with most MOBAs or hero shooters is the lame attempt at balancing
The actual biggest problem is toxicity, but i got you
Most MOBAs or hero based games need to balance the whole roster because characters are sold for money. Dota’s heroes being all free means that there’s no pressure to not drop a hero to oblivion for a few patches.
I think Dota feeling "more" balanced mostly comes down to how heroes in Dota are designed over how they're abilities are tweaked during balance patches. Every hero is genuinely very unique, which allows each of them to fill a different niche and be useful in different situations, meaning that even if a hero is meh in a given patch, they can become OP with a certain lineup or against a certain lineup. For example, even if Clockwork is weak in a given patch, he'll always be an amazing counter to squishy backliners just by nature of his design, so he'll just naturally be a great pick in some games. Even when heroes are sort of similar or fill similar roles, like Slardar, Axe, and Centaur who you primarily pick to initiate with their blink and AoE stun/taunt, they're other abilities make them fill totally different roles (Slardar is better at single target burst/disable, Centaur's ult makes him better at initiatiating and counter initiating as a team, and Axe is uh... Axe). Not to mention how each will scale differently throughout the game and fit into different lineups with different timings as well, or how some will do better in certain lanes, etc.
This is why Dota tournaments consistently have like 80-90% hero representation and Leagues is much lower. A lot of champs fill the same role in League, so you just pick whichever one fits the role you need that's the best that patch - but in Dota, unless a hero is extremely weak, every hero will always be the best at some specific niche thing
The cornerstone of asymmetrical gameplay is strength and weakness; fundamentally it’s essentially rock-paper-scissors, and I do not know a better example of a developer realising that than Dota 2.
I played Heroes of the Storm for a long time, and it frequently fell into the trap of trying to make characters more generically powerful in some vain hope that heroes fulfilling the same role in similar ways would lead to them all being useful in the meta. It didn’t, it exacerbates the issue of number balancing, and just makes an easily recognisable hierarchy of power- which enforces a much more static meta.
Axe is uh... Axe
AXE IS NOT AXE, AXE IS A PIG?
If anything there’s more pressure to balance the whole roster since everyone has access to all of them.
There’s less reason to balance characters that nobody buys
That's certainly a part of it but the philosophy in general is different too.
Strengths of the heroes are almost never touched so they always feel powerful and unique.
Heroes are not made to "fit a role" (like LoL's ADC/Support/Jungle etc) aside from the highest generalization of being str/dex/int hero and thus scaling differently with items. They are made to have interesting playstyle first, and basically given to players for players to pick how they want to play them.
Nerfs and buffs are not made "so the dps of ADC isn't higher than average DPS of other ADC", but to accentuate the hero's niche while having weaknesses for others to exploit
It's exciting that it's Ice frog but it's a bit boring in my mind that it's another lane tower type game.
It started being made in 2018 and I feel like those games peaked back then, kinda over them now
ICEFROG?
Oh Lord he came back to earth.
It's funny, I'm less excited about Half Life Alyx sequel itself, and more excited about the potential of Valve releasing a new VR headset to go along with it like last time. I really need a wireless Index in my life and I'm willing to sell my soul for one.
Would this half life game be a VR game like Alyx?
Remember when people used to consider overwatch a Team Fortress 2 ripoff?
I remember not long ago when all the internet comment about ANY new game coming out was: is it like Overwatch?
Before that it was World of Warcraft... Before that it was Ultima, and before that I'm sure it was fucking Super Mario Bros or some shit, I'm too young for that. Anyway art is derivative, that's the whole point - any aspiring game developer should pick 2-3 games to borrow mechanics from and then a 4th that they borrow the aesthetic from. Boom, instant success.
Alternatively, if they have a great idea that hasn't been done before, make a prototype indie game let everyone else steal your idea and profit off of your hard work. But I guess that's just capitalism for ya...
For a chunk of the 90s, first person shooters were simply called "Doom clones."
"Why paint bison on wall, go outside cave and see with eyes"
Some Cromagnon cavemen probably
xD
The term "First Person Shooter" didn't exist for like 10 years after the first game of the type came out. For a long time, it was just "Doom clone", or "Quake clone".
Humans have an amazingly small cache size.
They really struck gold with overwatch then killed it
Those people are silly, because it is inspired by rather than a ripoff.
It would be more understandable to say Marvel Rivals is a Overwatch ripoff since it is literally Marvel Overwatch (nothing bad about that).
Used to? Buddy dig deep enough in the tf2 Twitter/reddit dirt mound and you’ll still find people who unironically do.
Well ripoff is the wrong word, but it was obviously heavily inspired by TF2..
I mean it definitely borrowed a lot of ideas from TF2. I wouldn't go as far as to call it a rip off, but still it's not that crazy of an argument.
The art style contributed to that perception as well I think. It's easy to forget in a post-Fortnite world but for a long time shooter games were almost all going for realistic graphics; TF2's colourful and exaggerated aesthetic stood out as an exception. So when trailers for Overwatch started coming out, it was the obvious comparison.
But that's like saying TF2 ripped off Quake. Or Half Life ripped off System Shock. Games take inspiration from other games, that's how the whole concept of art works
If we keep going back to who copied who we will end up back at Pong
Pong ripped off Tennis for Two.
Tennis for Two was just a ripoff of the original Tennis
Tennis is just a rip-off of catch.
But that's like saying TF2 ripped off Quake.
The original Team Fortress was a Quake mod…
But that's like saying TF2 ripped off Quake. Or Half Life ripped off System Shock.
These 2 comparisons are not even remotely like a TF2/Overwatch comparison.
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15d
Distinct asymmetrical classes on two teams fighting varied objectives with a soft heavily stylized art style and emphasis on the classes personalities? Just like Quake buddy!
That's what I said
Yea I’ll agree with inspiration, i mean that’s how most multiplayer games work. But I’m talking about the people who argue Overwatch is just a blatant rip-off
The fact that Overwatch clearly designed characters in order to capture the TF2 audience didn't help. There's a very close 1:1 match for most of the 9 TF2 classes.
Scout - Tracer
Soldier - Pharah
Demo - Junkrat
Pyro - missing
Heavy - Bastion
Engineer - Torbjorn
Medic - Mercy
Sniper - Widowmaker
Spy - missing
Overwatch did great at making copies of the characters and then making them different/unique enough to actually be a new, interesting game. But to say that it didn't consider how it can capture the audience of the biggest online shooter of the time is delusional.
Pyro is Mei. Obviously not exactly the same but very similar main weapon.
And some feel like they take after TF2 subclasses, like Reinhardt being a tankier version of demoknight.
At the same time, there's only so far you can deconstruct basic FPS loadouts. Fast guy, healer guy, heavy guy, explosives guy, sniper guy.
There was bound to be a lot of overlap when you break it down the way you did.
Why do bow characters in these have to be so boring and samey? Really, a bow dude with...a sonar arrow, a dash and some aoe multishot? Daring, aren't we?
Because there are only so many different ways you can balance the damage/distance/reliability of a character. They'll come up with a handful of different abilities and damage they want in the game and then try to lump them together into a character that works thematically, and a bow and arrow is a really easy theme for a character.
Part of it may be just to have a simple, easy-to-understand character. Base/launch characters are often pretty simple for new players / young players to learn, and the really complex ones come later as the playerbase gets more experience and asks for more complex things to do.
Dota is a very complex game - there are characters that demand unique keybinds in order to maximize efficiency by controlling multiple units at once like an RTS, and characters with special spell combinations that need to be memorized and input correctly. And tons of characters that have double-edged abilities with positives and negatives that can hurt your team if you use them wrong. So I'm sure they have ideas to freshen up the genre.
Yep, there's a reason why the most beginner-friendly heroes in Dota are (or were back in the day, anyway) the woman with a big bow and the guy with a scoped rifle.
I was on a video game focus group years and years ago. It was clearly a major studio, and it was a third person shooter moba-style game. Since then I have been certain it was either Battleborn or a game that had since been cancelled. If this has really been in development for a long time I think this could be it. I'll probably know for sure when I see more heroes.
Makes a ton of sense honestly. Slots easily into their whole marketplace/skins business, they've got an easy pre-built roster of characters and/or skins people would want to play and previous experience making games in the genre and adjacent team-gameplay genres.
Just from the pure business side of things it's a slam-dunk.
You could’ve said the same exact thing, word for word, about Artifact.
Imo Artifact had a ton of potential. The stupid card market was it's biggest flaw. Soured people on the game so much that it didn't have time to tweak and find it's footing. Should have just been focused on the game itself, fun and competitive focused. Like the thing it's based on, Dota. Still annoyed at how they handled Artifact.
Saying they'd open the Artifact 2.0 beta, not doing it, then cancelling the beta due to low player count was a phenomenally shitty move.
It got closed not because of the raw player numbers, but because of the actual proportion of players invited that were playing. Absolutely none of the invited players were actually paying any attention, and this was the case because it was an awful game that threw away everything recognisably good about the first one
No the biggest flaw was the gameplay.
I would say it was the balance and over-abundance of RNG, not the actual game concept itself. I'm not even a card game enthusiast but had my fair share of fun playing the 1.0 version. It did drag on though, one of its flaws at the start. The actual client and audio design was top notch though. Digital card games are just in a weird spot. LoR, endlessly praised, has 124 viewers on Twitch and has only been dying off since its peak.
Artifact was flawed from the start. The magic creator who made artifact hasn’t released a great game in years. It wasn’t well thought out at all. I did enjoy I though and wish they tried to fix it.
I played Artifact, and the constant lane change (as opposed to having the 3 lanes at once like Marvel Snap) made you feel like you were playing 3 games at the same time, but for all that effort, it was not x3 as fun.
It was mentally taxing, you always felt like you were missing something and many times you were. It was VERY easy to let something slip through the cracks like across-the-lane kills.
If the game had an interface like Marvel Snap, I think the game could have been more popular.
Isn't Team Fortress already a hero shooter?
Currently it's a casino operated by bots
AI felt lonely and wanted to find some friends.
usually hero shooter means unique heroes / no duplicates. and loadouts that you can't customize much. like Mercy can't change to a Kritzkrieg or Quick-Fix, you'd have to swap heroes to Lucio or Zen
Class shooter, subtle difference, hero is an evolution
Died 2018, Born 2024,
Welcome back Super Monday Night Combat.
I sure hope the final visuals and tone leans that way at least, cause what I'm hearing about a Half Life elements getting scrapped for more fantasy really sounds so disappointing. Right now it's pretty clearly placeholder stuff or buildings from HLA so we'll see how it goes.
Also man, they sure love squashing most of the singleplayer projects for the last decade for not having cool enough tech or not vibing with the decisionmakers at Valve. But liveservice projects based on Dota or with Dota-inspired mechanics, baby those can happen whenever.
Seems like a strange one for valve as they have often said they won't make a game unless if does something completely new.
I guess artifact contradicts that strategy, but hero shooters are a pretty well worn genre at this point.
Will be interesting to see what they bring to the table.
People disregard artifact because it's a card game. But it was VERY different from any other card game out there
Artifact was an amazing game. Sadly, the real money card market was a bad idea and killed the game.
Shooter mobas is a genre that has had a couple of attempts over the years but none have really hit the mark. If Valve thinks they know the secret sauce for that genre then I'm excited.
RIP Monday Night Combat
It’s only a few screenshots so I don’t want to be definitive on this but man do the characters look dull and generic
The bow and arrow character looks like some random middle aged guy cosplaying lmao.
These are old screenshots from a pre-alpha. Art style was rebooted.
Do you have source on that? Like I understand that pre-alpha is pre-alpha and nothing more, but this is the first time somebody mentioned that the art style was rebooted instead of "it's just alpha, of course they will improve the graphics later on"
You can also see their models are modular as hell in order to sell hats and accessories instead of complete skins.
I don't think I need to explain why that's a controversial thing
Man the days when TF2 had readable characters and just one set of weapons instead of a meta based around shit you only ever have a chance of unlocking (I've had the game since 2008, I still don't have the minisentries).
I've forgotten by now you can no longer even react to silhouettes in that game. The exact same character can rush you down with a flamethrower or keep their distance with fireballs.
That being said, you can always go to sites like backpack or scrap.tf (if it's still a thing) and buy every weapon in the game for like 1 USD total.
I hope they’ve paid close attention to how Blizzard drove Overwatch into the ground and won’t make some of the same mistakes, both in gameplay design and monetization. I’m kind of burned out on competitive team games like this, but since it’s Valve I’d give it a try.
Maybe they've learned some lessons from TF2 and Artifact's monetization? CS:GO/CS2 is still a roaring success from what I know so they have at least one unmitigated success under their belt.
I feel like Artifact's monetization was something you learn is bad just on paper. TF2's issues is not monetization but lack of enthusiasm from Valve employees to work on it.
I know it’s probably a hot take, but it just seems like moving on to a Team Fortress 3 would be a better idea than doing more major updates to TF2. It was one of my favorite games, and it absolutely holds up, but it’s been long enough that it seems totally sane and normal to create a fresh entry.
i think that's kind of a catch 22 though since TF2 still makes good money but TF3 will almost certainly kill or at least hinder that particular golden goose, so it damn well better be worth it
granted i know valve's structure as we understand it isn't purely profit driven but i imagine it's at least some consideration.
I do agree with your sentiment. However, I'm fairly certain Valve's golden goose is the entire steam platform over just TF2.
Their bonus structure incentivizes working on and creating profitable games.
I think Valve employees are genuinely, for real afraid to release a game with a 3 at the end. It's a joke and a meme of course, but I think that over the years it became so ingrained in the culture that many actual Valve people now have a real apprehension about it. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
They’ve mastered the art of sequels being an incredible refinement of the ideas the initial game proved out. Which is great, that’s hard.
But, what do you do after that? You came up with a great idea in v1. You made an indelible classic by polishing it in v2. What do you do for v3 that could possibly meet people’s expectations for the v2-v3 jump being as satisfying as v1-v2?
It’s not easy, and for a lot of companies the answer is “keep churning out content as ‘new games’ until your fans catch on that you’re not innovating”. I can respect valve for mostly staying out of that, but it sure as hell makes v3 a conundrum.
What do you want them to do to TF2? The game is finished, there are tons of weapons and they aren't going to add new classes.
What lessons? Valve pioneered the modern microtransaction ridden shooter and got filthy rich doing so.
While I don’t disagree that they were one of the first to release skin based mtx on pc
Their golden goose is steam not tf2.
And in 2nd place I would leave cs2 (formerly known as cs:go)
I mean even 10 years after TF2 released, it was one of the highest grossing games for Steam. TF2 is absolutely nothing short of a blow-away sucesss any company would murder puppies to try to recreate. Around 2020 is when bots started killing it, 13 years after release
Nobody's done a better job of walking the tightrope that is balancing a game for both casual and pro play than Icefrog/the Dota team. I wouldn't worry about Blizzard-style design disasters in this.
Why don’t they just pay attention to how they drove TF2 into the ground?
I'll be soooo mad if they drive this game into the ground by supporting it and releasing content for 10 straight years.
There's also the last 4-5 years where the bots have been a very public and frustrating issue, with at most a couple of employees or contractors able to/hired to work on the game.
My only "real" concern with Deadlock being this kind of game is that Valve has shown to be really, really bad at long-term support for a big game. When it has all the advantage to find a way to provide support even long after the original developers move onto new projects. It really makes NO sense looking from the outside. A bunch of young folks can love Deadlock for 5 years, see it supported for 5 more, but Valve as a company might just not do anything to make sure they can see it in a reasonable state after the 11th. And that's if the game succeeds and is one of their most iconic properties. Forget it if it's even like Dota Underlords where it only does ok to start, then the devs can't even get season 2 out before being taken elsewhere.
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15d
So your partner is one of the closed dev alpha testers?
Honestly I'm not too enthusiastic about Valve adding yet another multiplayer game to their library, considering how little support they give the ones they do have.
cs2 and dota 2 still gets alot of updates
Yeah dota2 got 10 gameplay updates and 10 content updates in last 12 months, maybe seems little but that's the average number of updates for the last 7 years (post 7.00)
hwat
they announced a new hero a year ago and hes still not out.
Yeah, but that's not really how you compare being supported or not. Gameplay updates and balance changes still happens often and new events are there.
Which games are you referring to? They're main multi-player games these days are Dota and Counterstrike, which both get a ton of attention.
If nothing else, Valve can make a hell of a shooter. I'm on board.
Though I have a sinking feeling that I'm going to love it, and just by that fact it will die in six months.
I gotta say the TF2 and Dota 2 artstyles are just like, super not for me. Really wish they were going for something else with this. (Assuming it's even real, of course.)
TF2 looks nothing like Dota 2, what are you on about
I know. I was naming two different styles that I did not like. Sorry I worded it kind bad.
Feels more like Dota than TF2 imo. Honestly a genuine eyesore to me, I never got this "cartoony yet hyper-realistic" approach with that weirdly cold and aggressive UI. Really wish they'd go full-stylized with something more welcoming.
I don't remember a Valve game with a warm color palette tbh
TF2 is orange-based, orange is warm.
Their cold, aggressive artstyle used to look great back in the HL2 and Portal days, but combined with modern graphics today it just feels hostile and off-putting. Alyx legit gives off uncanny valley feeling because of it.
And if I ever decided to play a Moba, I'd go for League instead of Dota simply because that game is more visually welcoming.
These screenshots are supposedly from 2019 when it was called Citadel then later Neon Prime. It got rebooted to have a more fantasy / steampunk feel because the art style in the photos didn't have a good reception internally. It's got renamed Deadlock with that art style reboot.
Citadel was when it took place in the far reaches of combine / hl universe. Unfortunately we won’t get that.
Why god? Why no TF3?
Those golden days have long passed us by. It’s time to let go.
TF3 would genuinely not survive the current market without it getting some kind of battlepass or whatever BS.
Though it is Valve so they can afford to just put out something that isn't mega popular, but if TF 2 exists already, what would TF 3 even possibly offer other than a new engine and possibly better visuals?
Why would you need battlepass, with guarantee, fixed rewards if you can make casino in your game?
TF3 would genuinely not survive the current market without it getting some kind of battlepass or whatever BS.
Tf2 has had campaign passes since 2015
if they did want to evolve on Team Fortress, a good way to do it without reinventing the classes/slapping on entirely new concepts willy nilly would be rolling certain overwhelmingly popular weapon mechanics into the base kit.
Soldier's market gardener melee crits just being a normal part of explosive jumping
Either make Medic's syringe gun heal teammates with the needles or give it the Crossbow bolt as an altfire
give Scout and Heavy dedicated lunchbox slots along with their normal secondaries, assuming you want them to keep the pistol and shotguns normally. Also make Scout sandman ball a default ability (it doesn't have to slow, just give him an alt fire baseball projectile for damage, as stock)
Demoman shield still replaces the stickies but comes with the health and general steering the booties provided without taking the grenade launcher (okay this isn't about base kit but could just let demoknight be a pre-built subclass you can swap between i guess)
etc etc etc etc
obviously this would upset the balance of TF2 if done but when making it the baseline for a hypothetical TF3 it both lets you better balance those for use as core class abilities and offers more nuance for unlockable weapons.
And if still concerned about the balance being too wacky that way I guess you could do something akin to how the PvZ Garden Warfare games work and have premade alternate loadouts for the different classes. So Demoknight/hybrid knight would essentially be an alternate character you select based on the "Demoman" template" and could be balanced that way without worrying how the balance of any one tool would interact with 25 other unlockable options.
Bro do you even know team fortress 1 ? Look at how different 1 and 2 are. Same could be for 2 and 3
TF3
That's why.
This is not overwatch style. It's like battleborn. A hero shooter combined with a moba.