Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I know many of you will be spending the weekend tending to your winter-blasted shoots as you celebrate the feast day of Serenus the Gardener, or perhaps remembering Red Army Day by engaging in tabletop recreations of the Battle of Kiev or, for the more ambitious, Operation Bagration. Commendable pastimes, I’m sure, but if the dusty red blocks that represent Soviet armoured divisions are lost in the attic, or Serenus’ spirit is locked in the frozen turf, then you may be interested to hear that Gratuitous Space Battles is free to play on Steam until Sunday 9PM GMT.

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I wonder if this thing could be related to this other thing? Whatever the case, Bohemia Interactive are putting their next egg into a single basket, and that basket is Steam and the egg is Arma III. Rather than just sending out a press release to tell us, Bohemia have posted a detailed blog entry to make the argument that removal of choice for the consumer is ‘a good thing’. Primarily, it’ll allow Bohemia to concentrate on making the game, ensuring it’s out in 2013 rather than slipping as a result of “two quite serious situations”: the arrest of members of the team and, less specifically, Bohemia’s unhappiness “with how the project was going”.

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In recent years, Valve hasn’t proven too terribly consistent when it comes to, well, anything (cases in point: the recent ire-inducing layoffs, allegedly being a videogame company), but it can lay claim to one spotless record: Steam sales. If there’s an occasion, you can bet crazy Newell’s game, productivity software, wearable computing, and probably soon-to-be used car emporium will be on the spot to wheel and deal. Naturally, then, Steam Linux’s triumphant exit from beta is being heralded by a gigantic, Linux-centric sale. March past the break in a manner akin to that of a penguin for details.

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My absolute favorite thing in the world is when games existences somehow mirror their names. Seriously. I have very few other interests. I’m an incredibly boring person. But anyway, just as Duke Nukem Forever took forever to come out, Call of Duty is nothing if not dutiful in its adherence to a yearly release schedule, and Toilet Tycoon was awful, Left 4 Dead 2 has not, in fact, been left for dead. Sure, Valve hasn’t lavished it with quite as much attention as, say, Team Fortress 2, but it’s certainly attempted to empower the community’s efforts – first with Cold Stream, and then with full Workshop support. But those mods? They’re about to get seventy five point blue banana apple sauce percent modderier, because Valve’s put its Extended Mutation System into beta.

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Bethblog has word that the Rage tookit has arrived on Steam, along with some serious documentation to speed would-be modders on their way. Carmack has some advice, too, tweeting: “Doing significant work will require patience, because internally we use a 300 core renderfarm for megatexture creation.”

It’d be interesting to see what people could mod in using existing assets, though. If the toolkit gave enough access to get at the inventory and so on then I think there might be a true open world sandbox/economy game in there waiting to get out. But maybe not. Either way, significant work will require patience. And an enthusiasm for Rage.

CS:GO‘s map workshop opened up this week, replete with the environmental tinkerings of its busy community. There are already eight pages of maps to flick through. Valve are keen to get more up there, too, as they explain: “Don’t hesitate to get your rough draft up on the Workshop. You can update your map as often as you’d like, and players and servers will stay current. The best way to test a map is to get players in there, so publish early and publish often!” As headlined, it’s now 50% off until the 11th, so you can get a taste of the militaristic bounty for cheap, if you want.

Anyone playing this regularly?

One day, children will gaze up at the sky and fully believe its cottony bounties were named after hyper-sophisticated streaming data networks. I plan on being dead by then, so that’s good. But, at least in the short term, Gabe Newell’s not so sure. Yes, there are some fairly functional examples already up and running, but Newell believes they’re far from optimal. Here’s the real kicker, though: this, he claims, isn’t a shortcoming that a little time and elbow grease will fix right up. Actually, those things may well make it worse.

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I’m off in the strange, far-away land of Las Vegas right now, and I just got done watching Gabe Newell and JJ “Warring Trek of the Stars” Abrams chat each other up on stage. I’ll have more from the talk for you soon, but here’s the big take-away: Valve and Abrams are officially collaborating. “What we’re actually doing here,” Newell said at the talk’s conclusion, “is recapitulating a series of conversations that have been going on [between Abrams and I]. This is what happens when game and movie people get together. And we sort of reached the point where we decided that we needed to do more than talk. So we’re gonna try and figure out if we can make a Portal movie or a Half-Life movie together.” Meanwhile, Abrams added: “And we have a game idea we’d like to work with Valve on.” Finally, Gabe wrapped it up: “It’s time for our industries to stop talking about potential and really execute on it.”

Hmm! The Klaxons of hype were blaring over the weekend, with Steam-database watchers claiming the appearance of Halo 3, Fez and Brutal Legend on the service’s list of forthcoming IDs. As far as I can see these have now been changed to “test” names, which suggests revealing their addition was a mistake, but nevertheless the information seems to point to Double Fine’s bizarre Jack Black-voiced rock RTS coming to PC, along with Master Chief’s third outing and Polytron’s dimension-rotating platformer. So that’s interesting. Oh and Quantum Conundrum 2.

Yeah. Anyway. What you been up to this weekend?

The news-owls at VG247 spotted that there’s a video (below) of Gabe Newell’s recent talk at the University of Texas. In it he covers a wide range of issues relating to games, and particularly to Steam – discussing things such as the market for Team Fortress 2 hats. But what is perhaps most remarkable is that around 44 minutes, he talks about the problem of Steam being a curated store, and goes on to suggest that Valve are a bottleneck for publishing on the platform, and then even more radically, that they should remove themselves from the equation entirely: “So rather than having this curated store we’re going to say, “OK if we are thinking about this correctly, it really should be sort of a network API.” There should be this publishing model – and yes you have to worry about viruses and malware and stuff like that – but essentially anybody should be able to publish anything through Steam.”

That’s a download from the future right there. And there’s plenty more. Go watch it.
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Chivalry‘s not dead. Actually, it’s doing very well, I have heard. Adam had quite the time with it at launch, and Torn Banner’s promised so many free updates that, eventually, I imagine we’ll see medieval knights obtain trusty steeds, and then trade those steeds for rideable rockets. So yes, it’s probably about time you give it a go. But how? I bet it’s impossible. You should probably just give up. No wait! My mistake. It’s actually the easiest thing ever. Chivalry’s free on Steam this weekend, you see, so the ancient art of horrifically violent trash can battling is just a download away.

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