Uncovering Valve’s PC Gaming Platform
Valve revealed some juicy information on Team Fortress 2 this week at its information packed press briefing. 53 game updates in at this point the next class to receive its own achievements bundle will be the pyro class. In much the same way as the medic upgrade was rolled at last month, the hottest of the TF2 classes will see more intensives for people to choose the masked man(?).
Expect servers filled with fire in the months to come as we see another achievement rush.
[via PC Gamer UK]
More news on the controversial decision made by some publishers to not release games on Steam outside of North America. Gabe Newell told RPS that they are actively encouraging publishers and developers to make their entire back catalogues available but many are scared of this “new world”.
Jason Holtman (Director of Business Development) believes the reluctance of some publishers to rollout globally was just a case of being unsure of the “new world”. He went on to say that as they put additional titles on the service which see success (and the world doesn’t come to an end) more game and teritories will follow.
So the message here is to wait and see. Right now the likes of Ubisoft and Atari are testing the water in North America with a few games before going all out with their entire back catelogue around the world. With the success many publishers are having on Steam it can only be a matter of time before we see more international parity.
Huge news coming out of Valve in the wake of a press event held on Thursday. A feature many of us dreamed about but never thought would happen is coming, Steam Cloud will allow saved progress, game settings and other user data to be stored “in the cloud” so that game progress can be resumed on any PC.
I have multiple PCs at multiple locations and have always found it hard to continue playing through the same game on all systems because save game management is a nightmare. This addition to Steamworks completely solves it by uploading user data to Valve and then downloading that same data when you connect on another system.
The added benefit of this is of course that you won’t need to worry about backing up save data either. I’m sure many of us have been in the situation where upon formatting a PC’s hard drive and reinstalling Windows the realisation sets in that those saves were not backed up.
The feature will be rolled out to existing Valve titles such as Half-Life and Half-Life 2 soon. Titles such as Counter-Strike will have the feature added at a later date and the upcoming Left 4 Dead will ship with it from day one.
[via Next-Gen]
The third Virtual Villagers game is now on Steam in the form of “The Secret City” for $9.99.
In FPS land, the shiny new Day of Defeat Source Beta has had a patch released. This comes as a result of the hard work and extensive beta testing that some of us at Steam Report have been doing. It addresses the following issues,
Well, most of it anyway! Beyond Good & Evil 2 has been confirmed today at Ubidays 2008! A trailer has been released and it looks great, keeping exactly the same humour that put the original into that never to be touched place in our hearts:
Now we just have to play the waiting game! Two things tho; please don’t ruin the original, and please let it be released on Steam!
RedLynx have released Trials 2: Second Edition on Steam today. They clearly hope you’re going to buy it after releasing not one, but four (!) trailers, as well as a free to download demo of the game.
For anyone who played the cult hit shareware game Elastomania back when it was released in 2000, Trials 2 seems to be very similar in gameplay elements - with simple controls that speed up and slow the bike, and shift the riders weight on the bike to keep balance. To better itself as compared to it’s spiritual older brother, Trials 2 adds 3D graphics, Internet Scoreboards, 50 levels of varying difficulties and a number of achievements.
It’s quite good fun, although for me, the demo didn’t hold enough to take my fond memories of Elastomania make me want part with my cash for a 3D version.
If you feel differently, or you simply want to gain the 25 available acheivements, the game can be picked up for a very reasonable $8.99.
Today has seen the release of two updates, one substantially bigger than the other!
The first is a new update for the Steam Client, and has the following changes and updates:
- Enabled ClearType fonts if they are enabled in Windows
- Improved in-game status and play time tracking for games with launcher apps
- Improved in-game overlay input handling in a variety of games that previously did not capture or block keyboard input correctly
- Added D3D10 support to the in-game overlay
- Made voice chat requests ignored if you’ve blocked communications from the caller
- Fixed the original Half-Life not getting to 100% complete downloading when it should
- Improved server selection logic for Friends and VAC server connections
- Improved Steam network connectivity in the face of dropped UDP packets
- Fixed the overlay not recognizing the Tab key in some games (breaking the default hot-key)
- Improved Friends duplicate name collision detection
The other update is a small fix for the Day of Defeat: Source Beta, which fixes a possible crash when launching rockets!
Both can be installed by a restart of your client (as per usual)
Shacknews recently met up with Doug Lombardi (Valve’s VP of Marketing) for a 2 part interview.
During this interesting insight into the world of Valve we learn about the predicted release date for the highly anticipated zombie romp Left 4 Dead, as well as possibilities for a demo weekend.
Doug says it is going to ship simoultaneously on
360 and PC worldwide in November.
He goes on to say in regards to the potential of a free launch weekend that they’ve been
kicking around a lot of ideas now and nothing’s final. [However] the free weekend has proven to be really, really powerful in terms of promoting sales on Steam, as well as on retail.
So it looks like there is a strong possibility that we will get to play Left 4 Dead for free before launch. Here’s to hoping!
In the same article, Mr Lombardi also laughs at reports that PC Gaming is dying and that
Steam has taken off and become this whole other business for us, [and because of this] Valve has never been in better shape
Looks like we’re writing about the right technology then!
For the full article, headover to Part One of the Shacknews interview here.
Casual puzzler Chaos Theory (not Splinter Cell) has been put onto Steam and can be yours for $8.99. Both a trailer and demo are available.
If you want you can now get all the good Eidos games that are on Steam in one pack and who….errr…..doesn’t right? Anyway all 20 games can be yours for $99.99 should you be so inclined.
Better late than never (finding a new HQ for SteamReport.com is time consuming).
Valve are allowing owners of Day of Defeat: Source to opt in to a new beta which brings to the game many of the Steamworks multiplayer and community enhancements found in Team Fortress 2. This includes 51 achievements, avatar display, stats tracking and the nemesis/revenge mechanic.
Not only that but the graphics engine is getting an overhaul to bring it up to the more modern Orange Box engine. Oh and they are even throwing in a new map called dod_Palermo!
I am blown away. As an old school DOD player I cannot wait to check out this new stuff that I don’t think anyone was expecting. It’s incredible that a free update this high in quality is made to a game that many people bought back in 2005. Of course this obviously means that Valve are willing to update their other games in the same way. Counter-Strike with achievements? It’s coming.
