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]
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.
There are a couple of new releases on Steam today for those who haven’t yet got around to playing halflife in its other incarnations:
If you havent played Half-life you really don’t know what you’re missing, so now is a great time to jump on the bandwagon, with these sets saving you up to $25 (~£13) on the price to buy them separately.
