News In the Valley of Gods development is on hold

MJunioR

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Full article @ Firewatch team’s next game ‘on hold’ as it works on other Valve projects - but here's the quote from Campo Santo's Jake Rodkin:

Jake Rodkin said:
To fans looking forward to In the Valley of Gods, it’s probably clear that the optimistic “2019” at the end of the announcement trailer isn’t going to be accurate. In the end, Valve Time makes fools of us all. But yes, developers from the former Campo Santo team have joined other projects at Valve, including Half-Life: Alyx. As you can imagine, our experience in the first-person adventure genre is pretty relevant. You hear a lot about how at Valve you can work on what you want. It turns out that’s true, and there’s a lot of work available. As we integrated ourselves into Valve it became clear there was a lot of valuable work to be done on Half-Life: Alyx. Some of us starting lending a hand, and have since become full-time on the project as it approaches launch. Similarly, some ex-Campos are working on Dota Underlords, some are on Steam, and so on. So to answer your question as of today, In the Valley of Gods development is on hold—but it certainly feels like a project people can and may return to. And when that happens, we’ll find an exciting way to let fans know.
 

Alextended

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Oh well. I wasn't a fan of their last game but egyptian themes are always great, from Tomb Raider to Powerslave to whatever. Cool that they do what they like.
 
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Wok

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Damn.

Edit: Until there is a clear statement that the game is being worked on in the future, I will consider the game cancelled. The longer you wait, the harder it is to finish it. Life will find its way: at any given time, at least one team member will have other priority, and good luck getting somewhere... Unless other people from Valve help fill the gaps, I cannot believe that ex-Campo-Santo people would be able to do it in these conditions.
 
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toxicitizen

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I'm weirdly torn on this. On the one hand, it's disappointing because I really liked Firewatch and this looked interesting as well. On the other hand, it's good that they can do what they want within Valve and, to be perfectly honest, if they care so little about their own game that they can't be bothered to, you know, actually work on it, then I'm not sure why I should care either. ¯\(ツ)
 

Tizoc

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Should give them time to expand the game beyond their intended vision.
If anything ps5/nextbox gen is upon us so releasing the game on those platforms would benefit them.more than releasing it by next year for example.
 

Rosenkrantz

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Shame, I liked Firewatch well enough and hope they'll return to In the Valley of Gods at some point. Doesn't sound like they were forced to work on other projects though, probably internal decision or maybe they simply needed a break from the game.
 

EdwardTivrusky

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If all goes well they may even end up with some Valve devs helping them with their game next year.
I'm not ready to write it off totally yet.
 
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Durante

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I'm really curious to see what will happen at Valve after HL:Alyx.
A lot of people (esp. for Valve standards) are working on that, what will they decide to do afterwards? How do you follow that up?
 

Dandy

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So disappointing. I really enjoyed Firewatch and was super excited for Valley of the Gods. Half-Life was never my thing and VR is years away from being something I'm even remotely into.
 
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Aelphaeis Mangarae

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Valve's structure is not conducive to actually getting shit done. Other companies tend to have a natural pressure towards delivering products. If you have a game and the director quits, you replace them. Half the team quits? You replace them. As long as the project is viable, you try to deliver.

It's worth noting that Clint Hocking left Valve because he was tired of not actually shipping any games. He's now back at Ubisoft directing Watch Dogs 3. Because although Ubisoft cancel their fair share of projects, including multiple Splinter Cell cancellation/reboots, if you work at Ubisoft you're way less likely to have the rug pulled out from under you and for your project to completely stall.

If you let developers work on the projects they want to work on, you get situations where games that need developers to put the work in so they can get out the door get abandoned. You'll notice that Valve's mentality is not "hire more developers" like a normal company, but rather "everything except the main project gets pinned down a pillow over its face".

According to Ubisoft, a lot of employees are not interested in working on Splinter Cell because they'd rather work on Assassin's Creed and other "popular" series. But the difference is that Ubisoft WILL make a New Splinter Cell. Period. It will get done. They will hire the people necessary and force them to deliver a game. They won't just throw up their hands and say, "Oh, but everyone wanted to make Far Cry 6, so what were we supposed to do?"
 

Alextended

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The few & potentially bitter accounts of the going ons at Valve aren't enough to justify that positioning or present Ubisoft as better. I'm glad some randoms weren't forced to make a Half-Life game nobody had a passion for just to have something out in the past. To act like they're just hired to basically not do any work and just move from project to project and never get any one of them actually done is kind of unfounded & sounds silly, like Gabe or whoever else at the top just hires/pays folks like all of Campo Santo to be lazy. Doesn't sound like smart business sense but no, neither Half-Life nor Steam was a lucky fluke. Yeah Ubisoft has literally thousands of devs around the world and always ships something, doesn't mean they have a better ratio of cancelled vs shipped than the far smaller (game dev wise) Valve nor does it mean that every company with enough money should just keep expanding in that manner also (they do hire folks).
 
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Aelphaeis Mangarae

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The few potentially bitter accounts of the going ons at Valve aren't enough to justify that positioning or present Ubisoft as a better alternative imo. I'm glad the bosses of Valve didn't force some randoms to make a Half-Life game just to have something out in the past but to act like they're just hired to basically not do any work and just move from project to project and never get any one of them actually done is kind of unfounded sounds silly. Hired to finish nothing, yay.
For example, Viktor Antonov left Valve because Valve were no longer capable of making the kind of games he joined the company to make. Valve's structure is fundamentally not suited to long haul videogame development. The only reason games like Half-Life and Half-Life 2 exist is because they were legally obligated by Vivendi/Sierra to deliver them. Valve's "do whatever you want except the entire company is full of toxic cliques so you don't actually do whatever you want" has resulted in Valve having systemic issues.

The fact Valley of Gods has essentially been cancelled is a symptom of everything wrong with Valve. Valve took an acclaimed indie studio and completely destroyed it. Do remember that Portal 2 was viewed negatively inside Valve because it wasn't a lucrative loot box machine. It's why Portal 3 never happened.

What Valve have done is far, far worse than, say, Activision turning Raven into a Call of Duty support studio. See, when Activision did that to Raven, they did it after a string of failures. Activision saved Raven. If Raven hadn't fallen into strife they would have been allowed to keep working on their own projects.

This is not a new problem. Valve have a history of hiring some of the most venerated game designers in history and doing nothing with them. Companies like Ubisoft recognize and utilize talent. Valve does not. Bethesda hired Viktor Antonov and put him to work on games. He spent years at Valve doing nothing of note because Valve's structure didn't allow him to work on the projects he wanted to work on.

Valve's "people work on the stuff they want to work on" is actually a lie. It's not how it works. People work on what the clique wants them to work on. If you want to work on your passion project Valley of Gods, well, screw you, eh?

It's especially painful for people like the writer(s) on Valley of Gods, who were contract devs and their work will likely never be seen. Wheras the rest of Campo Santo is forced to work on Valve's internal projects whether they like it or not, the outside devs don't even have the luxury of being forced to make HL Alyx.

An uncomfortable number of core Half-Life developers including the lead art designer, the lead sound designer, and the lead writer left the company due to disagreements with how it was being run, and in Laidlaw's case he reportedly (according to VNN) walked into Gabe's office and quit because one of the lead developers of the new Half-Life was rude to him. (The new developers wanted to make a lot of lore violating changes that Laidlaw didn't approve of.)

This is what Laidlaw meant by:
Old friends have been silenced, or fallen by the wayside. I no longer know or recognize most members of the research team, though I believe the spirit of rebellion still persists. I expect you know better than I the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it. Expect no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final epistle.

Joining Valve often goes like this.

You join Valve.
You work on a project that dies because it's not protected by one of the major cliques. (Anything not backed by the VR clique within Valve is in massive danger, BTW.)
You work on the Steam Store.
You leave.

This is exactly what people were afraid would happen when Valve bought Campo Santo. They they would gut them and assign them to Valve's internal projects like DOTA.
 
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Rosenkrantz

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I love conspiracy theories too!

The reality is, Gabe has genetically engineered a headcrab that is capable of brainwashing and now commits atrocities on Valve's tightly secured blacksite somewhere in the woods between Washington and Canada. The only way to fight headcrab's poison is to posses the strongest of wills, this is the reason why the turnover is so small at Valve compared to the rest of the industry. The ordinary people think that Valve is a paradise to work at, little they know how evil Gaben have a plan to conquer the world and Valve Index is a first step of his masterplan. The day of HL:A release is the beginning of an end. In a first hour of a game players will be injected with headcrab's poison via headsets or controllers (if you're an owner, contact me, I can get rid of this evil for you). Do not give up, keep on fighting, together we can stop this inhumane hydra from rising its banner over our beautiful planet!

Sincerely yours, Tim Sweeney.
 

Durante

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He's now back at Ubisoft directing Watch Dogs 3.
And our lives are so much richer for that.

I can absolutely see that some people aren't comfortable working with this type of arrangement -- personally, I have been working in a somewhat similar environment (an academic one) for a long time, and there are lots of people (even at the graduate level) who just can't really manage their time in such a way to "actually get things done" when they themselves have full control, but there are others that thrive.

I could also see how it might discourage consecutive large-scale sequels, because most people in a creative industry won't really want to make minor iterations of the same thing over and over again.

What I don't see as a particularly strong argument for anything is exclusively listening to the people who left. If you do this with any workplace you'll naturally find a lot of accounts of all the things that are wrong. A more objective metric would be something like employee turnover/retention. Sadly I couldn't find any data on that.

Also, seriously, the amount of "shit getting done" at Valve, per employee, is in fact incredibly high. There's simply no way to dispute that. You are really dismissive in you posts when it comes to e.g. working on Steam, but just look at what Valve's so-called "competitors" achieve with a corporate structure that is apparently so much more conducive to "getting things done": they don't get anything done.
 

Aelphaeis Mangarae

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And our lives are so much richer for that.

I can absolutely see that some people aren't comfortable working with this type of arrangement -- personally, I have been working in a somewhat similar environment (an academic one) for a long time, and there are lots of people (even at the graduate level) who just can't really manage their time in such a way to "actually get things done" when they themselves have full control, but there are others that thrive.

I could also see how it might discourage consecutive large-scale sequels, because most people in a creative industry won't really want to make minor iterations of the same thing over and over again.

What I don't see as a particularly strong argument for anything is exclusively listening to the people who left. If you do this with any workplace you'll naturally find a lot of accounts of all the things that are wrong. A more objective metric would be something like employee turnover/retention. Sadly I couldn't find any data on that.

Also, seriously, the amount of "shit getting done" at Valve, per employee, is in fact incredibly high. There's simply no way to dispute that. You are really dismissive in you posts when it comes to e.g. working on Steam, but just look at what Valve's so-called "competitors" achieve with a corporate structure that is apparently so much more conducive to "getting things done": they don't get anything done.
You could use this exact same defense for Rareware. Rareware have made a lot of stuff under Microsoft. They boldly pushed game design with Kinect. All their current projects are bold and creative social games. But there is a deep, deep problem with how Microsoft handled Rareware. They imposed a structure that completely derailed the company's ability to simply produce videogames. High profile game directors got shuffled off to the art department and then laid off. Others simply left. I believe. Rare still has talent, but a lot left because their games got snuffed by Microsoft and Rare management. Developers reallocated to go work on projects Rare management cared about.

Valve turned into a company driven by gimmicks. Here is a concept or a technology, try to make a game with it. Whether they're good gimmicks or not is beside the point. It's the same trap Rare fell into. Instead of teams working on prototypes, the good ones being selected and refined into quality games, the studio just spent years chasing Kinect. Just as Valve are currently chasing VR, much like Crytek before them. Although Crytek didn't go all-in on VR like Valve.

The only way Valve have been able to justify making Half-Life Alyx is through VR. The three game lineup they're working on are VR experiments first and foremost. They don't exist in any other context.

What happens if you're a Valve employee that wants to make FPS games but actively dislikes VR? Where do you think such an employee fits inside Valve? Valve's pretense of "people work on the projects they want to work on" is no different to "Rare wanted to make Kinect Sports". Some within Rare wanted to make Kinect Sports. Everyone else got dragged along whether they liked it or not. Valve's flat structure is a lie.

If people were really free to work on the projects they wanted to work on, the Valley of Gods team wouldn't have imploded. People would have left and Campo Santo would have hired new people to help replace them. They would have posted job ads looking for people to assist on the project, and people would have answered. But that didn't happen.

People joined Valve to make Half-Life and Portal and Left 4 Dead and so on. And their projects repeatedly imploded. This is why people left. A lot of people are happy to be employed in an unstable industry doing interesting stuff. People aren't just gonna flee the company because they don't like all their pet projects dying.

Valve just killed a game studio. Campo Santo is dead now. Imagine if Valve bought Asabo. A Plague Tale 2, reportedly in development, would be dead within a year. If Valve had bought Obsidian, Outer Worlds would have imploded within months. You'd be reading a tweet from Chris Avellone about how he's sad that the entire team is working on DOTA now, but he's happy for them.

Valve have not fostered independent creative projects. They have fostered a consuming hierarchy that absorbs and often kills everything it touches. Campo Santo has ceased to exist as a self-determining entity. It is now just a group of Valve developers working on Valve's games instead of their own.

I think about stuff like The Stanley Parable. Fantastic example of the creativity fostered by the Half-Life modding community. It uses Unity now, but the point stands. Imagine if Galactic Cafe had been acquired by Valve. Do you really think The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe would still be in development? I don't think so.
 
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Durante

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VR is not a "gimmick", it's a new medium.
HL:A is not an "experiment", it's a full-scale game.

You don't seem to look at this objectively.

As I said, yes, you probably get more iterative sequels out of a traditional corporate structure. Where we differ is in how important we consider that vis-a-vis the things Valve is doing that no one else is. Personally, I don't think it's even comparable. I'd gladly give up Watch Dogs 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 for a single Proton, or OpenVR, or Steam Input, or HL:A (not because it's Half Life, but because of what it does for a new medium).

If people were really free to work on the projects they wanted to work on, the Valley of Gods team wouldn't have imploded.
Huh? How the hell can you claim that? Are you saying that the people who used to work on it and chose to work on something different now are lying?
Why do you seemingly consider it impossible that most people who worked on the game would rather work on e.g. HL:A? I mean, I'm in the industry, and if I had that opportunity and no other constraints I'd drop what I'm doing and jump on it.
 

Rosenkrantz

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Valve just killed a game studio. Campo Santo is dead now. Imagine if Valve bought Asabo. A Plague Tale 2, reportedly in development, would be dead within a year. If Valve had bought Obsidian, Outer Worlds would have imploded within months. You'd be reading a tweet from Chris Avellone about how he's sad that the entire team is working on DOTA now, but he's happy for them.
Jeez mate, your hate for Valve has no boundaries. You posted a tweet from one contractor who was left in the dust, which sucks, but happens all the time, yet you don't take into account words of actual Campo Santo devs who say that it was their decision to put a project on hold. Then you go on wild assumptions about games being killed left and right if the studios were acquired by Valve to work on DOTA and CSGO skins. The reality is we have no idea at what stage Campo Santo were with IVoG, it's possible they ran into obstacles which they couldn't overcome or the game didn't shape into a great experience they wanted, but you insist on "evil, incompetent Volvo only knows how to run promising devs into the ground" narrative. By that token, all of the R* studios are nothing but support teams for North and San Diego and all of the Ubisoft studios around the globe are forced to deliver yearly iterations of AC and FC. Hell, Naughty Dog has only worked on 3 IPs since they joined Sony, 3 IPs in almost 2 decades, imagine that.
 

Aelphaeis Mangarae

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VR is not a "gimmick", it's a new medium.
I apologise if I came across wrong. I'm not saying gimmick in a negative sense. I was lost for a better word to describe an eye catching new approach that the game is build around. that the game exists to demonstrate. I agree VR is quite possible the endgame for first person immersion in games, and I am eagerly anticipating HL Alyx for this reason.
HL:A is not an "experiment", it's a full-scale game.
Nobody IMO is questioning that HL: Alyx is likely going to be an absolutely fantastic game that pushes the medium forward. (Concerns about teleportation movement aside.) But it only exists to push VR, and Valve are explicit about that.
Huh? How the hell can you claim that? Are you saying that the people who used to work on it and chose to work on something different now are lying? Why do you seemingly consider it impossible that most people who worked on the game would rather work on e.g. HL:A? I mean, I'm in the industry, and if I had that opportunity and no other constraints I'd drop what I'm doing and jump on it.
Because the notion that an entire team chose to abandon their highly celebrated and highly anticipated game to work on DOTA is silly. I don't buy that the entire team voluntarily abandoned their beloved game. It's as silly as believing that all the people working on Half-Life 2: Episode 3 chose to go make hats in Team Fortress. We know about Valve's behind the scenes drama. Drama that caused key series developers to leave Valve in frustration and publicly voice that they couldn't make the games they wanted to make. We have testimonials about how things work at Valve. About how the flat structure hurts projects that aren't favored by invisible cliques.

Valve's development culture does not allow unpopular projects to get funding and development support. Valve doesn't do Ecco the Dolphins of game dev. Everything gravitates towards the popular projects. Now this happens at other companies. But at other companies, you don't work on a game and have everyone leave around you, with no avenue to replace them.
By that token, all of the R* studios are nothing but support teams for North and San Diego
Rockstar has historically been regarded as one of the most soul crushing nightmarish companies in the entire games industry to work at. It's a company that fired people for trying to fix Red Dead Redemption 2's combat. For all their faults, Valve are like the polar opposite of that. Valve's culture sabotages long haul game development (I used the phrase long haul earlier, and its meaning should be obvious), but it is wonderful for the health, and peace of mind of the developers who work there. You don't hear stories about Valve employees getting fired for displaying basic creativity.
and all of the Ubisoft studios around the globe are forced to deliver yearly iterations of AC and FC.
Far Cry isn't annual. Regardless, the official stance from Ubisoft is that they have had problems with Splinter Cell because their hires want to work on Assassin's Creed and Far Cry and series like that. But the difference is that if Ubisoft really want to make Splinter Cell they can do it. They hire people and they deliver a product. Ubisoft is making a VR Splinter Cell game for Oculus right now. They are also rumoured to be working on the next mainline Splinter Cell, with a reveal in 2020. This is the benefit of being able to form teams that don't disintegrate on a whim. Valve has a clear problem with team cohesion. "The desks have wheels" sounds great in theory, and I love the idea of developers being free to move around.

In fact, I think that the AAA games industry has a massive problem where it treats people as cogs. Instead of letting them try their hand at things they might enjoy, they do one job. And then they get put on hold at the end of dev. The idea of teams naturally forming and roles emerging from skills in a similar manner to academia like Durante said is actually fantastic.

HOWEVER it means that people move on to work on fun stuff instead of slogging away because it's their job. This is what happened to various Valve projects. Projects get cancelled at companies like Ubisoft. Remember Jade Raymond and Ubi Toronto? They were founded to make Splinter Cell games. It all went off the rails. But people didn't wake up one day and discover that the Splinter Cell team was making hats for Far Cry because they'd gotten bored with Splinter Cell because it's not sexy and exciting like Far Cry's microtransaction hats.

People who wanted to work on traditional singleplayer games at Valve were alienated for years. They tried to form teams, and the teams disintegrated. Valve's culture was not conducive to them. The only way the new Half-Life has been able to get off the ground is by piggybacking on a VR experimental project Valve had going.

Campo Santo should have seen this coming. Valve do not make usually games like Firewatch .A game like Firewatch would IMHO peter out inside Valve, just as Valley of Gods has. Some might disagree, but think about it. It doesn't have the gimmick or hook or whatever you want to call it to coalesce a team and hopefully keep them interested long enough to ship. This is a recurring pattern we have watched for over a decade. Valve's structure is absolutely fantastic for small scale experimentation. Rapid iteration. Live services. Valve's internal structure is why Steam is a better launcher than its competitors. Valve's culture overall is far healthier than most of their contemporaries. Valve's immense money pool allows them to pursue technological advancement and gaming-adjacent projects such as Proton. But it has proven deeply problematic for developing traditional videogames. They didn't cancel HL Episode 3 because they were perfectionists or anything romantic like that. They fell apart internally. They became a magpie chasing the shiny things around. Even though HL Alyx looks potentially mindblowing, the circumstances of its creation are reflective of systemic problems. And this includes Laidlaw's departure in 2016. Valve were the first major developer to jump on the F2P MP game bandwagon with TF2 and Dota and eventually CS GO and so on. And it caused issues within the company. It causes issues within most companies that go down that road.
 
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Nzyme

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For example, Viktor Antonov left Valve because Valve were no longer capable of making the kind of games he joined the company to make. Valve's structure is fundamentally not suited to long haul videogame development. The only reason games like Half-Life and Half-Life 2 exist is because they were legally obligated by Vivendi/Sierra to deliver them. Valve's "do whatever you want except the entire company is full of toxic cliques so you don't actually do whatever you want" has resulted in Valve having systemic issues.

The fact Valley of Gods has essentially been cancelled is a symptom of everything wrong with Valve. Valve took an acclaimed indie studio and completely destroyed it. Do remember that Portal 2 was viewed negatively inside Valve because it wasn't a lucrative loot box machine. It's why Portal 3 never happened.

What Valve have done is far, far worse than, say, Activision turning Raven into a Call of Duty support studio. See, when Activision did that to Raven, they did it after a string of failures. Activision saved Raven. If Raven hadn't fallen into strife they would have been allowed to keep working on their own projects.

This is not a new problem. Valve have a history of hiring some of the most venerated game designers in history and doing nothing with them. Companies like Ubisoft recognize and utilize talent. Valve does not. Bethesda hired Viktor Antonov and put him to work on games. He spent years at Valve doing nothing of note because Valve's structure didn't allow him to work on the projects he wanted to work on.

Valve's "people work on the stuff they want to work on" is actually a lie. It's not how it works. People work on what the clique wants them to work on. If you want to work on your passion project Valley of Gods, well, screw you, eh?

It's especially painful for people like the writer(s) on Valley of Gods, who were contract devs and their work will likely never be seen. Wheras the rest of Campo Santo is forced to work on Valve's internal projects whether they like it or not, the outside devs don't even have the luxury of being forced to make HL Alyx.

An uncomfortable number of core Half-Life developers including the lead art designer, the lead sound designer, and the lead writer left the company due to disagreements with how it was being run, and in Laidlaw's case he reportedly (according to VNN) walked into Gabe's office and quit because one of the lead developers of the new Half-Life was rude to him. (The new developers wanted to make a lot of lore violating changes that Laidlaw didn't approve of.)

This is what Laidlaw meant by:



Joining Valve often goes like this.

You join Valve.
You work on a project that dies because it's not protected by one of the major cliques. (Anything not backed by the VR clique within Valve is in massive danger, BTW.)
You work on the Steam Store.
You leave.

This is exactly what people were afraid would happen when Valve bought Campo Santo. They they would gut them and assign them to Valve's internal projects like DOTA.
nearly all of this is based on nonsense conspiracy theory, and forum circle jerk. Might do a long post fully debunking all of this with actual evidence.

ridiculous that this is still circulating as “fact” and even devs speaking out themselves to prove otherwise - totally ignored or ridiculed further.

look no further than the open statements of the ITvoG devs, completely ignored, but the entire sympathy for a contracting writer, as it fits the narrative you’ve preconceived.

As someone who is a creative and supports all manner of art, authorship from so many mediums- “fans” like this, self-proclaimed gamers that sit and spin in feral bubbles over this stuff with no regard for reality and the people toiling for research, inspiration, and creativity in there craft.. it’s just dumbfounding.

If the people behind the creative vision collectively need more time, cancel or put something on hold, or have any other creative decision, I fully respect them for it. I may critique from what I can see, and that’s about it. No hype, hounding or outright harassment, let alone conspiracy and blaming with disregard to their thoughts and facts

Gamers suck
 

Alextended

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Too many of the arguments are imaginary scenarios for random studios conceived to reinforce a couple existing reports, not a good look.

My first reply was aware of the latter, nothing new was brought to the table beyond a now obvious hostile bias despite the forced praise of certain aspects.

Is that Margaris guy taking after Schreier to criticize Valve having a good work environment with paid vacation and stuff that brings people joy, really?

I've worked on things I liked, I don't any more since I never found anywhere that gave good enough conditions/terms for a now older adult.
 
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fantomena

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Valve: Valle of Gods is put on hold
Most of Campo Santo folks: We are so happy here at Valve, making HLA is a dream come true.
Gamers: Fuck you Valve fuck you fuck you fuck you for cancelling Valley of Gods and splitting up Campo Santo
Campo Santo twitter: but Valve didn't split us up, we choose what we wanna work on
Gamers: Fuck you Valve fuck you fuck you fuck you for cancelling Valley of Gods and splitting up Campo Santo
 

sauce

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I'm not surprised at all that Campo Santo saw a chance to work on one of the most formative franchises of gaming and took it lmao. Hopefully once Alyx is wrapped up they'll come back to ItVoG, it looked really cool. Hell maybe they'll grab some ideas/people from Alyx to work on it afterward