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Valve is overrated
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That's right. Valve screwed us all.
After quietly sitting on my words for years and watching mediocre games receive rave reviews, I have to voice my opinion on this issue, even if it is unpopular. Valve, the company responsible for games such as Half-life, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress, is one of the most, if not the most, overrated company in video games today.
To back up this argument, I’m going to use the most popular Valve games that have come out over the past few years as examples: The Orange Box (2007) and Left 4 Dead (2008).
The Orange Box
The problems that I have with The Orange Box is, everyone said (when it was released) that you were getting great value for your $60 dollars. I didn’t quite see it that way after dropping my money and playing the game. What is included in the game is a single player first person shooter (Half-Life 2) with several expansion packs. All told, there are roughly 20 hours to be had playing this mode. That’s about the same as most first person shooters. Then, you get a deathmatch mode in Team Fortress 2 (with very limited options), but admittedly solid gameplay. And finally, you get Portal. While Portal was excellent, it was basically just an Xbox Live Arcade download, which they actually released it as later on.
When you break it down, you are getting an old first person shooter selling for full price. Remember, Half-Life 2 came out the same year that Halo 2 did (2004), yet The Orange Box came out three years later in 2007. I can remember pricing the PC versions of Half-Life 2 and the two expansion episodes for under $30 dollars when The Orange Box originally came out. Furthermore, The Orange Box came out less than a month after Halo 3. Not only did Halo 3 offer a similar number of hours for its single player campaign (which could also be played with up to four players cooperatively, and, was a new experience, not the same game from three years back) it also offered a more robust multiplayer experience compared to the very limited Team Fortress 2. To be generous, let's label Team Fortress 2 as having $15 dollars of value. The only truly unique item in The Orange Box was Portal. Portal is selling for about $15 dollars on Xbox Live as we speak. Add those numbers together, and you get $60 dollars. All of a sudden, it’s not a bargain. It’s exactly what the game should be sold at. But the sad truth is, for a minimal amount of work (since more than half of what was in The Orange Box was recycled), Valve got the last laugh. They were laughing all the way to the bank while consumers were paying full price for their old games.
Besides just the pricing, there are other issues to be had with Half-Life 2. I will admit that I never played it on a PC, so perhaps there is something to that experience that didn’t translate well to the console versions, but this game just isn’t that good. It’s an okay first person shooter, but there are some really slow parts and some jumping or swimming puzzles that should not be in a first person shooter experience. Not only that, but the graphics (back in 2007) were showing their age. It didn’t look as good as games that were coming out at the same time, such as Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
Furthermore, the gameplay in general in Half-Life 2 feels generic. There are very few memorable moments, and some truly silly enemies (like the barnacles, which are enemies what lick you from the ceiling).
On the positive side, Portal is a revelation. It has one of the most creative concepts seen in video games in a long time, and that concept made it very enjoyable for the short play through. On the downside, Portal isn’t funny. The cake joke was lame, and whoever wrote the dialog thinking that it was funny is wrong. It isn’t that I didn’t get it. I did. It just wasn’t funny.
Left 4 Dead
I don’t get the love for this game. I really don’t. When I saw that it was on numerous “game of the year nominee” lists, I was just floored. Especially on the lists that omitted games like Metal Gear Solid 4. I suppose my problem with the game stems from the fact that I played Call of Duty: World at War first, and then I went on to unlock the zombie mode in that game.
I was truly surprised at how fun the zombie mode was. You could play it alone or with others while defending yourself from wave after wave of zombie attackers. There was some strategy involved, such as boarding up doors and windows and purchasing weapons. And it contained some truly a jump-worthy moments such as when I would turn and see a room full of zombies making a beeline to my position (who weren't there 10 seconds ago). It was all playable in the silky smooth confines of the Call of Duty engine.
Then I played Left 4 Dead. The gameplay wasn’t as smooth, and the action felt less frantic. I was never afraid, and after about 30 minutes, the action felt ultra repetitive. Sure, there are more enemy types, and sure, there is some teamwork involved. And that’s definitely a plus, but there is also teamwork in the free add on zombie mode in Call of Duty. Left 4 Dead ultimately felt like it could have been a top down arcade game from the 80s as that’s about as fancy as it got. In fact, I’ve seen many people compare Left 4 Dead to Hunter the Reckoning, a mediocre Xbox title from seven years ago. So why is it that people love it now, and not then when it was at least somewhat original? Is it because you couldn’t take mediocre gameplay online back then, and you can now?
One unique gameplay mechanic that Left 4 Dead offers is the artificial intelligence that says “the player is doing to good – send out more guys.” From the reviews I read, people were praising this as some kind of state-of-the-art revolution when it’s really just code that measures a players health, ammo, and how many enemies are on the screen and decides to send more. Is this really the feature that people are so amazed by? Really? A friend of mine who worked at Microsoft Game Studios (and now works for them as an independent contractor) said that’s the dumbest feature a game could have. His thought on the subject was "so when the player is doing too well, we will make it so the game kills him."
But the bottom line is, for me, it’s just somewhat sad when a bonus extra outperforms an entire game of the same cloth. When I would rather pop in Call of Duty: World at War to get my zombie slaying fix when, right next to it on my game shelf, I have an entire game dedicated to killing dead guys, Valve failed.
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