Yeah, thats fair, I'm not trying to personally say HL2 is literally perfect, and I don't think Valve are either...

But they're saying that, by the time people really really wanted Half Life 3... they knew they would have to do something so revolutionary, so much better, to top it... that it actually wasn't possible.

So, think outside the box, innovate elsewhere, all the other shit they've done?

Conceptually and practically easier than making a sequel that would live up to HL3 expectations.

Although, there are apparently reports/rumors that they are now actually trying to do HL3.

But that has been the case for almost two decades.

... these things, they take time.

The friend 👆

Ok uh, what can you do, in terms of actual gameplay mechanics, in Fallout76, that you can't do in... basically every multiplayer, survival/craft/open world/fps game?

There are so many of those... and... FO76 basically came out around the tail end of the kind of craze for those kinds of games, they were trend chasing.

Uh lets see, Valve did make Portal, what happened was they saw a demo of a game (Narbacular Drop) being concepted at a nearby gaming college expo, and they basically hired all of them, taught them Source, gave them more team breadth and depth to work with.

Valve has... or had... a track record of doing this, in the 90s / 00s. Oh, thats a neat mod for our game: Hire them.

So yes, Valve did originally make Portal. By seeing a neat concept demo, hiring the people behind it, and then making Portal.

I mean, you can say that after 5 more years of development, F076 became a basically functional open world survival craft fps, sure, but like...

No Mans Sky basically revolutionized the concept of what you can do with procedural generation, oh and, they just kept adding more and more stuff, just to the base game, not as DLC, not as MTX.

CP77? Yeah very rough start, but uh, entirely different scope of production value, being an actually competent RPG that's practically an ImSim in many ways, all with an absurd level of graphical fidelity.

Like, everyone just expected that game to be Grand Theft Auto 5, Cyberpunk Edition, started their standards there, and then got mad that it wasn't at parity.

CD Projekt Red was a AA studio when they were making this.

They were not Rockstar. They were not Bethesda.

Ok, I'll give you that PayDay2 does actually have similar map mutating dynamics, I also have not played Vermintide, we do not speak of Back 4 Blood, what an embarassment, I am also unfamiliar with Remnant.

What I was trying to get at is ... map mutations is how you solve the age old FPS team v team problem of... if you just have better map knowledge, you tend to win, so this causes a problem where you either have to keep pumping out new maps to keep things fresh, or you have to have a bunch of other balancing gameplay mechanics to have variety from there.

But the fundamental problem is that vets will clown noobs all the time, often by just simply having the maps memorized, angles and positions figured out, etc.

Also Alien Isolation has pretty good monster AI that works with the rest of the game design, but no, thats not mutating maps.

Open world maps that move objective markers around are not mutating maps.

HellDivers 2 is a good example of doing proc gen maps... but again, thats an extraction shooter, co-op shooter type thing.

Nobody, that I am aware of, has pulled this off for mass PvP battles, like, 16-32+ vs 16-32+ players.

As for Valve not literally, technically, totally inventing VR... sure yeah ok, what I meant was they poured tons of their own resources into doing VR in their own way, they're one of the only teams that's made an actual AAA VR game that fully embraces the concept of 'you are a person in another world, a world that has high graphical realism.'

Virtual reality.

The point there was they turned toward innovating in other areas, that they did more or less start from scratch and invent their own concept of VR.

Your final quip about gacha games is funny.

Just look at the numbers dude, the vast majority of money to be made in gaming is by selling MTX addiction simulators.

That's not to say there are not still people who really do actually want well crafted, truly innovative or very well put together, fully fledged games... but the way the math of capitalism works on that is uh, those kinds of endeavors are way riskier, and have way worse ROI, than selling waifus to dorks.

I hope that actual games defeat waifu simulators, we are seeing a lot of AAAs crash and burn recently, but uh, I don't think gacha games are going anywhere... and most of the outfits with the money to be able to undertake a truly groundbreaking project?

Theyre all incompotent morons at the management level, who, after failing hard at their attempts in the last 5 ish years, are now just gonna try and hand that all over to AI, to attempt to further increase ROI.

But, normies love 'recognizable brand franchise', normies consistently auto-hypetrain and nostalgia-bate themselves, normies prove that having more than half a game's budget be marketing does brainwash them very well.

Here, I'll end with another hot take:

If, after everything that happened with Bethesda, up to the point of Starfield releasing...

You still bought Starfield on day one, or pre-ordered it?

You're the problem, you're the normie, you're the person marketing and nostalgia work on, you didn't realize your in an abusive, parasocial relationship with Bethesda.

Remember, no pre-orders.

You think one of the most popular and best-rated games of 2025 "did poorly?"