valve bits
Steam and the Steam Community (cont.)Friends as Stand-alone - Another common question people had was whether or not Valve would consider making the Friends system a stand-alone program much like AIM or MSN Messenger.
Future Achievements - More titles will include the achievements introduced with Team Fortress 2. I can confirm that both Episode 2 and Portal have their own set of achievements that will tie into the community.
User Content Distribution - Mentioned near the beginning of Steam’s life cycle, the idea to distribute user created content through Steam is not a new one. However, it still remains a focus for Valve to get user created content out to the masses.
There are nothing coming out in the short term, but 2008 was mentioned as a possible period we’ll see a solution come about. The major issue right now is that the aggregation of the content would be difficult, but various options are being worked on. Nothing was specifically mentioned about the hidden P2P settings buried inside Steam, but that may come into the spotlight for this very purpose.
This question actually popped up after a discussion with the Portal team about user created content. There’ll be more on that later though.
Immediate and Not So Immediate Plans
Episode 2 Pre-load - As of this writing, Episode 2 has not yet been offered up for pre-load to the public. Portal just started to pre-load last night for users, and to those with Team Fortress 2, the download for Portal was a relatively small affair.
Look for the Episode 2 pre-load some time this week. EDIT: It seems as though the pre-loading phase has begun tonight!
The Wii - At present there are no immediate plans to develop a title for the Nintendo Wii, at least nothing announced. The reason is that because it’s so different from the 360 and PC environments, the coding for the Wii would have “broken” them. Far in addition, time and new learning processes would have set them even further back had they decided to bring Orange to the Wii.
Episode 3 - Officially, there is not even a hint of speculation on when we’ll see Episode 3. Valve is taking more of an Id approach to matters now, and will try not to announce a date until things are set in stone.
This also has a lot to do with decisions they made to Episode 2’s story line. At the end of Episode 1 (and if you haven’t finished it yet, don’t read the rest of the paragraph!), we were treated to a video where we see Alyx hanging from the end of the train car. Dramatic, no? The problem is that that scene is scrapped from Episode 2. The video was just of a snapshot in time of where the Episode 2 development was. They (Valve) really want to avoid that as it breaks up the flow and continuity of the story if things are changed over time, and they do tend to be changed.
Valve wants to avoid situations like that, and they want to avoid situations where a date is given and then delayed however long. Quite the smart decision on their part.
Episode 3 Bundle Deal - They have nothing to announce at this time.
Cell phone titles - When asked if they were considering entering the cell phone game market as other companies have (Id with their Doom RPG being an example), they had no specific plans in mind. It was mentioned that there were those on staff that would absolutely love to do a title on cell phones, so perhaps it’s only a matter of time. Perhaps.
Team Fortress 2 Maps and Game types - Let me just start this by saying that the hugely popular Hunted game type is being worked on, but with a few changes.
The major problem with this game type was that success as the defending team really depended on not only how well your defenders were, but also how skilled the person playing the VIP was. Obviously, if the VIP was someone who hadn’t played before, things ended quite fast. Valve is retooling this game type and we’ll hopefully see it in a future update.
New maps are being worked on, though I didn’t personally see any new maps first hand. I do know that Jess Cliffe is hard at work on a new map for Team Fortress 2. No ETA on when we might see it though.
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