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Valve

Valve's Double Entendre

Today's the big launch day of Valve's much an­tic­i­pated Left 4 Dead up­date in­clud­ing the two-level cam­paign Crash Course… sigh.

I re­ally won­der if Valve has a QA de­part­ment. It seems to break in one of three ways—ei­ther it silently launches a local server (de­spite lobby set­tings), puts the server you con­nect to into a live­lock re­quir­ing a man­ual restart, or makes each player con­nect to their own local IP. It's not an iso­lated prob­lem, with their fo­rums being full of com­plaints. It makes me yearn for the days when patches weren't forced down your throat by some crap like Steam.

It ac­tu­ally works in sin­gle-player, so I tried the new cam­paign there. It uses a Death Toll theme, look­ing a lot like the level where you start in the church. In what seems to be a stor­age area, you jump from room to room or walk down the al­leys con­nect­ing the rooms. Each level is un­in­ven­tive, look­ing like one big area in­stead of smaller ones that vary to keep it fresh. Every room and alley looks the same, just a ran­dom scat­ter­ing of boxes and cars.

Re­ally, there's not much to left say about Crash Course. Given how short it is and how un­fin­ished and mo­not­o­nous it looks, I can't imag­ine my­self play­ing it much in ver­sus. Much rather be play­ing Ab­solute Zero or Death Aboard. If ver­sus ac­tu­ally worked, that is.

69th Annual Nisei Week

Nisei week is upon us—I'll be hang­ing out at the JACCC plaza this week­end, for the Next Gen­er­a­tion REMIX con­cert and the Taiko Gath­er­ing. Last year was a blast, I can't wait to see what they've got in store this year.

Sadly it seems NSU Mod­ern won't be re­turn­ing this year, but the REMIX con­cert will still fea­ture some other great artists -- Camile Ve­lasco, Bambu, Eye­ASage, TAIKO­PRO­JECT, Sib­rian, Kacie Yoshida, and DJ ET. Last year the more ma­ture per­for­mances were re­served for later in the evening; as­sum­ing they do the same thing this year, it should be pretty kid safe.

The REMIX con­cert starts at 6pm on Sat­ur­day the 22nd, and the Taiko Gath­er­ing starts at 11:30am on Sun­day the 23rd. Grab some karepan and mochi, and enjoy :)

What the L4D2 boycott means to me

With over 40,000 peo­ple in the Left 4 Dead 2boy­cott group, there are bound to be a lot of vary­ing rea­sons for why they're there. The pop­u­lar one is about past promises un­ful­filled, which I agree with whole­heart­edly. I've also got is­sues with the gen­eral qual­ity of sup­port we've got from Valve.

Lack of content

One major nit­pick I have with most of the boy­cott com­mu­nity is that a lot of peo­ple con­sider new con­tent to be "free up­dates". A lot of us paid $50 for a game with very lit­tle con­tent with the ex­pec­ta­tion, due to ex­plicit state­ments from Valve, that we would be get­ting more. To me, this means I have al­ready paid for this new con­tent with my ini­tial $50—it is not a free up­date. Con­sider it a pre-or­der.

Call­ing it free just gives the im­pres­sion that any new con­tent is a gift of good will from Valve, which makes a lot of peo­ple sound like whin­ers with silly ex­pec­ta­tions of get­ting every­thing for free. This is sup­ported by the way the media has been re­port­ing it—nearly all men­tions of the boy­cott has at­trib­uted it to whiny kids want­ing stuff for free.

So far, two minor up­dates have come out.

In the first up­date, we got the two old cam­paigns re­leased for ver­sus mul­ti­player. This amounted to adding in­vis­i­ble walls, very slightly re­struc­tur­ing some areas to be more bal­anced, and adding some climb spots for in­fected. The sec­ond up­date, called the "Sur­vival pack", added a Sur­vival mode where you see how long you can last against hoards of en­e­mies. This added a new sur­vival-only map and again very slightly mod­i­fied all the old ones. Un­for­tu­nately most of us have found Sur­vival to be a re­mark­able fail­ure with very mo­not­o­nous game­play, a very quick curve to mas­ter, and vir­tu­ally no re­playa­bil­ity.

How much new con­tent is enough con­tent to ful­fill the oblig­a­tion from those promises? This is an­other point where peo­ple have dif­fer­ing ideas. I could per­son­ally care less about new char­ac­ters, sto­ries, or achieve­ments. New weapons can be cool to de­gree, but they would need to be a real game-changer, like the grav­ity gun was in Half-Life 2, for me to care much. For new con­tent in Left 4 Dead, I was mainly ex­pect­ing my $50 to pay for an­other two or three full-sized, full-fea­tured cam­paigns.

Valve re­cently an­nounced a "Crash Course" cam­paign for Left 4 Dead. I'm re­ally hop­ing they de­signed it with all the ex­pe­ri­ences and flaws of the cur­rent maps in mind. One in­ter­est­ing quote:

…the pri­mary goal of "Crash" is to de­liver a com­plete Ver­sus mode ex­pe­ri­ence in just 30 min­utes, re­sult­ing in a stream­lined ver­sion of the game's ex­ist­ing Ver­sus cam­paigns.

I can't help but feel this is mar­ket­ing-speak that means "We wanted to spend as lit­tle money as pos­si­ble con­sid­er­ing we've got a se­quel about to come out, so we built a small cam­paign that should re­lease us from our oblig­a­tions of more con­tent". Sigh.

Lack of support

Any­one who plays Left 4 Dead will be able to tell you how rid­dled with bugs it is, and how slow Valve is to fix them. The issue is com­pounded by Valve's veil of se­crecy around de­vel­op­ment, be­cause play­ers don't know if Valve is work­ing on a fix or has even ac­knowl­edged some­thing is hap­pen­ing. With how lit­tle sup­port the game has got to fix its flaws, I can't re­ally feel com­fort­able think­ing Valve will be any more com­pe­tent with Left 4 Dead 2.

One ex­am­ple that I see in nearly every sin­gle game is 1-4 play­ers are kicked from a game within a few min­utes of start­ing, get­ting a "No steam logon" error that no doubt has to do with poorly im­ple­mented DRM. This is a pretty glar­ing bug that has been around since the ini­tial re­lease, with no fix in sight. An­other is that games tend to get "lost" in Valve's mas­ter servers. In pretty much every game, new play­ers will ran­domly stop com­ing in to re­place old ones. Some­times it re­cov­ers in 10-15min, but usu­ally it doesn't.

A lot of maps have se­ri­ous ex­ploits. There are sev­eral areas that, with a lit­tle skill (or luck), an in­fected player can in­stantly kill a sur­vivor. There are ways for sur­vivors to skip or out-run crescendo events, which are sup­posed to be a major game­play el­e­ment in­tro­duc­ing a tem­po­rary chaotic chal­lenge. In areas you can't out­right skip, there is al­most al­ways a spot where sur­vivors can sit that makes it all but im­pos­si­ble for in­fected to deal any dam­age.

Left 4 Dead is in­cred­i­bly sen­si­tive to lag. Un­like most mod­ern games, and even old ones such as the nearly 13 year old Quake­world, Left 4 Dead has no sense of lag com­pen­sa­tion. When pounc­ing a sur­vivor, you need to ac­tu­ally make sure you land a lit­tle ahead of the player. Land­ing on the player will just re­sult in you slid­ing off as your client catches up to re­veal you didn't ac­tu­ally hit your tar­get. Other play­ers will just see some stu­pid hunter land­ing 10 feet off his mark. This isn't just some­thing that af­fects those of 200+ pings, ei­ther -- it is still stress­ful at pings lower than 100.

There are some gen­eral flaws with game­play too. "Rage­quit­ting" was cer­tainly not in­vented with Left 4 Dead, but it's the first time I've seen it be­come such a com­mon phrase. Los­ing in Left 4 Dead can be a very frus­trat­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, but there is noth­ing to bal­ance that out to keep peo­ple hav­ing fun. Be­cause there is no in­cen­tive to stay, the great ma­jor­ity of peo­ple will quit at the first sign of a loss. Some­times they will even "grief" the game by killing them­selves or their team­mates. Most days it takes two or three games of every­one quit­ting be­fore I find a de­cent one. Even then, the only prize for win­ning is often the enemy team quit­ting right be­fore you get to play your fun in­fected fi­nale round.

This could be par­tially solved by a bet­ter match­mak­ing sys­tem. The cur­rent one, when it ac­tu­ally works, makes no dis­tinc­tions be­tween skilled and new play­ers, good sports and quit­ters, and full ex­pe­ri­enced teams and ran­dom peo­ple. Valve has been promis­ing a new match­mak­ing sys­tem that solves at least that last point for a while now, but keeps push­ing it back. Even then, it wouldn't solve the prob­lem that the game just doesn't offer any rea­son for a los­ing team to stick around.