efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
Here's the thing I don't get about the "wait for it to be revolutionary" argument:
The late 90s to early 2000s were a period of technological discovery and innovation in gaming that's not coming back. That ship has sailed. We're now in a stage of refinement, where what was established then is being expanded upon and polished.
The next big breakthrough is not "just around the corner", as some VR enthusiasts would have you believe. They've been saying this for over a decade and VR remains niche for the exact reasons everyone had predicted - it's cumbersome and isolating and there are no good solutions to emulating the sense of touch and feeling of force.
Empty buzzwords like "The Metaverse" are just like the flying cars promised in the 1950s: they may or may not materialize in Gabe's lifetime, and if they do will not be what everyone expected them to be anyway.
Generative AI is just as likely to turn the development pipeline and player experience on their heads before VR or AR become mainstream, and there's no telling what'll happen after that.
In the mean time, no one is stopping Valve from making great, interesting games that continue to flesh out the Half Life universe and keep it relevant for new generations of gamers.
The holy grail of a new technological revolution will happen when it happens, and Valve will be able to make Half Life 5 or 6 to showcase it, whatever it'll be. No one will fault then for "merely" releasing best-in-class games until then.
If Doom, Mario etc can keep getting new releases, so can Half Life. They don't all have to completely reinvent the wheel, as long as they continue to experiment while retaining their respective franchises' identity.
The late 90s to early 2000s were a period of technological discovery and innovation in gaming that's not coming back. That ship has sailed. We're now in a stage of refinement, where what was established then is being expanded upon and polished.
The next big breakthrough is not "just around the corner", as some VR enthusiasts would have you believe. They've been saying this for over a decade and VR remains niche for the exact reasons everyone had predicted - it's cumbersome and isolating and there are no good solutions to emulating the sense of touch and feeling of force.
Empty buzzwords like "The Metaverse" are just like the flying cars promised in the 1950s: they may or may not materialize in Gabe's lifetime, and if they do will not be what everyone expected them to be anyway.
Generative AI is just as likely to turn the development pipeline and player experience on their heads before VR or AR become mainstream, and there's no telling what'll happen after that.
In the mean time, no one is stopping Valve from making great, interesting games that continue to flesh out the Half Life universe and keep it relevant for new generations of gamers.
The holy grail of a new technological revolution will happen when it happens, and Valve will be able to make Half Life 5 or 6 to showcase it, whatever it'll be. No one will fault then for "merely" releasing best-in-class games until then.
If Doom, Mario etc can keep getting new releases, so can Half Life. They don't all have to completely reinvent the wheel, as long as they continue to experiment while retaining their respective franchises' identity.
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