Valve have confused me

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Comments

  • edited March 2010
    With the new update comes a new ending (not my video) where you're dragged off by a robot who thanks you for "assuming the party escort submission position".
  • edited March 2010
    Holy god! It's juicy!
  • edited March 2010
    Wait does this mean the old ending is gone?
  • edited March 2010
    Apparently Valve are about to do a Mac announcement. They've released some actual promotional material, today:
    http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2010/03/04/valve-teases-steam-for-mac-iphone/1

    However, I still feel there is more to this ARG than just that Mac reveal, it all seems a bit unneccesary otherwise ...
  • edited March 2010
    serializer wrote: »
    However, I still feel there is more to this ARG than just that Mac reveal, it all seems a bit unneccesary otherwise ...

    I think the timing of the Mac announcment was just coincidental, this is 100% all about Portal 2 and quite possibly but probably not related to Episode 3
  • edited March 2010
    Wait does this mean the old ending is gone?

    It's more extended than an entirely new end.
  • edited March 2010
    patters wrote: »
    It's more extended than an entirely new end.

    Okay that's a load off of my mind, because I had not managed to finish the game yet, and I was afraid I missed out on the original experience.
  • edited March 2010
    Okay that's a load off of my mind, because I had not managed to finish the game yet, and I was afraid I missed out on the original experience.
    Essentially, they added a cutscene of about half a minute to the end of the game.
  • edited March 2010
    JedExodus wrote: »
    I think the timing of the Mac announcment was just coincidental, this is 100% all about Portal 2 and quite possibly but probably not related to Episode 3

    I saw at least one image of an apple hidden away in the BBS images so I'm not so sure ... especially with the timing of all these things emerging right before GDC ... I'm thinking a kind of uber Portal 2 + EP3 + all source games out on Mac type bombshell.
  • edited March 2010
    Essentially, they added a cutscene of about half a minute to the end of the game.

    It's more like 12 seconds. It's not much.

    It looks like there'll be another update in about 4 hours or so. I have no idea what it is though.

    Oh and how can you not finish Portal? It's only like 2 hours long, and it's not that hard. It's quite possibly the greatest game ever made, I can't see how you couldn't put aside 2 hours to finish it lol.
  • I love Valve. What an awesome way to promote/announce your product.

    Also, Valve coming to Mac is GREAT news. I'm so :D.
  • edited March 2010
    I tried doing the radio thing in Portal today. I can already tell finding all of those things is going to be a huge pain in the butt, but what a cool idea. :D
  • edited March 2010
    Valve, I love you more than I did before, you are more in a long line of awesome
  • edited March 2010
    Curse you Valve... Because of you, I've spent 3 days straight reading random posts on the Steam Forums!
  • edited March 2010
    Well according to ScrewAttack's Hard News there is a "Portal Sequel definitely on the way" (oh and Steam games for Mac)
  • edited March 2010
    In my Game History class we were talking about ARG and then we ended up spending the rest of the day on the Steam forums trying to figure out Valve/Portal 2/Half-Life EP:3(?).

    Easily one of the best class I ever had.
  • edited March 2010
    mr_nutt wrote: »
    Well according to ScrewAttack's Hard News there is a "Portal Sequel definitely on the way" (oh and Steam games for Mac)

    Anybody know how long "definitely on the way" is in Valve time?
  • edited March 2010
    Anybody know how long "definitely on the way" is in Valve time?

    Eight to nine years. Unless, of course, Portal 2 has zombies. Should that be the case, we can expect it by next week. :p
  • edited March 2010
    ShaggE wrote: »
    Eight to nine years. Unless, of course, Portal 2 has zombies. Should that be the case, we can expect it by next week. :p
    Please. Can't you tell that Chell is dead in the new ending? What we're looking at here is Rock Band Left 4 Dead: Portal. Expect Left 4 Dead crossovers with all Valve franchises soon, followed by a team-up with Take Two for a LEGO adaptation.
  • nikasaurnikasaur Telltale Alumni
    edited March 2010
    You obviously never saw the huge amount of viral marketing done for the Dark Knight, even before the trailers came out.

    Both were successful in that they targeted different people. Dark Knight was successful since it required less intensity than most ARGs do, but was more continuous and widespread. Small bits of digestible information over a long period, rather than what Valve is (starting) doing in this case which is a dense amount of information up front, ready to be puzzled out. Dark Knight was arguably meant to grow awareness of a movie, but Valve already had fans and enthusiasts eating out of their hand, merely offering up new content to whet their appetite. Of the more "hardcore" fanbase, video gamers are more likely to put forth extreme amounts of effort as it is what they do in games anyway. Broadly, movie watchers are consumers of information, and video gamers are a more hands-on group.

    Bungie had success twice over with their I Love Bees and Iris campaigns for Halo, which exemplify the last point: gamers want to be a part of the action, including answering payphones in obscure areas of the world. This opens up a wealth of interesting questions, like the fundamental differences between these media types. The Dark Knight campaign made the movie expand outside the borders of the theatre. Gaming ARGs are made to envelop players into the game universe.

    It gets more exciting the more I think of it.
  • edited March 2010
    Portal 2 announced.

    The underlined stuff is a new login/password combination for the BBS.
    nikasaur wrote: »
    *snipped*

    Hehe. I'll be waiting for the ARG of your next non-Sam and Max game, then.
  • edited March 2010
    I'm an idiot, ignore me and this post.
  • edited March 2010
    nikasaur wrote: »
    Both were successful in that they targeted different people. Dark Knight was successful since it required less intensity than most ARGs do, but was more continuous and widespread. Small bits of digestible information over a long period, rather than what Valve is (starting) doing in this case which is a dense amount of information up front, ready to be puzzled out. Dark Knight was arguably meant to grow awareness of a movie, but Valve already had fans and enthusiasts eating out of their hand, merely offering up new content to whet their appetite. Of the more "hardcore" fanbase, video gamers are more likely to put forth extreme amounts of effort as it is what they do in games anyway. Broadly, movie watchers are consumers of information, and video gamers are a more hands-on group.

    Bungie had success twice over with their I Love Bees and Iris campaigns for Halo, which exemplify the last point: gamers want to be a part of the action, including answering payphones in obscure areas of the world. This opens up a wealth of interesting questions, like the fundamental differences between these media types. The Dark Knight campaign made the movie expand outside the borders of the theatre. Gaming ARGs are made to envelop players into the game universe.

    It gets more exciting the more I think of it.

    I can agree with that. Besides, at least Portal fans don't dress up in a purple suit and makeup, cosplaying as a creepy psychopath with a demonic lisp, and act like a general nuisance by walking up to random strangers and "y so srs"ing in their face.
  • edited March 2010
    S@bre wrote: »
    What's the significance of the underlined letters in that announcement? drattmannh0nee? Does that make sense to anyone? Drat man honey?

    Like I said in my previous post, it's a login for the ARG's BBS.

    Username: drattmann [The Rat Man was the guy who scribbled "The cake is a lie" everywhere]
    Password: h0ney

    Edit: Sorry, I missed your edit by a second! hee.
  • edited March 2010
    In my Game History class we were talking about ARG and then we ended up spending the rest of the day on the Steam forums trying to figure out Valve/Portal 2/Half-Life EP:3(?).

    Easily one of the best class I ever had.

    Education these days, you kids get away with any old thing.
  • edited March 2010
    The ARG for this was ultimately pretty disappointing. The first step was cool, but it sorta all fizzled off and stopped. It had a lot of potential, but people had already finished it after the first hour.

    Portal 2 will be good. They say it will be a standalone retail product, but hopefully it's still short. Short games are generally better games.

    And if Jonathan Coulton isn't in it, then I'm gonna demand a refund.
  • nikasaurnikasaur Telltale Alumni
    edited March 2010
    Kroms wrote: »
    Hehe. I'll be waiting for the ARG of your next non-Sam and Max game, then.

    It had been considered in the past, but the execution is difficult. ARGs are a very broad thing, and unfortunately so is our audience. We want to encourage European fans to participate as well, which creates a problem if we're doing something with actual objects instead of just website-style hunts. Due to time constraints, the most current idea fizzled, but we've done fun projects like the Time Mariachis in the past! Given the time and caffeine, we're sure to have more on the docket, someday...
  • edited March 2010
    Stupid question: what does ARG mean?
  • nikasaurnikasaur Telltale Alumni
    edited March 2010
    Alternate Reality Game. They're all the rage nowadays, with technology you essentially create a bridge between reality and the fantasy world, for the purpose of an immersive experience. Fake stuff is real!
  • edited March 2010
    so like when I play The Sims or Neverwinter Nights?

    I pretty much drown everything else out at those points
  • edited March 2010
    nikasaur wrote: »
    It had been considered in the past, but the execution is difficult. ARGs are a very broad thing, and unfortunately so is our audience. We want to encourage European fans to participate as well, which creates a problem if we're doing something with actual objects instead of just website-style hunts. Due to time constraints, the most current idea fizzled, but we've done fun projects like the Time Mariachis in the past! Given the time and caffeine, we're sure to have more on the docket, someday...

    If you compare Telltale to Valve, there's probably 90-100 times as many people on the valve forums. There's a lot of tecchies in that group, and there would be a lot less in the Telltale forums. So it would be really hard to balance how easy/hard it needed to be, because one single techie guy could solve the whole thing for everyone, but if it was too hard everyone would get stuck.

    What I don't get is though, ARG projects cost a lot of money to execute, but does it even increase sales? Is it just to raise the publics opinion of the company or franchise? I can't see it making sense from a business point of view.
  • edited March 2010
    Remolay wrote: »
    so like when I play The Sims or Neverwinter Nights?

    I pretty much drown everything else out at those points

    Er...not so much. Here, educate yourself.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game
  • edited March 2010
    Fury wrote: »
    What I don't get is though, ARG projects cost a lot of money to execute, but does it even increase sales? Is it just to raise the publics opinion of the company or franchise? I can't see it making sense from a business point of view.

    I would say that a well-though-out ARG is a hell of a lot cheaper than, say, TV advertising, which costs a fortune.

    What did this cost Valve? Let's see: some guy spent a day encoding a bunch of images to audio files. Released them as an update to a game through their pre-existing conetnt delivery network. They set up a BBS which would have cost as much as a computer, a modem, and a phone line. They stuck a load of ASCII art and random text on the BBS (all of which were likely content ripped from their scrap book of development of the game). There are free software tools available to do all these things. Yet, look at the publicity and media frenzy the whole thing has whipped up.

    Whereas producing something like a TV ad costs a fortune.

    Add to that the sense of fun and community created by something like this which, yes, raises their profile - but Valve, much like Telltale, are a company built on their community rather than purely sales. And I think their community have been overall a little disgruntled by the delays in the HL franchise and by the lack of information forthcoming, so I think an exercise like this does a lot to remind their community that they do care and are still awesome :)
  • edited March 2010
    Er...not so much. Here, educate yourself.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

    okay... so more like D&D then
  • edited March 2010
    Remolay wrote: »
    okay... so more like D&D then

    I feel like you're still missing it. D&D is a tabletop RPG. To me, ARGs are more like viral marketing than actual games. They're meant to make you look for clues in often unexpected places in the real world and they often include unusual types of puzzles.

    One example of a less interactive ARG was the one Nintendo set up for Metroid Prime 2. I choose to use it as an example because it's the ARG I'm most familiar with. It began with a website called Channel 51, where a woman named Samantha Manus from Sumas, Washington posted information about a video that she believed to be footage of aliens.

    At the same time, another website launched for a company called Orbis Labs, who were supposedly under a government contract to create some sort of "battle sphere". Apparently, under the design they had come up with, only a woman would be small enough to pilot the device. There was a space to log in to the website, but I don't think anyone ever found working log in information.

    And lastly, a third website went up called Athena Astronautics. If I recall, it was a website for an astronaut training program for women. One of the trainees had a blog on LiveJournal or something, where she gave vague information about her training. Eventually, she began to suspect that the program was hiding something, and she discovered Samantha Manus's website. She made plans to contact Samantha, but the program silenced her.

    In the end, Samantha Manus's "Rossler Transmission", which had been very fuzzy at the start, became clear and was revealed as gameplay footage from Metroid Prime 2. Samantha was disappointed, but undeterred in her search for proof of aliens.

    Hints at Metroid Prime 2 included Samantha Manus's name (by cutting out the middle of her name, you get "Samus"), her hometown ("Sumas" being "Samus" spelled backwards and Washington state being the location of Nintendo of America's headquarters), Orbis Labs and the "battle sphere" (a reference to Samus's Morph Ball, though her ability to use the ball is due to the Chozo origin of her suit and has nothing to do with her being female), and the entire Athena Astronautics premise.

    At the same time, Nintendo launched several websites with URLs similar to the Halo 2 ARG "i love bees". On websites such as ilovebeams.com, Nintendo posted an image of Samus's visor with a message below it: "All your bees are belong to us. Never send a man to do a woman's job." It wasn't an ARG, it was just a shot at Halo's ARG that I found amusing.
  • edited March 2010
    Apparently, under the design they had come up with, only a woman would be small enough to pilot the device.

    Hmm... why would a small man not be suitable? I smell a lawsuit ;)
  • edited March 2010
    I think I get it now. I have never had any way to participate in an ARG so I guess that's why I didn't understand
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