I’ve always been a fan of Valve’s games and the Portal series is no exception. When Portal 2 first came out I found myself among many people playing with a makeshift version of the Source SDK specifically for Portal 2 (basically just the Alien Swarm SDK with a custom FGD). Things started getting lively over at the Thinking With Portals website (the biggest Portal mapping site on the net), where I am a staff member.

After the official Portal 2 Authoring Tools beta was released, Valve contacted Thinking With Portals asking if we would be interested in running a mapping competition if they provided some prizes. We jumped on the opportunity.

Even though we were only given two weeks to accept submissions, the response we got from the community was astounding. Our initial projections estimated a total of between seventy and one hundred maps.

When submissions closed, the grand total was two hundred and thirty-seven maps (one hundred and ninety-five singleplayer and forty-two cooperative).

Wow.

We’re now executing the surprisingly arduous task of sorting through those maps and judging them. Given that each map takes about 10-20 minutes to play, it’s going to be a while until we’re done.

“… adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want…”

Indeed. I write about this because I recently played the multiplayer PC demo for Crysis 2. Technical issues related to GameSpy prevented many matches from starting when the demo was first released, leaving gamers sitting and waiting in server lobbies for hours on end. During that time many of us chat amongst ourselves about various topics and it wasn’t long until the word filter made its presence known.

This is a game that is ostensibly targeted at adults. If it were to be released here in Australia, I would wager that it would earn no less than an MA15+ rating. Not only is the game violent but it actually includes verbalisations of the very words the chat filter refuses to let gamers say. One particular scenario that springs to mind is that when the player is killed, they often hear a vocal taunt from the killer’s character. These are not the players themselves using these taunts, they are automatically played lines pre-recorded by Crytek. One of the particularly colourful ones is:

“Enjoy being dead, motherfucker!”

Now, I’m exposed to that kind of language frequently, so I don’t personally find it particularly offensive but my understanding is that if one were to write a list of the most vulgar words in the English language (as accepted by the wider community), the word “motherfucker” would have to be pretty high on that list. The game is quite liberal with these words and yet paradoxically tells its players they are not mature enough to read them in a chat channel. Any word Crytek (or possibly GameSpy) deems offensive is replaced with asterisks and that includes larger words which contain the same spellings.

So given that words like “ass” and “anal” are blocked, the word filter also blocks perfectly innocuous words such as “assassin” or “analyse”. Then there are words that I have never seen as even remotely offensive such as “thick” which are also blocked.

What’s the line of thought here, Crytek? Are you trying to stop players from bullying each other? It’s not as if the filter is hard to bypass and history has shown that if you try to remove or defuse swear words, new ones simply take their place. It wasn’t long before I started seeing people type “fuct” instead of “fucked” and personally it was the deliberate misspelling that offended me most.

Putting Crytek’s blatant hypocrisy aside, it’s not their responsibility to set the standard of conduct on servers they don’t own. There are indeed multiplayer servers for online first person shooters that have a “no swearing” rule but the vast majority don’t. It’s up to individual communities to set their own standards of player conduct which are enforced by the server administrators of those communities, not the developers of the game.

I’ve always been a huge fan of the Half-Life series. I’ve played through it more times than I can possibly remember but it occurred to me recently that I’ve never played through it on hard. I don’t often play shooters on hard because they tend to be more frustrating that challenging. I made an exception for Half-Life 2, though, partly because I was bored but mostly because I put a lot of trust in Valve’s design skill. After making the change I quickly found the gameplay to be one of the most intense gaming experiences I’ve had.

I’ve found myself constantly taking cover, thinking tactically about each encounter and more than once yelling “SHIT!” when a Combine soldier with a shotgun came swiftly around a corner.

Some of the more climactic battles are more than intense though; they return me to the frustration that so frequently puts me off playing games on hard. One particular battle just outside of Nova Prospekt has you fighting against combine soldiers and two gunships.

Now, if you’re playing on easy, a gunship takes exactly three rockets to bring down, which means if you’re skilled enough in steering the rockets past the gunship’s defences you can take it down without running around looking for extra ammunition.

On hard, a gunship takes roughly seven rockets to take down, which means in this particular scenario, you’re going to have to run to the exposed ammo crate a bare minimum of five times. The gunships cover each other remarkably well and will easily shave off tens of health points if you stand still in open (for instance, next to the ammo crate) for more than a second or two.

The whole area took me about an hour and several quicksaves to complete. On easy this would typically be five minutes at the most and without dying or quickloading.

This is exactly why I was dreading the three turret battles inside Nova Prospekt but I found them to be one of the easiest parts of the whole game because I elected to do something I had never attempted before and which I’m sure was not intended by Valve’s level designers.

When I headed off to the second turret battle I carried the two turrets from the first battle with me. When I got there I grabbed all the medkits and ammo I could find and piled it up under the health and suit chargers.

I then set up the two turrets that I carried with me on the right side of the room, opened the cabinets containing the three turrets for this battle and set them up on the left side of the room. I then promptly hid inside the cabinets like a little girl until the battle was over.

I didn’t lose a single unit of health or armour. I did have to destroy two manhacks with the gravity gun and one of the turrets got kicked over by a soldier at one point; apart from that, I didn’t really have to do anything in what otherwise should have been a fairly intense battle. In fact it was quite a shame to have such a huge stash of health and ammo and not having any need for it.

Afterwards I decided the best thing to do would be to carry all five turrets to the third battle (the one that takes place at the portal). For those that don’t remember, or haven’t played Half-Life 2 (shame on you), halfway between the second and third battle you run into an ambush. The lights go off, flares go on, soldiers come in. As you might expect, this ambush is nothing to worry about when you have five turrets in front of you.

When I got to the third area, I was of course given another three turrets, bringing the total size of my little turret army to eight. There are only three entrances that the combine use to assault this arena so eight turrets is kind of overkill.

It’s just a shame that I couldn’t take the turrets with me through the portal. I had grown fond of the little guys.

In an effort to “make some f$*&ing money already”, Valve has introduced the Mann Co. Store, making a large quantity of items in TF2 available for purchase using the recently introduced Steam Wallet. However, all items can still be found using the old methods of random drops and achievements. “Segregating players into groups that can’t play together, based on who bought what, is something we’d like to avoid.”, says Valve. “Any items affecting gameplay, and even most purely cosmetic items, will still be obtainable simply by playing the game.”

Thank god for that; not that I would personally expect anything less from Valve, but anyone who has played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 online can testify as to how easily paid updates can split a community.

If you’re greeted with a “The Mann Co. Store is currently closed” message when you fire up the game, this can usually be fixed with a Steam restart. The main page of the Mann Co. store shows a featured item, special offers, and an introduction written by none other than Saxton Hale.

You can start browsing through the store by clicking one of the categorized tabs at the top of the screen. Valve hasn’t disclosed what method they are using to determine item prices, but at a cursory glance it appears to be related with how common a certain item is in the community. Older and more common items such as the Axtinguisher are as low as 49 US cents at the time of writing, whereas most new items are up around the $5 mark.

Valve is planning to allow community contributors to make some coin via the Mann Co. store, but details are pretty sketchy on this at the moment.

 While browsing the store, items are displayed with a description and a 3d preview. Details such as customization support are also shown (certain items can now be painted different colours and given custom names).

The update includes the winning entries of the Polycount contest as part of the 65 new items that have been added. Valve have kept the names chosen by the authors, but have of course selected their own attributes for the purposes of balanced gameplay. I won’t go into heavy detail because there are too many items for the scope of this post, but you can read all about them on the TF2 website.

An interesting addition as part of the Polycount pack is set bonuses. Players receive a bonus such as increased movement speed if all items from a set are equipped at once. To keep things balanced, the positive bonus is paired with a negative bonus as well.

The loadout screen has been updated to accommodate the Mann Co. catalogue (which essentially shows the same information as the Mann Co. store, just without the purchasing component), and the new trading interface, a long-desired feature amongst the community.

When opening the trade interface, you are prompted to select a player from your steam friends list, the current server you are connected to (if applicable), or you can send a request to someone’s steam profile page. The trading screen is more or less what you would expect based on similar trading systems in other games such as World of Warcraft. The screen shows your inventory, along with 4 slots to send items and 4 slots to receive, and “ready to trade” checkboxes for both players which must be checked before a trade can be executed. Items that can’t be traded, such as the cheater’s lament, are dimmed out. Under the inventory is a chat interface allowing you to properly seal the deal.

Items that were found or crafted prior to the update are prefixed with the word “Vintage” and have a blue name. This doesn’t seem to apply to headgear and misc items.

By far the biggest update to TF2 since its release in late 2007, this adds a lot to the game. To be honest, I’m not sure that the prices are worth it for the vast majority of players but there’s no reason they won’t change in the future, and all items with significant gameplay effect are still obtainable for free, so it’s not a big deal. I think the opportunity for community member to not only contribute to the game but make some cash doing it is also a good thing, and not something you see in a lot of games.

In other news, E3 just passed and unfortunately, there wasn’t much to look at this year. The centrepiece of the expo, Microsoft Kinect (formerly known by its working name, Project Natal), was revealed via interpretive dance performed by Cirque du Soleil (I wish I was joking). The Sony EyeToy Microsoft Kinect promises to revolutionize the console gaming experience. Personally, I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

On the other hand, Valve showed off Portal 2 at E3 and my god, it is beautiful. Pushing aside the new features they’ve added to Portal’s already innovative gameplay, there appear to have been some drastic changes to Source’s lighting engine. The videos show off some complex and rather beautiful dynamic lighting which look completely unlike what the current release of the source engine is capable of. Portal 2 is due for release in 2011. I’ll leave you with IGN’s Portal 2 walkthrough videos from E3.

The board originally refused classification for Left 4 Dead 2 last month, which forced Valve to appeal the decision and quickly throw together a less graphic version of the game in order to meet the November release date. The three-person panel, which voted unanimously to refuse classification to Left 4 Dead 2, explained their reasoning in a press release made available today on the board’s website.

The computer game [Left 4 Dead 2] contains a level of violence which is high in impact, prolonged, repeated frequently and realistic within the context of the game.

In addition, it was the Review Board’s opinion that there was insufficient delineation between the depiction of general zombie figures and the human figures, as opposed to the clearly fictional ‘infected’ characters. This was a major consideration of the Review Board in determining the impact of this game on minors.

The decision has reignited the debate concerning Australia’s lack of an R 18+ rating for video games. Video game classification in Australia remains the strictest of all classified media due to its lack of an R 18+ rating. Valve plans to submit a modified version of the game to the board for review.

Speaking of games, I’ve heard whispers of a rumour that Blizzard is planning to roll out the Starcraft 2 beta within the next month or two, but I take that with a grain of salt. Should we be selected to participate, I’ll chronicle the experience in its own post. You can opt-in for the beta by creating an account at Battle.net and changing your profile settings.

Stick around, more stuff coming soon.