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I arrived late, but it didn't matter-the party was still raging. In doing so, I fell in love with the wild and chaotic world of first-person multiplayer shooters. When I returned around 2007, I had almost a decade of 3D gaming to catch up on.
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I took an unintended break from PC gaming in the early 2000s, during a period when I could only afford a laptop that threatened to go nuclear if I so much as looked at C&C Generals. The downside, for me at least, is that matchmaking misses out on a key component of what felt like such an important part of the PC gaming ecosystem throughout the '90s and '00s. It's a relatively benign way to keep a game feeling populated, even after its initial popularity has waned. Matchmaking also lets developers tailor playlists based on the size of the playerbase. Stomping newbies may be fun for a while, but it's destructive to the long term health of a game. It's easier for new players to get to grips with a game, for one, but also gives those with more experience a more interesting challenge. There are obvious benefits to matching players based on their level of skill. The systems designed to keep players coming back into multiplayer-many of which were popularised in the early 2010s in response to the perceived threat of pre-owned sales of console games-don't work if players have all the control. And it's hard to make players care about your persistent progression system if player-run servers can offer decentralised leaderboards.
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After all, it's harder to sell map packs when players can download an endless stream of player-made alternatives.
Perhaps this sidelining of custom servers was inevitable. Where once the server browser was front-and-centre, now it's buried below a suite of matchmaking options.
You just need to look at Team Fortress 2's menu to see how much things have changed. With only limited configuration options, it exists simply as lip service to player expectations. Battlefield 5 is perhaps the only game I've played this year that offers one, and it's a shadow of what was once a major feature of of the series. Gradually, over the last 10 years, the server browser has fallen out of fashion. Today, a game releasing without custom server support is just business as usual.
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That may be why Valve is suddenly willing to let this cat out of the bag: There's not much point in keeping your special mechanic a secret if someone else has already turned it into a game, after all.Īnd while an unused game mechanic might seem like a thin basis for a multipart video series, LunchHouse's Tristan Halcomb told USgamer that there's enough to it to make more than a dozen videos, although they're aiming to keep it to five or six.Ī full release schedule hasn't been set yet: Halcomb said LunchHouse wants to "discuss the future of the project a bit more with Valve to see what opportunities we may have going forward before committing to a follow up, so we're working based on their schedule to some extent." For now, you can follow along with the project at .īack in 2015, the announcement that Star Wars: Battlefront would launch with skill-based matchmaking instead of a server browser felt newsworthy. The "gameplay" in the clip bears more than a passing resemblance to Superliminal, a perception-bending first-person puzzler released in November-a similarity that didn't go unnoticed on Twitter. It also notes that Valve has given the studio "explicit permission to continue with our project using their original code."
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Instead, Exposure uses the original, official code from Valve's own F-STOP, or as it was properly named, Aperture Camera," the video description states. "The mechanics are not based on speculation or hearsay.
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Valve seems to have had a recent change of heart, however, as an upcoming YouTube series called Exposure, being made by indie studio LunchHouse Software, will not just explain how F-Stop was intended to work, but actually show it in action. One of the reasons so little is known about F-Stop is that Valve simply refused to talk about it, apparently out of hope that it would actually turn it into a proper game someday. For reasons unknown, that prequel never came to be, and the whole thing sunk into obscurity-another Valve mystery, to be occasionally whispered about in Reddit threads. One of them, as explained by the Half-Life Wiki, was called F-Stop, and it was enough of an internal hit that it was tapped for full development as a prequel to Portal. Shortly after the release of the famed Orange Box, Valve embarked upon a series of "Directed Design Experiments" that Gabe Newell hoped would spark a new wave of creativity at the studio.