Gabe Newell talks DotA 2 & Counter Strike: Global Offensive
Source Link: http://www.totalpcgaming.com/interviews/valve-md-gabe-newell-talks-dota-2-counter-strike-global-offensive/
Valve’s Gabe Newell on 3am DotA sessions, working with IceFrog and making Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.We caught up with Valve’s Gabe Newell at Gamescom to talk about DotA 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Here’s what he had to say.
This is Valve’s first fantasy game. How has this changed your approach to development, and what new challenges have you faced along the way?One of the things we’ve been lucky with is, there is a group of really devoted and articulate fans of DotA, who have been working with IceFrog over the years. We’ve been able to get a lot of feedback very early on, by talking to them about understanding the game’s mechanics, trade-offs in the design, and understanding the characters.
I’m sure that we’ll show this after we ship, but we created a bunch of different versions of the characters along the way, as we tried to zero in on what made those characters special.
So like with Zeus, we think we got Zeus right the first time. But with Lina we had like four or five different versions, as we tried to capture the personality we expected her to have. This doesn’t just relate to the visual style of characters, but the voice casting as well. Having those intelligent and articulate fans has been helpful to us in creating a different style of game.
You hired IceFrog to work with Valve on DotA 2. How has it been to work alongside him in the office?Oh he’s great. He’s very shy, but he’s a lot like Robin Walker and John Cook when they came to Valve after making a Quake mod. Also Minh for Counter-Strike or you know the Nuclear Monkey guys who did Narbacular Drop.
I think we’ve got a great history of people who have developed mods, or independent projects, and making the transition to having all of those people at Valve. This includes everything from animators, modellers, movie-makers and beyond.
The studio seems to have a real knack for spotting talent. How do you scout for these new projects and people?Well, we don’t really think of it as talent spotting. It’s more that we meet people and think, “I really want to work with this person”, and we can see that it would be so awesome to be sharing an office with them, bouncing ideas off them, as well as seeing the work that they do first-hand.
It’s sort of like the same impulse that fans have. If we find ourselves to be really big fans of somebody’s work, then it’s usually because we want to work alongside of them and build something together.
We’ve been lucky over the years. You know, I got to work with Warren Spector.
The original DotA was one scenario. How far have you expanded on this original design in DotA 2?DotA 2 will feel like the continuation of the evolution that people have already seen with the original DotA. So I think there are things about the core game that worked really well, as well as the progress made by adding more heroes, new game mechanics and so on.
We’re going to continue that progress. I think the bigger opportunity is that we’re solving many of the problems to do with approachability, by adding in the new coaching system, adding tournament play and broadcasting options. We’re all about filling in those edges to what is, at its heart, a really great game.
On the coaching mechanic, can you give us a rundown of how it will work?Other players will be able to essentially see exactly what you’re seeing. They will be able to talk to you, take over portions of your interface and say, ‘this is how you do it’. It’s essentially sharing the game with another, more experienced player.
That’s useful because there is a great intricacy involved in DotA play. But how would you pitch DotA 2 to someone who has never tried it, or perhaps feels intimidated?It depends on what kind of games they like. The first thing I’d ask them is, “What kind of gamer are you?” It’s the kind of experience where you have to think tactically about trade-offs and decisions. If you’re an RPG player, in DotA 2, you get to go from zero to hero in the space of about 40 minutes. It’s not as twitch and reflex-orientated as a Counter-Strike game, so if that’s the kind of game you like, then perhaps DotA 2 isn’t for you.
It’s addictive. I mean, we are all addicted to the game. Ordinarily, when developing a game, you tend to get pretty tired of it because you have to go through all it and play it about a thousand times. By the end you’re like, “OK, I don’t ever want to see this game again.”
At the end of the day, we all go home, turn on our computers, and play DotA 2 until about 3am. That’s a pretty good sign; when jaded developers want to keep playing the game they’re making in their spare time as well.
I guess that’s why you chose DotA 2 as your next project then? Were you all massive fans before you picked the project?Yeah, that’s how it started. There was a group of people at Valve who tried to get into a DotA league. They started a team, joined a league and just got crushed. When they got back to the office afterwards, they couldn’t even look each other in the eye for a week.
They were fanboys though, and because they knew they could never be competitive in league play, they decided to email IceFrog and say, “What’s up? Hey, we’re game developers too.” But really, they were just being fanboys.
IceFrog is this super-friendly, nice guy, and he always talks to his fans. So eventually we started talking to him about what we wanted to do, and talk to him about how he wanted DotA 2 to evolve. We eventually said, “Hey, we’ve got a great idea. Why not just come down to Valve? A whole bunch of our guys would love to work with you on this.” We then spent the next few weeks building a prototype, to show that it could work, and that we could see how successful it could be.
DotA’s essence has always been in delivering a constantly evolving game that is also a collaborative process with the community. How has this helped the game become so revered over the years?The thing that strikes me as I play it as a designer, is that a lot of games are just re-skinned versions of other games. The thing about playing DotA is, you have these expectations of the project that extend pretty far into the future, and you have a plan in mind about how your team is going to evolve and play.
But at the same time, elements of the game are being altered on a very short time scale, so expectations are very important in determining the value of rewards and punishments. Like, if you talked to a behavioural scientist, they’d tell you that there’s all this stuff about expectations and how they relate, and DotA has this unusual quality in that you will have a strategic plan for how you play, but then all of a sudden, you’re changing it.
You’re still trying to get to this place, a certain level of play, but at the same time you have to recognise what the other members of your team are doing. The reactions of players at top level are incredible.
There have been times where IceFrog has been trying to teach the game to Valve and he’s like, “Do this”, and so we’d do it, and then suddenly he’d be like, “What the hell are you doing that for?” We were just like, “But you told us to do that”, and he’d say “Yeah, but didn’t you even notice that all this other stuff had occurred in the battle down at the other end of the map?” We just act all dumb and say, “oh, OK” (laughs).
It’s those aspects that make DotA so much fun to play over and over again, as well as getting a real sense of when you’re getting better at it. Like, I’ve never had such a strong sense with a game, where I’ve felt strongly that I’ve gotten much better than I was the week before, and that’s all about the relationships between expectations over a time scale.
At base level, it’s almost like a game of chess isn’t it, where people must think two moves ahead. Is Valve thinking ahead in where DotA 2 will evolve post-launch? Will you nurture this growth?Oh yeah. We’ll constantly release new updates. I think Team Fortress 2 is the best model for what we’re going to do with DotA 2 in that we’ll be constantly updating, providing new content, and growing the game alongside the gamers. This relationship with the gamers is very valuable.
So ultimately, DotA will remain a collaborative process?Yeah, I mean the community is strong, and it doesn’t really matter what Valve thinks the game needs. It’s all about how the community react, and what they want to see next, and this is the same approach that IceFrog already has. When we’re looking at what the community wants from the game, it’s really important that we understand how extract the best from that
Because anyone can say, “Hey, make my favourite hero stronger”, and that’s not very helpful. But IceFrog has this way of saying, “I won’t do that, but I’ll do this”, and add something, then the community will be surprised like, “Wow, this makes the game better!”
He doesn’t do what they tell him to do, but instead he actually understands what it is they’re driving at, and will deliver things they didn’t even consider. This all comes from extended communication with the community.
Spotting these changes and understanding what the community wants without them even knowing it is a great talent. Although he adds new elements to DotA, IceFrog knows that the game needs balance.
How precarious is the balance in a game as intricate as DotA 2?You have to constantly be looking for unbalance. We have much better tools than IceFrog had back when he was working on the original DotA, that help us capture all the balancing data. We even have a ton of biometric data that we can use in balancing.
Is that related to the Excitement Meter that keeps popping up on screen during the Gamescom tournament?Yeah, the competitors are hooked up to devices that measure things like pulse rate and a lot more. In many ways it gives the crowd watching an insight into how these top players think and react to what’s happening on screen. But you know, some of the players react really strongly, and some of them have a flatlined graph and are like ‘assassin cool’ (laughs) but yeah, that’s been really interesting to see.
Do you have any further plans to take DotA 2 on the road with other tournaments?We feel that the Gamescom tournament has been very successful. Not just in terms of testing the technology behind the game, but seeing how the fans react to the game. It’s encouraging that these people want to understand more about what DotA 2 is, so we’re already speaking with event organisers about future events. There could be an announcement very shortly about what our own tournament plans could be.
What’s the situation with beta testing at the moment, and going forwards up to launch?You can register your interest now, and we’ll have an invitational beta. Were going to go through all the feedback, flesh out all the social aspects of the game. Then we’ll go to an open beta.
What sort of things will you be looking for from the beta?Well, today we’ve actually noticed a few things that need work, such as animation cancelling, and some minor details.
I’d also like to discuss Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Why did you decide to bring back Counter-Strike now, when the industry is saturated with modern combat shooters?
We haven’t seen Counter-Strike on consoles since 2003, so we invited lots of the pro players to Valve and we asked them what they liked best about Counter-Strike 1.6 and Counter-Strike Source. So we’re planning to take the best of both games and make it better.
What sort of feedback did you get?I don’t have the specific feedback, but it was things like hit boxes, weapon pricing, you name it. We got those players to try the game and it was useful because there is always something that players at that high a level are not happy about. They are such fans that I could take one element of the game, and we could talk about it together for like four hours.
Just like DotA 2, how would you pitch Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to someone who has never tried it, or staunchly prefers another shooter?I’d say it’s a pretty varied experience. We’re taking everything that we’ve learned from Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2 and even DotA 2 now, and applying that to Counter-Strike. But really, if you already don’t like Counter-Strike, you’re not going to like Global Offensive.
Source Link: http://www.totalpcgaming.com/interviews/valve-md-gabe-newell-talks-dota-2-counter-strike-global-offensive/
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GravedamN.
Subject: Gabe Newell talks DotA 2 & Counter Strike: Global Offensive 
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