Sulkdodds
The Freeman
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2003
- Messages
- 18,846
- Reaction score
- 27
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Sit down. Kick off your shoes. Pour a cup of tea. It's time for the second part of our mammoth interview with Chet Faliszek - so big that we caused major delays on the Circle Line when we tried to drag it home from the Eurogamer Expo. In last week's installment we grilled the Valve writer on how Counter Strike: Global Offensive will cater to CS players whether they're PC or console, casual or hardcore. This week we discuss the competitive circuit, how players react to updates, and what makes CS:GO unique among today's games.
[br]
Read on after the break - and watch out for Part 3.
[br]
[br]
GLENN: We were talking earlier about the International and what’s been happening with DOTA 2. Is Valve looking to go in that direction where they’re going to try and make their games for a competitive sports environment?
[br]
CHET: I think both CS:GO and DOTA 2 live in that space, and that is where they have fans. Left 4 Dead 2, I know there’s a competitive community there, but with that game, you’re playing against the nature of that game to make it competitive. There’s a lot of things we purposely built into that game to randomise it and make it fun. So there’s always going to be a little bit more tension back and forth. But these games definitely live in that space. I mean, the whole thing with Counter-Strike is that there’s already a large competitive community there, there’s already a naturally evolved group.
[br]
GLENN: Valve aren’t really a part of that, are they? That’s kind of a separate movement.
[br]
CHET: We’ve always let them and will continue to let them exist on their own, because they’re really smart about the choices that they’re making that are best for them. If we try to force them to make choices or if we impose something, it’s not going to last, because they’re going to be too smart about that and they’re going to go ‘well let’s go to another game, then, and let’s do these things.’ So instead we’ve been engaging them, ESL [E-Sports League] wrote a whole bunch of emails back and forth yesterday, and you know, our idea is just to engage them, see what their wants and needs are, make sure they understand what we’re doing, and then they can react to that and we can react to what they tell us.
[br]
SULK: One of the strengths of CS, originally, was its, like, iterative design - you know, it came out very simply, and released and released and released and kept doing things. Bearing in mind what you’ve done with TF2 - which is still going - what are you plans for the post-release development of CS:GO?
[br]
CHET: That’s one of the things we have some ideas for changes we’d like to see in CS. It’s really hard to do those with CSS and 1.6, because those communities are really set in how they play the game and what they expect from the game. Fair enough - that’s their game in a sense. So with CS:GO we want to be able to start clean, and say ‘let’s all make those changes and experiment on them.’ When you do that, you have to make sure you’re doing that when they can actually play it. There’s nothing worse than talking about changes. People will hear about a change - no, they’ll lose shit about it, because oh my god, it’s going to do something - but until you play it, it’s way different. So we did an interesting little test in Left 4 Dead 2. We had a change that we got PC players to actually play and experience, and 360 players weren’t able to play and experience it. We asked them both the same poll: ‘what do you think of this change - do you like it?’ 360 players didn’t like it, PC players did. And often what we see, even internally in the company when we’re testing and iterating our process, people - it’s hard to accept change. You get used to something and you think ‘oh my god, they’ve ruined it because they’ve changed it.’ They haven’t gone to adapt to it yet.
[br]
SULK: I personally really liked riot shields in 1.6.
[br]
CHET: Well, yeah, yeah! It’s hard to do! I’m not ragging on the community for having a hard time with it either, because INTERNALLY it’s really hard for us to do. But you kind of have to let ‘em live with it for a while, so some of the stuff like we’ve done with Left 4 Dead 2 recently, where we’re really iterating with the community on the Cold Stream DLC - they’re like, ‘why aren’t you making these fixes? Fix this! It’s absolutely broken!’ We’re like, no - play with WHAT’S THERE. Don’t say ‘It’s different from what was there, I don’t like it, fix it.’ You know what, there’s some new features that have been opened up with those changes; live with those first, adapt to that, try and get around those, then tell us.
[br]
GLENN: Right, there was a helicopter crash, wasn’t there? You guys removed it from the campaign when it didn’t make any sense to keep it there but people still wanted it back! [N.B. yes, Glenn actually put a link in his voice in real life]
[br]
CHET: Yeah, and now that they’ve got used to it, you won’t hear that complaint anymore. With CS:GO it’ll definitely be more fluid until it hits a point where we say, this is it. Some of that will come from the beta, some of that will probably come from post-release.
[br]
SULK: Can I ask what kind of tools will be put in the game to aid competitive play - for example, demo recording facilities, or your matchmaking stuff as well?
[br]
CHET: Yeah, some of that stuff will come later: our first goal is to make the best game possible, then make it where people want play it, and then we start looking at things like HLTV and all of that. It’s awesome that that’s a problem that we need to work on. Right now - I think if you’ve seen the DOTA 2 tournament stuff, they’re advancing into a lot of work there, and we want to let them bring it even further, and then begin to cut that off and bring it over into the game.
[br]
SULK: CS was one of the earliest kind of ‘realistic’ FPS games; it gave us quite a lot of things like having a limitation of only one primary weapon and things like that. What do you think of where that’s been taken and what’s grown from that these days?
[br]
CHET: I guess there’s a lot of different variations in that. I pretty much play almost every game that ever comes out. One of the great things with Steam is I get to play a ton of games. And so, you know, the Modern Warfares, I really like, those are a ton of fun. Modern Warfare 2 in particular hit this thing where I played the hell out of it online. Battlefield 3 I’m super-looking forward to; Battlefield 2 I played a lot as well. So there’s a lot of good variety - for a while there it felt like there were just gonna be World War 2 shooters, and a couple modern ones, and now I think we’ve got a really wide range of experiences, which I think is super cool. And some are really good single-player that I really get into - I go back to Call of Duty 4, I think it’s a really good single player combat focused game.
[br]
SULK: You can't really avoid the fact you will be in competition or overlapping with Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. So what does CS: GO have that they don't, what makes it unique now?
[br]
CHET: Because when I'm fighting you, I'm fighting you. It doesn't matter that you made 3 kills before that encounter. It doesn't make a difference how many hours you have played. We've removed all of that. Again, all that stuff makes sense in other games and they are totally fun and I like to play those games but the reason I think, that Counter-Strike has always been on the top of the play list for the PC community is because you go in fresh every time and every encounter you have is about your skill against someone else. You know that every time you go in, there is nothing you need to get in to your head like 'oh shit, this guy has this load out and he's super fast and he's going to stab me...'. You can say no, I understand this and I have the same choices in the game. If you lose you know you can make different choices but that is just part of that match.
[br]
Glenn: With a lot of modern shooters today the formula seems to be regenerating health and something like that in Counter Strike, wouldn't make it the same game. Was it ever considered?
[br]
CHET: No, it's the fun thing seeing the guy with 4 health not sure where the terrorist is and decides, screw it I'm going after the bomb and trying to defuse it. And lets take the grenade for example, it rarely kills anybody but it's to soften you up. So you might not want to kill some guys but do a lot damage because it will impact the other team late game.
[br]
SULK: How much did you used to play CS in its heyday?
[br]
CHET: Oh god a ton! Way back. That was one of the fun things. We were finishing up Portal 2 and CS: GO was already going and I started working on it and playing a lot of CSS again on a fake hidden account so people couldn't see me regaining my roots. But it's fun going back to places I know. You saw what happened when Quake got remade, and you go around saying 'I know these places', I used to spend so much time around these walls. It's a lot of fun going back to those old places.
[br][br]
But what did Chet say next? What did we ask? The suspense is unbearable. But you'll have to wait until Part 3 - coming soon.
[br]
Glenn and Laurence (Brindle Blog)
Sit down. Kick off your shoes. Pour a cup of tea. It's time for the second part of our mammoth interview with Chet Faliszek - so big that we caused major delays on the Circle Line when we tried to drag it home from the Eurogamer Expo. In last week's installment we grilled the Valve writer on how Counter Strike: Global Offensive will cater to CS players whether they're PC or console, casual or hardcore. This week we discuss the competitive circuit, how players react to updates, and what makes CS:GO unique among today's games.
[br]
Read on after the break - and watch out for Part 3.
[br]
[br]
GLENN: We were talking earlier about the International and what’s been happening with DOTA 2. Is Valve looking to go in that direction where they’re going to try and make their games for a competitive sports environment?
[br]
CHET: I think both CS:GO and DOTA 2 live in that space, and that is where they have fans. Left 4 Dead 2, I know there’s a competitive community there, but with that game, you’re playing against the nature of that game to make it competitive. There’s a lot of things we purposely built into that game to randomise it and make it fun. So there’s always going to be a little bit more tension back and forth. But these games definitely live in that space. I mean, the whole thing with Counter-Strike is that there’s already a large competitive community there, there’s already a naturally evolved group.
[br]
GLENN: Valve aren’t really a part of that, are they? That’s kind of a separate movement.
[br]
CHET: We’ve always let them and will continue to let them exist on their own, because they’re really smart about the choices that they’re making that are best for them. If we try to force them to make choices or if we impose something, it’s not going to last, because they’re going to be too smart about that and they’re going to go ‘well let’s go to another game, then, and let’s do these things.’ So instead we’ve been engaging them, ESL [E-Sports League] wrote a whole bunch of emails back and forth yesterday, and you know, our idea is just to engage them, see what their wants and needs are, make sure they understand what we’re doing, and then they can react to that and we can react to what they tell us.
[br]
SULK: One of the strengths of CS, originally, was its, like, iterative design - you know, it came out very simply, and released and released and released and kept doing things. Bearing in mind what you’ve done with TF2 - which is still going - what are you plans for the post-release development of CS:GO?
[br]
CHET: That’s one of the things we have some ideas for changes we’d like to see in CS. It’s really hard to do those with CSS and 1.6, because those communities are really set in how they play the game and what they expect from the game. Fair enough - that’s their game in a sense. So with CS:GO we want to be able to start clean, and say ‘let’s all make those changes and experiment on them.’ When you do that, you have to make sure you’re doing that when they can actually play it. There’s nothing worse than talking about changes. People will hear about a change - no, they’ll lose shit about it, because oh my god, it’s going to do something - but until you play it, it’s way different. So we did an interesting little test in Left 4 Dead 2. We had a change that we got PC players to actually play and experience, and 360 players weren’t able to play and experience it. We asked them both the same poll: ‘what do you think of this change - do you like it?’ 360 players didn’t like it, PC players did. And often what we see, even internally in the company when we’re testing and iterating our process, people - it’s hard to accept change. You get used to something and you think ‘oh my god, they’ve ruined it because they’ve changed it.’ They haven’t gone to adapt to it yet.
[br]
SULK: I personally really liked riot shields in 1.6.
[br]
CHET: Well, yeah, yeah! It’s hard to do! I’m not ragging on the community for having a hard time with it either, because INTERNALLY it’s really hard for us to do. But you kind of have to let ‘em live with it for a while, so some of the stuff like we’ve done with Left 4 Dead 2 recently, where we’re really iterating with the community on the Cold Stream DLC - they’re like, ‘why aren’t you making these fixes? Fix this! It’s absolutely broken!’ We’re like, no - play with WHAT’S THERE. Don’t say ‘It’s different from what was there, I don’t like it, fix it.’ You know what, there’s some new features that have been opened up with those changes; live with those first, adapt to that, try and get around those, then tell us.
[br]
GLENN: Right, there was a helicopter crash, wasn’t there? You guys removed it from the campaign when it didn’t make any sense to keep it there but people still wanted it back! [N.B. yes, Glenn actually put a link in his voice in real life]
[br]
CHET: Yeah, and now that they’ve got used to it, you won’t hear that complaint anymore. With CS:GO it’ll definitely be more fluid until it hits a point where we say, this is it. Some of that will come from the beta, some of that will probably come from post-release.
[br]
SULK: Can I ask what kind of tools will be put in the game to aid competitive play - for example, demo recording facilities, or your matchmaking stuff as well?
[br]
CHET: Yeah, some of that stuff will come later: our first goal is to make the best game possible, then make it where people want play it, and then we start looking at things like HLTV and all of that. It’s awesome that that’s a problem that we need to work on. Right now - I think if you’ve seen the DOTA 2 tournament stuff, they’re advancing into a lot of work there, and we want to let them bring it even further, and then begin to cut that off and bring it over into the game.
[br]
SULK: CS was one of the earliest kind of ‘realistic’ FPS games; it gave us quite a lot of things like having a limitation of only one primary weapon and things like that. What do you think of where that’s been taken and what’s grown from that these days?
[br]
CHET: I guess there’s a lot of different variations in that. I pretty much play almost every game that ever comes out. One of the great things with Steam is I get to play a ton of games. And so, you know, the Modern Warfares, I really like, those are a ton of fun. Modern Warfare 2 in particular hit this thing where I played the hell out of it online. Battlefield 3 I’m super-looking forward to; Battlefield 2 I played a lot as well. So there’s a lot of good variety - for a while there it felt like there were just gonna be World War 2 shooters, and a couple modern ones, and now I think we’ve got a really wide range of experiences, which I think is super cool. And some are really good single-player that I really get into - I go back to Call of Duty 4, I think it’s a really good single player combat focused game.
[br]
SULK: You can't really avoid the fact you will be in competition or overlapping with Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. So what does CS: GO have that they don't, what makes it unique now?
[br]
CHET: Because when I'm fighting you, I'm fighting you. It doesn't matter that you made 3 kills before that encounter. It doesn't make a difference how many hours you have played. We've removed all of that. Again, all that stuff makes sense in other games and they are totally fun and I like to play those games but the reason I think, that Counter-Strike has always been on the top of the play list for the PC community is because you go in fresh every time and every encounter you have is about your skill against someone else. You know that every time you go in, there is nothing you need to get in to your head like 'oh shit, this guy has this load out and he's super fast and he's going to stab me...'. You can say no, I understand this and I have the same choices in the game. If you lose you know you can make different choices but that is just part of that match.
[br]
Glenn: With a lot of modern shooters today the formula seems to be regenerating health and something like that in Counter Strike, wouldn't make it the same game. Was it ever considered?
[br]
CHET: No, it's the fun thing seeing the guy with 4 health not sure where the terrorist is and decides, screw it I'm going after the bomb and trying to defuse it. And lets take the grenade for example, it rarely kills anybody but it's to soften you up. So you might not want to kill some guys but do a lot damage because it will impact the other team late game.
[br]
SULK: How much did you used to play CS in its heyday?
[br]
CHET: Oh god a ton! Way back. That was one of the fun things. We were finishing up Portal 2 and CS: GO was already going and I started working on it and playing a lot of CSS again on a fake hidden account so people couldn't see me regaining my roots. But it's fun going back to places I know. You saw what happened when Quake got remade, and you go around saying 'I know these places', I used to spend so much time around these walls. It's a lot of fun going back to those old places.
[br][br]
But what did Chet say next? What did we ask? The suspense is unbearable. But you'll have to wait until Part 3 - coming soon.
[br]
Glenn and Laurence (Brindle Blog)
