Portal 2, last breaths?

[KyloX]

Portal 2 has been having some grave issues these past few months that really starts to bring the question: is Portal 2 done for good?

After the recent updates (dating from 10 Oct 2015 updates, almost 5 months now), the game has been having some serious issues. One of them being the broken cave textures in the old Aperture maps, chapters 6 and 7, giving off a silver like textures. A temporary fix for this is to lower shader settings to "normal", but an update to fix this issue hasn't been out, nor there were any news from the developers about fixing this issue. This issue was noted when PeTI editor was launched, but it was fix quite fast. Here is an example of what it looked like, and how it looks now:



Other issue is the publisher tool for those who want to publish custom made maps to workshop. The publisher tool has been reported to not work at all after the update. The community found ways to fix this problem or publish it other ways, but the problem still persists.

There are some extra issues at hand, like many players report shuttering issues or similar problems. Why the developers hasn't responded to these issues, has the game has finally been left out?

As well, one of the most loved Portal sites Thinkingwithportals.com has gone down and hasn't returned for months now, with hardly any news of what happened and if it will return.

What are your thoughts on this matter? Do the community has to scream it out loud to the developers to fix some of the issues at hand or... the end is near for this lovely game?

 

[Omnomnick]

Portal 2 hasn't been actively worked on in nearly 4 years. They need to get these problems patched and leave it alone once and for all, unless they want it to fall to the same fate as HL1 and HL2 (which have been repeatedly degraded by "improvements" due to a lack of an active development team).

 

[Barnz]

What are your thoughts on this matter? Do the community has to scream it out loud to the developers to fix some of the issues at hand or... the end is near for this lovely game?

They never fixed the issues of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, so I don't expect them to fix Portal 2 either. You should contact Jeep Barnett and let him know about the problems. He might be able to help you. He is one of the creators of the original Portal, and is very active in the community.

[email protected]

 

[Clan Wolf 2]

yeah some stuff on the multiplayer side never got updated. remember the store? its still there. gamepad in community maps works but annoyingly when you return to main menu, it ceases to function. that is for the supported Logitech F710 wireless gamepad, not sure about others. prolly is fine with Valves own but wouldn't know

 

[Omnomnick]

yeah some stuff on the multiplayer side never got updated. remember the store? its still there.

The store was legitimately abandoned after negative feedback and likely poor adoption. They never added any items since launch, and never got around to implementing trading (later replaced by the Steam feature). They then stuck a permanent sale on and left it to die, although last I heard it wasn't even possible to purchase anything anymore.

 

[Clan Wolf 2]

you can still purchase, i just did. they did add trading to the items, so go barter.

anything else about portal 2, doesn't register. Except game pad support for community maps, which sucks with the pad sticks. hardware problem. (alt gamepads)

Like everything else Valves, a new game or continue story plot, everything is up in the air/on hold.

Until the steam hardware is out of the way, hopefully then Valve employees would finally get interested enough to work on a new game in source 2...they are very unpredictable. For reasons i won't get into, i don't think Valve will make games like they used too. They prefer it seems to collaborate more with community and helping them out to do whatever, inviting them to mimic Valve so to be a success story. That seems to be where its going and that definitely fits in the scope of what source 2 would be about, create your own content etc.

one thing that would be good, is if theirs more communication on collaborating. Well recognized and trusted, micro devs on steam to put out updates to Valve games that valve personally don't have time for. Like everything else outsourced (not india) remote steam service support etc, if they were too engineer a network of safe access thru a vpn etc, imagine what could be achieved. i'd work for tf2 hats. it would be volunteer work, likely to never get passed playtester. or we can we?

((sry to takeaway from your griping about portal 2 not done, the game is a experiment on how to move forward. Like the Super 8 demo, n talks JJ. Abraham))

 

[KyloX]

Preaty much after the PeTI editor update, the game hardly had any major updates, the game was just fully done, it reached its finest. It was up from that point that basically the developers gaved away Portal 2 to communities hands to be responsible for how long the game will live on. Even though this is an "old" game, but setting up an update that brakes the game in a way and leaving it like that... that is just bad.

A shame that thinkingwithportals.com went down as after that I stopped playing Portal 2 and making custom maps for it. Was a great site to find the right people who work with SDK and other things.

On the subject of "Valve working with the community to make games", it is possible. Sure, they will make their own games, but I think the community will be even more involved, making source engine 2 more open than its older version. Being a fan of Portal series, the question "Do I want another Portal game?" sometimes lingers around my head now and then. Seeing as how source engine 2 is heading along, it wouldn't surprise me if the community would try to re-create Portal in source engine 2, using the same concept, but ofcourse being different game in a way, like a new mod for Portal 2.

 

[Tabajara]

The official website is http://www.thinkwithportals.com/ not "thinking". Just to correct ya. :^)

 

[KyloX]

The official website is http://www.thinkwithportals.com/ not "thinking". Just to correct ya. :^)

That is the official site, yes.

Thinkingwithportals.com is the community made page where many players who worked with Portal 2 authoring tools (Hammer) would gather and discuss, get news about Portal and mods, ask questions, look for answers or help, post custom maps. That site has been around from Portal 1 and was more or less the main site to download custom maps for Portal 1 and Portal 2 before workshop. It was the best Portal site there could be.