Ritual's Condition Zero

Oh joy! Ritual is just one of the remaining 'bitches of id' that sat around and tried to piggyback off their success as tons of kids with little education screamed "Let's move to Texas and make games!", and found some opportunity due to the now-failed-concept of hiring people based on their ability to fire their Doom weapons. EA obviously recognized that Ritual lacked the talent, take a look at their track record.

I made a bet with Steve that this topic would earn more comments than any other this week.

You guys need to get crackin!

[Note: I'm too lazy to sign in, so Steve will have to confirm the legitimacy of this post <g>]

-Randy Pitchford

Some guys (amateurs) simply modded per pixel lightning and bumpmapped textures into the quake 1 engine. If Valve (or Ritual) just did that, this game would look awsome.

Counter-Stike does so much right. Balance, gameplay, fun maps. While the premise is very exhausted, Counter-Strike still manages to be more fun than a lot of new games coming out today. Out of all the mods out there, it's still the most fun to play, though, Natural Selection is a close second.

So should we take from this that Condition Zero is a total ball-breaker of a programming/design challenge? That Ritual is so hot, nothing stops them? Or merely that Gearbox is back to what made it famous -- not shipping games?

Like it or not, CS is a successful game. It has broadened the computer games market for the better. Anything that brings more people into computer games is a good thing. Gamers might bemoan the death of community and all that sort of stuff, but the truth is, until the whole "gamer" category as a distinct and separate group goes away, the video game industry will not advance. Video games have to go beyond the typical market of just males. To appeal to a wider audience, they have to pull in people on the basis of more than just system specs and violence. Mind you, CS doesn't do that in terms of violence, it does it in a roundabout way, but at least it is pulling people in.

You don't know how many people I've talked to who have played and know about CS. I know plenty of chicks who have at least tried it, and some like it and lots of guys I wouldn't expect to be playing it. If CS can help to bring more people in to computer games, the less the industry will be viewed as for a specific target market and the more innovative gameplay you'll see. Hopefully, if they're brought into CS, then they might try other games, and those will be the really innovative ones that appeal to a wider, mainstream audience.

As somebody mentioned, CS doesn't require lots of system specs to run as if that were bad thing. Again, that's the gamer's thinking but it doesn't work for appealing to a mainstream audience. You cannot expect that everybody has a top of the line system. CS is in the point that you don't need a lot of horsepower to run it and where the low end computers meet the requirements easily, but if they see other amazing games, then they may try them out and see that they need a better computer. As it is though, CS is a very good mechanism for ensuring that initial adoption in the first place.

People may complain about the gameplay too as being stagnant and unchanging. I don't know that there's anything wrong with that. I have a friend who started playing CS and though he's tried other games such as Medal of Honor and BF1942, for some reason he just doesn't like them that much, beyond the initial "ooh" of pretty graphics. After that, he goes back to CS because he says none of the others have the same "feel" that CS does. Gameplay is therefore key. I don't know what it is, but it keeps people playing. Something that cannot be said for SOF2 despite all its amazing graphics and its gore engine, its not succeeding like CS is and that is fact. Besides which, what does SOF2 offer that CS doesn't? Better graphics? More realism? Playing games isn't about realism. It has absolutely nothing to do with it. I'm not sure what it does have to do with, but if it were real life, you'd all be dead when you died in the game. The Sims, believe it or not, is not about real life either, its about control. Better graphics may pull people in, but it won't keep them playing.

Screw CS.

Where the fuck is Team Fortress 2.

Is there gamers at Valve?..

Seems like they don't *want* to release any games.

So when is Halo supposed to come out now?

Halo better be pretty fucking good considering the amount of time its taking the taking to port it. Obviously the single player campaign isn't going to change so that's already known to be a steaming pile of shit, but the multi is where Gearbox could bust out and devise something cool. I have nowhere near the expectations that I and all my friends had for Halo pre-MSassimilation, but still they are spending a lot of time on what could be a fairly easy port, so they must be doing something extra. I think the mod community will love it and Halo will be next HL if its easily moddable.

Square arms rock.

Yay CS!

Memorize 3 routes to the enemy, charge down... most everyone dies. Some cleanup in the end. Repeat!

The strategy in natural selection compared to the strategy in CS is like comparing chess to connect 1.

All they need to do now is to cut out the multiplayer part so that they can "focus" on single player.

you know, i think this cs:cz is going to be just like global ops (not that im knocking on global ops) but the single player is probably going to be just like it.

NEWSFLASH:

Ritual just outsourced the development of the project to Bungie.... and... now.... we.... yes.... yes... we.. are hearing that they IN TURN have outsourced it to RARE, ltd.

and that will..... no..... whats that? yes.... yes.... IT has now been outsourced to Valve Software!

I'm asking just out of pure curiousity, but what is the average amount of hours per week everyone logs on CS in here?

So does this mean Gearbox is working on CS2 now?

how did he know august? where is that info at?

Who wants CS single player? I've never gunderstood that. It's not like the game's AI is going to be anywhere near what a human can do.

wow all that stuff looks dated

Exactly what part of Halo are they porting? Since it was already written for DirectX, an MS operating system, a GeForce graphics card, an Intel processor... surely the code doesn't really need much adaptation.

Oh god please let this cs cz or whatever mark the end of all these military shit...

BTW this means we'll see EF2 very soon?

Wait... 'Ships on 03/18/2003' on eb and Gspot says Q1 2003. meh

this is almost comical.

Jeez. Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Having spent time with three different developers is now the game-slut of the internet.

We'll all be working forLevelord one day.

The truth:

Valve was jealous of 3DRealms for having the crown in FPS development cycle length.

hahah look at the update. Thanks for all that information.

give me TF2 ;[

HAHA oh man, CS:CZ has turned into quite the fiasco. It's just a dang CS single player module! They really screwed the pooch by not having it done for this Xmas season. CS isn't getting any younger...

To Maarten or Steve (whoever got Valve to confirm that Gearbox had taken over): did you ask if Gearbox had taken over the existing stuff or it they started from scratch? Seems to me it was "almost done" a long time ago

3 companies? with fourth being the original team. It doesn't sound very good for a game at all.

I wonder when Valve is going to actually release a game instead of outsourcing it all.

Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Counter-Strike 2 are the next Duke Nukem : Forever's

bah and i actually wanted to play this game, earlier this year anyway. now CS is getting even more buried with other "realism" games that are not only graphically superior but also have better ballistics models (IGI2). if they take their time and bring it out on a new engine and add some varying game play to it i would think about it. but as of right now lets face it although CS is getting bigger, its gameplay is very stagnate.

I know why this happened...

Gabe Whatshisname at Valve was bored one night and decided to try out a demo of Nightfire for the PC...the rest is history...

Has gearbox simply gone down the drain?

If Gearbox screwsup Halo I will never forgive them. Or bungie for giving it to them.