Spong.com got the chance to sit down with Doug Lombardi, director of marketing at Valve at this year's Leipzig Games Convention.
Doug, if you didn't know, is a thoroughly 'Good Bloke'. His profile up on Valve's website introduces him quite nicely: "After years in the music industry, Doug decided to get a real job. Then he came to his senses and made the decision to get into the gaming industry instead."
Doug joined Valve back in the heady days of the first Half Life, and has been with the company through numerous sequels, new franchises and the introduction of a little online service called Steam.
From the luxury of EA's business stand (revolving bar and all) Doug and Spong talked about Valve, Steam, PC gaming, online services, Half Life and Darwinism. First, however, they got into the much talked-about but little acted-upon subject of episodic gaming. Read on...
Today, Portal with RTX is being upgraded with DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, multiplying framerates, as well as the transformer model for Ray Reconstruction and DLAA, enabling even better image quality. Portal with RTX is also adding RTX Neural Radiance Cache (NRC), a neural shader that improves indirect lighting, as well as a bevy of performance optimizations.
Discover 10 timeless video games from the past that remain absolutely playable today. From Chrono Trigger to DOOM, these classics have aged like fine wine!
Hot damn that's a good list. The only one i never played is AOE2 and i never finshed Chrono Trigger but it was damn good.
Speaking of what's old but holds up amazingly well and plays like a dream.. i played Symphony of the Night for the first time in 2019.. yep that's right. It became one of my favourite games of all time that i replay almost every year. I couldn't believe how good it was. That is almost impossible for me with newer games let alone older ones. Truly a special gem.
The only one I’d disagree with is doom. It shows its age badly I think. After 5 minutes of play these days you put it down.
After Valve released the Team Fortress 2 source code, developers and modders are reviving TF2 VR, making it bigger and better than ever.
Seems dumb, multiplayer fast paced VR... Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Source 2 versions of the games they had, remakes or sequels to their games should've come out like a decade ago, now they'd need a heavily upgraded Source 2 or just Source 3 to be up to par with current engines tbh..
Nice interview, really nice. Valve is really one of the good guys of developers. They know what most of us want.
And Doug didnt say anything that could be misinterpreted/used/abused by console fanboys on either side of the war, and thats refreshing in these days of comment wars....