Gabe Newell, maker of Half Life, founder of Valve, Lord and Saviour took part in an Ask
Me Anything over on Reddit, on The_Gaben page of all places.
He posted a total of 40 responses, received 16 months’ worth of gold and gained at least
280,000 upvotes.
For this video I’ll be covering the ones that apply to CS:GO.
Link is in the description so you can read through the AMA at your own pace.
The comments most relevant to CS:GO didn’t actually come from Gabe himself but from another
member of Valve with the reddit name ‘ido_valve’.
One comment in particular of his was of interest as it covered Valve’s plans for CS:GO for
2017.
When it comes to updates, it looks like they aim for one update every week or so and that
there are no set schedules for Operations… which would explain why we only saw one in
2016.
It looks like they thought that it would be better for the game to work on the Inferno
remake and to add joinable lobbies and HRTF sound instead.
This all indicates that even if Valve has a master-plan for the game, they’re not
afraid to ignore it if they think other things are of higher priority.
What is exciting though is the mention of some long-term work that was planned late
last year but has not yet been announced.
Does long-term mean a large update that’s taken a while to make or one that they’re
committed to doing more than once, similar to operations or cases?
It was already known, but worth repeating that Valve employees aren’t dedicated to
a particular project so the numbers involved with something can fluctuate, but it was said
that a team of 20-30 people work on CS:GO.
I was surprised (and reassured) to learn that so many people are involved with CS:GO’s
future.
Even more unexpectedly, Team Fortress 2 also has a team of people working on it.
When it comes to specific updates, it appears that replacing the UI is a top priority.
‘Panorama’ was mentioned, which is a UI that Dota 2 has already upgraded to.
In my previous video I discovered that the current Scaleform HUD in CS:GO noticeably
drops the framerate, so the move to a new UI alone could improve the game in a meaningful
way for everyone.
As well as making it prettier  Source 2: will CS:GO ever get it?
It looks hopeful, but the game won’t just ‘jump’ to it.
Source 2 seems to be less of an engine and more of a number of parts.
Valve chooses which bits would benefit each of their games and upgrades accordingly.
Upgrading in small parts should reduce the number of gamebreaking bugs that are introduced.
It also means that they’ll have control over things like whether to keep the grenade
physics the same and so on.
Apparently the new UI borrows bits from Source 2, so technically CS:GO will be getting an
engine upgrade!
After this, ‘Other systems might follow’.
But don’t expect Source 2 to fix everything: apparently the new engine wouldn’t just
magically fix hitboxes.
They simply worked on improving them for CS:GO’s current engine instead.
Gabe had more to say about Source 2 as well.
He says that it is their primary game development environment and that they’re using it as
the foundation for some unannounced products.
It also applies to their existing games: he says that they’d eventually like everyone
at Valve to be using the same engine.
This suggests that it’s a long-term goal of theirs to move any games they’re still
working on over to Source 2!
Which could include CS:GO… unless they stop working on it completely.
But I don’t think that will happen.
I like the idea that Valve wants to bring everything up to the same standard to make
future updates easier to roll out to everything at once.
And they’ve done similar things in the past: even their older products have been shifted
to newer versions of the Source Engine, like the Orange Box update and so on.
Even the original Half Life has had a port to Source!
Could it be Valve’s end dream to have Source 2 supporting EVERYTHING -even the original
Half Life?
They also revealed that anti-cheat was something they intended to work on in 2017 for CS:GO.
This could just mean more VAC ban waves as they try to crack down on popular cheats,
or could be more.
Possibly some sort of collaboration with other anti-cheat solutions within the community.
Hell, since I don’t know and am free to speculate, they could even be coming up with
some sort of optional, more invasive anti-cheat method that if you agree to you get put in
games with other people who also use it.
Sort of like Prime, this would be another layer of security to try and reassure players
that they’re not playing in the same match as cheaters.
But this is just speculation, all we know for sure is what’s shown in ido’s message
here.
Please don’t take what I’m adding to it as any more than just speculation, partly
based on what I’ve seen the community wanting from future CS:GO updates.
Apparently improving the game and ‘the viewing experience for players’ is the best way
to grow CS:GO as an esport.
The majors were used as an example of this, with Valve explaining how these are intended
as aspirational entertainment for the game and as a way to reach more of an audience.
Gabe also said that he’d be at one in the future!
They also want to widen the CS:GO audience into new places, with China being mentioned.
And in another comment it was said how servers are being added all the time.
One day this could even mean Russian servers, which is something a lot of people in Europe
want because of the differences Russians typically have when it comes to language and… stuff.
In this AMA I noticed Valve’s fascination with machine-learning.
This is a very new area of development that attempts to overcome the limitations of computers
by making them behave more like a brain would.
It is something that many computer-based companies are interested in, including Microsoft and
Google.
Indeed, they used this to defeat CAPTCHA bots and even to beat humans at GO for the first
time.
Maybe Valve could also use it in GO?
Really, just imagine the things that humans are better than computers at, then imagine
if computers could be better at them instead.
It could help to crack down on the spam that goes on in Steam.
Gabe says how it could also be used to connect users to content, perhaps by suggesting games
that you might actually want to play.
It could do anything!
It’s a great thing to speculate about since there really doesn’t seem to be a limit
to what it could be applied to.
It’s like a magic solution to everything!
Kind of like nano technology.
When it comes to CS:GO it could perhaps be used to automatically detect new kinds of
cheats, similar to the heuristic methods currently found in antivirus software.
Why stop there?
Why not use it to automatically detect abusive and griefing players from their actions and
communication, to assist with overwatch and once again I’m getting carried away but
even to improve AI so that it behaves more convincingly, mimicking human players?
This could be very exciting for Bez the Bot Whisperer.
I’d like to warn you again that I get a bit over-excited by tomorrow’s possibilities
and that the things I’ve mentioned will probably never be a thing.
But it’s an exciting topic to think about.
It might not be about CS:GO’s future, but Gabe mentioned how good Left 4 Dead is at
linking different games within the Valve universe and I can’t think of a better example than
the demolition maps for CS:GO, which are almost all heavily based around locations from the
zombie shooter.
Of course, CS:GO is developing its own lore and we could see references to this in future
Valve games, or perhaps other game’s lore within CS:GO.
Who knows.
Valve appears to like dropping easter-eggs in their games.
Onto conversation now.
Valve has insisted that although they seldom reply, they do keep a close eye on the community
and what it’s thinking.
One of their reasons for not getting involved is that they don’t want to influence the
discussion, though ido did say that they will comment when they have information that would
help those conversations along.
This mindset is repeated in one of Gabe’s comments, where he stated that Valve prefers
‘to communicate through (their) products’, rather than to do a blog post.
This also stops them from being wrong and having proof of it in stone; in 2012 they
made a blog during CS:GO’s beta, justifying the use of fog within the levels.
Although this other comment of his refers to Half Life, please bear with me: ‘If you
are involved with a game, everything ends up being a set of trade-offs.
Anything in a game is a sacrifice of things not in the game’.
And I think it’s worth applying this to CS:GO.
Whenever it gets an update and it’s not what you wanted, also remember that even CS:GO’s
creators aren’t happy with the game.
And I’d like to end this video with a comment that Gabe made, describing the fastest way
he has found to improve something.
I’d be very surprised if Valve hasn’t applied this theory to CS:GO’s updates as
well.
He described a cycle that involved planning what you think would improve a product, making
that change then measuring how successful it was.
Before starting the whole thing again.
This is very much like their approach to implementing Source 2: slow and steady.
And just like Source 2, this method can be hard to notice.
Because it’s spread across many updates, we might take the sum of these changes and
improvements for granted and fail to see just how far the game has already improved.
Maybe they should return the game to its 2012 state for a week.
That would show us.
Thanks to Gabe, Ido, Driller and to the others involved with this AMA.
It is refreshing and very exciting to see behind Valve’s shroud and to understand
how the company operates and what it has planned for the future.