Trollbait, it has to be. “no brand tie ins” is genuinely hilarious to me. I’m picturing a videogame reviewer going like: “The game is an artistic and a technical milestone. The gameplay is also the smoothest we’ve seen so far. Unfortunately, the game does not feature a Ronald McDonald skin or even a Slurpee coupon, so we have to give it a 7/10”.
Ahh, the days before games companies hired the casino slot machine UX designers. An elegant game from a more civilised age.
Hello, could I take a minute of your time to talk to you about our lord and savior, de_rats?
CS 1.6 was peak gaming. There were servers with Warcraft 3 mod where you could pick your race and level up to receive additional modded abilities and items, and it would save your progress over months. Not to mention the map customizations.
Also, no paying for season passes or DLC, no paid skinpacks, no censorship or embedded ads or tracking. And custom porn sprays.
EDIT: there were definitely skins, they were just free downloads from modders. And they were client side so you could see them but other players would just have their own skin or default for the same item.
This reminds me of wc3 mods run on fy_pool_day. Stupid fun with the overpowered HE nades
It was pure gaming.
No advertisments, no marketing, no extra costs.
The only way to get better was to play more.
How can it not be fun?
Good ol’ days, thank you VALVE.
I believe the thank you was regarding the mod-friendly mindset of early valve. A section in the game menu for loading new mods and it shipped with a mod (TFC, which was based off a community mod for Quake)
I don’t know about the launch release, but the Game Of The Year release is the one that shipped with TFC, plus (what we now know as) the GoldSrc SDK was on the disc. Every tool they’d made they used to build Half Life, they put on the disc and gave to customers.
Well we had mods and custom levels when we got tired of the official stuff.