Check out the canceled sci-fi Stars of Blood by Valve -apkrig
Although we can consider Valve to be an unorthodox society based on various testimonies and the conditions of the video game studio, games are still created in it. And as you probably guess, industry-wide developments cannot be placed in too tight boxes, given how organic the process is. Thoughts come and go, prototypes are subject to an immeasurable number of iterations, until at the end a product falls out, which may or may not necessarily correspond to the original vision. In another case, the developers will come to the conclusion during the preparations that the ideas and mechanisms presented are not sufficiently supportive and will put the project on ice or cancel it directly, and this happens – but often without the public presence – quite commonly in any studio. But I will not tire you with something you can imagine yourself – let’s go back to Valve, which, for the reasons mentioned above, is responsible for a lot of unfinished and canceled projects, which we learn about here and there through leaks. The current one concerns the sci-fi game Stars of Blood, which was supposed to be worked on in Valve more than ten years ago, although the game has never seen the light of day.
The existence of Stars of Blood, after several speculations at the time, was confirmed by Gabe Newell himself on the 4chan discussion portal, which in 2012 did not yet have a reputation for being such an unreliable source of information for developers to avoid it. He didn’t say anything specific, just denied that the project should be named Stars of Barathrum, as expected at the time: “We had a project called Stars of Blood in development. It was a space game with pirates that never saw the light of day. ”But the players searched for more details and the stepping stone became the artworks that appeared in a video on the channel called TheJavaServer in February 2012. Fans could examine several drawings of characters, faces and spaceships and speculate what is actually being created under the hands of the authors of the Half-Life or Counter-Strike series. But in the end, the wait for more material was much longer than fans apparently imagined nine years ago when a new batch appeared on the fan-led Valve Archive portal.
She was pointed out by an insider with the nickname Obscure Game Aesthetics, who added a little of the context described above to his Twitter posts and, most importantly, led the player to a whole folder of interesting pictures, from which you can get at least a partial idea of what the game might have looked like. According to the date stated in the mentioned archive, the archives were updated at the end of August this year, resp. in November 2018, but so far no one has noticed them yet, and the artwork is expanding the hitherto known data package from the above video. Most of the drawings and studios should be in charge of the graphic artist Peter König, who has shared them in his portfolio in recent years, others – especially figures and ships – should come from photographs taken by an unknown source during a visit to the studio. Admittedly, the game could have a style that we would now thoughtlessly compare to, for example, Bethesda’s upcoming Starfield, but with a lack of information about how the game works or its closer genre set-up, it would only be similar to visual style.
The only thing we know about Stars of Blood was that it was an action adventure, but we don’t know anything about other plans at the time, such as the game world, the level of action represented, storytelling, necessary choices or decisions, and other important issues that could arise at least some expectation. Nevertheless, a look at the archive is another valuable example of what games players are talking about they came, especially when it was a project from developers of such fame. In the end, we can’t deprive you of a video, which also shakes in connection with the described works of art and which, according to the mentioned insider, should be the only moving example of the unfinished version of Stars of Blood. However, some of the fans argue about this and claim that the game did not go beyond inventing the concept, and the video from former developer Valve Gray Horsfield probably captures a different game. Maybe Alien Swarm, maybe a prototype of Half-Life – mainly due to the similarity of the location with the Citadel reactor from the Beta Half-Life 2, but unfortunately there is no clear answer to this question either.
