We never got to see In the Valley of the Gods, the indefnitely delayed game from the makers of Firewatch after the studio was bought by Valve and shut down. However, a former developer on the game has shared footage on what could’ve been.
Matthew Wilde, a visual effects developer at Valve and previously on the In the Valley of the Gods team, shared a clip on Bluesky of what the water looked like in testing, and it looks incredibly realistic. Even the compression on the video from posting on social media can’t hide that.
Matthew Wilde, the Valve developer behind the water shader for Counter-Strike 2, has shared a rare gameplay footage. It shows the water technology that was tested for In The Valley of Gods before Valve acquired the company Campo Santo. Team shelved the game not so long after… pic.twitter.com/wIs6Im8KYx
— Gabe Follower (@gabefollower) November 11, 2024
Wilde, who most recently worked on water effects and shaders in Counter-Strike 2, previously wrote about how the team accomplished this. We’ve seen similarly realistic water physics over the past couple of years, but in 2018, developers at studio Campo Santo had created a GPU-based simulation that would take into account the water’s depth, velocity, and distance from a “blocking object.” The resulting textures were then fed into the shader.
You can see the clip in the post linked above, but it’s been a number of years since many of us have thought about In the Valley of the Gods. Campo Santo struck critical gold with Firewatch before getting acquired by Valve in 2018. In the Valley of the Gods was a single-player adventure game that was originally just under Campo Santo, but with the deal, it would be then released under Valve. The plan was to release it in 2019.
Unfortunately, the team was moved onto other projects inside Valve like Half-Life: Alyx. At the time, Campo Santo co-founder Jake Rodkin said the game wasn’t canceled but was “on hold.” Oddly enough, the Steam page is still live and lists the release date as “December 2029.”
