I got the distinct impression that Breen didn’t know quite what was going on. I think he was fed disinformation, not only about the Combine invasion but about Gordon Freeman, the G-man, and the forces that the G-man works for (I’m presuming other alter-dimensional hegemonies, in a bit of a Cold War with the Combine).
The one thing that Valve did absolutely perfectly with HL2 is gave the player the impression that they definitely know what they’re doing… that they have this massive, epic story and we’re headed towards a definite conclusion. That allowed me to forgive the abrupt ending.
Note that we don’t know if Alyx died or not. In fact, I’m betting that the next time Gordon comes back, it’ll be another ten or fifteen years later (they never say how long after the Black Mesa incident the game takes place, but it’s heavily implied that significant time has gone by). I’m betting Alyx will be in her forties in HL3, probably still bearing scars - or even lost limbs - from the ending of HL2.
Question for those who played both HL1 and HL2, and in order.
I never played HL1 (well, I played the demo, but never thought much of it) but I loved HL2. Is it worth playing it, in the same way that If you enjoy the sequel to a film you should absolutely watch the original or ‘first’?
Or is it not worth playing, in the same way that if you like Unreal Tournament 2004 then you won’t get any extra benefit from playing UT2003 instead of UT2004?
I found the ending abrupt because the nature of the game was very different from HL1. There was far more interaction with other characters, and then you’re yanked away from that at the end.
I agree that HL2 was far and away the best game I’ve ever played. The multiplayer is okay, but Halo PC multiplayer is far better (but then I was more of a TF player than CS anwyay–if and when TF2 Source comes out I will hopefully eat my words).
As far as length, I was terrified when playing that I would suddenly reach the end, but it kept going. I’d love to see many expansions that add features that had to be removed before release (do ya hear me Valve?).
The biggest negative to me is Steam. I don’t like how my ownership of the product is basically gone–I can’t ever sell the game to a used store, or even give it to someone else. I don’t like how the Steam architecture slows down the game (I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the steam engine is serving the content of HL2 and that’s the primary reason why the load times are sooooo slow between sections).
Oh, and the load times (did I mention load times?). HL2 is extremely linear (even though it doesn’t feel like it most of the time), so they should always be trickle loading the next level so that I always have the last/current/next section in memory and don’t have break out of the immersion to load the next level.
As far as playing HL1, I would say yes, but with a caveat. First of all, you should obviously play HL1:Source, the updated version. Second of all, there are a number of texture/model updates that various mods are working on to make HL:Source look and play even better. Personally, I’d wait for them to come out before giving it a go, though by then it might still start to feel REALLY dated.
HL1 certainly isn’t as fun to play anymore compared to HL2 or other modern games. But it really created the genre of “good FPS” in a way that hadn’t been done before. It’s immersive, creates a consistent world inside ongoing events, and features probably the best FPS AI ever before or ever after until games like Far Cry came out. Some parts are a bit of a long stretch towards the end, but all in all, it’s got some really, really classic moments in FPS history. Unlike UT2003 vs 2004, it’s part of an actual storyline, and also unlike it it has all sorts of distinctive moments (like when you first encounter the Garg, several of the scripted sequences, etc.) You’d be missing out on FPS history if you didn’t play through it at least once.
Nope. The load times are longer because the content to get loaded is just a lot more extreme. Steam does have a memory footprint though, but it’s hard to tell if that really affects things, or if other games simply incorporate some of what Steam does into their main exe, meaning you wouldn’t notice that in the end, it makes no difference.
I like Steam. I like having virtual access to all my games anywhere in the world , with no restrictions on what I can do with the content (burns cds, etc.). The fact that you have to give ALL your Valve games away at once to someone else is, I agree, clunky and bad, but I don’t really see it as taking away ALL ownership at all.
If its so obvious to you how to do it, don’t you think that people who program this stuff for a living would have realized it? I’m betting there are major technical problems with this idea, especially since HL2 already maxes out the available memory in most people’s rigs just to run. I’ve never actually seen such a trickle load concept work with a .bsp based game.
I got HL2 as a “free” download with my video card. So I played it. Then I noticed that Condition Zero was also loaded up (I’d seen it, but didn’t really bother with it). So come to find out it’s HL1 done with the Steam engine.
And I think it’s a LOT harder to play than HL2. Maybe not as pretty, but to me at least, it’s more challenging.
Oh? I didn’t know that Valve had published anything about this. Where can I read about it?
If you watch the IO stream on HL2.exe and Steam.exe both processes get massive IO bursts of the same size when a new area loads. I see three possibilities: [ol]
[li]steam.exe loads from the disk and passes the data to hl2.exe []steam.exe and hl2.exe both load from disk []hl2.exe is loading from the disk and passing the data to steam.exe [/ol]Option 1 seems like the most likely (and it’s an elegant design, which easily to extends to online games–it’s just slower for local games).[/li]
But I’ll defer to whatever article/interview that tells me otherwise.
Hey, Steam has its bonuses as well, and I chose to buy the Silver package to do my best to reward Valve for a great game. However, I think you downplay the negatives a bit too much.
Yes. Since I’m one of those people I know of what I speak*.
I didn’t say they didn’t know how to do it. It may have been something they wanted to do but didn’t have time to do, etc.
So where have you seen it work?
*No, I don’t write video games. I do however write high performance scientific visualization and calculation software, simulating radiation treatment. It’s complicated, CPU intensive, and I routinely chew through 5-10 GB of data in a session. We’d like to migrate to a 64 bit platform but that isn’t an option, so I had to write a bunch of code to manage memory and disk access.
Is this “super gravity gun” simply the gun you used to play catch with Dog with, or something else? Is it a suped-up version of that gun, or what? I only recall one gravity gun in the game (which I finished).
Yeah, it’s the same gun that you’ve had all through the game, but the scanning device didn’t recognize it as a gun because it’s a utilitarian device. And in fact, the scanner messes up the internals, causing it to go super-powered.
Sorry, I just thought that that was such an obscenely clever way to incorporate a “blow shit up” level into the storyline, that I wanted to repeat it.
I think it’s clear that, despite the obvious artistic and story-oriented success of the game, there are some significant technical failings that, though minor, simply shouldn’t be there. A lot of computers had problems loading the various sounds in the game (stuttering, slowing down of the game, etc.). The problem with the long, long, long load times. The nerfed guns and aiming system.
The game definitely is in the top-tier of Best Games, but these are things that I think Valve really needs to focus on improving next time. Doom 3, by contrast, while not nearly as creative or indepth as HL2, certainly had a near-perfect level of technical polish (at least in my experience).
I was also disappointed by the apparently-reduced amount of destructable terrain and buildings. The original 2003 E3 video gave the distinct impressive that most structures could simply be blasted through or altered… certainly that there’d be various paths to take. Deus Ex had an amazing level design in that regard… no matter where you were in the game, you always had two, three, or even four different choices of how to reach your objective. You could go in the front door and battle it out with the baddies; you could sneak in the vents, or the sewers; or you could hack in the back door, or simply blow it up…
Again, just areas that I think should be focused on in the next iteration.
Now, to whore up the game again… how about the horrible, tortured screams of the headcrab’d zombies? That stuff really got to me, this nightmarish existence of being 1/3 conscious while this freakish monster controlled and mutated my body… and Father Grigori, and his mad existence “tending his flock”…
I’ve got to admit, I’m getting a really low tolerance for long load times. I’ve had the game since it came out but I’m really taking my time getting through it – I just keep putting off having to sit the the ages of loading before the game will even get to the menu, much less start playing.
Valve used some kind of strange method to initiatialize the graphics drivers, forcing it through a weird subset - I don’t entirely understand what they did. This is why it takes 10 minutes to start up. There’s no reason it needed to be done like that, and several people have reported good results simply by erasing that force-fed command, so that it starts like any other game.
[spoiler]In the last level, when you enter the Combine tower, you get a couple of rides on their transit systsem. In one of them, they capture you and use their floating-zero-g-stuff to take away your guns. Somehow, the alien technology interacts with the gravity gun in a wierd manner, causing it to supercharge. Maybe the G-man screwed with the machine or something. Either way, it starts to be able to reach out and crush people or smack them around like tinfoil, and it can grab Combine energy cores and rip stuff off the walls. They apparently didn’t consider it a weappon and that’s why the Combine didn’t take it away from you.
Yes, but how do you know this? Did the bad guy explain it via the monitor and I missed it, or was it just obvious to you from seeing what happened, or what?
The load time at the start isn’t about graphics drivers or anything like that. It’s because the menu is loading an entire level for the background each time instead of going right to the menu.
Add the flags -novideo -console to the “Launch options” in “Properties” in “Play games” and it will skip the 3d menus.
I don’t think it’s ever said outright; you just see it happen. All your guns float away from you, and each is zapped by one of the combine machines. When the gravity gun gets scanned, its core starts to spark and turn blue. I think the female computer voice says something about its not being a threat, but I could just be inferring that because when Alyx gives it to you, she says that it’s used for heavy lifting, not as a weapon.
And I guess the following sounds condescending, but I swear I don’t mean it to:
That’s exactly where I think the game succeeds so well. They don’t beat you over the head with plot points or character introductions or what you’re supposed to do (the ending could’ve used a little bit more explanation, as to what exactly you’re supposed to be shooting). Instead, they mostly put you into situations with little or no exposition, and let you piece together the rest. There’s an explanation for everything, right down to why there are health packs littered all over the place (because the resistance put them there), and the explanation is always given subtly and lets you figure out the backstory.
I’ve been waiting for years for games to mature to the point where people talked about them in terms of plot, and story, and presentation, instead of talking about vertex lighting and trilinear filtering and such. The games “industry” is distressingly masturabtory about polishing and re-polishing engines in order to make just iteration after iteration of the same cliched, shallow games.