Slashdot Mirror
Half Life 2 To Appear At E3
MonsieurEvil writes "Valve announced today (http://www.planethalflife.com) that the long-awaited Half-Life 2 will be appearing at E3, and will be released this year. The NDA for press is supposed to end on April 28th, and quite a few magazines are already hyping their scoops. Hopefully all the teen-angst types that show their superiority through decrying this as vaporware can now listen to their elders..."
Just because it's at E3 doesn't mean it'll be released this year. Wasn't TF2 at E3 in like 2001 ... but there is still no sign of it?
If there isn't a Mac version of this I'm going to become a an angry and bitter person. Well, OK, more so than normal.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
that's the scary, story-based sequel we need.
Well, hopefully even if Valve does not release a Linux client, the Windows client will run under Wine - that's how I played through both OpFor and Blueshift.
However, all I can say is, "Let Our Voices Be Heard" - contact Valve.
(of course, I expect this to work about as well as previous efforts at software advocacy have worked)
www.eFax.com are spammers
I just hope that Valve has kept in their minds the fact that HL's continued reign as #1 comes not from the game Half-Life, but the fact that HL makes a world class gaming platform. It's just an operating system for games. They had better get TFC, CS, DoD, NS, and everything else ported, or HL2 will just be another game, not the gaming OS that it is today.
Look at how many people buy Windows. They don't do this for all the "features" M$ tries to cram into the box, but rather for all the things that run on Win32. The same goes for HL.
HL2 will be a really good game, but will it be the next (and second, after HL1) gaming platform? If they could manage to let HL1 games run under HL2, (perhaps with some kind of 3d improvements like higher-rez, automagic shadows, etc) they'd have a killer. If not, HL2 will sell about as well as WinXP would if it couldn't run Win98 apps.
-twb
One must also mention that one of the main reasons why HL is such a great game is its nice modibility and Valves open policy / support of mods (great marketing!!) So give HL and Valve a lot of obvious praise for allowing CS to become what it has become.
I think the biggest competition that HL2 has to worry about isn't all the other big name games coming out this year. Rather, HL2's worst enemy is the original Half-Life. Half-Life is hailed as a milestone in FPS, single player, and story driven gaming. If HL2 does not live up to the incredible amount of expectation built around it, I doubt it will really succeed. As soon as one reviewer says "HL2 does not live up to the hype," many gamers will just dismiss the game as just another attempt at raking in money from a cashcow franchise. Even if the game really is great, it may forever be overshadowed by it's predecessor. However, with that said, I think the Valve team is very talented and will produce a game worth buying.
Are you under 16? HL was game of the year long before anyone heard of CS. Hell, most magazines wanted to give it game of the year AGAIN a year later because it was so damn good. It sold very, very well in its original form.
Don't get me wrong, Half-Life had some great set pieces and lots of cool moments, but that's not the same thing as a story. By way of demonstration, a few questions you can answer about all of the games I listed but not about Half-Life:
This isn't sophisticated abstract stuff, just the kind of thing they expect you to already know in Creative Writing 101. None of it is required to make a fun game, but it's all required to make a fun game story.
Maybe you should check out a game called Quake. It was the first true big mod platform. Doom had mods, but they were usually just new maps and textures. Not new games. Quake on the other hand has great mods such as Capture the Flag, TeamFortress (a far better game than the sequal TFC), Rocket Arena, QRally (racing game), Quess (Battle Chess with Quake characters), etc...
The only two Quake mods that people regularly play today are: Capture the Flag and Team Fortress.
My point is that Valve wasn't doing anything original.
When the briefcase man was revealed, did you find yourself saying, "Aha, now what he was doing earlier in the game all fits together?" I didn't. He could have walked up to me at the end of the game and said he was a really shy Swiss-cheese salesman looking to sell to interdimensional clients, and it would have explained his earlier actions in the game equally well.
When I talked to one of the scientists, since I was the one playing the main character, how could I express that I had no time to deal with him and wanted him to go find his own way out? I couldn't, because I could only listen to his predetermined lines or blow his brains out, nothing in between. The so-called "conversations" were really monologues, which kind of shoots in the foot the whole notion of "I am the main character" -- how can I put myself into the game if I can't even choose how to interact with the other people in the world? Apart from causing me to die, no choice I made in Half-Life made the least bit of difference to the progression of the story or my interactions with the game world.
Now take Planescape: Torment. Do everything you just described, playing the story with yourself in the starring role, and the game adapts to what you're doing. Play it as an egomaniacal jerk with a chip on his shoulder (and yes, it gives you the expressive power to have that attitude in-game) and NPCs who might otherwise cooperate with you will barely give you the time of day, but you may earn the respect of others who want nothing to do with a lily-white hero type. And all the while, you'll explore your way through a story about loss, self-discovery, revenge, and redemption, full of fleshed-out, memorable characters and spanning a world every bit as epic as Half-Life's.
On the other end of the spectrum is a game like Jedi Knight. Very linear, and similar to Half-Life in that the story is really a set of vignettes to explain why you've gone from level X to level Y. It gives you about the same power of self-expression that Half-Life does (which is to say, very little) but in exchange, your character discovers his true heritage, follows a trail of clues to solve a mystery, sneaks deep into enemy territory to recover something that rightfully belongs to him, and runs up against a villain whose motives put the two of them on a collision course.
Both modes of storytelling are fine by me. What I don't like is a story that gives me no expressive power, then fails to make up for it by giving my character no personality to speak of and nobody very interesting to interact with along the way. If a game wants me to role-play, put myself in the shoes of the protagonist to fill in the details of his personality, it had better supply the tools to give him a personality in a way that affects the game. Half-Life didn't.
It was still a damn fine shooter, though, don't get me wrong. For all that I don't think it served up much of a story, it did a great job serving up an environment, and it was fun to play. It certainly deserved all the action-game-of-the-year awards it got. But I can't understand why people hold it up as an example of great game storytelling when there are so many better examples to choose from.
There have been many people already in this story claiming Halflife's success was based upon its modability, and Valve's support for developers in doing so. And going by sales fuelled by Counterstrike and the other mods, that argument would have some merit.
But if you take that argument, then shouldn't UT2K3 be selling in absolute droves? Its marketing campaign focussed a lot on its extreme modablity, to the point where Epic packaged a customized Maya with it, for mod makers. They were driven by the Counterstrike phenomen in doing this.
But in a store the other day, I saw a Halflife pack selling for more than UT2K3 was. The difference between the two is that Halflife the game had incredible appeal because it really was a revolutionary game. UT2K3 wasn't. Lots of people therefore bought HL. This meant it generated large market share. And *that* is what gets a good mod. There's little point in modding a game to distribute if noone else has the game. So with the wide HL userbase, it made itself a very attractive medium for mods.
Yes HL sales were fuelled by CS and co, but that's not what started the avalanche. I'm sure Valve are acutely aware of this.