Half Life 2 To Appear At E3

Yeah BUT ... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-04-21 13:50 · Score: 5, Insightful

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?

Re:Yeah BUT ... by deadsaijinx* · 2003-04-21 13:57 · Score: 2, Funny

1. Dont read article
2. Post
3. ???
4. Profit!!!

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YOU SUCK BALLS!
Re:Yeah BUT ... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-04-21 14:01 · Score: 5, Funny

I was wondering what "teen-angst types" that article was referring to. I guess now I know.
Re:Yeah BUT ... by VoiceOfRaisin · 2003-04-21 14:40 · Score: 2, Informative

believe it or not, tf2 was started in 1997. as a quake 2 addon. shortly after that valve had interest in the team and picked them up and i remember seeing a demo of it at a quake event far before half life was even out! yes its that old.
Re:Yeah BUT ... by HeywoodJablomi69 · 2003-04-21 14:45 · Score: 5, Funny

Hehe, a bit older than that. From Sierra's own site: "TF2 named: 'Best Action Game', 'Best Multiplayer Game', E3 1999". Just imagine how good it's got to be by now!
Re:Yeah BUT ... by Phoenix823 · 2003-04-21 15:02 · Score: 5, Funny

You're VERY right. 3DRealms showed off Duke Nukem Forever (still running on the Quake 2 engine) at E3 in 1998. And yes, it is still not out.
Re:Yeah BUT ... by Warped-Reality · 2003-04-21 15:38 · Score: 5, Funny

I vaugly remember the first release date for that being july '97... of course, that was 6 years ago. Then they switched engines. Then they did it again.

By the time it's released, no body will buy it. Anyone who remembers the first DN3D will be dead.

*smells another daikatana coming up*

--
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Re:Yeah BUT ... by intermodal · 2003-04-21 17:58 · Score: 2, Funny

Last I checked, the official TF2 site says it is coming out in December 2001...boy, I can't wait till then!

--
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!

Still single player focused? by spoco2 · 2003-04-21 13:51 · Score: 5, Interesting

One would hope and expect so. The thing that made the first game was the fantastic story line, the incredible scripted sequences, and the feeling of intellegence from the enemy.

When the first one came out, it really blew me away with that mix... will the second one be able to live up to that? The marketplace has moved on, and it's harder to impress gamers than it was then...

I hope they've come up with a brilliant single player game as I'm sick of the focus on multiplayer these days. (Which is one of the reasons I'm so looking forward to Doom3)

Re:Still single player focused? by B3ryllium · 2003-04-21 13:55 · Score: 4, Funny

I hope they've come up with a brilliant single player game as I'm sick of the focus on multiplayer these days. (Which is one of the reasons I'm so looking forward to Doom3)

Hmm, I think you broke my sarcasm detector.
Re:Still single player focused? by deadsaijinx* · 2003-04-21 14:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

no, valve owes all sales AFTER the initial 5 months to the CS team. Lotsa people bought HL for HL, and then CS was a kick ass bonus. Of course, lotsa people like you never yeard of HL till after CS became THE game. So, the prolonged success is due to CS, the game can stand on its own merits though.

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YOU SUCK BALLS!
Re:Still single player focused? by grumpygrodyguy · 2003-04-21 14:09 · Score: 4, Interesting

So, the prolonged success is due to CS, the game can stand on its own merits though.

OK, but I would bet you top dollar that over 90% of sales were "AFTER the initial 5 months".

--
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Re:Still single player focused? by Lord_Slepnir · 2003-04-21 14:24 · Score: 5, Funny

Hmm, I think you broke my sarcasm detector.
oh yeah, like that's a useful invention
Re:Still single player focused? by shazbotus · 2003-04-21 14:28 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Still single player focused? by CaseyB · 2003-04-21 14:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

...I would have never heard of it if not for counter-strike.
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.
Re:Still single player focused? by spoco2 · 2003-04-21 14:52 · Score: 3, Interesting

That doesn't give anywhere near the credit that Valve is due to Valve... Half Life was Game of the Year, in its own right!

You may be one of those that is a CS nut, and it really has been an amazing success, but the single player original Half Life made one hell of an impact when it came out, without CS to help it along. It was a hit with the types of gamers that were longing for a really good single player game again, as the industry was so focused on multiplayer.

The fact that you never would have heard of it without CS simply demonstrates that you were ignorant of the best single player game of that year.
Re:Still single player focused? by grumpygrodyguy · 2003-04-21 14:52 · Score: 3, Insightful

It sold very, very well in its original form.

All right I give. I'm not disrespecting HL either, I played it to completion...and enjoyed it. But HL is a classic case of a technology becoming something much larger than it was ever intended to be.

Modding HL into TFC and CS was a huge, and very overlooked, occurance in the game community. Most game companies still don't have a clue on how to capitalize on the modding phenomenon. HL is a perfect success story for this.

And there's noone on this board who can say with a straight face that CS didn't at least double HL sales.

--
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Re:Still single player focused? by koreth · 2003-04-21 15:32 · Score: 5, Insightful
Fantastic story line? Was I playing some other game called Half-Life? When someone says "fantastic story line" about a video game, I think of, say, Planescape: Torment, Jedi Knight, Xenogears, Deus Ex, or most of the Final Fantasy games. Even Freedom Force, with its paper-thin comic-book plot, had a more involving story than Half-Life.
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:
- What does the main character want in life?
- How do the events in the story change that character?
- Who's standing in the way of the character's goals? Why?
- What unexpected events along the way force the character to look at his goals in a different light?
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.
Re:Still single player focused? by Jagasian · 2003-04-21 15:33 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Still single player focused? by Minna+Kirai · 2003-04-21 16:44 · Score: 2

When you play DOOM, your objective changes throughout game.

"First, you just want to get to earth, then before you know it, you have to go to an evil dimension to save all of earth."

The "story" for Doom, Quake, and Half-Life were all exactly the same. "Military scientists in a remote base are experimenting with teleportation when they unleash alien monsters that could destroy the earth unless a single man carrying 8000 kgs of ammunition can halt the invasion and take the fight right back to the enemy's home!"

Technically, that can't even be called a story. It's a situation, a setting. To be a story it must change at least once. Football games have as much story.

You want to live, your goals change from living to saving earth

You never take any action except to preserve your own life.

the army coming in to kill you is pretty unexpected

It also doesn't make any sense. In a real story, with you playing the main role, a situation like that would present a choice. Fight the hostile soldiers, or evade them until the alien menace convinces them to work with you (the inevitable flow of any movie treatment of Half-Life). But the railroading game provides no such option.
Re:Still single player focused? by koreth · 2003-04-21 17:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

Sure, you can fall back on "you are the protagonist" to fill in the massive blanks -- and I should add that I did talk to every person I could find in that game, and poked into every nook and cranny I could reach -- but to me that's just a copout, an excuse for a minimally sketched story with little emotional resonance, thematic meat, or deep characterization.
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.
Re:Still single player focused? by ukyoCE · 2003-04-21 17:20 · Score: 3, Insightful

"My point is that Valve wasn't doing anything original."

That is very incorrect - I think you're missing the parent poster's point. Allowing mods is not original, *supporting* them is. There may have been mods for Quake or Quake2 that got sold retail, but none good or popular enough for me to remember despite all that I played those games. With counter-strike, Valve helped the team tremendously, and started selling Counter-Strike on store shelves at Wal-Mart and etc. for 30$, not even requiring the purchaser to own the original Half-Life.

I'm not sure where all the popularity came from, but Counter-Strike is the first multiplayer game I've seen reach the masses. My girlfriend's RA in her dorm has played Counter-strike. My brother owns and plays Counter-strike. As some of the other posts show, there are people who play Counter-strike who haven't even *heard* of Half-life.

This is a truly remarkable and original thing for Valve to do, to take a popular mod and help it grow beyond an add-on to being a separate retail product, completely dissasociated from the single player game.
Re:Still single player focused? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-04-21 18:24 · Score: 2, Funny

# What does the main character want in life?

presumably he wants a long and distinguished research career, but most of the game deals with his desire to escape from the black mesa facility with all of his limbs intact.

# How do the events in the story change that character?

mild-mannered scientist to badass alien-killing machine

# Who's standing in the way of the character's goals? Why?

aliens: because they're aliens
the military: to coverup the presumably sensitive nature of the research being conducted at black mesa
g-man: a shadowy figure for almost the entire game, this Big Time Operator was bent on exploiting everything that has happened at black mesa for his own benefit

# What unexpected events along the way force the character to look at his goals in a different light?

- discovering that the military has not been brought in to rescue the facility, but rather to bring it to the ground and cut the government's losses
- discovering the nature of the matter transporters that were being researched, allowing gordon to travel to the alien's homeworld and bring the fight to them
- every solved puzzle and newly obtained weapon, NPC interaction and scripted sequence opened a new part of the game world, and brought new goals.

the real strength of half-lifes story wasn't in the deep philosophical issues or nail-biting plot climaxes, neither of which were present, but it was in the supremely executed integration of the plot into the game world.

while playing through half-life, it seemed that every detail, every texture, every vertex was contributing to the storyline which was hurtling you towards some sort of conclusion. there were no cut-scenes or pre-rendered cinamatics in half-life. your viewpoint never left the head of gordon freeman, theoretical physicist with degrees from MIT. that sort of story-telling hadn't been seen on the PC in many, many years.

Re:A good game? by deadsaijinx* · 2003-04-21 13:51 · Score: 5, Interesting

I was looking forward to Unreal2, but it just didn't live up to the expectations. That is really too bad, I know a lot of people who were looking forward to it .... sigh.

But hey, I think Doom]|[ will be released before this year is over :) , so that makes two cool games with totally pimped out graphics. Hopefully, the gameplay wont be sacrificed in HL2, cuz its the gameplay more than the graphics that made HL what it is.

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YOU SUCK BALLS!

But will it run on Linux? by MrResistor · 2003-04-21 13:51 · Score: 2, Interesting

I don't mean to be the typical troll, here, but I've managed to ween myself from Windows completely now. I really want to play this game, but not enough to go back to the dark side. besides, so many other FPSs support Linux now that it seems like a reasonable thing to expect.

--
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.

Re:But will it run on Linux? by deadsaijinx* · 2003-04-21 13:54 · Score: 3, Interesting

Weening off of windows is always a good thing, but would it really hurt to leave a 10gig partition to play windows only games? And even if HL2 doesnt support it natively, i'm sure that the gaming version of wine will be able to pick it up within a month or two.

--
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Re:But will it run on Linux? by wowbagger · 2003-04-21 13:59 · Score: 5, Insightful

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
Re:But will it run on Linux? by Blondie-Wan · 2003-04-21 14:08 · Score: 4, Interesting

I play on a Mac, and after the original Half-Life debacle on our platform I think many Mac gamers are so resentful of Valve they'll probably refuse to touch the sequel even if it's ported and it's a great game.
Of course, not everyone would behave this way, but still, Half-Life is a very sore subject for Mac gamers. That said, if it showed us anything, it turned out it's indeed true one can have a satisfying gaming experience on the platform without having a specific "A-list" title, and I'm sure that's true for Linux as it is on the Mac, even if there are fewer Linux games than Mac ones. Certainly my own biggest problem isn't too small a selection of games, but too little time to play the ones I have and too little money to get the rest of the ones I want, smaller though the Mac selection may be. Even with more money and time, though, I wouldn't do Windows for games. One has to have principles. ;)
Re:But will it run on Linux? by xaqar · 2003-04-21 14:26 · Score: 3, Interesting

Say what you will about Windows for other applications, but for gaming, it works well. As far as WINE goes, why futz with WINE, when you can get better performance out of Windows? You should just use the right tool for the job. Sure you can dig a hole with a hammer, but it's a hell of a lot easier with a shovel. Windows for a server? No. Windows for gaming? Yes.
Re:But will it run on Linux? by irc.goatse.cx+troll · 2003-04-21 14:30 · Score: 5, Funny

"even if there are fewer Linux games than Mac ones."

I already beat photoshop, There isnt enough replay value to keep me on a mac.

--
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Re:But will it run on Linux? by NotAnotherReboot · 2003-04-21 14:48 · Score: 5, Informative

Half-Life runs on WINE, and is practically supported by Valve in this configuration.

They have pulled back releases of their security modules (anti-cheat) just because users of WINE were having trouble. This is not to say that the experience is perfect, but it does mean that they don't have a "screw linux, it's not supported" attitude.

The rumor is that Half-Life 2 will come out THIS year, which is a very real possibility. Nothing has been heard about Team Fortress 2 for over a year now, so this project has been under very tight wraps (I mean, up until a couple of weeks ago, everyone thought they were still working on Team Fortress 2, and the Valve team gave no hints that they were doing something else).

November will be the 5 year anniversary of the original Half-Life. I would say a 5 year product development cycle should be enough, but I would have only said that with 100% confidence BEFORE Daikatana, and lord knows when the next Duke Nukem game will come out (it's been so long, I'm beginning to think that maybe the original really actually sucked, but we had low expectations back in the day, and the suspense keeps growing).

Obligatory DNF post by Anonymous Coward · 2003-04-21 13:52 · Score: 5, Funny

I still have my $5 down for DNF at the local EB, and have had it there since it first showed up in their books (97 or 98).

Do I get a prize for that much dedication for a TRUE vaporware product? =P

Re:Obligatory DNF post by ruiner13 · 2003-04-21 16:07 · Score: 5, Funny

"I still have my $5 down for DNF at the local EB, and have had it there since it first showed up in their books (97 or 98).
Do I get a prize for that much dedication for a TRUE vaporware product? =P"
PRIZE? I don't even think you'll get your 5 dollars back....

--
today is spelling optional day.

They're waiting for you, Gordon. by B3ryllium · 2003-04-21 13:52 · Score: 4, Funny

Gordon, there you are. They're waiting for you in the test chamber, Gordon.

I hope they don't go all hollywood on this and do it as a "prequel". Although, that would be quite amusing ... :)

Re:They're waiting for you, Gordon. by demonbug · 2003-04-21 13:58 · Score: 5, Funny

Half Life 2: Gordon: The College Years

Find out what it really takes to get your PhD.

Mac version? by Mister+Black · 2003-04-21 13:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Re:Mac version? by Hawthorne01 · 2003-04-21 14:27 · Score: 4, Funny

Yeah. Whoever modded that down needs to read up on the sordid history of Half-Life on the Mac.
Oh, wait, I just asked a /. ' er to read. Nevermind.

--
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Re:Mac version? by WatertonMan · 2003-04-21 16:52 · Score: 4, Informative

Why was that modded funny? A bit of sarcasm closing a very insightful point. The only downside was a lack of links to the "sordid history."
The "polite" explanation
The background explanation.

System Shock 3 by Rubel · 2003-04-21 13:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

that's the scary, story-based sequel we need.

Re:System Shock 3 by Doktor+Memory · 2003-04-21 18:19 · Score: 3, Interesting

Right fucking on.

The many sings to us. Your flesh...betrays you.

I've never yet played a "survival horror" game that didn't make me want to laugh at its lame attempts at suspense...but Shock2, played in a dark room with good headphones (oh how I miss you, Aureal!), had me literally shaking in fear.

Please, god, let this be Warren Spector's next game...and let it be done right.

--
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.

Did anyone see.. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-04-21 13:57 · Score: 4, Funny

that pig just fly by?

Counter Strike 2 by MidoriKid · 2003-04-21 14:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

Does anybody actually play Half-Life? I only bought it for the excellent mods. Day of Defeat and Counter Strike top my list there.

Re:Counter Strike 2 by The+Zody · 2003-04-21 14:45 · Score: 2

dont forget Natrual Selection a mod that truly feels like another game. FPS/RTS what more could you want?
Re:Counter Strike 2 by edgecrusher · 2003-04-21 14:58 · Score: 2, Interesting

Uhm, I recently purchased HL (the platinum pack with all the spinoff addons) because I never really had a chance to in the past 5 years. I had a blast playing the actual game.

Half-Life 2? What's the full title? by WIAKywbfatw · 2003-04-21 14:03 · Score: 4, Funny

I'm guessing that it's Half-Life 2: Full Life.

Or Half-Life 2: How The Other Half Lives.

Or Half-Life 2: You Only Live Twice.

Or Half-Life 2: Life Begins At 2.

Or Half-Life 2: Half-Liberty. (With the third game to be called Half-Life 3: Half-Pursuit Of Happiness.)

--

"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg

Re:Half-Life 2? What's the full title? by Have+Blue · 2003-04-21 14:29 · Score: 4, Funny

Half-Life 2: Quarter-Life.
Re:Half-Life 2? What's the full title? by W32.Klez.A · 2003-04-21 14:31 · Score: 2, Funny

Or Half-Life 2: You Only Live Twice.

Theme song by Bjork?

Fantastic! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-04-21 14:04 · Score: 5, Funny

As a mac user, i eagerly await the day Half Life 2 is released, so we can begin the fantastic four-year wait that we have in store while whoever now owns sierra (or whoever they farm the port out to) very very slowly and incompetently attempts to port their game to our platform. Although that is nothing compared to the eager anticipation i have for what comes after that, when upon finishing and discovering that the port they have created is of very poor quality, Sierra suddenly announces "hey, the mac market is small and we don't want to bother porting to it" so that they can simply insult the mac market rather than releasing what they would percieve to be a public embarrasment! That was my favorite part of Half Life!

Ooh! Or even better, maybe they'll go with the ever-so-popular development model they used with Tribes 2. You know, the one where they lie to the consumers for years, then at the end of the development cycle suddenly react to unexpected overruns in schedule by releasing the product before it's finished, promising lots of patches and a macintosh version really soon, and then firing the team that programmed the game before they can even begin to attempt to fix things! That was SO fun, i can't imagine they wouldn't jump at the chance to repeat their success at completely destroying a critically acclaimed franchise with a cult following! If so, I SO hope that they add insult to injury like they did with Tribes 2 by creating a fantastic Linux version that by all indications could run in Mac OS X's UNIX layer with little more than a recompile, one or two small compatibility layers such as an X11 server, and a trivial amount of slowdown, and then refusing to comment on this despite repeated and wide-scale petitioning on the part of would-be customers requesting Sierra attempt to make the Linux port run on OS X!

*** /me grumbles and bitterly huddles back closer to his GameCube, where he never has to worry about this kind of thing. Hmm.. dammit, "Navi", i hate you.. ***

-- super ugly ultraman

Re:Fantastic! by Mister+Black · 2003-04-21 16:10 · Score: 2, Interesting

Sierra/Havas/Vivendi does this all the time; look at what they did to Quest for Glory and Space Quest.

And don't forget Outpost

--

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

If Deus Ex 2 and Half Life 2 are released in 2003 by Travoltus · 2003-04-21 14:07 · Score: 3, Interesting

Then you can expect a HOLY WAR in the offices of those game review companies.

And if TES III: Bloodmoon is as good an add-on as we Morrowind fans hope it is, this year will be even hotter than last year, which brought us blockbusters in triplicate (NOLF 2, GTA 3, AND Tes III: Morrowind / Tribunal).

Then again, sadly, all three could fall short...

--
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!

Heavily mod'ed Q2 by wowbagger · 2003-04-21 14:08 · Score: 2, Insightful

The HalfLife engine was a heavily modified QuakeII engine - and as I understand it many of the modifications Valve made were done in such a fashion to make them very tied to the Windows API.

As a result, there was no native port of the HalfLife client. However, due to much demand Valve eventually did release a native HalfLife server.

Now, did Valve learn from this, and if so, what did they learn? Did they make the server code portable, so that there will be a native Linux server (most probably)? Did they make the client code portable (less likely, but who knows?)?

I don't know about anybody else, but I would pay a premium price (e.g. US$20 more) for a native Linux version than for a Windows version.

No matter. When HL2 comes out, I will in all probability buy it. However, when I send in my registration card (and send it in I shall), I will scratch out all the Windows 9x, Windows 2000, and such options and write in WINE & Linux.

It may not make a difference, but it most certainly won't make a difference if I don't do it.

--
www.eFax.com are spammers

Re:Heavily mod'ed Q2 by AvitarX · 2003-04-21 14:27 · Score: 5, Funny

"It is a common misconception it was based on Quake 2, but in fact it was based on Quake 2."

people spouting things like that might have somehting to do with it.

--
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Re:Heavily mod'ed Q2 by Renli · 2003-04-21 14:28 · Score: 3, Funny

"It is a common misconception it was based on Quake 2, but in fact it was based on Quake 2.

OMF YOU IDIOT - QUAKE 1 WAS THE BASE! HOW COME SO MANY PEOPLE GET THIS WRONG!??!?"

When you flame someone, proofreading is always a good idea. Nothing makes you look like more of an ass then calling someone an idiot with mistakes in your post. Just a little FYI

Re:John Carmack's Ferrari is on eBay!!!! by frankthechicken · 2003-04-21 14:10 · Score: 5, Funny

Ooh! Ooh! I want a car with an extra hole in the engine!

As with most of Carmacks engines, I'm sure there'll be a mod somewhere that'll both fix the hole and create a capture the flag mode.

Gaming Platform by lostchicken · 2003-04-21 14:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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-twb

Re:Gaming Platform by Tom+Dunne · 2003-04-21 14:33 · Score: 2

It's not up to Valve to port mods. While TF is a Valve game and CS and DoD are in a publishing agreement with them, NS and ever other mod out there is owned by the teams that created them. I created a HL mod, and Valve can't do anything with it unless I give them permission, etc.

More to the point, I am absolutely certain that even if mods were given some degree of direct portability (which is extremely unlikely), very few would bother. The visual limitations of the original HL engine significantly restrict the content created for those mods - 256-color textures, a fairly limited potential polycount on models, the limited and underpowered world building system and so on. If mod makers don't spend the effort to improve their visual elements, what's the point in bothering with a 'port' to the new engine?

Valve's delay with HL2 was so long, my team moved to working with Unreal Tournament 2003. I hope we don't come to regret that, but Valve certainly has taken their sweet time in getting the new engine together. Nonetheless, I think they definitely know where their bread is buttered and will again try to take a strong position in the mod community.
Re:Gaming Platform by SimplexO · 2003-04-21 15:25 · Score: 4, Insightful

HL makes a world class gaming platform. It's just an operating system for games.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Half-Life was a wonderful game. It was Game of the year in almost every gaming magazine that year. The next year, there were so many bad games that numerous Game of The Year descriptions cited the fact that they wanted something more like Half-Life or maybe even Half-Life again!

Half-Life was such a phenomenal game, that it became the ideal development platform for mod's first and foremost because of its HUGE user base. Everybody and their mom who played single-player computer games had Half-Life. If you wanted the best exposure you could get, make a mod for Half-Life.

There was also the added bonus that VALVe didn't just drop their product on the world and count the Jeffersons. As many know, they included patches that fixed game play performance, added mods, solidified their own mods, made (in my opinion) the best non-broadband network code ever, and then supported the popular mods.

Counter-Strike eclipsed Half-Life because of the replay-ability inherent in multi-player games. That doesn't mean that Half-Life was one of the best games many people have ever played.

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Re:Gaming Platform by SimplexO · 2003-04-21 15:32 · Score: 2, Informative

Wrong, it was based off of the Quake 1 engine, but added the same things that id added into their Quake 2 engine, so it looked a whole lot like Quake 2.

This is why we say that Elite Force uses the Quake 3 engine, but Half-Life uses the Half-Life engine.

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Re:Heavily mod'ed Q2^H1 by Osty · 2003-04-21 14:22 · Score: 4, Informative

The HalfLife engine was a heavily modified QuakeII engine - and as I understand it many of the modifications Valve made were done in such a fashion to make them very tied to the Windows API.

s/QuakeII/Quake/. Somebody always gets this wrong when Half-Life is mentioned. Half-Life was based on the Quake 1 engine. Yes, it heavily modified the engine (skeletal animation, better lighting and hardware acceleration, particles, etc), but in the end it's still based on the Quake 1 engine. Most people confuse this, since Half-Life was released shortly after Quake 2 (IIRC, Q2 was Christmas 97, while Half-Life was Spring 98 -- off the top of my head, so probably wrong). Of course, just thinking about it for a second would prove that HL wasn't based on Q2 -- If HL was released so soon after Q2, how could Valve have had time to modify the Q2 engine, as well as provide all of the necessary IP in formats Q2 would accept (models, maps, textures, etc)? History repeats itself -- SiN and Soldier of Fortune were based off of the Q2 engine (so were Daikatana and Anachronox, but those are bad examples simply because Q3-based games launched before they did), and they came after Q2 by a year or more, and without the major engine modifications Half-Life had. Alice, FAKK2, and RTCW were Q3-based games, and they came a year or more after Q3. Valve must be some kind of special, then, if they can highly modify the Q2 engine and launch within months of the official release of the Q2 engine (not supported by the length of time it's taken them to develop HL2 and the later-than-DNF TeamFortress 2).

Maybe now is not the time by sielwolf · 2003-04-21 14:22 · Score: 2, Interesting

But what the hell happened to Team Fortress 2?

Is this the first time vaporware has been deprecated?

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What is music when you despise all sound?

Bugger by mlk · 2003-04-21 14:24 · Score: 5, Funny

I'd finally got my life back in order, no more CS'ing & TFC'ing til the wee-morning hours. I was clean, CLEAN...

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Wow, I should not post when knackered.

Vaporware has to exist... by drzhivago · 2003-04-21 14:28 · Score: 3, Interesting

How is it that Half-Life 2 could be considered vaporware? A product is only vaporware if it was publicly announced by the maker, and Half-Life 2 was never mentioned by Valve until today.

Sure, rabid fanboys have been speculating about it for years, but that doesn't qualify it as vaporware.

Give it 2 years before calling it that! Considering they plan to have it out by year's end, it should never get that far.

slashdot + game news = wenis by mayns · 2003-04-21 14:32 · Score: 2, Insightful

I love getting my gaming news from slashdot. My favourite part is when nearly half of the comments are along the lines of "I don't think they're going to release this game on BeOS, so therefore I hate it and want nothing to do with it!" I feel like every one of these posts is off-topic. You don't see people commenting on movie news lamenting the fact that new movies don't come out on Betamax. What makes gaming magically different. Would people prefer a topic distinction between Windows gaming and anything else so they don't have to sully their eyes looking at news about products coming out on a Microsoft OS? Face it folks. Until linux gets a much bigger userbase, games developers will focus on Windows. So games news will be about Windows 9 times out of 10. If the topic is gaming and linux, then go right ahead and have your say. But being negative in a post about an upcoming Windows game due to the fact that it's a windows game is verging on trollish.

Biggest competition by LeiGong · 2003-04-21 14:33 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Catch-22 by NetDrain · 2003-04-21 14:49 · Score: 2, Insightful

Don't you realize that until companies actually support one or two other major platforms those platforms will continue to have minority market shares?

The only thing my Mac truly lacks is games. Not that I really care, though -- as a college student, I -really- need to be doing other things (like replying to a /, troll instead of doing physics homework (I guess that shows how much I don't want to do it.)) Anyway, your logic, if I can call it that, is severely flawed.

Re:Screenshot by NotAnotherReboot · 2003-04-21 15:20 · Score: 5, Informative

PC Gameplay's cover has been released at:
http://www.pcgameplay.be/
And if that female in the background is from the game, it appears that perhaps there will be a sidekick for Gordon (wild speculation).

I'm not sure why your "leaked" shot has the top of it blurred out, you can see an unblurred version at:
http://www.gamez.nl/content/artwork.phtml?sho tid=0 &nieuwsid=5587

Shouldn't the name this game... by lhbtubajon · 2003-04-21 15:38 · Score: 3, Funny

...One-Quarter Life?

Sorry.

First Master of Orion 3, now this? by Luxviaest · 2003-04-21 15:54 · Score: 2, Funny

Ask yourselves, can the apocalypse be far off?

Not on GameSpy by sprayNwipe · 2003-04-21 16:02 · Score: 4, Funny

It hasn't been /.'ed, you've just been put into the patented GameSpy/FilePlanet queue system. Your web page will be served to you in

87

minutes. When you are at the front of the queue, you will have 60 seconds to click the link to view the webpage, otherwise you will have to re-enter the queue.

Re:Not on GameSpy by traskjd · 2003-04-21 19:55 · Score: 2, Informative

They make their money by the fact that you get to SKIP the queues if you pay.

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What the...? by Overly+Critical+Guy · 2003-04-21 16:10 · Score: 2, Insightful

Where did all these ignorant fruits come from?

Where were you when Half-Life came out and rejuvenated single player, and all the game magazines gave it game of the year and wouldn't stop raving about it? Half-Life revolutionized gaming when everyone was going multiplayer-only with Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. How could you have missed this game? It was only the hugest freaking thing for years. The fact a bunch of popular mods came out for it is just a mere side effect. Half-Life made a lot of gaming companies go back to the drawing board (id Software included).

Yep, it's even a better game than Counter Strike. Counter Strike is overhyped and overrated, a breeding ground for high schoolers with broadband and a handful of cheats. Counter Strike will never freak me out like, say, Half-Life's giant tentacle creature tapping at the metal, or the helicopters dropping troops to take you down, or the bizarre alien factories and weirdness of Xen and the final battle at the end ("The truth you will never know"...I'm hoping the sequel really explains what the hell exactly happened at Black Mesa). Enemies even used scent to track you and battled using herd behavior. Human troops would scatter and run for cover if you tossed them a grenade.

I've never seen better designed aliens or creepier labs or weirder alien dimensions than in Half-Life. The game just got better and better as I played it. Go back to your multiplayer mods.

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"Sufferin' succotash."

Re:What the...? by ArmyOfFun · 2003-04-21 16:15 · Score: 3, Interesting

For me, the two defining moments in HL were being heard and then shot at while crawling throgh the air duct. And when crawling through a water pipe when a soldier opens the other end, sticks a bomb in there and shuts the pipe again. My jaw was on the floor after those two moments...

Isn't that kind of premature... by tangent3 · 2003-04-21 16:26 · Score: 2, Insightful

...to announce a release date of THIS year, considering that they haven't even gotten Condition Zero and Team Fortress II out of the door yet?

Re:A good game? by Peterus7 · 2003-04-21 16:35 · Score: 3, Interesting

I hope the same. It was the gameplay, yes... But also the graphics really created a certain feeling. That's why I couldn't stand the graphics upgrade: The scientists didn't look like such chrome domes! I love the stylized look of half life, and I hope they do all in their power to save that.

Another thing I contribute to Half Life's success is that the protagonist is instead of a buff army guy, a physics nerd. You can't go wrong there!

Re:A good game? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-04-21 16:46 · Score: 2, Funny

You mean $6000 of ATI stock.

Oops, I mean $5000.

Hrm by RightInTheNeck · 2003-04-21 17:12 · Score: 4, Interesting

I dont know much about game engines, but I wonder if all games created using the Unreal/Quake ect engines must be shooters? Could it be used to make a whole new Myst/Riven type of game? Would be interesting. I miss those great Zack McCraken type games.

hl2 vs doom 3 - from a story perspective. by heff · 2003-04-21 17:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

I'm not sure if the folks at ID software working on doom 3 are going to be able to beat the folks at valve in terms of immersive storytelling and player interaction.

Let's face it, quake I and II weren't all that immersive, quake III wasn't even in the category.

Half Life was so revolutionary because it brought the story telling/involvement aspect to into a stale shoot-em-up line up.

Now with half life 2 and doom 3 possibly coming out around the same time, I think it's going to be interesting to see if ID can make a game as immersive as half life and also to see if valve can exceed half life and make half-life 2 even better.

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|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)

Re:A good game? by Jonner · 2003-04-21 17:36 · Score: 2, Insightful

I know Freeman was supposed to be a "physics nerd" according to the story, but was he really? He could wield any weapon thrown at him with ease, was very athletic, and didn't have access to areas where other scientists did. Of course, none of these by itself would mean he wasn't a scientist, but to me, it always seemed a thin part of the story.

Consider that at the beginning of the game, Morgan goes into the hazardous area of the "tank" to do some grunt work--push a sample into the beam. Maybe he was more a high-level technician than a scientist.

Of course, the story didn't have to be immaculate to make for good game play. I spent $50 for Half-Life and Opposing Force and it was the best value I ever got on software. I still play free mods like Counter Strike, Day of Defeat, and FireArms. Since HL runs quite well on Wine and my cheap 16MB Vanta card, I won't be buying many new games. Of course, since there are so many people running HL servers on GNU/Linux, maybe Sierra/Valve will finally decide it's worth it to make a real port of the entire game, at which time I'll need a new GPU.

I wonder if they will fix the bad things about H/L by Dolemite_the_Wiz · 2003-04-21 17:44 · Score: 2, Insightful

1)Scripting.

Allowing clients to script just about everything possible has given an unfair advantage to the average player. Taking this out will even the playing field.

2)Mapping

That and it would be nice to create maps that don't rely on Right Angles (like circles!!). Also, it takes almost 3 months to create a good map. This is ridiculous!!!

3)Hacks

Valve has been known to take forever to address hacks and other exploits (which is the reason why I stopped playing CS). Cheating Death has stepped up where Valve has failed. To get and keep players, hacks and cheats need to be addressed and patched ASAFP.

I know there are others but these are the biggies in H/L.

Dolemite
______________________

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And this means.... what exactly? by nobodyman · 2003-04-21 18:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

Hey, TF2 also appeared at E3... in 1999. It's still not out. Valve has not had an official comment since 2001. So, why is anyone getting excited about this announcement?

Don't get me wrong. Half-life was a good game. Still is. It's so good, in fact, that it has spawned a grass-roots development community that has been incredibly prolific.

Still though, I've lost patience. In five years, Valve has made one game. ONE GAME. That's only one more game than I've made and I'm not even trying.

Oh, they've also become quite good at taking the mod's and add-ons developed by other people and putting them in cardboard boxes. Kudos, Valve. Oh, and there's Steam: their nifty content delivery mechanism for downloading that one game they've made.

In short, I'll believe it when I see it.

Re:Halo would be a bad comparison.... by Doktor+Memory · 2003-04-21 18:14 · Score: 4, Funny

FPS games will mean nothing after this game, unless they can come up with their own massive multiplayer feature.

Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking after finishing up the original Half-Life: "This game was okay, but what it really needed was more 13-year-olds asking me "A/S/L?! HAHAHAHA F4G0T!!!" every five minutes.

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News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.

Re:A good game? by Jonner · 2003-04-21 18:28 · Score: 2, Insightful

ESR model? You mean Eric the Gun Nut? Like I said, none of those things by itself means Gordon (oops, my bad: Morgan sounds like Gordon) isn't a scientist; it just seems a little stretched, especially since all of the other scientists are pure stereotypes and cower in fear if they even hear a loud sound. In fact, all of the characters are stereotypes--unthinkingly hostile Marine grunts; quiet, invisible, agile black ops; pansy (timid, not homosexual), white-lab-coated scientists; and bizarre, hostile aliens--except Gordon. A few less stereotypical NPC's would make it more interesting. Note that I'm not knocking the game; I wouldn't care enough to comment if I didn't love the game.

Also, if he's a PhD and fully part of the research, why do the other scientists have to hold his hand during the experiment? I guess he's probably the most junior member, so he does the grunt work. Having a PhD in a project of all PhD's wouldn't give you any status.

Easy questions by Rui+del-Negro · 2003-04-21 18:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

Didn't you play the game? If so, why are you asking questions that have such obvious answers?

Initially, the character (Dr. Gordon Freeman) wants to settle into his new job. At this point, there is no-one standing in the way of his goals.

The first unexpected event happens when the experiment goes wrong. Part of the lab is destroyed, and what remains is infested with aliens. At this point, the aliens and the destruction stand in his way and his goal is to contact people on the outside.

Eventually, he manages to find his way outside, and that's when another unexpected event takes place: the people who were supposed to save him and the other scientists are in fact trying to kill them to keep the whole affair secret. At this point, the soldiers stand in his way, and his goal is to try to learn as much as possible about the situation, and how to solve it.

Eventually, he finds a way to teleport to the alien's planet (which must count as another "unexpected event"). Now his enemies are once more the aliens, and his goal is to destroy them.

Finally, at the very end of the game, there's a final "unexpected event".

So there.

Half-life's story isn't "great" in the sense that it's very original (it's not). The great thing about it is not the story itself, it's the way it flows so naturally and feels so much part of the game, despite the fact that the game's genre is not one typically associated with "a story".

Half-life is essentially an action game. It's not an adventure, it's not a RPG. There are no dialogues and no items. Just guns, monsters, puzzles and the occasional scripted "scene". Given these building blocks, I think HL manages to create a great atmosphere and (apart from the rather weak and predictable ending) to tell a pretty entertaining story (a lot better - more interesting and more consistent - than some movies).

HL's great strength is not its originality, it's the level of perfection and polishing of every single of its elements, from the gameplay to the default keyboard layout to the auto-save system. Things that stem not from great technology or brilliant ideas but from a lot of playtesting, a good dose of common sense, and a refusal to settle for "good enough" just to meet the deadline.

As someone wrote at the time, "Half-life restored my faith in gaming". After fiascos like Black & White and Neverwinter Nights (not exactly bad, but very disappointing nonetheless), I could definitely use a new injection of Valve fluid.

It's ironic that the company that created such a perfect game (and later created and financed so many great free updates and mods) was founded by ex-Microsoft employees...

RMN
~~~

Re:Easy questions by nocturbulous · 2003-04-21 21:03 · Score: 2, Insightful

'HL's great strength is not its originality, it's the level of perfection and polishing of every single of its elements, from the gameplay to the default keyboard layout to the auto-save system. Things that stem not from great technology or brilliant ideas but from a lot of playtesting, a good dose of common sense, and a refusal to settle for "good enough" just to meet the deadline' *thumbs up*

On the subject of mods and gameplay by syphoon · 2003-04-21 20:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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