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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?
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)
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.
:) , 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.
But hey, I think Doom]|[ will be released before this year is over
YOU SUCK BALLS!
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
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
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.
that pig just fly by?
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'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
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!
/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.. ***
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!
***
-- super ugly ultraman
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. ;)
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.
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
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).
I'd finally got my life back in order, no more CS'ing & TFC'ing til the wee-morning hours. I was clean, CLEAN...
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
"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
"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
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.
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).
PC Gameplay's cover has been released at:
o tid=0 &nieuwsid=5587
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?sh
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.
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.
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.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
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
~~~
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.