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Half-Life 2 Interview Illuminates
As part of the continuing Half-Life 2 media blitz, GameSpy has an interview with Valve's Doug Lombardi about the much-heralded FPS sequel. This insightful interview has info on who'll be returning: "A few of your friends from Black Mesa are in Half-Life 2, and they are sort of immediately your allies; like some of the scientists and Barney the security guard character", as well as more on system requirements: "I think that Valve tries very hard to support as far back with system as we humanly can, and in this case we're going back to a Pentium II 800 with 128mb of RAM, but as get up to a Pentium 4 class you'll see better water and better effects." Meanwhile, the third direct-feed Half-Life 2 movie, 'Kleiner's Lab', is available via Steam, Gamers Hell, BitTorrent via GameTab, and most of the other usual online stockists.
IE people with slow computers will force the whole community to play to the lowest common denominator. They will have the settings so low that fog and grass and trees and rain and whatever else will disappear, leaving anyone with a system powerful enough to handle these things at a disadvantage. Thanks valve. I wish you would leave some of these old PC's behind. It is 2003 already.
Look at what they did with Enemy Territory. It includes punkbuster and through pb settings an admin can limit how much a client can play with their cvars and still be allowed on that server. This makes sure everyone sees the same rain and fog and trees and grass. If you were a serious gamer you wouldn't be rocking a PII 800.
Valve has just basically invited (and really forced) everyone to stay in Half-life 1 level graphics for another generation.