Bill Van Buren Talks Half-Life 2

node writes "Pixel Kill has up a summary of the talk Bill Van Buren recently gave in London on the development of Half-Life 2. It's an interesting insight into some of the design decisions that resulted in such a fantastic game, plus there are some bits about the direction they're taking the upcoming expansion."

Comments

Re:Can I play it

[xXBondsXx]

Half Life: Aftermath is going to be a Steam-online-distribution-exclusive product, so you're going to have to connect to "teh internets" ;-D

Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me our was that article about as informative as something not very informative?

More interesting to most slashdoterd would be the recent completion of the Alyx nude skin. You can get that here http://www.hl2world.com/bbs/160-vt16821.html?postd ays=0&postorder=asc&start=2385.

Re:Whatever

[toddestan]

Since this thread is otherwise worthless without pics, here are some I found in the forum from the parent's link:
(By the way, Captain Obvious says, "Not work safe!")

One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight

Re:Field of view

[the_weasel]

My guess (without having played) is for dramatic impact. A shorter field of view means you are more focused on what is in front of you. You have to turn more often, and you get paranoid about your surroundings.

Take it too far and its just annoying - done right, and its super scary.

The scariest scenes in Alien (and other horror movies) take place in tight narrow hallways and crawlspaces for some of the same reasons.

Re:Too Much Realism?

[Hockney Twang]

Have a look at this rather in-depth analysis of the topic you mention. Not certain if the author is a post-grad or not. I'm also fairly certain that this is only one of a growing body of works on the subject.

Re:In case of Slashdotting

[Will Sargent]

A low slashdot id is not a sign of intelligence.

Re:Actually, overall the game sucks

[Nogami_Saeko]

Hmm... I had quite the opposite experience.

I purchased it via steam - entered my credit card number, and the game was streamed to my HD over the course of a few weeks leading-up to release without me having to do anything (except reload the steam client occasionally to trigger a download).

On release day, the game unlocked itself at 12:01am and was ready to play about 10 minutes later. No problem.

I'm quite happy with how it works. I have steam installed on my office computer now too and I can play CS/HL in my office when I get bored and have some time to kill. Fully authorized and patched just by logging-in from another location.

So for me, steam worked just fine. And now that they've started to ban asshat cheaters FOREVER from secure servers using VAC2 (no debates, no account unlocks - if a cheat is detected, you never play a source game on a secure server online again unless you pay for a completely new copy and create a new steam account), it's making things even more desireable for us honest players...

N.