Highlighting HL2 Episode One's Commentary Track

Via GameSetWatch, an article on Waxy.org highlighting the great audio commentary for Half-Life 2: Episode One. The article includes a few excerpts from the experience, via flash movies. From the article: "Most of the game's 115 nodes are audio only, pointing out interesting tidbits about the scene you're currently in, such as the visual design, character dialogue, or gameplay. Some of the best examples discuss the iterations a stage or puzzle went through, why original versions didn't live up to expectations, and how they reached their final design. It's a fascinating glimpse into the minds of the developers, very much like sitting next to them as you play through at your own pace. But a few commentary nodes do much more, taking over the player's view to show them something hidden or entirely new. I've captured video from some of my favorites." Completely worth it to play through a second time to experience.

Comments

Do you have to install this?

[Future Man 3000]

Granted, I've always enjoyed easter eggs, but I have to figure audio commentary takes up a huge chunk of HDD space -- space that's already all-too-scarce when games now take multigigs to install. It's not bloat if you want it, but if you don't want it can you get rid of it?

User Created Commentary

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a great 47 minute video of great player commentary of some of the best moments of Episode One.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-779199230 4107970746

Unpleasant truth.

[SharpFang]

The idea is nice but it reveals some of the internals which are NOT pleasant. What do I mean? "Player gets rewarded by the view of...", "Here we get an opportunity to display some Alex's emotions, making her more believable", "we tried [some horrible, really dumb idea] but we got reports from betatesters that they didn't like it, so we changed it." "It is important to reward the player with praises from Alex"

The story is not a result of a talent. Talent makes the story feel real, be believable because it feels like "if it ever happened, it would happen just like this". But both HL2 and EP1 felt simply fake - engineered, where characters follow script and play emotions, where events happen from script, because you entered a trigger area, not because they should happen about then. When you enter the car you -know- the crane will fail. When you enter the house and see the lift down and a button by it, it's like it was labelled "call lift and zombies". Places, devices, locations, layouts that make no sense but play well as puzzles. (HL1 is guilty of this heavily too).

The underlying script - the concept - is good. But when it left hands of the writer, it wasn't implemented with the game written around it. It got in hands of game designers and they hammered it into the concept of a game, mangling it beyond recognition. Real world isn't split into physics puzzles, vistas, combat arenas and storytelling locations. The commentary track just makes it painfully obvious.

Re:Unpleasant truth.

[cgenman]

When you're developing a game, you rely upon certain techniques to create emotion, a sense of forboding, etc. These techniques can be as simple as "your robot pal dies here" or as complicated as having multilayered reactive music enter and drop out as conditions change. But they're all techniques. A well-scheduled plot twist here, a stat-driven character building dungeon there... all thought about down to the moment, all heavily planned, and all relying upon a simple batch of techniques that the devleopment team picked up over the years.

Of course you switch up your pacing between puzzles, vistas, combat arenas, and story-focused areas. If you were attempting to tell a story while gravity gunning a stack of laundry machines to flip a swith and police were swarming in to shoot you, you'd be at a loss for what to do. Sure, you want intense action sequences followed by relaxation points, a rollercoaster of tension and release. And of course these have to be scripted out in painstaking detail in a completely non-spontaneous way.

As I like to tell the incoming QA: "You have to give up the illusion of magic to become a magician."

Welcome to the wizard's guild, kid.