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?

Re:Do you have to install this?

[Dr. Eggman]

Nope, its part of the package. Extracted from 1.19 GB GCF, for my out of game listening enjoyment, however it's only 68.4 MB. Not massive and I suspect the GCF has some sort of compression that means it's not really that much space.

Re:Do you have to install this?

[lolocaust]

It's part of the game's data files. I'm sure they're compressed highly, since I've compressed (to MP3) voice only sounds to really low bitrates with little perceptable loss in quality. tbh, it's probably nothing compared to the rest of the gamedata.

Re:Do you have to install this?

[Southpaw018]

HL2 shows as 841 MB on my HD; EP1 shows as an additional 606 MB (the games are independent of one another, and when you delete a game, you're free to download it later).

The Source engine core is probably another 2.5 GB. All told, my SteamApps folder, which includes Valve's ENTIRE catalog (19 games, including the entire HL and CS series) + 2 3rd party games is 15.2 GB.

Direct answer to your question: as others have said, no. This is included with the game.

Re:Do you have to install this?

[SharpFang]

Stop complaining about diskspace of the commentary track. It's relatively small and definitely a feature. Instead look into the "sound" folder and replay all the sounds that are there.

Developers sure didn't care to remove development, testing and obsolete files.

There's LOTS of quite lengthy sequences including at least two versions of every single sentence said by most major characters, including something that was scrapped from the game (secret shrine with Breen's busts collection anyone?), plethora of random sentences to be said by your squad (you get a squad of 1 or 2 for a really short piece of the game), and lots of other sounds you're never going to hear.
I really wonder if the situation is similar with the rest of the game data. Seems likely.

It needed it.

[wileyAU]

Completely worth it to play through a second time to experience.

I beat the game in less than 6 hours. Playing again with commentary added some much needed value to the package.

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.

Re:Unpleasant truth.

[SharpFang]

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.

When you write a book or a story, you may lay out the plot schedule on paper, plan every piece of action and interaction, apply plot devices at strategical points, then wear it nicely in words and you most likely get a horrible, boring, unreadable pulp. Or you write as you feel the action would progress, try to feel what the characters would feel at different points, make smart decisions for both sides of the conflict, set up traps then let the characters foresee and avoid them instead of pushing them into them, and you get some great reading.
The golden rule of GOOD books is: Know the genre conventions, then BREAK them in original and interesting manner. Same is true about good games: make the player used to certain idea then turn everything upside down. If you just follow the old tools of the trade, the result is boring.

Re:Unpleasant truth.

[cgenman]

Most of the gaming companies I know hire writers specifically. The problem isn't that writers aren't involved, the problem is that writing for games is very different than writing for other mediums.

For a short run-down: Dialog needs to be very, very short in games. It needs to be visual. You need to define characters in ways that don't conflict with player initiated actions. You need to integrate real gameplay sequences (which would normally be terrible writing). You need to establish and stick to a palette of expressive animations. You need to write your plot for all of the possible ways that the player can traverse through that plot, and ensure that conflicting information and worldstate is never achieved. It needs to be paced for 20 - 40 hours. It needs to be technically possible to implement on a budget, which means paradoxically that flying through space is OK but fabric falling to the floor is not. It needs to be modular enough that when you cut two sections for time from the final game, the plot still makes sense. And it needs to "feel" right when you've moved your sequence from ten lines on a page to eight months later when you have a character running and jumping and dying.

A friend of mine just finished a project which had hired a big-name and well skilled author to write scripts for his game, and the results were functionally unusable. He just didn't get the structure of gaming, the non-linearity of it, and the types of things which can be effectively communicated or done in the digital realm.

Game writers need to have strong backgrounds in game design, and more than a little programming, art knowledge, and production. Oh, and they have to be amazing writers. That's a pretty rare overlap of skills. They had to dump him, hire a lesser known hollywood writer, dump him, then hire a game designer with a writing background to finish up.

Most gaming companies that I've seen "get" that they need writers. They just have a terrible time finding the right ones.

Re:Commentary

[l33t gambler]

How about playing it with a slow-motion button so you can study the physics in greater detail?

http://jooh.no/clips.html

Just add this
bind "g" "host_timescale 1.0"
bind "q" "host_timescale 0.3"
to
Steam\SteamApps\username\half-life 2 episode one\episodic\cfg\config.cfg
You may need to enable cheats, add a sv_cheats "1" line too.

If this is software then I'm really excited about what a PPU like Ageia PhysX can do. Wreak havoc with explosive projectiles and bullet-time ability among hordes of monsters with no dip in framerate or realism. Of course, as business must grow, GPU makers like nVidia and ATI doesn't want consumers to shift focus on a dedicated physics processor and discover the fact that GPUs aren't much more then antialasing and texture effects. Gameplay is king, imagine Battlefield 2 with improved physics and twice the framerate.
Sorry off topic but us single-issue activists love to have our hot buttons pushed.