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?

[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.

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.

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.