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Half-Life 2 Episode Two Stats Now Online
To go along with its recent hardware survey, Valve has released stats from Half-Life 2: Episode Two . The page notes the most common achievements, as well as the deadliest places in the game. Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs blog spells out a few of the results for us: "The median completion time hits at exactly five hours, with some noteworthy variance between four and seven hours. Average play session time logged was 27 minutes. The average number of deaths spikes significantly at two specific maps during the final two levels with an average of 11 deaths per section, as well; and looking at the topographical maps at some very specific locations on the maps as well. 73.1 percent of users playing were doing so with Direct X 9.0 SM3, and 72.6 percent played the game on medium."
I didn't read the stats yet but I can guess the deadliest place is when you have to defend the missle silo from the stikers (those huge walkers with a little body up top and two massive guns.
I'm assuming that the 73.1% using directx 9 means that 26.9% were using directx 10. If that's the case, doesn't this mean that vista adoption is higher among gamers, those who are usually more technically adept? IMHO, that's the most interesting tidbit right there.
An alternate interpretation is that a large number of the computer playing HL2:2 were bought from a large retailer rather than built by the owner. I'm seeing a lot of potential with those statistics if combined with more information, like the rate of old OS reuse, etc.
When a submitter writes a sentence like "Valve releases game stats" then one would think that would point to the site where Valve actually released the game stats. A more accurate sentence would be "Arstechnica 'analyzes' Valve's released game stats".
Or you could just link to the actual stats:
http://steamgames.com/status/ep2/ep2_stats.php
I play FPS games often and I like well made single player action (I rarely play commercial games online). It seems to be a trend that the length is cut down to a few hours gameplay, usually in the last years the avarage length was about 10-15 hours (which is not very long) for a linear shooter game.
I didn't play episode 1 and 2 (because I wasn't satisfied with HL2 anyway), so 5 hours gameplay seems to be a rip-off for me.
These processors are odd... 1 0.00 % Unspecified 1 0.00 % CentaurHauls 5 0.00 % GenuineBMCpu 1 0.00 % Also, is there any way to tell the number of WINE users from this survey?
...they're tracking your gaming? And we're left to hope that they don't track much else? Does anyone else find something suspiciously wrong with this? Is there anyway to turn it off?
Here's an interesting bit from the achievement stats. Apparently many players didn't actually finish the game. There are numerous achievements that you will get if you get to a certain point in the game. Let's see:
Acid Reflex: 81%. While you *may*, I believe, get through those levels without killing an acid antlion, it's extremely difficult. With 19% of players not getting this achievement, I'd bet that's at least 17% that never got far enough, and that's close to the beginning of the game.
Twofer: 63%, and you'll get this achievement when you progress far enough. Ditto for "Meet the Hunters", 61% - here it looks like a third of players didn't make it this far.
Gunishment and Quiet Mountain Getaway, 59% and 58%. Looks like those who make it past the first third or so of the game mostly continue to go forward. You can complete the game without getting Gunishment but it's tricky and is a glitch.
Finally: Defense of the Armament, at 48%. You get the achievement for winning the game's last (and truly spectacular) battle. So it'd seem like half the players who started the game didn't finish it, interesting.
It's obvious to me why not many have finished this game- the orange box! The first game I played when I got it was Portal, then I played an hour or so of Episode 2. I'm more likely to revisit Portal for the challenge levels then slog through the second two thirds of Episode 2, though I'll probably get around to it in the next few months.
What really sealed the deal against finishing the game was TF2. Every time I think about finishing Episode 2, I think of how much more fun it would be to play a few rounds of TF2 instead. Even though there are only a few maps, the team-based play never gets old. I would really like to see a stat of hours of TF2 played vs. Episode 2, for those players that have both installed.
And trust me, never again will I go through the trouble of installing pretty things into my computer. It's just not worth the effort. It only gives an awe factor once for about 30 seconds. I'll save the rice for my car (assuming my wife will allow it... whooped I am).
However, the liquid cooling is well worth it. In order to get my 13% overclock previously, I had to install some AC fans that sounded like a lawn mower, I kid you not. And it caused so much dust I had to clean out every month. With the liquid cooling (fluidXP = no maintenance unless it leaks, for up to 3 years) I spend maybe $50 more than those fans and get an almost silent PC with the same overclock. And if I really want to kick it up a notch (BAM!), I can turn up the speed of the fans and get even more "value" out of my CPU.
The way I see it, if a mere $50 doubles the value of my CPU for a fourth the price, it's worth it.
Resistance is futile. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. You will become one with the morgue
I'm pretty sure profit is the primary reason. It almost always is. Any additional benefits would be secondary.
Valve is a for-profit company. If they did anything else, they would be failing in their mission.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Resistance is futile. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. You will become one with the morgue
I currently have an AMD Athlon X2 3800+ with 2GB RAM and a GeForce 6800 XT but the game seems really choppy at times, even in 1024x768. Can anyone give me a recommendation of what video card that I can purchase which will make Halflife 2 (mainly TF2) quicker? I don't want to spend more than about $200, just need something that is a little quicker. Thanks.
You don't get achivements if you are cheating or in commentary mode, or if you are playing the game without an active internet connection. I know this is how I played Episode 2 so I don't have that achievement.
By the chart, it looks like 5 hours is the most common game completion time (i.e. mode), not the median completion time, which appears to be above 5 hours.
Similar to those "death maps", they need to show all of the common places where players zoom in on Alyx's butt.
I love the death map of the first level (red spot at the bottom right): all those people jumping off the cliff like lemmings
And this one (green spot at the bottom left, where Dog fights the Strider): "Oooh, robot fight! Let's watch... uhoh! *squish*"
And last (greenish blue at the top, where the rocket takes off): it seems that several people wanted to become astronauts, they even went through walls just to get on that rocket ("Wait for meeeee...!")
The commentary mentions that HL2 EP2 does use some of the features that are supposed to be limited to DirectX10 through some "back door" calls in DX9. I don't know enough about the architecture to know exactly what's going on, but it did sound like they use some of the DX10 features on the graphics cards, without requiring the DX10 API it (and thus Vista).
I just took the hardware survey through my Ubuntu desktop a few days ago, and got lumped together in the Vista category since that's the Windows version my Wine config reports to Steam. Considering Steam doesn't include a Linux option in their survey, anyone running Steam through Wine (which works very well btw) will be reported as whatever version they have chosen. (I tried setting my config to Windows 2.0 to fill out the survey, but Steam refused to start...) Of course it's probably not too significant of a number overall, but it does need to be mentioned that there was no way to specify that you were running under a different OS than automatically detected. I would guess that Wine users would skew the Vista percentage upwards compared to the XP results, if they are anywhere near evenly split (I forget the default Windows version setting in Winecfg but I think it might have been Vista).
i killed all of the grubs halfway before i noticed that the achievement wasn't being properly recorded.. apparently you can't play in offline mode and track achievements (even tho i was), it looks like steam thought i wasn't connected to steam and therefore ignored the tracking..
When i resumed playing a day later it did track the events but i was already a good ways through the game...
Where did I say otherwise?
"primary" != "only"
Producing crap usually cuts into one's profit quite a bit (unless you're Microsoft or a phone company, ha-ha). Indeed, in a competitive free market, making the best product is often the best way to make the best profit. A great many professionals take a lot of pride in their work. That doesn't mean profit isn't the primary goal.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.