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Gabe Newell Understands Half-Life Fans, Not Promising Any Sequels
jones_supa writes Half-Life 3 is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated games in history. While Valve transitioned from the revolutionary series that brought the company most of its original success, to online games like Team Fortress, Dota and Left 4 Dead, people still desperately want to believe that there is more coming for Half-Life.
In a recent podcast interview he had with Geoff Keighley, Valve CEO Gabe Newell opens up the current situation a bit more: "I'm a fan of TV shows, I'm a fan of writers, I'm a fan of movies, I'm a fan of games and I certainly understand why people are like, you know, hey I remember this awesome experience and I'm starting to get worried that I'm never going to have it again. I am a fan of Terry Pratchett and he has Alzheimer's, it's like, Oh my god, I may never get another great Discworld novel. [...] We aren't going to go all retro because there are too many interesting things that have been learned. The only reason we would go back and do a 'super classic' kind of product is if a whole bunch of people internally at Valve said they wanted to do it, and had a reasonable explanation for why it was."
In a recent podcast interview he had with Geoff Keighley, Valve CEO Gabe Newell opens up the current situation a bit more: "I'm a fan of TV shows, I'm a fan of writers, I'm a fan of movies, I'm a fan of games and I certainly understand why people are like, you know, hey I remember this awesome experience and I'm starting to get worried that I'm never going to have it again. I am a fan of Terry Pratchett and he has Alzheimer's, it's like, Oh my god, I may never get another great Discworld novel. [...] We aren't going to go all retro because there are too many interesting things that have been learned. The only reason we would go back and do a 'super classic' kind of product is if a whole bunch of people internally at Valve said they wanted to do it, and had a reasonable explanation for why it was."
Just announce Half Life 2: Episode Three: Blue Shift 2. You once again play as Barney, this time explaining where he was and what he was doing in Episode Two. Everyone would love you for this.
seems they ended it with a cliffhanger and now they dont know how to end it
How about... oh I don't know... to finish the story?
But Gabe!....It's not the developers who pay the millions for the game...the devs will do whatever you tell'em to do. The Internet has been abuzz with insane amounts of comments from gamers begging for HL3 for years.....how can there not be enough evidence to make it obvious HL3 would be a monumental success...(if on par with previous versions)?
Maybe working on HL3 is what you need at this time of your life.....you know,...something to get those creative juices flowing ....it'll make you feel young again.....HONEST!
Just do it....you'll see!!
I agree.. they left the last episode hanging, that was no ending. It just doesn't do a great game series justice to cut it off like that. If nothng else, release a rendered video short of the Earth falling to the Combine or something (or vice versa), but wrap it up somehow!
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
At this point, those gamertards are probably in their late 30's. Seriously, it's starting to be a long time now.
It very much reads like they have no intention of doing another one. Which is actually fine, but why play coy? It's not like they ended the series in any sort of final way. People like the series and wanted to play again.
Something makes me wonder if Gabe developed a personal issue with the series and just doesn't want to do another one. That or they have something big up their sleeve and want HL3 to be the flagship title for that thing, whatever it is.
Heck, if there's nothing else you want to do with the gameplay, write a novel (or, probably better, get a well-known SF writer to do it) to give it all a proper ending.
There's an existing horde of people clamoring to buy Valve's sequel/product sight-unseen. They don't want a stupid VR headset or overpriced Linux gamerbox thingy, yet Valve is wasting resources at various dead ends, instead of updating the product category that brought them success and relevance.
With so many awesome games out now, plus the backlog of 2014 and 2013, I just don't care about HL3 anymore, and I suspect most gamers are in the same boat.
Secondly, it'll invariably suck simply because people's expectations are just ridiculously high after so much time waiting. Look no further than Doom 3 or Diablo 3 for evidence.
If we raise 1 million dollars, we can send a team of people to help Terry Pratchett write another Discworld novel, making Gabe so happy he approves work on Half-Life 3.
Well, Gabe, Half-Life 3 wouldn't be "Retro" if you hadn't WAITED SO FREEKIN LONG!
Let's be honest... we love Valve because of Half Life, and GabeN's voice through the years.
That's been gone for a long time. They are a money machine now, and their Steam platform is basically a printing press for said money. Where are the improvements to the Steam platform? When you rank behind EA in customer service, you have to think that there's something amiss.
Don't get me wrong, I love Valve games, I love Steam not because it's a great platform (it's actually pretty shit), but because I have a whole bunch of games at a cheap price. The communication tools ingame are pretty terrible, the game updates themselves are pretty terrible (coming from a CSGO player), and they make exceptions to their marketplace to allow bots to trade, so they can keep a very shady betting scene from the likes of CSGOLounge/DotaLounge going strong. After all, they get a cut of every marketplace transaction. It's also the reason for the big push behind Steam Machines, which are positioned so that the likes of Microsoft and the Xbox/Windows integration to an app store (and games!) never competes. In short, Valve isn't that "indy" group of lovable "gamers who make games" any more -- they are a pretty ruthless business.
Long story short... I don't care about Half Life 3. That's about something that isn't even here yet. I care more about their attention to the games they have out now, engagement with the community (which is how they got this big to start), and a start to a conversation with the gamers. Half Life 3 will come when it comes; I am sure Valve wants to get it out too so they can cash in another big check.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I'd laugh if they made a game with 3 in the title, some stylized 3, and they only show that at the beginning.
Then make some trailer that almost looks like it could be HL3, 3 flashes on the screen, the entire audience gasp in excitement, "3 days" (or similar) shows on the screen, and it turns out to be not HL related at all, but a whole new IP.
The absolute rage that day would ripple through time and unexist reality.
We have passed the point where Half-Life 3 could be welcomed with anything except massive criticism no matter how good it might be. It has taken on a life of it's own and if it wasn't so good that just being installed on your PC made you see visions of Jesus riding unicorns firing rockets at Santa Clause riding sharks firing lasers it would be scored a 0/10 - IGN. Seriously, it could never be warmly received after all these years.
I think they got conscious of their success and realized that they could not live up to the hype.
Look at Duke Nukem: the sequel took forever and... sucked. Well, not exactly sucked, but it was just mediocre, which was worse than sucking. It was supposed to be the Messiah of Games and ended up being a Wal-Mart bargain bin special.
Half Life, as a series, still has the same kind of aura that Doom and Duke Nukem had gathered about themselves. It hasn't been ruined yet: in fact, it's been augmented by the Portal series, which wasn't a sequel but rather a symbiotic addition. The words "Half Life" raise an expectation in the audience, and Gabe knows that HL3 would have trouble living up to that expectation. He doesn't want to be responsible for the next Duke Nukem Forever.
One problem with this kind of series is that it was so successful that an average sequel will not cut it.
Whatever comes out better be excellent or it will trashed by the gaming community. They cannot afford to have the kind of game which would be labelled as 'quite good' if it was made by an indie developer.
Another issue is caused by the time that went past after the second instalment: times change and what was ok as a FPS may be not appeal to the new gamers or may be considered as archaic when comparing to the new games. Now people expect better AI, destructible environments, the focus of FPS is shifting more towards multiplayer including coop mode. Since changing the game concepts is likely to attract the ire of the hardcore fans, the more you wait the more you are stuck between a rock and a hard place: it becomes increasingly difficult to please fans of the previous game and newer players since the first category wants probably the same game with minor improvements and the latter just want an AAA game which could best titles such as BF or CoD.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
HL2 ended with a fucking cliff hanger FFS! We were left thinking that it's time to take it to where the baddies live. What's so desperate to believe they intended to make a third installment? I always assumed that we'd see HL3 when they came out with their Source 2 gaming engine. Now Gabe's talking like HL is "retro" and the article makes it sound as if Valve has no intention to make new games that are single player. Personally, after reading that article, I hope they don't release a new HL. Gabe comes off as a major asshole who forgot that they set up the whole ending of HL2 as a segue to a sequel and is now acting like anyone who wants them to finish their story is a sorry ass loser. So fuck them. I don't buy many games, and haven't bought a Valve game since Portal2 and will make damn sure that's my last Valve purchase ever unless HL3 is released and they stop talking about their customers like they are worthless trash who are idiots for wanting a finished story when left with a cliff hanger.
DNF changed hands, was abandoned, resurrected, revamped, rewritten, etc. with the details in public before it ever got close to a release. The screenshots from 10 years before look NOTHING like the final game at all. At some point, someone just said "Let's push anything and live off the scam to at least recoup our money".
HL3 doesn't have that legacy. Same guys (probably not exactly, but near enough). Same software. Same engine. Same designers. Same artists. Same programmers. Same company. No hype. No feature promises. No screenshots, even. A company making money hand-over-fist outside of game development to invest into the game. It's a totally different scenario (which makes it much more frustrating).
At this point a HDR HL2 sequel that was written in the same engine, same quality of graphics and game style with a few gimmicks would go down just as well and you can just say "This is Episode 3, the same as Episode 1 and 2 but finishing the story somewhat, and Half-Life 3 will come out later".
That they don't do this makes me think they have something planned. SteamOS maybe? I don't know. But I'd rather they kept the HL universe alive with some "expansion" to HL2 than cocked-up HL3 in the same way as DNF. I can't imagine them doing either, though.
This. With half life 2 they set it up for multiple equals and the never ended it.
It's like R.R. Martin just giving up at the second to last book because "he's learned so much" and now he's going to write something else.
Can someone mod parent down for being an arse ? :)
People hate Valve's customer service, sure, but across my 5 accounts (including my kids accounts) I have never had a reason to need support on Steam. I have bought 3 EA games in the last decade and have had to contact EA support 4 times. They were helpful each time. But which company gave me better customer service? The one that made a system where I don't need support at all, or the one that forced me to TALK ON THE PHONE like some sort of oxcart driver in order to unfuck my Sim City singleplayer online game.
Customer service scores are great and all, but if I never need support at all, that ranks much higher on my hierarchy of ratings.
The Duke Nukem release did do at least one bit of good for the community: It got everyone to stop talking about Duke Nukem Forever. Apparently some people just need closure.
I read the internet for the articles.
Valve has no commercial interest in making Half-Life 3. It's not that the game wouldn't be profitable. It almost certainly would be - lots of people would buy it. But it would risk the wider strategy they've been pursuing for a decade now.
Valve's income these days isn't from making and selling games; it's from charging other people to sell games via Steam. Seriously - you buy a game on Steam and a big slug of the price you pay goes straight to Valve. Sure, they have hosting costs, but there is a lot of pure profit in there.
Ever since Steam started to be a big thing, Valve has focussed on more niche games rather than big-budget fpses. It does not want to be seen as threatening or a rival to its biggest business partners. EA have already taken their toys and gone home to Origin; Valve's dominance of the PC gaming market relies on keeping Activision, Ubisoft and others on board.
And a big part of that is not being seen as a competitor. If Activision wants to pay Valve a lot of money to plaster the Steam front-page with a huge Call of Duty advert, then that's good for Valve. But Activision might get nervous if they worried that the platform they were using was run by a company that was actively pushing a game in competition with theirs.
Over in console-land, Sony and Microsoft's first party exclusives are generally put out there to sell consoles (not always a profitable activity in itself). They build up the installed base to get the third parties interested. The only platform-owner to really emphasise first-party games development is Nintendo, who, surprise surprise, have terrible third-party relationships.
Far easier for Valve to allow other people to put the effort in to making money for them, rather than take the risk of investing in games development to make direct income from sales. Particularly now that Steam is so ubiquitous as a platform that it doesn't need first-party games to grow the installed base.
You're a perfect illustration of the GPs point. The car/boat and gravity physics of the time were something quite different and exciting. Now of course Halo and everyone does it, but at the time, it was fairly new.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Now people expect better AI, destructible environments, the focus of FPS is shifting more towards multiplayer including coop mode.
Am I the only one who actually still prefers single-player campaign to co-op/multiplayer? I mean it's ok sometimes, and there's nothing wrong with it. But when the multiplayer fad came along it always seemed like such a tween sub-culture to me.
I have to work for a living and I have a wife & kids.... which means I don't hide in my Mommy's basement every night "pwning teh n00bs" nor do I want to associate with those morons in online game play.
I think he is saying we don't want to just make "another game" that happens to have the same characters and genre with a new subtitle. It has to really be good so we don't spoil the franchise. In order to make sure it is good we need to know why the first one was really such a big hit.
What was truly unique, what was the special sauce that made all the other ingredients truly integrate? If they can't confidently answer that they won't do it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Back when HL came out I had a buddy whom was a real life Army Ranger ( with thirteen missions on his coin) . He thought video games were for , " geeks and eggheads " . I dragged my game machine to his house and forced him play a bit of it ....several days and almost no sleep later , he came to me and said, " that was fucking AMAZING, i want to play more games like that , show me more games like that...",
and I had to hit him with that horrible gut punch ," sorry man , that's all she wrote, there aren't any other games like that ".
If you go back and play HL ( or better yet the awesome 'Black Mesa' ) and then play HL2, you will notice the trouble inherent in creative success when you jump to ep1, ep2. It's hard to remember what was the lightning and what was the lightning rod back in the beginning that forged the HL goodness.
I mean HL was based on the supposedly 'true' story of a guy claiming to be a guard ( where the idea of Barney came from ) that escaped the secret Dulce military base in New mexico . True or not some damn fine source material to work with .
In HL2 they basically explord the logical aftermath implications of the first game and added some cool bits ( mostly borrowed from other obscure places like: the gravity gun; "inspired" entirely by how the character in the game Trespasser handled objects ).
But in ep1&2 the original magic is gone, some of the levels were mind numbingly bad ( like, how many hours do I have to play in poorly lit or totally dark jump scare tunnels, or the "someone got CS:GO in my Half-life" style levels where you had no way of not being at a tactical dis-advantage as you criss-cross the same landscape again and again ).
So in Newell's case he has to say nothing. If the magic is dead and lightning cannot strike the HL franchise a third time , then he needs to keep millions of raving fanboys at home polishing their homemade gravity guns , and not say, storming his castle ( or constantly hacking steam servers ) and burning all his stuff down. Alternatively if , by some magic they were producing another lightning infused HL game ( and not just something grossly self-indulgent ) how could he possibly say anything that could be squeezed between HL3's expectations and the hype ceiling that already exists?
Perhaps he should just sell the rights to HL3 to TakeTwo or rockstar It would be interesting to see what they could do with it
There is gameplay and there is story. There is story and there is art. There is business and profit and legacy.
Why do we want HL2E3? It isn't gameplay (for the most part). We can get that anywhere. Do you pull out HL2E1 or HL2E2 (or even Black Mesa) every now and then? Yeah. It is story. It is borderline art (though my artist-wife would guffaw to read that).
Story, give us story. If no one is interested in completing it, is it because no one is interested in the story, or because no one is interested in extending the gameplay? Would it be a fulfilling experience to take their existing framework, give it to new devs as an experimental/toy playground and treat it as a "have fun" environment? Would they be able to entice a team into a non-profit-driven, do-it-for-the-fan-accolades pro bono/cover the cost experience?
Do it, Gabe. How you sell it internally ("another game release in our catalog" vs. "art and glory for the ages") HIGHLY influences how it appears to potential team members. You can sell product outside, I'm sure you can sell it inside as well.
I am like you, I was merely pointing out that the younger generation seems to prefer games this way.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
No, it wasn't. At the time it had already been done almost a decade prior by Battlefield and Tribes.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
If Microsoft can do that and provide some nice social tools to boot, then I will give them my money. Or GOG, or Humble, or anybody else. (thought the irony is with GOG/Humble is that they are usually Steam activated).
Minor correction:
HumbleBundle games often offer titles through the Steam platform, which requires you to activate their titles online first, which can be a surprise for someone who buys a game through HumbleBundle not expecting that sort of inquisition.
GOG.com never does; their chief claim to fame is that that their titles are DRM-free and are not tied down to any sort of online activation. Yes, offering products that are DRM-free as well as providing access to otherwise abandoned titles.
Erm, their two claims to fame are no DRM, great old games... and low prices. Three! Their three claims to fame are no DRM, great games, low prices... and getting those older titles to work on newer hardware. Four, no... amongst their chief claims are, erm, such elements as no DRM, great games...
Look, I'll just come in again, shall I?
If we pick on any single aspect of the game, there were far superior games released at the same time. There were games that looked better, games that played better and games with better stories. The problem was that these games only excelled at one thing. Half Life and Half Life 2 bought all of these factors together. It had great graphics, it had great gameplay and it had a great story all at the same time.
Above this, HL and HL2 both mastered the art of unobtrusive storytelling. The transition between playing and storytelling was so seamless you didn't even notice that you'd stopped playing and started listening, What makes it truly amazing is that they did the whole thing without a single cutscene that restricted the player (excluding the start cut scene), it was masterful direction that kept the player focused on the story when they still had free reign. 10 years on from HL2, few other games can do the same thing and still what sets the Half Life series apart.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I have 3 brothers, back in the day we played Doom, Doom II, Duke Nukem, Quake, Quake II and Unreal coop with 2 to 4 of us doing the whole game. Half Life came along and Coop was out the window, we fired up "Multiplayer" and found ourselves in a warehouse with a bunch of guns, no monsters and no way out, like, WTF do we do now!???
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
The best stories have no "ending". Because a wrapped up sort of endings always feel a bit cliche and thin. But with so many possibilities open, it allows for user/player interpretation.
Nice try Gabe.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it