This echoes what Yahtzee said about the game years later, and it still rings true: Half-Life is such a powerful experience precisely because you never leave the shoes of Freeman. Its story interleaves with its gameplay, and the pieces are all there to see, but if you just want to shoot some aliens, that's okay too.
It's a collection of innovations and feelings that few other games have been able to capture.
On an unrelated side-note, if you've played Half-Life, Freeman's Mind is a must-watch: it's an astoundingly funny bit of comedy that is just so brilliant.
Yahtzee Crowshaw's (yes, the very same guy I mentioned above) LP of the game (Let's Drown Out All Of Half-Life), while by no means a must-watch, is also reccomended.
I think that's why Half Life 3 is still so desirable for so many who were influenced by that story, despite the reality that it's almost certainly never going to be made.
By the way, is Yahtzee still slumming it on the Escapist, or has he done the Patreon thing like Jim? He always seemed too good for that place.
The Escapist really is a sad story. Back when it started in PDF form in 2005, it was intended to be a high-brow gaming magazine with no news or reviews, just in-depth articles about trends in games. This was compromised when they started doing just those other things, but for a long time they at least didn't include numeric scores in reviews like everyone else (until they compromised on that).
And for a long time even after it became a website, they had a weekly magazine with some really good articles. But that gradually got pushed further and further out-of-focus in favour of more videos until they basically stopped doing it entirely. And then of course they lost most of the worthwhile video series and now it's just a bland gaming press site with Yahtzee.
I don't think 'never' is very realistic. HL3 would be the perfect killer app for selling Vive VR headsets, I'm reasonably sure they are working on something like that. Although Portal does actually make more sense in terms of how the transport mechanics can work together with a VR rigged room, however HL3 could easily introduce a teleport mechanic as well based on its backstory.
All of that is true, but consider that in the years since HL2 came out, that anticipation and fan theories have gone through the roof and back again. Valve has since stopped being a developer, and prints money with Steam, and a big part of the goodwill they garner has to do with their reputation as sterling game devs.
Now, you have to ask if HL3 could ever hope to meet the expectations of the modern gamer, many of whom were probably just born when HL2 was big and have no real connection to it. What do they have to gain from it? What do they have to lose? I'd argue that they're making so much money now they don't particularly need the expense and risk of developing a game that, even if it is quite good, stands to potentially harm their reputation.
I don't think it's quite true that Valve has completely given up on developing. Their last release is Dota 2 from three years ago. If you follow the rumor mill, there's often asset leaks going out from various source updates to TF and Dota2 - development certainly hasn't stopped, it just seams that they only announce something when they know they have something that sets new standards.
Valve released a complete engine rewrite for Dota 2 only about 12 months ago, Dota 2 Reborn. They also release major game updates regularly.
Aside from Steam, Valve (the developer) seems to be putting a lot of focus on esports right now. Many of the recent updates to Dota 2 seem to be new features and quality of life improvements for casters and spectators.
You're right, and I phrased that badly. I should have said that they're continuing development for their existing properties, but not developing new games.
Wait, why is that? Isn't this 2016 where any game or movie that is even a little successful, must inevitably have successors?
How could valve motivate not making a game that would sell like hotcakes no matter how terrible it is? Sure, it would have enormous expectations, but that's true of all movie sequels (yet most suck). Is the value of Valve currently based on a game they'll never make, because it' can't live up to expectations? That would be an odd situation!
Even if Valve decides against ever doing HL3, could they afford not to sell the franchise? It must be worth a TON to e.g. Microsoft who could use the title it to push xboxes or VR headsets or whatever.
I think Valve are very aware that their PR relies on them being seen as game devs. Their customer service is genuinely appalling. One of the major things keeping Steam in power is the refusal of players to consider using other platforms.
If they were to sell the HL franchise they risk losing a lot of customer support overnight. They would no longer be game devs, whose blunders can be excused because of their amazing games, they are money grabbers willing to whore out their franchises for short term cash grabs. The risk to the Steam platform just doesn't seem worth it.
If they were to sell it MS would be one of the worst destinations for it. If I were in their shoes I would likely explore having a smaller studio build it. A sale to MS could only be viewed as financially motivated and the quality of the game produced is almost certain to suffer.
However if I were them I would keep it as an ace up the sleeve to bring the masses to a new H/W platform Valve bring out. Such a release could seal the platform that wins its generation of consoles.
...However, if HL3 becomes console exclusive, Valve will lose the PC hardcore demographic that makes up their fanbase. I myself would never forgive them. This Steam Controller is okay, but keyboard and mouse is really the only way to play FPS.
> How could valve motivate not making a game that would sell like hotcakes no matter how terrible it is?
I think it mostly boils down to Valve being a privately held company that is not under pressure to meet arbitrary quarterly financial targets. The article is quite clear that Gabe Newell gutted HL a few months before the original release date rather than deliver a game that wasn't quite "there" yet.
Additionally, if Valve have maintained their notoriously flat structure, HL3 will need to acquire critical mass /buy-in within Valve before it can make it out the door.
> Even if Valve decides against ever doing HL3, could they afford not to sell the franchise?
Yes, as long as Steam remains a money printing machine, they will not be desperate.
He gets paid decently (and on time, unlike most of the people who've worked for them) and, I've been told, doesn't actually make his own videos--just does the voiceovers. That sounds like a pretty easy gig.
One of the things which really surprised me when I played HL and all its subsequent versions(HL2, HL2:E1, Hl2:E2) was the FPS game design -- The designers knew precisely the limits they could go to make it damn difficult for you to find next steps you will need to do and what to do to reach to those steps. Combine that with FPS gameplay and you have a heck of a game there. Loved everybit of my life playing it and that's why I choose HN username as "gordon_freeman". :)
The writer for that Freeman's Mind was far better then I'd expected. I remember watching that back when machinima was considered "nice" or "good" by the community! Brings back memories.
It's quite fantastic. I thank Yahtzee for bringing it to my attention through his many digressions, including a story about how he accidentally ripped Ross Scott (the creator of Freeman's Mind) off.
Unfortunately, my prophecy seems to be self-fulfilling. GPP is down from +3 to +0.
Many said that Marathon delivered on the story promise before Half-Life. I tried it out recently. Unfortunately, due to a warped perspective and a positively abysmal FOV, I can't actually play it without feeling sick, and as a result the whole thing feels like a slog. It may be good, but for me, it's totally unplayable.
I remember playing Marathon when it first came out, and... frankly had the same reaction. I managed to play Spectre on a Mac LC, but Marathon broke me. Lots of potential, but as seen through the bottom of a beer glass.
Ehh, wondering if you played Marathon or Marathon 2. Either way, older games are often lacking in usability compared to newer ones. That's especially true of FPSs prior to, say, 2000.
This usability thing has been fascinating me recently.
I've been re-playing the Metal Gear Solid series. The second and third game are better than the originals because of a control scheme update that was part of a bigger 'HD' update. But they still suck compared to the controls of the fifth iteration of the game, 'The Phantom Pain'.
MGS5 has some of the best controls I've ever used in a (third person) game. For lack of a better description, it made me feel almost like how I felt when I first played Mario64.
And I can't help but wonder why 1) it took three iterations to get here even though 5's controls could be realized even in earlier iterations of the game, 2) why other similar games don't just use the same controls instead of more dated approaches.
I mean, I get why, but it feels strange. I understand how the development of graphics, physics, AI, etc. is limited by technology but as long as you don't need a controller update for your new control scheme, such a limitation shouldn't be there. And yet it is, apparently.
It's about how people think about things. Other companies could have put a stick on their controllers, but Nintendo were the first ones to realize that it was a good idea. Twin sticks could have evolved earlier, but Sony was the first company to really get it. Turok on the N64 didn't need to have as bad controls as it did, but until Goldeneye, that was just the way things were done. Mind, Goldeneye's controls weren't that great, but they were playable.
OTOH, there are some old games that control fine. Megaman 2 still feels great to play, as does Quake with +mlook and WASD. But yes, control affordances matter. For the large part, Doom can only be played comfortably by modern audiences because of the work Source Port developers undertook to allow for rebindable keys, and sgtmarkiv's Brutal Doom, which allows for proper mouselook, if you really want to be that guy.
I've been doing Ludum Dare for a while now and it has only deepened my respect for games with good controls. For the last jam, I didn't spend nearly as much time on control feel as I usually do and I got a bunch of negative feedback for it.
For another example, people criticize Unity for games with poor feel, but what's really happening is that Unity has enabled a bunch of new developers to make games with less effort, and that includes spending less effort on getting the controls to work well. All Unity did was lower the bar to entry.
Take a look at Quake III, in bg_pmove.c PM_Accelerate
This is the code that translates player input into acceleration for the physics system to handle. Notice the code blocked out with #if which fixes a bug but the fix isn't used because it "feels bad". The bug lets you accelerate to ridiculous speeds with the right pattern of movement.
...that's not exactly why that fix was killed. What you see is Carmack losing a war with the fanbase: strafe jumping came about in Q1, and was a really important part of the Quake metagame. Carmack wanted to kill it, because it didn't fit his vision. He tried to, but the only fix he could come up with was limiting jumps and having a cooldown, which he recognized was actually even worse, because it just wasn't fun.
Meh. Different people are always going to like different games. I remember being at a LAN party where different people would dominate the game depending on the lineage of the game technology--you get used to something, it feels normal, and everything else seems "wrong". I don't feel any need to convince you that you "should" enjoy Marathon any more than you "should" like the same bands I like.
Of course. I mean, I'd probably enjoy it a lot more if it didn't look like it did. If M2 fixes it, I might try that, but it is a story-based game, so that's got its own problems.
Yes, HL had a better story than most FPS, but I don't think this is why it was hyped.
It simply delivered one of the best modding possibilities ever.
You bought HL and every week you could buy a gaming magazine with 5 new mods. Most of them crap, for sure, but it felt like paying once and getting new stuff all the time.
I never had a game installed for so long and played the "main game" for such a short time.
HL², on the other hand, I played for the story only, never installed any mods or something, but maybe I was already to old to run after this half finished games, haha.
Unreal Tournament had a decent mod scene too though, and it was only with HL2's Source Engine (and I suppose Valve's active support of modding) that I saw people leave that scene.
I only worked on mods for UT and the original Jedi Knight, and I've only heard second-hand that UT and Quake (3? 2?) were easier to mod than HL1, so I might be wrong.
And compared to Jedi Knight and its only editor(s) being user-made, all these games were easy to mod!
> On an unrelated side-note, if you've played Half-Life, Freeman's Mind is a must-watch: it's an astoundingly funny bit of comedy that is just so brilliant.
True. Also I just learned that he actually finished the whole game. I used to follow this series as he was producing it, and I thought he gave up halfway through.
> On an unrelated side-note, if you've played Half-Life, Freeman's Mind is a must-watch: it's an astoundingly funny bit of comedy that is just so brilliant.
Likewise, if you've played Half-Life 2, you owe it to yourself to read Concerned: The Comic of Gordon Frohman
> Before beginning work on Half-Life, I encountered a lot of comments to the effect that a first person shooter didn’t need a story—that hardcore gamers didn’t want one, and that anything more complicated than a bunch of moving targets and some buttons to push would be lost on them.
I remember reading a long time ago that John Carmack insisted that Doom and Quake needed nothing more than one interact button and the depth of level design of finding keycards to unlock doors.
Considering how ID Games have been received after Half-Life, i.e. criticized for their lowbrow gameplay and story, I wonder if he ever really understood how wrong he was.
John Carmack wasn't wrong: Those games are still legends, and rightfully so. A focus on gameplay is a blessing and a curse: when you strip away all but the most basic context and themes, there's a certain sense of purity which, much like HL's innovations did for it, give a distinct feel to your games. OTOH, if you rely on gameplay and level design alone, your game lives and dies how how good that gameplay feels, how tight those mechanics are, and most of all, how solid the levels are. Doom, Quake, and Quake 3 all pulled it off. Doom 3 and Quake 4, ironically id's most story-focused games... didn't.
It may not be a coincedence that all but one of id's best games came before Romero left, and the other one was a pure multiplayer gameplay experience, rather than the standard story-driven affair.
I'm tempted to say that what gave the likes of Quake1 longevity was mods rather than the base game itself.
It was so damn easy to mod, and so damn easy to stick mods on magazine covers. A single individual was able to turn Quake1 into a rudimentary flight simulator after all.
Later games have become more complicated to mod because of their adherence to realism in rendering, thus requiring the mod makers to be as skilled and equipped to make anything worthwhile.
OTOH, the actual language that Quake mods were written in, QuakeC, belongs in nightmares.
And you might say it's not that bad. You might say that it's okay, given its domain. And then you realize that Xonotic is still, to this day, written largely in QuakeC. And then you start to feel a bit ill, just contemplating a codebase of that size in a language that actually has less abstraction powers than C.
QuakeLive is basically dead due to id mismanagement (which QuakeLive is essentially Q3 + a CPMA-like mod), I switched to Nexuiz/Xonotic because QW died, and Q3's community is finally dying off.
There's Reflex, but that community never really seemed to form, and there's also the newly announced Quake Champions game that is basically a QuakeLive-esque game via Doom 4's multiplayer engine (whereas Doom 4's multiplayer gameplay as-is is a lot like classic Doom/Doom 2 multiplayer).
I'm looking forward to Quake Champions, but I'm afraid all the younger kids are going to bring too much salt to make it worth investing time into.
That would be me immediate idea. It's unlikely you'd be banned for winning if you weren't suspected of it. It's a community mostly consisting of migrants from Nexuiz, Quake, and Quake 3: Very competitive.
Was he, though? There were actually quite a few very complicated first-person shooters at roughly similar times. System Shock was released in 1994, Quake 1996. One could argue that System Shock is currently held in higher regard (and you'd still be having an argument, it would not be universal agreement, although I'm firmly in the System Shock camp), but System Shock sold 170,000 copies to Doom's millions and Quake's millions.
Sometimes gamers have to learn to walk before they can enjoy running.
Perhaps you can make a successful game without a decent narrative, but I think he underestimated how much of the enjoyment comes from developing an attachment to the avatar.
You can develop an attachment in a game like Doom or Quake just by feeling amazing acquiring a new weapon and being terrified when entering a new room on low health.
The player is supposed to be the avatar. You aren't playing Gordon Freeman, you are some space marine fighting the hordes of hell or dimensions incomprehensible.
You have an emotional investment in your character because your success or failure in combat dictates if you live or die. It is surely a simple connection, but it also certainly exists. It is implicit to almost any video game.
I guess I've never gotten that vibe before—the only thing tying me to the protagonist is being human, which sometimes doesn't even hold true. The idea that I would even want to be a space marine is absurd. Why would I want to get shot at?
It makes much more sense it you view it as a target practice game instead of one with a narrative.
1) Half-life owes a lot of its legacy to add-one like Team Fortress and Counterstrike, which have nothing to do with story.
2) id games after Quake 2/3 really weren't id games. id wasn't even really id anymore. The guys from the gold old days had moved on except for Carmack and a few others, they became more of a technology company instead of a game company - not that there's anything wrong with that.
Your first point is flat-out wrong. CS had a degree of significance in HL's success, true, but TF was a quake mod first, and both only really hit the mainstream when valve picked up the developers and made the games standalone.
HL made its own legacy, and it's for a large part due to its mixture of story and gameplay. To paraphrase Yahtzee on the subject:
"The thing you have to understand about half-life is that in most shooters at the time, guns still hovered three feet off the ground, spinning gently like Barber's poles, and nothing else had ever felt so absorbingly real"
Doom and Half Life (and other such FPSs of its time like System Shock 2) seem to me like two entirely different genres. I think Carmack was wrong but you can still have fun with a simple shooter + puzzle game like Doom.
Given the lack of ammunition, and the overall design, I find it hard to believe that there's a way to play it on which a significant amount of time would be spent shooting.
Games don't have a minimum "bullets per minute" quota they need to fill to be considered a shooter. Sometimes I go on a melee spree in Halo, does that make it "not a shooter"?
SS2 lets you use projectile weapons as your preferred way of disposing of enemies. In my mind, if you choose that path, it could be described as a shooter. That isn't all it is, but it is one word that describes a particular way you can choose to play the game.
Side note: SS2 is probably my favourite game so I certainly don't mean to "degrade" it by implying it is "just" a shooter.
"Lowbrow" is more of a design style than a criticism. Someone else mentioned "loud rock": Doom is explicitly a metal game, to the extent of ripping off Pantera tracks in the music. Doom is fast and loud. Like a first-person Robotron: http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74
Doom 3 kind of forgot this, but Doom 4 has definitely brought it back.
The modern niche for lowbrow shooters is filled by pseudo-simulationists CoD and GTA.
Half-life was always more cerebral and science-y. Valve took FPS in an even more scientific direction with Portal. You could argue that that limits their audience by being highbrow.
Funny you'd mention those two (CoD and GTA); CoD started out as an authentic (or, authentic-seeming) WW2 shooter, preceded by the Medal of Honor series that had the same 'genuine' feel to it. GTA started out as a comical top-down shooter and became more serious / realistic in a lot of ways. Well, until GTA Online came around anyway.
Indeed Carmack was wrong. And the game that proved it was Quake, not HL.
Wolfenstein and Doom were both great, eye-opening games because their rendering gave us a visual experience we hadn't seen before. Nobody cared if they were the gaming equivalent of dumb, loud rock. Besides Doom's art had a terrifying -- if brainless -- grandeur.
Quake also delivered a step up in rendering, a great feat that I admire as a software engineer. But as a game, it was dull.
It was no more brainless than Doom, but we had already seen that particular kind of dumb-horror before, and the full 3d really just felt like an incremental improvement.
My guess is that you only played single player. Single player Quake is indeed less exciting than Doom, largely because of lower enemy counts. The people correctly praising Quake as a classic played multiplayer. In multiplayer the 3D environments really matter. It's more than just an incremental improvement because full 3D gives you so many options for movement. Quake has very high skill ceiling and mastering movement is a big part of it.
Quake and its mods (Team Fortress!) were pure magic for me as a young kid. I can't imagine how many hours I spent in that game. The multiplayer community was a big draw, and services like Mplayer that had voice-enabled chat rooms were also amazing at the time. Lots of Quake LAN parties. It was a total game changer.
I still love the atmosphere and total weirdness of the game.
> But as a game, it was dull.
I disagree. The art, skybox (not really a skybox; I spent so much time just looking at that grim-looking moving purple sky), sounds and music made it incredibly immersive.
Id has ended up doing poorly while Valve has flourished. Steam was justified by HL2 being a good game in the first place people wanted to play. ID s legacy is rather in its past.
And one of the most popular games on steam is a game where you kick around a ball with RC cars. Another is a game where a team of counter-terrorists and terrorists fight with no context, made by Valve itself. A hit game that is claimed to be partly behind the modern roguelite resurgence is a game where you fly forward across several systems, to escape the dastardly rebels and save the federation, and that's all the story you're given. In what has been hailed as one of the best shooters in years, all you need to know about the plot (although there is more to it) is that you kill demons from hell. Gameplay over story, every time.
Since HL3 is probably never going to be released, I'd love it if Valve released any script or story notes they had for it. I want to see what would/could have happened.
Marc Laidlaw has answered this question at least one time: Half-Life doesn't exist separated from the game. There is no script, since there is no game. Story and game are developed as a single thing. I guess they still have some concept art and very sparse ideas, but nothing like a script.
> Half-Life doesn't exist separated from the game. There is no script.
I find it hard to believe there are not loads of //notes// about it. Maybe not a "final_script.txt" but lots of data spread out over lots of files seems logical to have.
The failure would be to create Half Life 3. No matter how good an actual game called Half Life 3 could be, it would never live up to the fantasy. The No Man's Sky disaster would be nothing in comparison.
The fact that Half Life 3 isn't released and there is no sign of it is almost certainly not due to some failure to produce it but due to a decision not to.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see Half-Life 3 announced as a flagship title for a Steam VR platform. The individual components are in place, but it’s still immature.
I thought the Portal demo on the Vive was mindblowing. If they released Half-Life 3 in that form, it would survive the anticipation.
>>The No Man's Sky disaster would be nothing in comparison.
No Man's Sky wasn't a simple case of hype, though. The developer blatantly lied about what was going to be in the release version, including videos and screenshots of content that doesn't exist[1]. The extent of this mismatch between what was advertised and what was delivered is so large that it's being investigated in the UK[2].
Consider the 2016 Doom. You could claim expectations were tempered by Doom 3 and Rage plus the loss of Carmack, but the game wildly exceeded expectations and was incredibly well received by its target audience.
Valve isn't developing HL3 because a project of that magnitude requires simply more dedication and conviction than Valve's devs might even have anymore. The company is one of those flat structures where developers work on whatever they have passion for, which means anything they make is gold, but if nobody has passion for it it will never be made. And compared to the work required to make all their games since HL2 - not skill, just raw hours of design and testing - HL3 is way beyond the scope of what Valve has made since then. Portal 2 is the most significant achievement since then, and all it really was was level design and event scripting - there are no real enemies, no AI, and the game length was still quite a bit less than what a full FPS release on par with the old Half Life would expect.
It should be no coincidence the release of Steam ended the Half Life franchise. Once the company had effectively infinite cash the staff could pivot from making complex hard to develop games that would make huge returns to making whatever they wanted - Dota 2 has nothing pay to win, no payments to even play, the only in game transactions are for cosmetics. It is something no other moba, not even Blizzard's, is willing to risk because everyone else is too worried about making sure ends meet from the games revenue.
So I do not believe Valve is incapable of living up to the hype. Even making a game as good as Half Life 2 would be enough. Portal 2 was considered a success despite being inferior to its predecessor because it was still really good. The problem has nothing to do with fear of failure, but a lack of willpower in Valve staff to put millions of hours into making a worthwhile successor to Half Life 2 when they can get similar accolades for much less effort making games in other genres. It is the same reason you so rarely see expansive and good RPGs. They are much more time consuming to make than almost any other genre of game.
Maybe you're right and I'm overestimating the potential disappointment from gamers. Nevertheless I think we agree overall that after the release of HL2 and Steam the company has effectively transformed. In fact I have primarily focused on the financial motivation and I think you're making excellent points that not just financially but structurally Valve might not be in the position to be able to pull of any projects that require much coordination.
I think the point you're making on structure, could also explain the failure of Steam Machines. Something that would require quite a lot of people coordinating not just with others in the company but also with people outside it.
Considered a bit of a disaster internally from what people are saying these days and responsible for valve no longer having an interest in shipping single player experiences.
My theory is that since HL2 was "revolutionary" because of its physics engine (and HL1 before was "revolutionary" because of the story telling and no cutscenes), it makes sense that HL3 should combine the series excellent storytelling and level design with something that is also considered new for its time.
The problem is that the only "new" thing since HL2 that could take off is VR which isn't quite there yet.
It's indeed hard to believe, in fact it would be ridiculous. The reason though why it isn't hard to believe that Valve would do this is because Valve isn't a games company.
At this point games are to Valve what email is to Google. An important product to be sure but not what they make their money with. Valve makes their money with Steam, their games are side projects.
Steam is popular, the games Valve makes are popular and Valve is popular. HL3 is a massive investment, a huge risk to all of that and for what? If Valve were a games company, the money would be the answer but Valve is the Steam company, that money is not all that much to them.
I would encourage anyone who finds this interesting or just loves Half-Life in general to also read the preceding entry Mathoms from the Lamda Files[1].
Half-Life was just such an experience. Even almost 20 years later, it might be the best game I have ever played.
Site is down, and I can't get the archive.org copy to render the top of the article... If anyone else has this problem I've managed to scrape the article text into a pastebin:
That doesn't seem to be the actual linked page. Confusingly, there's both /writing-half-life/ (original link) and /writing/half-life/ (your cached link) on the server.
I can't get google to give me a cache of the actual article.
No, that's a cache of the wrong page. There's a one-character difference between the urls. Google may not actually have a cache of the correct page, since it's so new.
It's a collection of innovations and feelings that few other games have been able to capture.
On an unrelated side-note, if you've played Half-Life, Freeman's Mind is a must-watch: it's an astoundingly funny bit of comedy that is just so brilliant.
Yahtzee Crowshaw's (yes, the very same guy I mentioned above) LP of the game (Let's Drown Out All Of Half-Life), while by no means a must-watch, is also reccomended.