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Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

half-life.com

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Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

#151

Post by cojo »

Wow, seeing this made me surprisingly emotional as I realized that downloading the pre-release leaked source code for some testing levels of HL2 (which included an early version of what would become Steam, as well)

- and then debugging / figuring out how to hack together a version that would compile in Visual Studio (back when you had to have a license… in theory…) as a preteen -

had a way bigger impact on me than I gave it credit for at the time. I think seeing the sheer scope of that codebase and realizing how much I didn’t understand and still had to learn is part of what put me in my path into both the game industry and software startups. I found both Valve’s and Gabe’s stories that much more compelling after gaining an appreciation for how much there was under the hood.

Cheers to everyone who has worked on this engine, this project, and this company over the years. I suspect your influence runs deeper than you know.

Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

#152

Post by philistine »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #29
balls187 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not a single company has my loyalty anymore. FromSoft

Besides FromSoft as perhaps the exception to the rule as a subsidary to Kadokawa, private companies seem to be keeping their shit together fairly consistently. Larian and Wube are a pair of solid examples, although Valve is probably the most outstanding example. Game developers and publishers start shitting the bed when they IPO and need to juggle the conflicting interests of managing investor relations as well as cu…

Wube at this point could announce they made an arsenal of thermonuclear devices and I'd trust them with it.

Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

#153

Post by wolrah »

bsimpson wrote: post #86
jsheard wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty obvious that Alyx didn't inspire the industry because it's a giga-budget game addressed to a tiny potential market, that Valve could only afford to make due to Steam being an infinite money printer. It wouldn't surprise me if Alyx never recouped its development costs despite the immense hype around it. If Valve wanted more Alyx'es to happen they needed to spread their wealth around until the VR ma…

It's also a $60 purchase that requires a beefy Windows machine in addition to the headset. VR is a small market to begin with, and most VR people can't play Alyx without buying a whole new computer.

> most VR people can't play Alyx without buying a whole new computer.

When Alyx first came out I had a PC that was the minimum recommended specs for VR from the day the Vive launched (4790K and Geforce 970). The game ran fine.

It sure as hell got better when I upgraded to a 3900X and 3070, but it plays just fine on the original minimum requirements VR PC which was a $1500 PC in 2015.

The idea that PC VR requires a massive rig is just nonsense. Computers that run VR perfectly fine are literally being forced in to retirement, they're officially obsolete.

Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

#155

Post by mhh__ »

ethbr1 wrote: post #58
ramesh31 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is still a top tier org, but they simply make too much money in the publishing business to bother with game development anymore. Any sales would be peanuts to what they are making through developer fees and the marketplace. This is why all of their releases in the last decade have been F2P.

Also, supposedly the whole radically flat org structure thing. Which I imagine doesn't lend itself to doing hard things like making Half Life 3... Why would any game dev choose to go through a death march to perfection, if they had other project choices?

From what I've read the flat structure goes in the bin when they've decided to go to the finish line on an idea

Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

#156

Post by BigJono »

kartoffelsaft wrote: post #126
derbOac wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've played through HL2 and its expansions so many times as a kind of meditative relaxation thing I couldn't tell you how many times. I could never get used to Ravenholm though. Thinking about it even now years later stresses me out a tad.

For whatever reason, Ravenholm didn't particularly unsettle me. I don't know what it is, maybe expectation from the praise it receives left me underwhelmed, or maybe it's the fact that I was quite literally a toddler when the game came out and only first played it in 2019? To be fair, I did enjoy it and could feel the intent of it being the horror section. I could see it usettling me if I played it at the time, but I…

It holds up well in gameplay because the gravity gun is still fun. But I think most of the hype was multiplied by HL2 being such a massive step up in graphics. Nobody in my friend group played Doom 3, so for us it was going straight from HL1 and CS 1.6 to HL2. Compare the 2 games side by side and HL2 literally looked futuristic, like it shouldn't even be possible with the hardware at the time. (And to be fair my graphics card burst into flames trying to push 15 fps in the canals section so maybe it wasn't).

Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

#157

Post by kingkawn »

karim79 wrote: post #95

I can never understand why they haven't made a HL3. Given that they could literally make approximately 3.88 bajillion dollars from it in 24 hours. I suppose this is the very definition of developer integrity.

As everyone pointed out there’s lots of reasons Valve as a company hasn’t done it, but also the corner they wrote themselves into of convoluted story telling, everything about it was headed toward being a mess and unsatisfying. It’s almost better to be left undone so that nobody has to take responsibility for trying to tie all this randomly assembled stuff together

Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

#158

Post by et1337 »

donatj wrote: post #88

In 2007 when The Orange Box was released, Half-Life 2 took forever to load on my dual-core Athlon 64 X2. It would run but the levels would take a solid minute to load. At the time I figured it was some incompatibility with the multiple cores as that was still rare and a lot of other software gave me trouble with it at that time. I tried to play it much more recently, maybe six or so years ago on an Intel MacBook befo…

This was my experience too. IIRC they raytrace the lightmaps for the whole map on demand during loading instead of baking them ahead of time. But I might be misremembering

Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

#159

Post by jcranmer »

karim79 wrote: post #95

I can never understand why they haven't made a HL3. Given that they could literally make approximately 3.88 bajillion dollars from it in 24 hours. I suppose this is the very definition of developer integrity.

The documentary on this page does explain why they didn't make it, at the very end (it's half the section on the HL2 episodes).

In short, they started working on episode 3, and made it about the point where the game development progresses from "here's demos of what could be set pieces in the episode" to putting together the sketch of the game narrative [1] when the developers were pulled to crunch for Left 4 Dead. After Left 4 Dead released, Gabe felt the window for an HL2e3 had closed, so it would be HL3 instead... and that because HL1 and HL2 had both heralded genre shifts, HL3 needed something to push that shift as well. But there weren't any such ideas for that shift (except maybe VR, which hasn't exactly panned out), and Gabe also felt that releasing a HL3 just to complete the story wouldn't cut it, so it never got made.

Which pretty much matches everybody's speculation for the past decade.

[1] About 18-24 months away from being releasable at that point, to give a sense of how far from complete it was.

Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

#160

Post by taeric »

Uvix wrote: post #135
taeric wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they have a record of doing this? Paranoia here is largely warranted. But people had fewer rights than they realized before. And finding a way to play older media is often a rather expensive endeavor. Edit to add: I also find picking on Valve awkward here. Microsoft? Sony? I would be far more inline. Even Nintendo. Valve seems to be much more on favor of empowering users, though.

Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all have physical releases for most of their games that they can't take from my cold dead hands. Valve has singlehandedly killed that market for PC games.

Nintendo has some where you can't rent anymore, because the save data is on cartridge. They all have limitations on regions.

Again, Steam /could/ do this. Has it? The others have done the things.

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