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Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update
51–60 of 277 posts
Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update
#52My claim to fame on the 20th anniversary (84 views thus far) is to have completed Ravenholm without inflicting any deaths or receiving any injury:
Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update
#5320-25 years ago a handful of companies had a weird hold on me. I’d jump on anything Google made back then. Blizzard could sell me any game they came up with. If it was from Blizzard, it was gonna be great. Lost all of it obviously. Not a single company has my loyalty anymore. Except if valve were to release a mystery black box with faint lambda symbol on it. I’d pay whatever they asked for it.
> Not a single company has my loyalty anymore. FromSoft
It's Larian for me
Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update
#54It doesn't seem to be mentioned here, but HL2 (which now includes the sequel episodes) is completely free to claim on Steam until the 18th, if you're new to the series. https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/ Also try clicking on the gravity gun at the end of the anniversary page.
Also I highly recommend Black Mesa, which is the remake of HL1 in the HL2 engine. The Xen levels went from what they were to possibly some of my favorite levels in the game, and the music scoring is top-notch. It feels great to play.
I had a lot of issues getting black mesa to run on linux natively or via proton. Frequently crashes. Not uncommon per protondb. Food for thought of you're on a linux setup.
Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's pretty much exactly the logic that got me to buy a Valve Index + Half Life Alyx and it was totally worth it . VR turned out to be cooler than I expected and both the game and the Index were just so satisfyingly well-executed. It's nice to have products which clearly had far more attention to detail and quality than was economically necessary. It's clearly the result of a different philosophy than I've seen at…
Unfortunately VR also showed the flipside of Valves approach to development - putting extreme amounts of money and effort into a project, then abruptly dropping it and moving on to something else. The Index was great at the time but now it's five years old, dated in numerous aspects, and hasn't even had a price cut since launch. Alyx is great but it came out four years ago and Valve has done nothing with VR games sin…
I've been patiently waiting for an index 2 or a price cut. I will continue to patiently wait.
I threw my CV1 that I bought secondhand in the trash when facebook bought oculus then forced login. Maybe I'll return to the market when it supplies something I want.
Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when you buy an album on CD you just license it for personal use, you can't play it on the radio or in a commercial space. "Buying" a copy of some intellectual property always had strings attached even in the age of physical media.
Steam can delete a game from your account, they can't delete a cd that I physically have with me. Why does this even need to be spelled out...
This should be so trivially apparent to anyone on HN using Steam that pointing it out is like noting the sky is blue.
Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update
#57If there is any game worthy of a remaster or remake it's HL2, and all of its episodes. It remains one of my most memorable gaming experiences, and not just because of nostalgia. The story, writing, characters, dialogue, environments, gameplay, graphics, audio... Everything was pretty much revolutionary back then. I remember being awed by the physics in the demo, and couldn't get enough of the gravity gun once I got the game. It was so brilliantly versatile and satisfying to use.
And yet these days we get "remasters" of games that are not even 5 years old. Most of the AAA industry is just putting out lazy cash grabs and predatory live service garbage. Valve itself has profited immensely from the live service business model. I just wish they would get back to development, or sell someone else the rights to their single-player franchises. Spinoffs like HL: Alyx and Aperture Desk Job don't really cut it for me.
Anyways, this update looks alright. I'm looking forward to the new commentary.
Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory is that there's a period when a studio has huge early success (plus in the case of Valve, they started with huge amounts of money from being former MS employees) that lets them devote themselves to their mission of making games, before either mission creep or dilution with new hires occurs over time either from staff naturally changing over time or expanding. Another factor is that when aiming to 'go big' a…
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?
Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when you buy an album on CD you just license it for personal use, you can't play it on the radio or in a commercial space. "Buying" a copy of some intellectual property always had strings attached even in the age of physical media.
Steam can delete a game from your account, they can't delete a cd that I physically have with me. Why does this even need to be spelled out...
Not contradicting your point, but adding tangential interesting information.
Blu-Ray UHD discs can no longer be played on modern computers as Intel has removed the trusted execution environment needed to decrypt them. Blu-Ray UHD players do a handshake that verifies the use of Intel SGX.
One might have always been skeptical of these discs, especially as AMD had never implemented those TEE instructions.
But I believe the interesting takeaway is that even physical media is becoming something you can’t count on using without the continued permission/assistance of some outside party.
Without regulation I would expect that all new media will eventually require players to be always-online.
Re: Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when you buy an album on CD you just license it for personal use, you can't play it on the radio or in a commercial space. "Buying" a copy of some intellectual property always had strings attached even in the age of physical media.
Steam can delete a game from your account, they can't delete a cd that I physically have with me. Why does this even need to be spelled out...
> Why does this even need to be spelled out...
Indeed. Why did you bother?