All this post tells me is that either you are lying to bolster the position you are arguing for, or you are suffering from a series case of the Dunning Kruger effect. Neither is a particularly good situation to be in imo.
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Valve's Director of Business has left [GAF Rumor: TF2 Art Lead, SFM Head Gone, More]
- Thread starter BlockheadBrown
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All this post tells me is that either you are lying to bolster the position you are arguing for, or you are suffering from a series case of the Dunning Kruger effect. Neither is a particularly good situation to be in imo.
dreamghost
Member
Do we know who had the immunity idol?
there's a lot of speculation so we're going to clear it up by not explaining anything!
CountAntonius
Member
I feel better.
Felix Lighter
Member
Well if that's the extent of the official response, speculation isn't going to stop here.
So they tried to stage a coup and were banished. It's so obvious now.
faceless007
Member
"I thought I'd take the step of addresssing it....I'm not going to address it."
Huevos de Oro
Member
So, shit goes down at companies, not always that shit going down means cataclysmic change. Good. That should stop the wild rumours.
IMO several things: Gravity gun gameplay has to be the most important, from the way they introduce you to it to how it develops through the game, using physics to your advantage in terms of combat and for puzzles, ambience quality/graphics, pacing. When the main character doesn't talk and there are no cut scenes but yet you completely immerse yourself in the game story/setting you know you are playing something special.
ThreePiMatt
Member
I bet the same thing happened last year, but no one with any degree of Twitter fame made mention of it, so no one cared.
Karma Kramer
Banned
THANK GOD
Probable. Few outside of Half-Life fans really took much notice when Kelly Bailey and Viktor Antonov departed, iirc.
Well, it was apparently performance review 'season'. After hiring dozens of people in the last year, Valve probably realize they had too many people. More people were "fired" than usual because of that. The female engineer (forgot her name) was probably surprised because she started working at Valve only 18 months ago and last year not many people were affected. So the process was new to her. But we know from Twitter another employee was expecting bad news the next day. So it's an annual process.
Still doesn't explain why many "senior" employees are gone.
Still doesn't explain why many "senior" employees are gone.
You do? That doesnt explain anything
Kadayi
Banned
When episode 1 was released (originally it was going to be Halflife 2: Aftermath) Valve essentially sold the concept (to a fairly skeptical fan base at the time) of episodic (shorter games/faster turnaround) and stated that the trilogy of episodes would conclude by Christmas 2007. Now even though EP 2 slipped and wasn't released until autumn/fall 2007 as part of the Orange Box, there was a reasonable expectation that Episode 3 would arrive within a year - eighteen months. Yet here we are 5 years later and neither Doug Lombardi or Gabe Newell have the base level of common courtesy to keep the very people most likely to buy EP3/HL3 (IE the people who bought HL2 + EP1 & EP2) informed as to what's going on. I can't think of one other business where in if you blow a deadline you don't give your customer base a new ETA. Their dogged refusal to even countenance the topic smacks of a degree of hubris that frankly beggars belief in truth.
Personally I think there's a bit of an expiry date on a game play style (FPS, linear levels, minimal interaction) which dates back to the 90s, and seems faintly more archaic with every passing year. Increasingly we're seeing a broadening of the game space as technology is improving and it's hard to see EP3/HL3 necessarily still feeling relevant as more and more games are embracing open world/larger levels going forward, unless Valve intend to dramatically change up the core formula.
Especially if it was a whole group of accomplished individuals all fired at the same time.
Sentenza
Member
Well, I would actually say that addressed a lot.
They firmly denied any restructuration or cancellation of previously discussed projects.
What they didn't address is why these people were fired, but that's understandable.
It would be extremely impolite and disrespectful of their former employees' privacy to do otherwise.
Let's imagine the reason is something very blunt and yet simple, like: "those people's overall productiveness over the last years was just pure crap".
Do you actually think they should state it publicly just to satisfy your curiosity?
Would you commend them for doing it?
Fair enough, though there have certainly been other departures that went under the radar completely, and not just iconic "Half-Life guys". What this event has if nothing else is volume.
They didn't even know what they were doing with Half-Life 2.
Look at the plot beats:
ACT I: To learn more about this new world, get to Eli in Black Mesa East! He's the carrot who is promised to explain why Gordon has shown up. The game actually never explains this, so it's just assumed the player was there to fight the Combine. You might say "oh, that's self-evident." On the contrary--the lack of any clearly stated motive indicates a deeply-rooted narrative issue.
ACT II: Eli has been kidnapped and you are stuck in Zombietown! Get out of Zombietown and... rescue Eli in Nova Prospekt. At this stage, whatever non-stated reason for showing up in the world the player had is thrown out the window. Eli is the only objective now.
ACT III: Eli has been kidnapped again, having been taken to the Citadel! Fight your way through the city to get to Eli!
(Episode 1)
ACT I: The Citadel's going to explode! Eli says to delay it, then catch up with him. You stop the Citadel from exploding.
ACT II: Get out of town and catch up with Eli!
(Episode 2)
ACT I: Eli's daughter is hurt! Save her!
ACT II: Get to Eli!
ACT III: Eli will explain everything, but first, there's an attack going on, and you've got to stop it!
Oh wait, Eli dies.
---
Consider that.
There is literally no reason for Gordon to be in this world. Every event that's happened has been something that has pulled Gordon away from whatever that objective was.
Consider the motive of Half-Life:
ACT I: Survive.
ACT II: Now the military is going to kill you. Get to Lambda and stop this!
ACT III: Welcome to Xen. Kill the guy responsible.
These motives are all coherent. Unlike Half-Life 2, they are all directly related to player self-interest, rather than some sort of assumed empathy (there is no reason to care for Eli beyond the game saying "he resists the bad guys! You should care!").
---
See, Half-Life 2 never really does motive right (I wrote a thread talking about this thing earlier; if you're even remotely interested, check it out). It never provides compelling reasons to move from point A to point B. It never even tells you why you have shown up, beyond an ambiguous "you should probably stop the Combine." That seems like the obvious goal, but nothing you do really works towards that. Even vague hints at the nature of how you stop them are nothing more than just that. Vague.
The joke could be that Half-Life 2: Episode 3 can't be made because Eli is dead.
But in truth, I think it's because Valve's development style doesn't really work for huge, overarching narratives. It works best if you want to make one focused, single-player game. Storytelling requires a writer's distinctive voice. Collaborative narrative efforts rarely work, but that's the very core of Valve's development style. There's no sense of planning or focus, just a bunch of people doing things that sound good at the time.
The game's narrative follows a course that indicates people were thinking bit by bit. "Okay, this bit of the level happens, now what do we do?" "Oh, hey, I think we should have a trap town there, so let's put it in somehow." It's not cohesive in any way. It's all thrown together, explained as logically as it can. They did well with what they did, but in the end, it's a game where nearly every major story beat is centered around getting to Eli Vance or protecting him (Citadel explosion, attack on the missile). The game seems to have no central narrative motive or theme beyond this, other than possibly "stop the Combine," which it almost entirely avoids directly (ex: you don't go to the Citadel to stop the Combine, you go to rescue Eli). They haven't planned this out--there's no indication that they're working towards some conclusion. They're making it up as they go along, doing what sounds good at the time.
Take, for instance, Portal/Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and the way they connect. Someone, at Valve, probably put the Black Mesa thing into Half-Life 2 as a joke. It's a hilarious joke for those familiar with Valve's history, but then someone else thought it would be a good idea to make this connection canon, which is where Episode 2 comes in. You can put Black Mesa in Portal as a joke, because it's nothing more than that--a joke. In Half-Life 2, it would have to be a big piece of the fiction, but everything about Aperture Science is so jokey and silly that it just wouldn't fit. There can be no serious version of Aperture Science.
Valve wrote themselves into a corner with that mistake, and that's probably costing them quite a bit.
From a purely narrative perspective, Half-Life 2 and its sequels seem to have no cohesive vision, no reason for being, no sense of purpose. They're just heavily atmospheric games with a gravity gun.
Karma Kramer
Banned
NervousXtian
Thought Emoji Movie was good. Take that as you will.
I want to respond to this, but I don't think it's a serious question.
The hook is at the core it's a very basic game, the depth comes from using the systems the best to be good at it. While doing this as part of a team, playing against another team.
The depth is from playing it competitively. As someone not really interested in competitive MP, it doesn't offer me much in depth at all.
Besides, this is a stupid conversation, about a game I don't really give a shit about, other than the fact Valve is making it instead of HL3.
I know lots of people want and love Dota2. There's also quite a few of us who'd much rather that Dota2 never happened and we were well into HL3 and new Source engine that could be modded and toyed with by the community. I'd love a Garry's mod on a newly minted optimized Source.
grimshawish
Banned
Gordon never knows why he is in Black Mesa.
Pay attention. Its pretty much a big point across the game and episodes.
Pay attention. Its pretty much a big point across the game and episodes.
oneils
Member
This took me forever to figure out. Bravo. I liked it.
IronicallyTwisted
Banned
There won't be a Half Life 3, it just doesn't fit their ambitions as a company any more. I'm sure there are people at Valve that are keen to push it forward, but I doubt its even gone past pre production let alone development.
There are many reasons why someone might be made redundant. Someone internally might be a better fit for a specific role, the job might just not be required any more etc etc.
Its primary contribution was from an environmental storytelling standpoint.
It might have helped encourage people to include physics in their game (much of the game seems to be designed simply to demonstrate physics features), but other people had already tried it (check out the awesome use of physics in Max Payne 2).
They also made some cool strides in
In terms of gameplay, if anything, it didn't do particularly much (aside from physics). The puzzles are almost all simplistic physics puzzles (put heavy objects on thing to open path), rather than the more complex puzzles (particularly the level-as-puzzles-within-an-overarching-puzzle genius that is Blast Pit). AI seems to have taken a hit, and AI placement isn't nearly as good. Boss fights are significantly worse, and almost all center around guiding a missile at a gunship or helicopter.
Gunplay is like the previous games, but ammo counts are reduced to increase dependence on the physics gun (again, Half-Life 2 is pretty much a physics tech demo with a bad story and great art design attached; from a shooter perspective, it's pretty bad), and enemy variety is decreased, not through number of enemies, but through number of enemy archetypes.
There's more versatility found in Marines + Headcrab Zombies + Zombies + Gargantuas + Tentacles + Ickies + etc than there is in X # of types of Marines, X # of types of headcrabs/zombies, etc.
Running into variations on five different kinds of marines isn't going to alter the gunplay as much as running into a mix of houndeyes and marines or a mix of marines and vorts or a mix of marines and vorts and bullsquids, etc.
Encounters could be a lot more varied in Half-Life than Half-Life 2.
So, yeah, physics and environmental storytelling aside, Half-Life 2 didn't really advance shooters in any noticeable way. FEAR's AI approach has been adopted by others, Crysis' destructible environments are slowly being introduced to more games, etc etc. Half-Life 2 didn't really do as much.
*shrug*
That's my take on it.
I really should take the proper time to write about Half-Life 2's failings instead of trying to crap out a post in three minutes.
NervousXtian
Thought Emoji Movie was good. Take that as you will.
Honestly, I think what you find wrong is something that some of us enjoyed. I didn't need the story shoved in my face.
A lot of games fuck up by trying to make a game a big narrative, when video games aren't as good at that.
Take Dark Souls as a grand example of where the lack of forced story was a strong point
To respond above post:
HL2 just was able to put a lot of those ideas into one neat tidy package. It was greater than the sum of it's parts. You can pick apart a lot of the game, and find places that other games around the same time did certain things better, and you'd be right.. but HL2 put all these parts together in a grand way to make one of the greatest experiences I've had playing a game.
I replayed it sometime last year, and for the most part it still held up strongly. My son is replaying it with me over the last few weeks, and again there's things in the game that still impress me all these years later. I first played the game in 2004. 8 1/2 years ago.. and parts of it still feel fresh.
Karma Kramer
Banned
Yep, do not understand that post at all. I felt like Gordan Freeman and I felt like I had a responsibility to help. Most immersive gaming experience of my life.
Basically my thoughts on Half Life 2 currently, at the time it was a damn fine FPS but it hasn't aged well at all. I'd say F.E.A.R 1 is better than Half Life 2 based on gunplay alone.
It must be awesome feeling like a pet poodle being told to attack that or do this.
Gordon Freeman is one of the blandest videogame characters of all time, people can say "the player is Gordon, what he does reflects who the player is". Nah, at least in Half Life 1 it made sense why Gordon/the player do the things they do, Half Life 2 made me feel like a lackey.
That's not true. Half-Life's narrative is far more minimal. They don't even lock you in a room for ~10 minutes while telling you that the world is bad after you just spent ten minutes discovering that yourself.
That's why Half-Life is one of the best video games ever made.
Half-Life 2 forces you to talk to people who you've never met who ask you "remember that time when you would race Barney through vents?" and stuff, who work to establish and define the person of Gordon Freeman far more than Half-Life ever did.
The problem is that Valve was trying to do the big game narrative thing with Half-Life 2, but with their unique organizational ethic. It doesn't work.
The first time I played Half-Life 2 was the week after I played Half-Life for the first time. My mindset that I'd established with Gordon Freeman was constantly at odds with the one Valve 'suddenly' (from my perspective) started forcing on the player in Half-Life 2. I had a great deal more self-interest in Half-Life. I was a loner. For me, that moment where they say "you can trust me. You can trust all of us" is really powerful, because as a player, you go into the game with everyone being pissed at you. Half-Life straight-up affirms you, the player, and creates the feeling that people are depending on you, even though they didn't like you at first. It's a transformative experience.
Half-Life 2 goes "these guys are bad, mmk? and those guys are the rebellion, so they're good. Here's a past you don't remember having, with people you don't know. Now you've got a history and a personality." At that point, why is Gordon mute? It's a lot simpler, and your relationship with the characters never changes or evolves. It's just straight-up, simplistic, in your face "bad guys hurt people, good guys oppose them, support the good guys."
I could go on at length about how the player never sees the Resistance do anything of their own accord, or talk about how the Resistance do things counterintuitive to what most Resistances would (mysterious guy shows up to help rightfully paranoid people, as soon as he does, their leader is kidnapped and their base attacked, nothing is heard from him for two weeks... so they decide it's a good time to engage in all-out war for some reason, because it's "a signal" iirc), but this whole thing is an edit to you, so I'd better not. Plus, I don't have my thoughts organized well on this atm.
NervousXtian
Thought Emoji Movie was good. Take that as you will.
I'm glad they failed then.. as it was a deeply immersive game for me.
Also, Gordon being mute was a great decision.
Karma Kramer
Banned
It's a video game, you are always doing what you are told in so many ways.
Half Life 2 did it in such a way that I could use my imagination with what was given and put myself in the character better than most any other game I played.
Yeah, but the immersion is almost entirely tech and production-driven. The narrative isn't why you were immersed, it's that godlike sound and visual design.
Take, for instance, the bridge.
No one likes first person platforming segments (well, I do, and I'm sure others will say the same, but generally, people hate them). In Half-Life 2, however, people love talking about the bridge sequence. They talk about how incredible it is. Why? Because it has some of the best sound design I've heard in a long while. It makes you feel like you're a person on a bridge trying to get to the other side. It feels real. It hits all the right buttons.
It's incredible.
The game's a work of atmospheric genius. As much as I think it's got a shit story and awful gunplay, it's got this brilliant atmosphere, so that's why I will boot it up every once and a while and play it. I like being in Half-Life 2's world. That sense of immersion is all audiovisual stimulation. It's not rooted in gameplay/story.
valve got big and corporate
Karma Kramer
Banned
This I can agree with, so perhaps we just differ on the role of story in a video game.
No it wasn't.
In Half Life 1 it made sense, the intro sequence when Gordon arrives at work was interesting thinking back because of him not speaking. He either hates his co-workers or is so apathetic about his job he doesn't care to speak.
Then once the alien portal is opened and hell breaks out it also makes sense why he wouldn't speak. Either PTSD or shock of what just transpired.
Besides that there are a handful of NPC's that speak to Gordon after the intro sequence, so him speaking wasn't integral with the story because there was no one worthwhile to speak to.
Half Life 2 has many NPC characters that talk Gordon's head off. It's boring having to listen to events that Gordon has almost no say or stake in, he unanimously agrees with anyone that isn't a brain dead soldier or dictator prick.
This stood out to me, in large part because my experience with the games was the complete opposite. All of HL2's beats more or less accorded with what I would have done in the first place, I went through the first Half-Life trying to save and protect as many scientists as I possibly could, and was genuinely interested in escaping to lambda and getting a breather with other people. The line about trust that resonated with you so deeply was more or less a non-event to me, the science teams were consistently the only people you could trust long before that point, nothing about it was revelatory or transformative in the least.
This for sure has a strong impact in your opinion, Half Life is the better game but a comparison in such a short time between the two games will condition your view of HL2 specially because HL1 does so many things extremely well that almost no game can survive it. I waited 6 years so I'm not that hard on HL2.
I agree a lot with this post except for the gunplay part. Gunplay in HL2 for me it feels right but I think it gets lost after you acquire the gravity gun and everything that goes with it. Gameplay is not only gunplay, it also includes the physics and the impact they have in everything, it gives a unique dynamic, at the time I think that was refreshing, comparisons with max payne 2 in this respect have no place here because in MP2 they are purely for immersion and they have no effect in gameplay iirc, at least not in the way HL2 does (and I say that loving MP1/2).
All in all I think we can agree HL2 evolved the genre even if we do not agree on which aspect. The bridge part is just perfect
What makes the line interesting is that so many scientists are assholes before that line. They're often uncooperative, sometimes jerks, and so on and so forth. After that moment, they're more likely to cooperate with you, give you guns, etc. It's them realizing you're their best hope. They begin to recognize you, too. Some people recognize you throughout the game, but it's that moment where it's like everyone knows who you are, for good or ill.
It's subtle, but it's there, and it's fascinating.
With Half-Life 2, you have to be in the mindset they want. You have to be complacent enough to do what they want. If your mindset clashes, then the experience falls apart. If it had tried to be less story-focused, and more immersive (that is, "I am a person at this moment in this place and time--how do I react?"), like Half-Life, it wouldn't run into the problem of having mindsets that clash.
You and I were both free to react to Half-Life as we wanted. I am not free to react to Half-Life 2 as I want. This is very core problem with the game's design and narrative delivery.
Based on your prior response to me, I think you misunderstand my stance.
This for sure has a strong impact in your opinion, Half Life if the better game but a comparison in such a short time between the two games will condition your view of HL2 specially because HL1 does so many things extremely well that almost no game can survive it. I waited 6 years so I'm not that hard on HL2.
I agree a lot with this post except for the gunplay part. Gunplay in HL2 for me it feels right but I think it gets lost after you acquire the gravity gun and everything that goes with it. Gameplay is not only gunplay, it also includes the physics and the impact they have in everything, it gives a unique dynamic, at the time I think that was refreshing, comparisons with max payne 2 in this respect have no place here because in MP2 they are purely for immersion and they have no effect in gameplay iirc, at least not in the way HL2 does (and I say that loving MP1/2).
All in all I think we can agree HL2 evolved the genre even if we do not agree on which aspect. The bridge part is just perfect
This reads to me like "I waited so long I chose to be less critical."
The gun feel just a tad too light. Moving them feels a bit like waving a balsa stick around. Weapon feedback isn't quite as powerful as it could be00guns need more impact. The gun sounds, particularly the pistol and SMG, really hurt that sense of lethality (I noticed that when experimenting with playing the game muted, I favored the pistol more than when I played it unmuted).
While you can't throw things at people in Max Payne and kill them, it's fun to hide behind a bunch of boxes and have cover shot away, then dodge roll out and kill everyone.
When it comes to evolution, I look at all shooters before Half-Life 2 and all shooters after, and do you know what I see? Nothing really changes.
There are far more distinct watershed moments with Half-Life, Halo: Combat Evolved, Call of Duty 1, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
water_wendi
Water is not wet!
HL1 sure. HL2 didnt really do much that im aware of. Yes i remember the Gravity Gun but while some found it fun its not something that altered the genre of FPS forever. Physics based puzzles i can see an argument being made but i thought the actual content of those puzzles was rather boring and straight-forward. Episodic gaming? lol
While HL2 is a fun game its nowhere near HL1 in terms of influence on the genre, imo.