This time, its like you are actually there! Stacking boxes and doing seesaw puzzles!
I’m into grabbity gloves
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Maybe VR will fix the gravity gun always being in your way
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I agree wholeheartedly with the analysis of Half-Life as redundant once it became the dominant mode of single-player gameplay, and how that means ‘new Half-Life’ is meaningless in this day and age.
but
These games were both created to function as benchmarks for graphical verisimilitude in order to maintain and accelerate demand for high-end graphics cards.
is silly, conspiratorial, and reductive, simplifying down the multitude of reasons so many people have been interested in pushing forward the bounds of real-time simulation (and I mean simulation in the broadest sense).
failing to use the game to sell VR hardware would have been incredibly foolish business-wise
I think it’s also the case that using Half-Life as a VR game is almost certainly a money-losing proposition, next to making a traditional, pointless Half-Life 3. I believe Valve views it as a tool to explore and shepherd high-fidelity VR experiences, as an investment in VR as an ecosystem. I don’t think there’s any realistic possibility this game’s dev costs are remade in sales figures in anything but a decade-long view of VR as a whole. This is one of those cases where rents accrued are being shed to push forward R&D and halo projects.
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The problem isn’t the development cost, it’s the opportunity cost. They could if they wanted split off a “single-player games division” which creates games like Half-Life 3 at a profit, but they probably worry that would unnecessarily distract their management from money-printing-press platform opportunities.
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Nah that twitter guy is right not releasing a game for 15 years is an incredible business decision.
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unironically, probably true!
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i love how people will, to the ends of the earth, claim that in-engine scripted cinematics were the intentional stroke of singular genius when multiple first party accounts have made clear it was a happy accidental byproduct of lacking the bandwidth for higher fidelity cutscenes
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There are still less good solutions to that problem. And moreover necessity is the mother of invention
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“the Half-Life games were created in part to drive up demand for graphics cards” is a really fucking funny gamer conspiracy theory. Big 3dfx axed Half-Life 3 because we were too close to the truth!!
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Not to grant this undue legitimacy, but I do seem to recall reading somewhere long ago that HL1 was intended by its developers to be something of a graphical showcase at the time, a la Crysis, because they wanted push the industry into accelerating the standardization of polygonal 3D graphics as the norm, rather than an offshoot, as many high-res sprite-bases games were still incredibly popular at the time (ie Duke, etc)
This guy’s comment may have been a gross misinterpretation of that?
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I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory so much as someone trying to boil down a bunch of history and industry trends and stuff into a tweet-sized fart of a thought.
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i have always been anti-twitter thread for this reason
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Whenever I see a thing blow up big enough that people are doing “tweet storms” about it I’m just like, this is what blogs were for all of you could just be blogging.
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Sprite-based FPSes seem to have been on the way out on PC, I don’t remember any past 1997’s Shadow Warrior, which wasn’t nearly the hit Duke3D was. In 1998 HL1 was part of a wave of pure 3D ones, including Unreal and several forgotten ones like Sin.
That said, on PS1 the sprite approach continued, and while HL1 was under development the general industrywide turn may not have been as obvious as it is in hindsight
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don’t just let them out, store those harsh butt fumes inside and condense their powerful vapor into a rich and thick turd
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there was one guy I was seeing every day who would make like 120 tweet threads constantly and I had this exact thought before I blocked him
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Just to be contrarian, I do kind of like the way Twitter threads encourage people to write short sentences, and to express themselves in a way that is actually intelligible for people reading linearly
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