Full-Life

King of Posters
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I don’t think valve was ever at the forefront of graphically intensive games. like, half life 2 was a showcase game at the time but also was visually designed to run well/look good with lower spec systems (though my PC couldn’t run it at the time but it was fairly by then and I didn’t know how to upgrade on my own back then). half life 1 even more so since it was just running on the quake engine which at that point was fairly ancient. if anything valve has made an effort to keep all of their mainline franchises accessible to lower spec machines without feeling like it’s too much of compromise.

there were several other notable high profile fps games of that era that literally included branding for videocards in their splash screens and stuff.

I think there is some insight in that twitter thread but, like many twitter threads it’s kind of just trying too hard to be this piercing observation and I’m just like… idk man

I definitely agree with @broco that it was almost certainly more of an opportunity cost situation. and also I kind of wonder if portal 2 didn’t meet their sales expectations or something. I mean, it sold very well, but they lavished it with expensive production values and talent, arguably more so than any of their other flagship titles. (I could be way off base with this idk)

it might also be that development encountered actual obstacles for the scope of the game. at least reading the leaked episode 3 script it seemed to be far more ambitious in scope and storytelling than the series had been to that point. like I feel like nothing in the script couldn’t have been executed by any moderately competent AAA studio today, but idk about 2012 era. something with that ambition and enormous fan/sales expectations combined with technical challenges that might have set the team back could have contributed.

I always assumed that half life 3 would feature portal technology or the portal gun in some way (but according to the leaked script, it didn’t). so maybe they originally planned it that way and got fairly deep into building that out only to realize it introduces too many design problems or something.

this is all wild speculation and I guess we’ll not know what really happened for quite some time, but I feel like there were certainly enough available circumstances to combine unfavorably to stall the project. combine that with lack of a survival motive (ie valve was going to do totally fine with or without half life from a business perspective) might have been all that was needed for it to just kinda fizzle out with no reason to come back.

where the twitter guy is right is that yeah, it’s the VR dummy. regardless of the possibility of hardware sales they recognize that VR is a blossoming (I guess) form and they want to extend steam’s dominance of digital distribution into that realm while it’s still relatively young and easy to get in. and they know nothing will excite john q. gamer like a new half life game. like honestly I’m not proud to admit that this is the first thing that’s seriously caused me to consider buying a VR system bc I’m such a depraved fanboy of the series

god this is such a monkey’s claw situation. at least it’s not trying to sell a streaming service or something.

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The initial media push on HL2 is that it was the next gen of next gen. That it would push GPU and CPU way beyond the status quo and that Valve were wizards of engine tech (and art). And then the game got delayed and delayed. And by the time it finally released, it didn’t look so next gen anymore (which had also been spoiled by a leak with some fully functioning sections of the game, which looked near release quality. Quality which wasn’t as great as the hype. I played that leak). Far Cry had been out for like 6 months and was doing even more with visual effects. Had ragdolls. Max Payne 2 had object physics and ragdolls, 11 months earlier. Had HL2 not been delayed so much, it would have been a much bigger deal, in terms of visuals and some of the physics.

It looked like a typical new game which did a couple of things visually—really well. And then the rest was a mixture of decent technical merits and/or well implemented assets sort of exceeding the actual technical details. But also a few things which were very obviously bad. Such as some of the lighting (your flashlight), the way vehicles control, obvious LoD in open areas, etc. Also the A.I. wasn’t very good for awhile. That’s another thing they patched.

It was still a bit of a GPU monster when it released. Not like Crysis crazy, but it definitely benefited from more potent stuff. I played it on a Geforce 6800 non ultra, which was new at the time. And sort of occupied a quite powerful mid-range spot. And I felt like I still had to tweak down a few things to balance the game out. It does scale back rather nicely. So, you can still play the game pretty well on say, a Geforce 4 Ti 4200. But you also lose a lot of the finer shader effects. So its kinda running nice on account of being able to fall back to an older Direct X, avoiding the new visual FX.

But another thing to consider is that, at the time, texture filtering was still evolving and LoD transitions weren’t hidden nearly as well as they are nowadays. Lots of texture shimmer at medium distance and very obvious, stark lines separating quality filtering and low quality/low detail. And the game engine has had updates since then, as well as driver updates for GPUs. Its kinda tough to really know and see anymore, what HL2 really looked like, upon release.

I’d argue the CPU side was the more exciting aspect, by the time it released. As they figured out how to do some pretty nice physics stuff on the CPU. and you didn’t need the bestest CPU do do it. It did still benefit from the best CPUs in certain instances. But that would only show up as like, when this barrel explodes with this wood, will the flying splinters drops some frames or not. Not really pulling you out of the gameplay. Movement and weight physics were all fine on many CPUs. I had an Athlon 64, which were tip top at the time. So I was able to enjoy pretty smooth physics.(but if I’m not mistaken, HL2’s explosion physics didn’t become truly smooth, until dual cores came out). That was my second system build ever. Saved up some Taco-Bell money for that.

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The Episodes felt like a brief moment where Valve just wanted to deliver comfort food HL gameplay to people, but even that was an experiment in episodic delivery and probably also backporting Source features from the EPs to HL2.

Toups, Epistle 3 was a huge scope that doesn’t mention the portal gun but from what we know of how Valve works, the script would have been adjusted to fit whatever gameplay concept and new tech people came up with. The EP3 leak from a few years ago suggested the team was trying enemy spawners and some procedural generation, but who knows where else they could have gone and how that would have impacted things. That work stretches until 2013, so it seems Valve knew with the EP3 hype that they would need to deliver a big game and nothing on the scale of the previous episodes. Which may be why it got shelved in the first place.

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Return to Half-Life in VR, March 2020.
Half-Life: Alyx

Set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, Half-Life: Alyx is a new full-length game built from the ground up by Valve for virtual reality.

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i mean rhys darby is unmistakable but is that rosario dawson?

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Goddamn it, why does this look actually really good.

I can’t just ignore this like I was hoping.

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i guess not

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I’ll never have too much of Half-Life 2’s sound design

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gonna go out on a limb and say valley of the gods is confirmed cancelled if and only if alyx takes the bandanna off in a mirror at some point in the game

it is pretty cool that this is the first VR game to officially list support for every headset on the market without shims

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The hands floating in space disconnected from anything are some pretty peak Valve stuff.

That would require the hands being connected to a body, and Half Life protags aren’t allowed to have bodies.

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::cries in PSVR::

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MARCH 2020

FINAL FANTASY
DOOM
HALF-LIFE
FRANCHISES
ADULT CONSUMERS

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oh, Valley of the Gods has been cancelled in all but name for at least a year

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I’m really appreciating how a game named ‘Alyx’ has no key art of her face so every site is running a 15-year-old shot

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Wow it might be time to finally save up some money and build a vr capable PC huh.

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the trailer makes it look really cool, but being totally removed from the VR ecosystem i wonder how does movement even works in these types of games? so much of the atmosphere in half-life games to me is this tension between traversing dangerous zones and strolling through non-combat areas, how you’re more or less constantly snapping into one or the other as you go

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i bet there is no player directed movement

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that really would be the galaxy brain valve option here and honestly it’s probably not the wrong one

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