Yes because Half-Life ends on a cliffhanger of “what happens with Freeman and the Gman” and continues to show us the “unforeseen consequences” of the little science experiment gone wrong at Black Mesa. If you open a rift to another dimension alien life forms might just invade and take over the whole planet. Half-Life 2 is a really neat extension and expansion of the original.
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All three HL2 games do absolutely nothing with the premise that “Gordon Freeman is secretly in the employ of the G-Man”, except for using the G-Man as a Deus Ex Machina to continue Gordon’s story into Episode 1. The G-Man was a super cool aspect of HL1 and a legacy appendage they could never figure out what to do with after that.
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He’s some mysterious force pulling strings behind the scenes and using Freeman for his own purposes until another, slightly less mysterious force is able to pry Freeman from the Gman’s grasp and start using him for their own purposes. Gman is just part of the overall premise that there’s lots of weird alien influences competing with each other and using humans as pawns now that they’re in our dimension. I wouldn’t say they did nothing with the premise. They made three games out of it.
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A cool trick I noticed George R. R. Martin does is to end many chapters with a cliffhanger, and then when he comes back to the character much later, he has quietly advanced the story forward to a later period with no literal description and rather little emphasis on the resolution. His method has the good aspects of a cliffhanger – drama and tension that keeps you engaged – without writing himself into a corner.
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That’s a smart way to do it. Valve should have introduced multiple playable characters in Half-Life 2 and put in multiple cliffhangers that occur right before it switches to another character. Which you would then play through without realizing you were playing at an earlier point in time (unless you were paying close enough attention) until you caught up with the original character and helped them resolve their cliffhanger. Or flash forward, or sideways or whatever. You could do anything it’s videogames.
That would just be a really good way to do a videogame story in general I guess. Wouldn’t need silent protagonists, wouldn’t need to try and tell a 15 hour story from a single point of view, etc. I just wish more games would try to do a multiple character interwoven story like GTA 5. Now I wish Valve had done that instead of sticking you in Gordon’s shoes for four games.
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Then again, to bring it back around to Halo because that’s what we’re also talking about for some reason, Halo 2 totally did this and everyone hated it. I can only imagine the shit storm that would have occurred if halfway through Half-Life 2 it switched over to Alex’s or Eli’s perspective.
Who hates the pulse rifle what the hell
My big idea was that as the series progressed, the gameplay slowly opened up, which would be reflected in increasing characterization of Gordon, and that HL3 should have him speak for the first time, and have light strategy elements as you made decisions about running a resistance cell in postapocalyptic earth or whatever.
Of course now that seems like a horrible idea because every single game has “survival” and “crafting” as a mechanic and I hate it and it’s the worst. But it was a novel idea when I first had it in like 2009.
Jesus, Ep2 came out in 2007.
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This used to be my theory but now I have knowledge
And it really is that purity of their structure. “Work on what you think would be most valuable to the company”. And it’s impossible to argue that making linear single-player games is that just due to sheer opportunity costs next to the machine that generates a cut of all PC games revenue.
Employees are still able to make arguments on new plays: ‘what if we hedged our bets with Linux?’, ‘what if we created a new hardware platform?’; people can follow other titanically-successful games: ‘what if we made a version of that mod/game that everyone else is making money on?’. But, ‘what if we made a very expensive game that matches all the patterns we see in our database of the habits of all PC games players of games that underperform?’ is not a winnable argument in this structure.
Valve bought Campo Santo the other year. ‘Wow!’, I thought, forgetting everything I’d learned, ‘maybe they want to get back to making some games!’ Don’t expect to see another Campo Santo game, because the inexorable logic of ‘most valuable’ makes Valve the most ruthlessly capitalist machine in games.
I say this as someone who loves Valve but knows enough to keep my limbs far away from their ravenous maw
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Imagining crafting in a Half-Life game all I can come up with is it would definitely have to involve literally manipulating physics-based objects, no menus or abstractions whatsoever. Like a Metro game but with a lot more procedural animation stuff going on so there aren’t a bunch of repetitive canned animations. Complex, multiple stage procedures to craft even the simplest items but over time you get better and therefore quicker at it so you can start to risk doing it on the fly while trying to escape zombies or combine or whatever.
Likewise adding a strategy element wouldn’t rely on abstractions either. You’d be looking at literal maps spread out on tables and having to rely on your own experience and what you can remember from already visiting an area or scoping it out with your suits binoculars. Maybe there are NPCs who can give you advice or more information assuming you managed to keep them alive up to that point.
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But like… they’re not accountable to any public stockholders… they specifically don’t have to follow this logic…
Ultimately, it must come down to:
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the halo vs half life debate will always be relevant because its very much a controllers vs keyboards thing and like top tube said half life 2 did not give a shit about controllers when they released the orange box
two sides of the same insufferable coin
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I think they’re highly ideological.
Valve is interesting as a monopoly holder in that they’re very good at playing fair to the companies underneath them. They’re almost Plato’s enlightened philosopher-king, or, at least, closer than any rapacious company has a right to be.
That’s no replacement for the muscle of competitive pressure but Valve has always been a more open and helpful partner than anyone like Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft; their sins tending to arise of slothfulness and concealment; they are very open and honest but very strategic in what they choose to reveal.
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F.E.A.R. >>>> Halo and Half Life
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halo is definitely the better console shooter but yeah FEAR is probably the best pc fps of that era
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best fps of that era fullstop
shadowrun 360 felt the best to move around with a controller in that wasnt halo
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That flavor of fairness is characteristic of monopolies. They take on pseudo-governmental authority over their sector, and they see the need to maintain its health. This requires predictability – so they develop and enforce pseudo-regulatory policies. Just like government regulation sometimes serves the public good better than race-to-the-bottom competitive capitalism, monopoly capitalism has this rarely noted good side.
The problem with monopolies is rather A) laziness, inertia, waste of immense potential, B) profits calibrated to the maximum amount consumers will bear before revenue declines. We see both of these problem in Valve today, too.
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Very good point, although their history as a shepherd of new markets seems to have carried forth a stronger ethos of ecosystem development, as opposed to the more assumed market we see in telecoms and utilities; their success is dependent upon other studios, and so they are motivated to cultivate? But they are much better than the console manufacturers at it.
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im glad valves shitty monopoly on the pc market is crumbling
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