Half Life 2 To Appear At E3 499
MonsieurEvil writes "Valve announced today (http://www.planethalflife.com) that the long-awaited Half-Life 2 will be appearing at E3, and will be released this year. The NDA for press is supposed to end on April 28th, and quite a few magazines are already hyping their scoops. Hopefully all the teen-angst types that show their superiority through decrying this as vaporware can now listen to their elders..."
Yeah BUT ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mac version? (Score:5, Insightful)
System Shock 3 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But will it run on Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, all I can say is, "Let Our Voices Be Heard" - contact Valve.
(of course, I expect this to work about as well as previous efforts [slashdot.org] at software advocacy have worked [slashdot.org])
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:3, Insightful)
Heavily mod'ed Q2 (Score:2, Insightful)
As a result, there was no native port of the HalfLife client. However, due to much demand Valve eventually did release a native HalfLife server.
Now, did Valve learn from this, and if so, what did they learn? Did they make the server code portable, so that there will be a native Linux server (most probably)? Did they make the client code portable (less likely, but who knows?)?
I don't know about anybody else, but I would pay a premium price (e.g. US$20 more) for a native Linux version than for a Windows version.
No matter. When HL2 comes out, I will in all probability buy it. However, when I send in my registration card (and send it in I shall), I will scratch out all the Windows 9x, Windows 2000, and such options and write in WINE & Linux.
It may not make a difference, but it most certainly won't make a difference if I don't do it.
Gaming Platform (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at how many people buy Windows. They don't do this for all the "features" M$ tries to cram into the box, but rather for all the things that run on Win32. The same goes for HL.
HL2 will be a really good game, but will it be the next (and second, after HL1) gaming platform? If they could manage to let HL1 games run under HL2, (perhaps with some kind of 3d improvements like higher-rez, automagic shadows, etc) they'd have a killer. If not, HL2 will sell about as well as WinXP would if it couldn't run Win98 apps.
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:5, Insightful)
slashdot + game news = wenis (Score:2, Insightful)
Biggest competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you under 16? HL was game of the year long before anyone heard of CS. Hell, most magazines wanted to give it game of the year AGAIN a year later because it was so damn good. It sold very, very well in its original form.
Catch-22 (Score:2, Insightful)
The only thing my Mac truly lacks is games. Not that I really care, though -- as a college student, I -really- need to be doing other things (like replying to a
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:4, Insightful)
All right I give. I'm not disrespecting HL either, I played it to completion...and enjoyed it. But HL is a classic case of a technology becoming something much larger than it was ever intended to be.
Modding HL into TFC and CS was a huge, and very overlooked, occurance in the game community. Most game companies still don't have a clue on how to capitalize on the modding phenomenon. HL is a perfect success story for this.
And there's noone on this board who can say with a straight face that CS didn't at least double HL sales.
Re:Gaming Platform (Score:5, Insightful)
Half-Life was such a phenomenal game, that it became the ideal development platform for mod's first and foremost because of its HUGE user base. Everybody and their mom who played single-player computer games had Half-Life. If you wanted the best exposure you could get, make a mod for Half-Life.
There was also the added bonus that VALVe didn't just drop their product on the world and count the Jeffersons. As many know, they included patches that fixed game play performance, added mods, solidified their own mods, made (in my opinion) the best non-broadband network code ever, and then supported the popular mods.
Counter-Strike eclipsed Half-Life because of the replay-ability inherent in multi-player games. That doesn't mean that Half-Life was one of the best games many people have ever played.
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, Half-Life had some great set pieces and lots of cool moments, but that's not the same thing as a story. By way of demonstration, a few questions you can answer about all of the games I listed but not about Half-Life:
This isn't sophisticated abstract stuff, just the kind of thing they expect you to already know in Creative Writing 101. None of it is required to make a fun game, but it's all required to make a fun game story.
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only two Quake mods that people regularly play today are: Capture the Flag and Team Fortress.
My point is that Valve wasn't doing anything original.
What the...? (Score:2, Insightful)
Where were you when Half-Life came out and rejuvenated single player, and all the game magazines gave it game of the year and wouldn't stop raving about it? Half-Life revolutionized gaming when everyone was going multiplayer-only with Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. How could you have missed this game? It was only the hugest freaking thing for years. The fact a bunch of popular mods came out for it is just a mere side effect. Half-Life made a lot of gaming companies go back to the drawing board (id Software included).
Yep, it's even a better game than Counter Strike. Counter Strike is overhyped and overrated, a breeding ground for high schoolers with broadband and a handful of cheats. Counter Strike will never freak me out like, say, Half-Life's giant tentacle creature tapping at the metal, or the helicopters dropping troops to take you down, or the bizarre alien factories and weirdness of Xen and the final battle at the end ("The truth you will never know"...I'm hoping the sequel really explains what the hell exactly happened at Black Mesa). Enemies even used scent to track you and battled using herd behavior. Human troops would scatter and run for cover if you tossed them a grenade.
I've never seen better designed aliens or creepier labs or weirder alien dimensions than in Half-Life. The game just got better and better as I played it. Go back to your multiplayer mods.
Isn't that kind of premature... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:5, Insightful)
When the briefcase man was revealed, did you find yourself saying, "Aha, now what he was doing earlier in the game all fits together?" I didn't. He could have walked up to me at the end of the game and said he was a really shy Swiss-cheese salesman looking to sell to interdimensional clients, and it would have explained his earlier actions in the game equally well.
When I talked to one of the scientists, since I was the one playing the main character, how could I express that I had no time to deal with him and wanted him to go find his own way out? I couldn't, because I could only listen to his predetermined lines or blow his brains out, nothing in between. The so-called "conversations" were really monologues, which kind of shoots in the foot the whole notion of "I am the main character" -- how can I put myself into the game if I can't even choose how to interact with the other people in the world? Apart from causing me to die, no choice I made in Half-Life made the least bit of difference to the progression of the story or my interactions with the game world.
Now take Planescape: Torment. Do everything you just described, playing the story with yourself in the starring role, and the game adapts to what you're doing. Play it as an egomaniacal jerk with a chip on his shoulder (and yes, it gives you the expressive power to have that attitude in-game) and NPCs who might otherwise cooperate with you will barely give you the time of day, but you may earn the respect of others who want nothing to do with a lily-white hero type. And all the while, you'll explore your way through a story about loss, self-discovery, revenge, and redemption, full of fleshed-out, memorable characters and spanning a world every bit as epic as Half-Life's.
On the other end of the spectrum is a game like Jedi Knight. Very linear, and similar to Half-Life in that the story is really a set of vignettes to explain why you've gone from level X to level Y. It gives you about the same power of self-expression that Half-Life does (which is to say, very little) but in exchange, your character discovers his true heritage, follows a trail of clues to solve a mystery, sneaks deep into enemy territory to recover something that rightfully belongs to him, and runs up against a villain whose motives put the two of them on a collision course.
Both modes of storytelling are fine by me. What I don't like is a story that gives me no expressive power, then fails to make up for it by giving my character no personality to speak of and nobody very interesting to interact with along the way. If a game wants me to role-play, put myself in the shoes of the protagonist to fill in the details of his personality, it had better supply the tools to give him a personality in a way that affects the game. Half-Life didn't.
It was still a damn fine shooter, though, don't get me wrong. For all that I don't think it served up much of a story, it did a great job serving up an environment, and it was fun to play. It certainly deserved all the action-game-of-the-year awards it got. But I can't understand why people hold it up as an example of great game storytelling when there are so many better examples to choose from.
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:4, Insightful)
That is very incorrect - I think you're missing the parent poster's point. Allowing mods is not original, *supporting* them is. There may have been mods for Quake or Quake2 that got sold retail, but none good or popular enough for me to remember despite all that I played those games. With counter-strike, Valve helped the team tremendously, and started selling Counter-Strike on store shelves at Wal-Mart and etc. for 30$, not even requiring the purchaser to own the original Half-Life.
I'm not sure where all the popularity came from, but Counter-Strike is the first multiplayer game I've seen reach the masses. My girlfriend's RA in her dorm has played Counter-strike. My brother owns and plays Counter-strike. As some of the other posts show, there are people who play Counter-strike who haven't even *heard* of Half-life.
This is a truly remarkable and original thing for Valve to do, to take a popular mod and help it grow beyond an add-on to being a separate retail product, completely dissasociated from the single player game.
Re:A good game? (Score:2, Insightful)
Consider that at the beginning of the game, Morgan goes into the hazardous area of the "tank" to do some grunt work--push a sample into the beam. Maybe he was more a high-level technician than a scientist.
Of course, the story didn't have to be immaculate to make for good game play. I spent $50 for Half-Life and Opposing Force and it was the best value I ever got on software. I still play free mods like Counter Strike, Day of Defeat, and FireArms. Since HL runs quite well on Wine and my cheap 16MB Vanta card, I won't be buying many new games. Of course, since there are so many people running HL servers on GNU/Linux, maybe Sierra/Valve will finally decide it's worth it to make a real port of the entire game, at which time I'll need a new GPU.
I wonder if they will fix the bad things about H/L (Score:3, Insightful)
Allowing clients to script just about everything possible has given an unfair advantage to the average player. Taking this out will even the playing field.
2)Mapping
That and it would be nice to create maps that don't rely on Right Angles (like circles!!). Also, it takes almost 3 months to create a good map. This is ridiculous!!!
3)Hacks
Valve has been known to take forever to address hacks and other exploits (which is the reason why I stopped playing CS). Cheating Death has stepped up where Valve has failed. To get and keep players, hacks and cheats need to be addressed and patched ASAFP.
I know there are others but these are the biggies in H/L.
Dolemite
______________________
And this means.... what exactly? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong. Half-life was a good game. Still is. It's so good, in fact, that it has spawned a grass-roots development community that has been incredibly prolific.
Still though, I've lost patience. In five years, Valve has made one game. ONE GAME. That's only one more game than I've made and I'm not even trying.
Oh, they've also become quite good at taking the mod's and add-ons developed by other people and putting them in cardboard boxes. Kudos, Valve. Oh, and there's Steam [steampowered.com]: their nifty content delivery mechanism for downloading that one game they've made.
In short, I'll believe it when I see it.
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that the reason is, is that although compared to a lot of other games, half-life's stortelling is sub-par (i agree with you here), compared to almost every other shoot-em-up action type game, half-life's story is great. I mean, compare half-life to doom or even better mario brothers (or any other old-school console game) Half-life has so much more story than those. And for me, when I first played half-life, it really was the first action game that had any real story, so I remember it as having a great story.
Re:A good game? (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, if he's a PhD and fully part of the research, why do the other scientists have to hold his hand during the experiment? I guess he's probably the most junior member, so he does the grunt work. Having a PhD in a project of all PhD's wouldn't give you any status.
On the subject of mods and gameplay (Score:5, Insightful)
But if you take that argument, then shouldn't UT2K3 be selling in absolute droves? Its marketing campaign focussed a lot on its extreme modablity, to the point where Epic packaged a customized Maya with it, for mod makers. They were driven by the Counterstrike phenomen in doing this.
But in a store the other day, I saw a Halflife pack selling for more than UT2K3 was. The difference between the two is that Halflife the game had incredible appeal because it really was a revolutionary game. UT2K3 wasn't. Lots of people therefore bought HL. This meant it generated large market share. And *that* is what gets a good mod. There's little point in modding a game to distribute if noone else has the game. So with the wide HL userbase, it made itself a very attractive medium for mods.
Yes HL sales were fuelled by CS and co, but that's not what started the avalanche. I'm sure Valve are acutely aware of this.
Re:Easy questions (Score:2, Insightful)