Half-Life 2 - Aftermath 467
Eurogamer.com has word that the expected expansion pack for Half-Life 2 is already in the works. Reporting on information gleaned from PC Gamer UK, the site has learned that the expansion will be entitled 'Aftermath' and is currently slated for a summer release. Aftermath will deal with the fallout from the events at the close of the PC title as the residents of City 17 make for the hills in an attempt to get to safety. Alyx Vance, heroine and robot wrangler, will play a larger role in the expansion, but the article doesn't give specific details on what exactly her relationship to you as the player will be. From the article: "The reason we're able to do this, and why it's so exciting is because of Steam. If we were doing this without Steam we'd have to put it in a box, we'd have to start figuring out shelf space over a year beforehand. You'd see it six years from now..."
Wrong Focus (Score:3, Informative)
Like it or not, Steam has been a huge success and through the sale of HL2 (and subsequent server almost-meltdown) they have learned a lot of lessons. I never have problems playing any Valve games, from HL2 to Counter Strike. Any and all patches are applied quickly and easily with no input needed from me.
Call me what you like, but I -love- Steam and being ingrained in the independent game industry, I really like how it has been accepted, sometimes begrudgingly, by the game-buying public and geeks at large. I see its flaws, but I'm more of a silver lining guy myself.
This is the kind of service/platform that independent developers need, not shelf space. Games are becoming risk-adverse, and that means creativity suffers. Don't slam a great leap in technology and delivery. Instead, use it, provide some constructive criticism, but don't dismiss it.
mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This means she lived? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Letting Steam Off (Score:5, Informative)
True.
> Steam is just a second method of distribution.
False. You must *register* with Steam, you must be *connected* to Steam. Or your dead-tree package doesn't work.
Chris Mattern
Re:Letting Steam Off (Score:3, Informative)
I am the opposite. I have many old games that I can not play anymore because of scratched discs or lost manuals with Keys printed on them. Yes this is my fault for letting the discs get scratched, losing the manual, or misplacing the CD. Tribes 2 had the best of both worlds. You could install from the CD, and not have the CD KEY. All you needed was your username/password. For myself, steam is the way I want to buy games.
Re:Wrong Focus (Score:1, Informative)
In a word, no. Trygames [trygames.com] is not only much less intrusive, it also offers far more games.
Several other publishers and developers have also launched similar services. Paradox Interactive [paradoxondemand.com] (Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis) and Atari [paradoxondemand.com] are the two I can recall from the top.
Yahoo also offers games on demand, but will only accept customers from North America. I'm sure there are plenty of others, it's just that nobody else has the name of Half-Life 2 to help them market their service.
Re:No thanks. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Exactly. (Score:3, Informative)
Just pointing out an answer to this, even though I hate Steam anyway. The price of the game if bought through Steam is the same as retail because of the deal Valve has with Vivendi, in which Valve was not allowed to undercut the retail value of Half-Life 2 as opposed to the Steam version of it.
Re:Wrong Focus (Score:5, Informative)
I don't play Counter-Strike unless Steam says I can play Counter-Strike. Whether I want to play it or not is a moot point, because the Steam authentication servers have to give me permission either way.
no Steam at 1k-person LAN in Texas (Score:3, Informative)
Due to problems experienced at previous LANparties hosted by the Texas Gaming Festival [txgf.org], the upcoming 1,000-person lanparty in Austin, Texas will not feature any tournaments based on games that depend on Steam technology. This means no CounterStrike [txgf.org].
Re:Letting Steam Off (Score:4, Informative)
Also, while I was playing the game, there was a fairly severe bug in the process-- the order of events in authentication went like this:
1. check for network connection
2. if present, delete offline token
3. get new token from server
If the server happened to be down, but you left the ethernet cable plugged in, you'd lose your offline token and be unable to play. It locked me out for a solid weekend, and all I wanted to play was a singleplayer physics mod.
This bug may be fixed now-- I haven't played in several months after finishing the game and getting too busy with other things.
Re:Wrong Focus (Score:3, Informative)
It was like that with the old WON-authenticated Half-Life for online multiplayer stuff.
But everyone seems to forget that, along with the big WON downtimes etc...
Re:This could all be resolved.... (Score:3, Informative)
That is a very misleading thing to say. You can't simply put HL2 on an unconnected computer and get it to work. You can however turn OFF your internet connection and get the game to work AFTER it has bene installed.
Re:no Steam at 1k-person LAN in Texas (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This could all be resolved.... (Score:2, Informative)
Where are you people living at that steam works? (Score:2, Informative)
Then on top of that I'm not able to play without a disc, but yet my friends that bought it on STEAM are able to do that? I can't say i remember the last time i had to put a disc in my computer to play a game. I have ISO backups i just mount in a virtual drive to do that. Makes life simpler.
Granted all you that claim you've never had a problem with STEAM, Have you ever gone to a big LAN and tried to use it?? Can you say disaster??
Granted if a LAN does have Internet half the time its limited and all the STEAM Clients just kill it. And if you don't have internet well... lets just hope you remembered to saver your client information.... I know i don't because i have different accounts for my different games.
For those of you that have said the patching works great. Have you actualy tried to play right after a patch? usualy something is always wrong that they have to release a patch for the patch. I also remember at least 2 instances where they had to re-call the update because it actualy messed more stuff up than it fixed.
What about when the authentication servers went down?? Half of the STEAM users were not able to log in for a day or two. I consider that a big issue.
Also I play Counter-Strike in online leagues. Steam creats so much more hassel than counter-strike ever caused before Steam was released (version 1.5). Your clientregistry.blob is bad. oh well time to restart and delete all your content on your computer so it downloads correctly again.
Also lets look at STEAM's Friends list. Now i must not have any friends cause i dont remember the last time that piece of coding worked on the system.... I haven't been able to log into the friends server for the past month, maybe month and a half. I've just given up on that.
For the casual gamer its ok for. But for those of us that enjoy playing it on a daily basis, we're punished for wanting to play a game we love. They refuse to give us other options, (they took the WON Servers down) and so we're stuck with the STEAM'ing pile of Coding they call an inovation....
Any Game developer can look at STEAM and realize this is what not to do.
Steam is also the reason ... (Score:1, Informative)
However, I would pay a few dollars more for a box CD that did not need an umbilical attachment to Valve to function properly. Hopefully Valve will be interested in this market again eventually. They make great stuff.
Re:This could all be resolved.... (Score:1, Informative)
For a while, anyway. My install wakes up every few weeks and demands to "phone home" before I can play again. not good.
Re:Who cares about Aftermath... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Letting Steam Off (Score:2, Informative)
That was an awesome Gameboy game.
Re:This could all be resolved.... (Score:2, Informative)
Also these work, as I've gone through the process myself. A bit of a pain to work out at first, but after that it's a breeze.
Re:This could all be resolved.... (Score:1, Informative)