Writing for Half-Life

I remember playing Marathon when it first came out, and... frankly had the same reaction. I managed to play Spectre on a Mac LC, but Marathon broke me. Lots of potential, but as seen through the bottom of a beer glass.

Ehh, wondering if you played Marathon or Marathon 2. Either way, older games are often lacking in usability compared to newer ones. That's especially true of FPSs prior to, say, 2000.

The writer for that Freeman's Mind was far better then I'd expected. I remember watching that back when machinima was considered "nice" or "good" by the community! Brings back memories.

Yikes, oh well, as long as he's on Youtube as well I suppose it doesn't matter. Thanks for the info.

He gets paid decently (and on time, unlike most of the people who've worked for them) and, I've been told, doesn't actually make his own videos--just does the voiceovers. That sounds like a pretty easy gig.

All of that is true, but consider that in the years since HL2 came out, that anticipation and fan theories have gone through the roof and back again. Valve has since stopped being a developer, and prints money with Steam, and a big part of the goodwill they garner has to do with their reputation as sterling game devs.

Now, you have to ask if HL3 could ever hope to meet the expectations of the modern gamer, many of whom were probably just born when HL2 was big and have no real connection to it. What do they have to gain from it? What do they have to lose? I'd argue that they're making so much money now they don't particularly need the expense and risk of developing a game that, even if it is quite good, stands to potentially harm their reputation.

HL2 is good old FPS game.

There is no way in hell they could release it as a VR game and not as regular FPS game. That would be just really bad move from Valve.

Half Life 3 will be made, in about the same way humanity will solve climate change. Which comes first remains to be seen.

And imo he seems to be stuck in a rut.

His early videos seemed to be interesting, but these days every video is an excuse to rant about clueless game company execs and overweight manchilds.

The value of Valve is in Steam, Team Fortress hats, and DotA skins.

I think Valve are very aware that their PR relies on them being seen as game devs. Their customer service is genuinely appalling. One of the major things keeping Steam in power is the refusal of players to consider using other platforms.

If they were to sell the HL franchise they risk losing a lot of customer support overnight. They would no longer be game devs, whose blunders can be excused because of their amazing games, they are money grabbers willing to whore out their franchises for short term cash grabs. The risk to the Steam platform just doesn't seem worth it.

If they were to sell it MS would be one of the worst destinations for it. If I were in their shoes I would likely explore having a smaller studio build it. A sale to MS could only be viewed as financially motivated and the quality of the game produced is almost certain to suffer.

However if I were them I would keep it as an ace up the sleeve to bring the masses to a new H/W platform Valve bring out. Such a release could seal the platform that wins its generation of consoles.

> How could valve motivate not making a game that would sell like hotcakes no matter how terrible it is?

I think it mostly boils down to Valve being a privately held company that is not under pressure to meet arbitrary quarterly financial targets. The article is quite clear that Gabe Newell gutted HL a few months before the original release date rather than deliver a game that wasn't quite "there" yet.

Additionally, if Valve have maintained their notoriously flat structure, HL3 will need to acquire critical mass /buy-in within Valve before it can make it out the door.

> Even if Valve decides against ever doing HL3, could they afford not to sell the franchise?

Yes, as long as Steam remains a money printing machine, they will not be desperate.

Yeah, Errant Signal is pretty cool. Have you checked out matthewmatosis? He does the same sort of stuff, and sometimes goes even more in-depth.

Yes, I read that too.

Like I said, I got most of my stuff from gaming magazines before I had Internet, and I almost never saw any Quake mods on their CDs.

On the other hand, I was rather young when Quake was "a thing" and just started with PC gaming. I found out about these magazines a few years later.

It is if you want it to be.

You can develop an attachment in a game like Doom or Quake just by feeling amazing acquiring a new weapon and being terrified when entering a new room on low health.

The player is supposed to be the avatar. You aren't playing Gordon Freeman, you are some space marine fighting the hordes of hell or dimensions incomprehensible.

You have an emotional investment in your character because your success or failure in combat dictates if you live or die. It is surely a simple connection, but it also certainly exists. It is implicit to almost any video game.

And one of the most popular games on steam is a game where you kick around a ball with RC cars. Another is a game where a team of counter-terrorists and terrorists fight with no context, made by Valve itself. A hit game that is claimed to be partly behind the modern roguelite resurgence is a game where you fly forward across several systems, to escape the dastardly rebels and save the federation, and that's all the story you're given. In what has been hailed as one of the best shooters in years, all you need to know about the plot (although there is more to it) is that you kill demons from hell. Gameplay over story, every time.

I think Carmack wins this one.

That was certainly part of it.

OTOH, the actual language that Quake mods were written in, QuakeC, belongs in nightmares.

And you might say it's not that bad. You might say that it's okay, given its domain. And then you realize that Xonotic is still, to this day, written largely in QuakeC. And then you start to feel a bit ill, just contemplating a codebase of that size in a language that actually has less abstraction powers than C.

You are right that I am thinking only about single-player. Which is a big limitation on my thinking.

However, in terms of an argument between story-driven vs. just-shoot-em-up, I think single-player is the most relevant.

>CoD started out as an authentic (or, authentic-seeming) WW2 shooter

I seem to recall the draw of CoD vs MoH was that you weren't one lone soldier vs the axis of evil. You actually had teammates! And scripted events!

I still find it hard to believe that a games company would drop an IP just because people wanted it too much. But maybe that's exactly what they did

It wouldn’t surprise me to see Half-Life 3 announced as a flagship title for a Steam VR platform. The individual components are in place, but it’s still immature.

I thought the Portal demo on the Vive was mindblowing. If they released Half-Life 3 in that form, it would survive the anticipation.

>>The No Man's Sky disaster would be nothing in comparison.

No Man's Sky wasn't a simple case of hype, though. The developer blatantly lied about what was going to be in the release version, including videos and screenshots of content that doesn't exist[1]. The extent of this mismatch between what was advertised and what was delivered is so large that it's being investigated in the UK[2].

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no...

[2]http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/09/uk-advertising-board-i...

Portal 2 had extremely high expectations, and while it didn't meet everyone's wishes it is still highly regarded.

Consider the 2016 Doom. You could claim expectations were tempered by Doom 3 and Rage plus the loss of Carmack, but the game wildly exceeded expectations and was incredibly well received by its target audience.

Valve isn't developing HL3 because a project of that magnitude requires simply more dedication and conviction than Valve's devs might even have anymore. The company is one of those flat structures where developers work on whatever they have passion for, which means anything they make is gold, but if nobody has passion for it it will never be made. And compared to the work required to make all their games since HL2 - not skill, just raw hours of design and testing - HL3 is way beyond the scope of what Valve has made since then. Portal 2 is the most significant achievement since then, and all it really was was level design and event scripting - there are no real enemies, no AI, and the game length was still quite a bit less than what a full FPS release on par with the old Half Life would expect.

It should be no coincidence the release of Steam ended the Half Life franchise. Once the company had effectively infinite cash the staff could pivot from making complex hard to develop games that would make huge returns to making whatever they wanted - Dota 2 has nothing pay to win, no payments to even play, the only in game transactions are for cosmetics. It is something no other moba, not even Blizzard's, is willing to risk because everyone else is too worried about making sure ends meet from the games revenue.

So I do not believe Valve is incapable of living up to the hype. Even making a game as good as Half Life 2 would be enough. Portal 2 was considered a success despite being inferior to its predecessor because it was still really good. The problem has nothing to do with fear of failure, but a lack of willpower in Valve staff to put millions of hours into making a worthwhile successor to Half Life 2 when they can get similar accolades for much less effort making games in other genres. It is the same reason you so rarely see expansive and good RPGs. They are much more time consuming to make than almost any other genre of game.

There's probably a treasure trove of storylines and ideas from HL2 that would be incredible to read, though.