Half-Life

What was the other fish?

It was called Half Life Day One, and I remember seeing it as a bundle with some hardware, not sure which one.

Thank you (and the whole team of course) for creating something so amazing

I bought a 3dfx just to play Half Life, 3dfx because of that association between your game and their tech, figured it was the obvious choice, likewise so did most of my gamer mates.

So hope you had shares in them :D

I was wondering which Mike this was - Mike Harrington I see!

Thanks - Half-Life is a great legacy.

I remember playing that leaked first level on the tram with roommates in college over and over again. We were so psyched by it. All salivating for the final release.

Next to playing Quake for the first time with 3d acceleration (3dfx voodoo) it was an awe inspiring flashbulb moments that changed what I thought was possible.

I loved world building with the valve map tools. It was fantastic. Almost as much fun as the game itself.

> On a side note, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well

I also remember it like it was yesterday when, after school on a hot summer's day, a friend showed me this "cool new mod" he recently downloaded for Half-Life. It was an early version of Counterstrike. It took him an entire night to download the mod, and it only ran on his machine with a 320x240 resolution. It looked like crap and was basically unplayable. 6 months and a hardware upgrade later, we all played it for hours each day, and often non-stop for 12 hours on LAN parties. I also remember that you could contact the internet provider (Telekom) by mail, and after a few weeks they would activate something called "Fast-Track" for your connection, which would drop the latency from around 110ms to only 35ms, a huge advantage for MP games... it really blows my mind that all of this was 25 years ago.

In the early 2000s, CS was arguably better known than the original HL. I had some friends who probably played CS for thousands of hours, but never even touched the original HL.

The hype was so hot and fast around HL when it came out, that I remember playing it without a dedicated graphics card (I think I was running on a motherboard integrated gpu) in the lowest resolution possible because there was this feeling of "you have to try it".

> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years.

Modding still exists. It’s just called “UGC” now. Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft have thriving and accessible options. GTA has an unbelieveable number of players playing role playing mods of it too.

> purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years.

A time when technology changed that fast, too.

The crazy thing is there are still a few people playing Half Life!

Nightmare House was a super fun mod that I found at some point.

I don’t remember where or how, but it scared the heck out of me.

> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods.

Another game from that time that was also easy to mod was The Sims 1.

For a bit of context, EA/Maxis released modding tools BEFORE the game was released, to let players create custom content for the game (like walls and floors) before the game was even released!

And installing custom content was also easy, just drag and drop files in folders related to what you downloaded and that's it.

Imagine any game nowadays doing that? Most games nowadays don't supporting modding out of the box, but of course, there are exceptions, like Minecraft resource packs/data packs. I don't think Fortnite and Roblox fit the "modding a game" description because you aren't really modding a game, you are creating your own game inside of Fortnite/Roblox! Sometimes you don't want to play a new game inside of your game, you just want to add new mods to enhance your experience or to make it more fun. There isn't a "base game Roblox", and while there is a "base game Fortnite" (Battle Royale... or any of the other game modes like Fortnite Festival or LEGO Fortnite) Epic does not let you create mods for the Battle Royale game. You can create your own Battle Royale map, but you can't create a "the insert season here Battle Royale map & gameplay but with a twist!".

Of course, sadly EA/Maxis didn't release all of the modding tools they could (there isn't a official custom object making tool for example, or a official way of editing the behavior of custom objects) but they still released way more modding tools than what current games release.

I think that most modern games don't support that easiness of modding because the games themselves are complex, because as an example: The Sims 1 walls are like, just three sprites, so you can generate a wall easily with a bit of programming skill, the skin format is in plain text in a format similar to ".obj", so on and so forth.

Lately I've been trying to create my own modding tools for The Sims 1, and it is funny when you are reading a page talking about the technical aspects of the game file formats and the author writes "well this field is used for xyzabc because Don Hopkins said so".

Modding was amazing back then. I wasn’t a modder myself, but it felt like something new and crazy was happening every week. The excitement for every beta release of Counter-Strike. The buzz around newcomers like Action HL, The Specialists, and PVK. Experiments like Science & Industry that didn’t last long but were a fun romp nonetheless. Endless rounds of TFC and DoD. And there were always populated community servers for any mod you plucked fom Fileplanet.

We’ve lost something along the way.

> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding.

I'm generally skeptical about the use cases for current-gen AI, but very hopeful that it can help us get back to this golden age of game Modding.

I think many people, like me, got lost in all the polygons and shaders soon after Half-Life 1. But if AI tools can make it easier to express Modern game outcomes, the way we could make a funky HL1 mod with the IDEs back then; it could be swing things back.

GTA5 had a super big budget yet received very good feedback from gamers and critics alike, and is still played to this day. So not sure you can just discard big budgets as a whole.

And then Star Citizen is quite innovative in many regards and has virtually unlimited budget, and would not exist in the first place without a long runway

>What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Witcher 3 comes to mind. But I just realised it was released 10 years ago...

BG3 was great.

I don't think it counts as big budget, but I've recently gotten into Last Train Home and it's a fantastic and unique premise (with gameplay that's a mix of Company of Heros + XCOM + This War Of Mine).

> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Elden Ring. You’d need to go quite a bit further back for the last one before that though.

> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Elden Ring and its DLC, probably. The Japanese games industry is doing far better than their western counterparts, there have been huge headlines that in 2024's Game Awards, 4 of 5 games nominated for Game of the Year came from Asia (3 Japan, 1 China). The last game (Balatro) was an indie game developed by one person.

Not a single nominee was from a major western company like Ubisoft, EA, etc. They may be financially successful now, but the games industry is imploding. This is what happens when you treat developers poorly and chase greedy trends while expecting consumers to put up with it. Like you said, most AAA games releasing these days are either dead on arrival or completely unnotable and miss expectations.

For one, id software is still making great big budget single player experience, see Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and the soon-to-be-released Doom the dark ages.

> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Talos Principle 2. Does that count as big budget?

I recently got to play Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Gameplay is virtually the same as the previous entry in the series, but the story is interesting and entertaining.

> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

To add to the other answers - Half-Life: Alyx ;)

> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Kingdom come deliverance, baldirs gate are two massive titles in the last 12 months. God of war, spiderman, Indiana jones are other titles that are just stand alone artistic experiences, again in the last little while.

> What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?

I think it’s funny you mention that because the games you sniped at (Fortnite Minecraft GTa) were seismic shifts in gaming - in the last few years - Fortnite wrote the book on live service games IMO. But, when they’re “popular” suddenly they’re not cool anymore.

> It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.

What do you want? IMO the industry is in an ok place - aside from the mass layoffs over the last 24 months. But for consumers there’s so much choice - there’s massive hundred million dollar budget tiles with new content every year (Ubisoft/CoD/ Sony/microsoft doing these) there’s “smaller” budget games in the 50-80millon mark that are achieving critical success on PC and Console, there’s AA-budget games in the 15-30 million mark coming out every month that are hits and misses, there’s a thriving indie scene for every genre you could possibly imagine, and many you can’t (e.g. trombone champ).

There’s options at every level, dozens of games coming out every year - more than any single person could ever play.

disclaimer: I’ve worked on one of the titles you’re talking about here, but don’t anymore. Opinion is mine, not theirs.

I haven't played many different games over the last few years, but both Half-Life: Alyx and Zelda: Breath of the Wild left strong impressions. Both games have a rare sense of place that's hard to replicate in other mediums—the same thing that stood out for me after the first time I played Half-Life 2. These games feel less like a movie I've seen or a story I've read and more like somewhere I've been.

This isn't unique to video games—I've had the same feeling from, say, 2666 or Stalker—but video games seem especially well-suited to do this as a medium.

> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Control was very good!

Well, please be bloody careful and don't create any resonance cascade scenarios.

Wow that's inspiring. Let us know when you are asked to send a crystal into the testing chamber. I'll go to the mountains.

Let us know if we need to prepare for "unforseen consequences".

Also I am really sorry but I messed up your lunch in the microwave earlier.

Thank you for soldier of fortune. It was a pioneer in its own way with how brutal the enemy destruction was. I loved it. Incredible game that is up there with DOOM, Half Life and Halo for me.

I remember Soldier of Fortunte, at the time I was still in my home country and somehow I get to find the CD.

It was a great game and one of those which stuck in my head despite being a kid back then.

The indie market is a bloody red sea right now. But as long as you don't care about money or can expense your hardware and internet costs, I think it's good enough.

I sorta want to do this, but developing completely open source games.

Maybe even developing my own game engine.

Of course all this costs a lot of money with no clear way to make it back. If I had to come up with a monetization model, I would come up with an ad network similar to Unity.

If Unity needs 2 billion in revenue to barely keep going, I reckon a more focused engine could be funded for 20 million a year.

It's a moot point since I'll never have that much money or be able to raise a VC round.

But HN, let's dream. Imagine a .net or JavaScript engine that's web first. With mobile and PC support coming later( PC can just run a local server). The engine developers dog food their own engine, making very high quality examples for the community.

Keep the engine focused on small lightweight games.

Unity's ultimate problem is they keep trying to do literally everything.

I wouldn't do that. I'd say straight up this engine isn't going to do AAA gaming. It's not going to scale. I'm not supporting 800 design patterns.

> Not AAA, of course, but with the definite goal of making the best game that such a setup could realisitically produce.

have a read up on Savage Game Design and the SOG Prairie Fire CDLC for Arma 3.

hands down, the best DLC ever created for Arma3. a good chunk of the original team were Unsung modders. they went down the road of CDLC, now they’re working on their own standalone game and a bunch of other stuff (look through Rob/Eggbeast’s posts on the SOG PF discord for more info).

Arma is actually a great way to hack something together for basically nothing. buy Arma, start scripting sqf to build a gamemode, create new assets in blender and stick ‘em in a mod, host a server. though the engine has lots of weird bugs/footguns, your costs are basically Arma+devtime+servers.

disclaimer: i’m a maintainer on the Mike Force multiplayer gamemode they released. do it in my spare time for kicks (although been slacking recently).

There’s a ton left that can be done by small companies - factorio is just one example out of the hundreds waiting to be discovered.

Find a niche and polish it to perfection and you can make headway.

Most big-budget games have more to do with interactive movies than with gameplay, anyway.

Yeah, similarly, there's quite a few established games/genres just waiting to be disrupted because of the incumbents losing their ways and their charm. The most obvious, blatant example is Minecraft - a game where you can survive, thrive, build anything and mod it to your hearts' desire. That's not true about it anymore - but any game which would fulfill this would probably go big.

It's one of those things where someone's going to eventually do it. As they say, "watch this space".

Man, TFC was the greatest. I’m surprised there aren’t more threads mentioning it here. Got overshadowed by Counter-Strike of course (also great) but TFC was the “prototype mod” released by Valve themselves as an example of what could be done with the HL SDK and it was a great game in its own right. I spent many hours perfecting rocket jumps and timing those grenade throws to wipe out unsuspecting enemies. 2fort ftw.

I played through the single player, but like you I think I preferred doom.

That said, half-life mods were imo the golden age of gaming. Vampire slayer let you scare the shit out of your friends at 3am in a LAN. Day of defeat and firearms were the cod and mw of the day. Natural Selection crushed it in terms of fps/RTS hybrid, teamplay and overall quality and polish. Science & industry? Pirates Vikings & knights? Tfc? Several attempts at matrix mods & the opera. So much amazing diversity - it's such a shame that CS (the most banal, vanilla, milquetoast game ever) got all the mindshare. Even when CS ventured into making things more interesting/diverse (hostage rescue, shield, etc.) those things seem to have died off back to the 'standard' game mode (80% of players dead and spectating while "the bomb has been planted" sound effect plays).

At that time in 1998 I mostly played Q1/Q2 online and contemporaries wise I preferred Unreal and SiN over HL's single player experience. Also Unreal's graphics were just truly next level on the Voodoo2 vs anything else. HL DM at LAN parties was surprisingly good and a bit overlooked though; the beginning of the game until the dimensional rift was definitely fun. What stood out the most to me was the soldier AI actually. I always felt the series was a bit hyped but I've come around as I returned to the games on my Steam Deck OLED last fall. In retrospect; clearly classics and the high praises were well earned after all. SDOLED apart from actual CRT setup is maybe the perfect way to experience it today IMO.

Of course DOOM is its own thing completely; a timeless distillation of the 80s - the arcade, Super Mario and D&D all astonishingly abstracted into an unreasonably blissful bleeding-edge hellscape; 93 till infinity.

> I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure

I think I remember reading an interview with the dev team where they explained that playing action for too long was boring, as well as solving puzzles, so they consciously designed the game with interleaved phases of action/puzzle. Your recompense for solving a puzzle is action, and your recompense for killing all the bad guys is a relaxing puzzle.

It's funny you didn't liked that, because for me it was the complete opposite. I like pure action shooters, and I like pure puzzle adventure games, but I really loved Half-Life and I didn't know why until I read that explanation.

The same author has full articles on Jedi Knight [1] and X-Wing/TIE Fighter. [2]. If you go through his archives [3], he's also written a lot about LucasArts' adventure games; I think the first posts that talk about them are the three "A New Force in Games" posts.

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2024/04/jedi-knight-plus-notes-on-an-... [2] https://www.filfre.net/2021/02/the-second-coming-of-star-war... [3] https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/

I've been waiting decades for a re-visit of the Jedi Knight series; preferably in the breadth of Jedi Outcast. I hope to see it soon.

The shareware version of DooM was more of a complete game than many boxed games at the time. It’s no wonder it spread so far - especially because it was also an amazing hardware demo.

Probably also because graphics nowadays are "good enough". I would rather have a new game with current-gen graphics and awesome story/physics/mechanics/world, than a game with shitty gameplay but slightly better textures.

To add to the nostalgia train. My friend Chris had it installed on his computer (my family computer was far too old to run it). F5 quick save had been a godsend in that game for all the surprise traps (which the article calls out). Anyways, he accidentally F5'd falling into a pit. His only save IIRC, which meant he had to restart the game.

A bummer, but made for a good story and fond memories

Yes and no. The original is still very much playable, one does not replace the other, both are very good

Does it run on MacOS? (That page suggests not?)

Black Mesa is not the same game!

Black Mesa is a recreation but it's not identical to the original either. So... Yes if you want modern graphics, no if you want the real thing

Skip Xen if you're playing this.

I really didn't like black Mesa at all. It's different for the sake of being different

There's still a lot of value in playing the original, but what the Black Mesa team achieved with what is effectively a fan project is incredible. And in a world where Take Two goes after people doing cool stuff with 20 year old GTA games, it's great that it got the official blessing from Valve.

I also found it very weird back then.

My favorite pasttime in HL/CS back in the day was bhopping and kz_. To some degree I think it has too responsive movement. I recently went back to play HL and I fell down so many crates due to the instant movement, having been used to some inertia in games since.

Super tight and responsive movement wouldn't necessarily mean jumping puzzles make sense in a 90s single player FPS. Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.

My memory is that it wasn't the controls but the sizes of the spaces you had to jump to and the clarity of where they were so you could adequately position yourself that were the issue. The latter of which is probably more down to texture usage than the engine itself.

I assumed it was a general complaint about Xen.

I liked Xen when I played it. I thought the boss fights were terrible, but I think most FPS boss fights are terrible. The other complaint is that the healing pools were too slow. The navigation and obscure puzzles were great, though. They scratched an exploration itch I didn't know I had.

Well it was responsive but it wasn't physically accurate at all, which makes it non-intuitive. The whole reason side-games like KZ and surf could exist was due to the bad physics. I competed in local IRC KZ tourneys and also surfed a lot in 1.6. The fact that you gained speed by moving left and right repeatedly doesn't make any intuitive sense. The surf scene was also heavily infected with frame-rate tricks (hotkeys to increase fps-limit in the air, and then lowering it on the ramps) since you floated more in the air the higher your FPS was. In the beginning you needed to have a PC that could support 250+ FPS to be a high-end surfer. This was fixed later with server-set fps limits etc. though.

It created an entire universe of movement based mini-games that I treasured more than the base-game, but it was mostly based on unintuitive physics and engine bugs.

I do agree that the modern game's "inertia" and slow heavy movement feels bad though. Last modern game that I remember had really fast and rapid movement was The Talos Principle.

> Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.

I distinctly remember a noticeable delay between moving the mouse and the view turning, even when the frame rate was high. I think the fix was switching from DirectX to OpenGL.

I loved Q1 and Q2, but Q3A just felt like half a game to me.

I'm reminded of my art professor whose friend worked designing lottery scratch offs, and found it unfulfilling yet well paid. While my professor struggled teaching at a B-tier state university and contracting for prestigious brands.

Around the same time I gave up my dream of making videogames because pay and hours were terrible, and I had no prospects in the Midwest.

there were other brilliant ideas bridging nascent technology for the sake of gameplay, like surround sound to locate some fast (nearly impossible to see coming) enemies. It really was perfectly executed.