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)
Re:Yeah BUT ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah BUT ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yeah BUT ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah BUT ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah BUT ... (Score:5, Funny)
By the time it's released, no body will buy it. Anyone who remembers the first DN3D will be dead.
*smells another daikatana coming up*
Re:Yeah BUT ... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yeah BUT ... (Score:2, Funny)
2. Post
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
Still single player focused? (Score:5, Interesting)
When the first one came out, it really blew me away with that mix... will the second one be able to live up to that? The marketplace has moved on, and it's harder to impress gamers than it was then...
I hope they've come up with a brilliant single player game as I'm sick of the focus on multiplayer these days. (Which is one of the reasons I'm so looking forward to Doom3)
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm, I think you broke my sarcasm detector.
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:5, Funny)
oh yeah, like that's a useful invention
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:2)
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:2)
System Shock 3 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:System Shock 3 (Score:4, Interesting)
The many sings to us. Your flesh...betrays you.
I've never yet played a "survival horror" game that didn't make me want to laugh at its lame attempts at suspense...but Shock2, played in a dark room with good headphones (oh how I miss you, Aureal!), had me literally shaking in fear.
Please, god, let this be Warren Spector's next game...and let it be done right.
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.
Easy questions (Score:5, Interesting)
Initially, the character (Dr. Gordon Freeman) wants to settle into his new job. At this point, there is no-one standing in the way of his goals.
The first unexpected event happens when the experiment goes wrong. Part of the lab is destroyed, and what remains is infested with aliens. At this point, the aliens and the destruction stand in his way and his goal is to contact people on the outside.
Eventually, he manages to find his way outside, and that's when another unexpected event takes place: the people who were supposed to save him and the other scientists are in fact trying to kill them to keep the whole affair secret. At this point, the soldiers stand in his way, and his goal is to try to learn as much as possible about the situation, and how to solve it.
Eventually, he finds a way to teleport to the alien's planet (which must count as another "unexpected event"). Now his enemies are once more the aliens, and his goal is to destroy them.
Finally, at the very end of the game, there's a final "unexpected event".
So there.
Half-life's story isn't "great" in the sense that it's very original (it's not). The great thing about it is not the story itself, it's the way it flows so naturally and feels so much part of the game, despite the fact that the game's genre is not one typically associated with "a story".
Half-life is essentially an action game. It's not an adventure, it's not a RPG. There are no dialogues and no items. Just guns, monsters, puzzles and the occasional scripted "scene". Given these building blocks, I think HL manages to create a great atmosphere and (apart from the rather weak and predictable ending) to tell a pretty entertaining story (a lot better - more interesting and more consistent - than some movies).
HL's great strength is not its originality, it's the level of perfection and polishing of every single of its elements, from the gameplay to the default keyboard layout to the auto-save system. Things that stem not from great technology or brilliant ideas but from a lot of playtesting, a good dose of common sense, and a refusal to settle for "good enough" just to meet the deadline.
As someone wrote at the time, "Half-life restored my faith in gaming". After fiascos like Black & White and Neverwinter Nights (not exactly bad, but very disappointing nonetheless), I could definitely use a new injection of Valve fluid.
It's ironic that the company that created such a perfect game (and later created and financed so many great free updates and mods) was founded by ex-Microsoft employees...
RMN
~~~
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:3)
"First, you just want to get to earth, then before you know it, you have to go to an evil dimension to save all of earth."
The "story" for Doom, Quake, and Half-Life were all exactly the same. "Military scientists in a remote base are experimenting with teleportation when they unleash alien monsters that could destroy the earth unless a single man carrying 8000 kgs of ammunition can halt the invasion and take the fight right back to the enemy's ho
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:3, Insightful)
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, but I would bet you top dollar that over 90% of sales were "AFTER the initial 5 months".
Re:Still single player focused? (Score:2)
Think about it.
Re:Still single player focused? (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.
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: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.
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:Still single player focused? (Score:4, Interesting)
You may be one of those that is a CS nut, and it really has been an amazing success, but the single player original Half Life made one hell of an impact when it came out, without CS to help it along. It was a hit with the types of gamers that were longing for a really good single player game again, as the industry was so focused on multiplayer.
The fact that you never would have heard of it without CS simply demonstrates that you were ignorant of the best single player game of that year.
But will it run on Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:But will it run on Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
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:But will it run on Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, not everyone would behave this way, but still, Half-Life is a very sore subject for Mac gamers. That said, if it showed us anything, it turned out it's indeed true one can have a satisfying gaming experience on the platform without having a specific "A-list" title, and I'm sure that's true for Linux as it is on the Mac, even if there are fewer Linux games than Mac ones. Certainly my own biggest problem isn't too small a selection of games, but too little time to play the ones I have and too little money to get the rest of the ones I want, smaller though the Mac selection may be. Even with more money and time, though, I wouldn't do Windows for games. One has to have principles. ;)
Re:But will it run on Linux? (Score:5, Funny)
I already beat photoshop, There isnt enough replay value to keep me on a mac.
Re:But will it run on Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But will it run on Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
They have pulled back releases of their security modules (anti-cheat) just because users of WINE were having trouble. This is not to say that the experience is perfect, but it does mean that they don't have a "screw linux, it's not supported" attitude.
The rumor is that Half-Life 2 will come out THIS year, which is a very real possibility. Nothing has been heard about Team Fortress 2 for over a year now, so this project has been under very tight wraps (I mean, up until a couple of weeks ago, everyone thought they were still working on Team Fortress 2, and the Valve team gave no hints that they were doing something else).
November will be the 5 year anniversary of the original Half-Life. I would say a 5 year product development cycle should be enough, but I would have only said that with 100% confidence BEFORE Daikatana, and lord knows when the next Duke Nukem game will come out (it's been so long, I'm beginning to think that maybe the original really actually sucked, but we had low expectations back in the day, and the suspense keeps growing).
Re:But will it run on Linux? (Score:2)
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 ma
Re:Heavily mod'ed Q2^H1 (Score:4, Informative)
s/QuakeII/Quake/. Somebody always gets this wrong when Half-Life is mentioned. Half-Life was based on the Quake 1 engine. Yes, it heavily modified the engine (skeletal animation, better lighting and hardware acceleration, particles, etc), but in the end it's still based on the Quake 1 engine. Most people confuse this, since Half-Life was released shortly after Quake 2 (IIRC, Q2 was Christmas 97, while Half-Life was Spring 98 -- off the top of my head, so probably wrong). Of course, just thinking about it for a second would prove that HL wasn't based on Q2 -- If HL was released so soon after Q2, how could Valve have had time to modify the Q2 engine, as well as provide all of the necessary IP in formats Q2 would accept (models, maps, textures, etc)? History repeats itself -- SiN and Soldier of Fortune were based off of the Q2 engine (so were Daikatana and Anachronox, but those are bad examples simply because Q3-based games launched before they did), and they came after Q2 by a year or more, and without the major engine modifications Half-Life had. Alice, FAKK2, and RTCW were Q3-based games, and they came a year or more after Q3. Valve must be some kind of special, then, if they can highly modify the Q2 engine and launch within months of the official release of the Q2 engine (not supported by the length of time it's taken them to develop HL2 and the later-than-DNF TeamFortress 2).
Re:Heavily mod'ed Q2 (Score:5, Funny)
people spouting things like that might have somehting to do with it.
Re:Heavily mod'ed Q2 (Score:3, Funny)
OMF YOU IDIOT - QUAKE 1 WAS THE BASE! HOW COME SO MANY PEOPLE GET THIS WRONG!??!?"
When you flame someone, proofreading is always a good idea. Nothing makes you look like more of an ass then calling someone an idiot with mistakes in your post. Just a little FYI
Obligatory DNF post (Score:5, Funny)
Do I get a prize for that much dedication for a TRUE vaporware product? =P
Re:Obligatory DNF post (Score:2)
Re:Obligatory DNF post (Score:2)
Half-Life 2 can't be considered vaporware either. All Valve has said about it was yes, they were working on it.
Since when has
Re:Obligatory DNF post (Score:5, Funny)
Do I get a prize for that much dedication for a TRUE vaporware product? =P"
PRIZE? I don't even think you'll get your 5 dollars back....
hmm (Score:2, Offtopic)
They're waiting for you, Gordon. (Score:5, Funny)
I hope they don't go all hollywood on this and do it as a "prequel". Although, that would be quite amusing
Re:They're waiting for you, Gordon. (Score:5, Funny)
Find out what it really takes to get your PhD.
Re:They're waiting for you, Gordon. (Score:2)
What do you think . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
can't wait to see hl2!
Mac version? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mac version? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait, I just asked a /. ' er to read. Nevermind.
Re:Mac version? (Score:5, Informative)
The "polite" explanation [macworld.com]
The background explanation. [macnn.com]
Did anyone see.. (Score:4, Funny)
Counter Strike 2 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Counter Strike 2 (Score:2)
Re:Counter Strike 2 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What the...? (Score:3, Interesting)
Awesome (Score:2)
Re:Awesome (Score:2)
Half-Life 2? What's the full title? (Score:5, Funny)
Or Half-Life 2: How The Other Half Lives.
Or Half-Life 2: You Only Live Twice.
Or Half-Life 2: Life Begins At 2.
Or Half-Life 2: Half-Liberty. (With the third game to be called Half-Life 3: Half-Pursuit Of Happiness.)
Re:Half-Life 2? What's the full title? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Half-Life 2? What's the full title? (Score:2)
Re:Half-Life 2? What's the full title? (Score:2, Funny)
Theme song by Bjork?
Fantastic! (Score:5, Funny)
Ooh! Or even better, maybe they'll go with the ever-so-popular development model they used with Tribes 2. You know, the one where they lie to the consumers for years, then at the end of the development cycle suddenly react to unexpected overruns in schedule by releasing the product before it's finished, promising lots of patches and a macintosh version really soon, and then firing the team that programmed the game before they can even begin to attempt to fix things! That was SO fun, i can't imagine they wouldn't jump at the chance to repeat their success at completely destroying a critically acclaimed franchise with a cult following! If so, I SO hope that they add insult to injury like they did with Tribes 2 by creating a fantastic Linux version that by all indications could run in Mac OS X's UNIX layer with little more than a recompile, one or two small compatibility layers such as an X11 server, and a trivial amount of slowdown, and then refusing to comment on this despite repeated and wide-scale petitioning on the part of would-be customers requesting Sierra attempt to make the Linux port run on OS X!
***
-- super ugly ultraman
Re:Fantastic! (Score:2)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Interesting)
And don't forget Outpost
Will it work through a Nat firewall? (Score:2)
I can not do autoupdates either thanks to my dlink nat firewall. IT does not like apps that use multiple streams. No its not a MTU setting like some have suggested. It just that the networking code in the first one sucked!
Re:Will it work through a Nat firewall? (Score:2)
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:Gaming Platform (Score:2)
More to the point, I am absolutely certain that even if mods were given some degree of direct portability (which is extremely unlikely), very few would bother. The visual limitations of the original HL engine significantly restri
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:Gaming Platform (Score:2)
And Q2 did run the engine, but Q2 was just much harder to mod (palette issues).
And I finished HL single player in '98, yet I still play HL, and its various mods, almost every day. It's the only multiplayer game I use. I hope HL2 will still be #1 in 2009.
Re:Gaming Platform (Score:3, Informative)
This is why we say that Elite Force uses the Quake 3 engine, but Half-Life uses the Half-Life engine.
Maybe now is not the time (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this the first time vaporware has been deprecated?
Bugger (Score:5, Funny)
Vaporware has to exist... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, rabid fanboys have been speculating about it for years, but that doesn't qualify it as vaporware.
Give it 2 years before calling it that! Considering they plan to have it out by year's end, it should never get that far.
Re:Vaporware has to exist... (Score:2)
This is so great... (Score:2)
slashdot + game news = wenis (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Biggest competition (Score:5, Insightful)
linux client this time? (Score:2)
Shouldn't the name this game... (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry.
Isn't that kind of premature... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hrm (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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:A good game? (Score:5, Interesting)
But hey, I think Doom]|[ will be released before this year is over
Re:A good game? (Score:4, Interesting)
Another thing I contribute to Half Life's success is that the protagonist is instead of a buff army guy, a physics nerd. You can't go wrong there!
Re:OMG! (Score:2)
Most definitely! Half Life (w/Team Fortress mod) is still the only game I play. I will definitely pick up the next one.
Re:a great company? (Score:2)
If Deus Ex 2 and Half Life 2 are released in 2003 (Score:4, Interesting)
And if TES III: Bloodmoon is as good an add-on as we Morrowind fans hope it is, this year will be even hotter than last year, which brought us blockbusters in triplicate (NOLF 2, GTA 3, AND Tes III: Morrowind / Tribunal).
Then again, sadly, all three could fall short...
Re:John Carmack's Ferrari is on eBay!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
As with most of Carmacks engines, I'm sure there'll be a mod somewhere that'll both fix the hole and create a capture the flag mode.
Re:John Carmack's Ferrari is on eBay!!!! (Score:2)
Now that's a car...damn. I wouldn't worry about the #10 cylinder...it still has 11 others.
Re:Screenshot (Score:2)
http://www.planethalflife.com/screenshot.asp?src=
Re:Screenshot (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pcgameplay.be/
And if that female in the background is from the game, it appears that perhaps there will be a sidekick for Gordon (wild speculation).
I'm not sure why your "leaked" shot has the top of it blurred out, you can see an unblurred version at:
http://www.gamez.nl/content/artwork.phtml?sh
Not on GameSpy (Score:5, Funny)
87
minutes. When you are at the front of the queue, you will have 60 seconds to click the link to view the webpage, otherwise you will have to re-enter the queue.
Re:Not on GameSpy (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Halo would be a bad comparison.... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking after finishing up the original Half-Life: "This game was okay, but what it really needed was more 13-year-olds asking me "A/S/L?! HAHAHAHA F4G0T!!!" every five minutes.