toblix

Half-Life 3

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We've to keep believing. $100 say the next installment in the Half Life franchise will be out before the first human sets foot on Mars.

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We've to keep believing. $100 say the next installment in the Half Life franchise will be out before the first human sets foot on Mars.

About 30 minutes before. Trust Valve to steal the headlines.

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Also, Half-Life ended on a MASSIVE cliffhanger and it also ended 2/3rds of the way through a planned trilogy. So in terms of having hype built up, I think it's pretty understandable why people would jump all over Half-Life news even if it's not the best game ever made in the history of forever.

Yeah, this. Fackin' Valve!!!!!

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Never been sure why people are so willing to play a third Half-Life after the first two were nothing more than technically impressive shooters.

What?

Half-Life, for better or worse, largely defined the way shooters have been constructed for the last decade and a half. Half-Life 2 was, you know, more of that plus then-impressive physics puzzles, but let's not undersell the significance of that first game. It was quite a bit more than "technically impressive", it was a revelation in design.

As for why people want Half-Life 3 so badly, i'd wager a lot of it has to do with Episode 2 ending on a massive cliff-hanger.

There hasn't just been two of those games, there's been six. (Arguably seven, depending on how you count Gearbox's contributions.) I'm personally fairly critical of Valve's story-telling in that series, but they've still convincingly built a world, and people are invested in that world.

Or maybe people think that with HL3 will come a successor to the Source engine.

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Half-Life 2 was a triumph of organic level/world design, atmosphere and subtle story telling. People want more because it was an incredibly fun, memorable experience. I'm sorry some people didn't share that experience, but that's no reason to troll into a topic resurrecting a useless discussion we've had before. Yes, you think Half-Life is overrated, we get it. I have those feelings about Final Fantasy 7 and got over it.*

* admittedly after years of bitching when I was younger

I too get the feeling Valve will wait with Episode 3 until the second iteration of the Source engine is out. Then again, maybe it'll be its swansong, or maybe it has nothing to do with it.

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There's not really a great place to post this, but I just saw the most hilarious ad on GameTrailers.

Valve is kind of the monopoly of digital distribution on PC, and Gabe Newell has been a beneficial director of the computer gaming market, and internet customer service for decades. By now he's just about reaching his 50's, and has way more expansions to make on Valve, and with Steam as a service.

So could this look ANY MORE like a magazine ad for the PlayStation 1?? Man I gotta tune in for those wicked strats! What a bunch o goofballs. What is he blowing up in this picture? Prices??

...anyway yeah- the Half Life games are kind of boring now, but stand as significant milestones, and it's been way too long for anyway to still care about Half Life 3 unless they pull out something really surprising; which they probably will.

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I think TychoCelchuu nailed it. As for why people like/dislike the Half Life series at all; see the previous threads that Toblix linked to.

Agreed, the rarer and less common something is the more important it seems to us humans, regardless of what it is. We get excited over things like weird shaped rocks. The opposing force is true as well. The more commonplace something is the less we get excited about it. "Oh, air. Yeah, it's there." and yet we need it to live.

Regardless, having played the simply excellent "Mission Improbable" mod just last week I was reminded that there can be such a thing as classic gameplay that's not outdated. It was the most fun I had playing a shooter, any shooter, in years and is basically a chapter that could have slotted almost seamlessly into Half Life 2. I would challenge anyone musing that Half-Life as a game or series being "outdated" in terms of gameplay to actually go and play them again. For me at least it's remained just as fun and is in fact superior to every shooter I've played within the last 2 years.

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To be fair, Gabe Newell seems as unimpressed by that ad as you do.

Yeah I picture that the GameTrailers guys made the ad, and then opened their e-mail for the final photo to go in the middle and said "ah crap."

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I randomly stumbled on the original, cam-captured HL2 demo showcased behind closed-doors over a year before release.

I remember being completely blown away by the technology at the time; it's hard to get a sense these days for how big of a leap forward it was, simply because a lot of the innovations are now universal assumptions for games.

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Yeah, stuff like the physics, wood splintering and such, facial animation were simply breathtaking.

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I remember that demo killing me knowing that there was no chance my laptop could run it. That first playthrough of Half-Life 2 is still really memorable in my head because with everything turned to their lowest, the thing still ran at roughly 15fps and my laptop would constantly overheat and shut itself down. And even then, I knew the game was just something else.

It's hard to believe it's been almost five years since The Orange Box and Episode 2. God damn, Valve. I don't think the wait would have been so bad if they didn't leave it on that cliffhanger.

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I guess everyone heard the latest rumours about Half-Life 3 being reinvented as an open world RPG. It's on this Google translated page, so it must be true! Though my initial, but brief, gut reaction was the «You guys are breaking my game!» nerd rage, I still trust Valve to know what they're doing – even if what they're doing is not making a Half-Life 3 at all. For a while I was uncertain about whether they were interested in doing single player games at all, but Portal 2 proved they still are, and they're still great at it, and my fears that Valve has turned into some twisted, multiplayer-only, micro-transaction thing are almost completely gone.

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So i really, really love the two great tastes that taste great together of an RPG that is also an FPS, but i'm getting a little cynical about it. I've seen far too many developers carelessly cram RPG progression into their shooter as a cynical value add.

That said, i'm just speaking my mind there, i don't think Valve is the kind of company that would do that. If Half-Life 3 is going to be an RPG, i'm sure they'll do it right.

Even so, it would kind of really bum me out to see them not sticking to their guns on the style of game they make. It would be really nice to see a sort of internal consistency through the series, especially when you think about how much HL2 really is like HL1, despite having come out so many years later. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to play the entire series as a coherent experience where you can see the gradual evolution in craft?

I remember being completely blown away by the technology at the time; it's hard to get a sense these days for how big of a leap forward it was, simply because a lot of the innovations are now universal assumptions for games.

The last time i was absolutely floored by visuals in a Video game was probably Doom 3. I literally could not believe what i was seeing, that it was being rendered in real-time on a personal computer. The normal mapping, the shadows and lighting effects, it seemed to just be breaking fundamental rules about how i believed Video games would look.

We really don't get that anymore, do we?

The huge leaps that were being made in the 90's and early 2000's have slowed down to much more subtle, iterative technological progression. I look at Unreal Engine 4 tech demos and i go "yeah, that looks like a game, i recognize what that is."

Perhaps i've just grown jaded though, maybe younger gamers are losing their minds over how pretty Halo 4 is, but i imagine that is probably not the case. (Halo 4 does look sexy though, some serious wizardry must be happening to get that thing running on the 360.)

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Yeah, I totally hope Half-Life 3 is more of a pure FPS. But that's coming from the part of my that always want sequels to games I love. Valve will probably make a better decision with regard to any Half-Life sequel than I would be able to.

As for sweet-looking games: yeah. I'm playing Sleeping Dogs, a game that, if I were to show a screenshot from to myself ten years ago, would cause a rip in the space-time continuum because I would no longer exist because I died ten years ago from my head exploding, and I appreciate that it looks fucking amazine, but I'm not as excited about it as I probably should be. It probably has to do with h4rd k0re gamerz being so attuned to video game graphics that we start to ignore the obvious advances that are being made in areas like texture resolution and sweet full-screen lighting blooming effects wizardry and crave only the truly revolutionary stuff. I remember playing the Mardi Gras level in Hitman without having heard anything about it before; I wonder if any video game graphics will ever give me that kind of amazing «holy shit this is the future!» rush.

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Well, I don't know if it's just jadedness. A talk I heard from Carmack a few years ago spent a while on diminishing returns for technical improvements, mostly as a way of explaining his new interest in iOS. The anecdote he used that's stuck with me is that, while working on Doom 3, id originally built an advanced 3D audio engine, which simulated the entire levels as a virtual soundscape and propagated effects accordingly. It worked great, except that it crashed every twenty minutes. Well, one night Carmack decided to rebuild the audio engine as a simple yes/no reverb algorithm. It took the rest of the team two weeks to figure out that it had been replaced, and then only because the game wasn't crashing anymore.

His implication was that graphical fidelity will soon reach a similar tapering point, and I believe him. Nothing matches how Doom 3 gobsmacked me after several years of Half-Life mods anymore. I play Far Cry 2 or Counter-Strike: Source for a few hours, then load up Crysis or Metro 2033 and find no appreciable difference. I mean, I can enjoy the slightly better specular lighting, the better shadows, or well-placed bump-mapping, but those things look awkward or bad as often as they look good. At a certain point, the razor edge becomes invisible and disappears.

So yeah, my hopes are that Valve's innovation comes on the mechanical side, either by mixing genres or just refining the FPS gameplay to its finest sheen possible. FEAR is still my gold standard for kinetic gunplay, and that's four years old now. That ain't right.

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It seems crazy now because it's been so long since Valve were on the cutting edge of engine technology, but HL2 was some seriously mindblowing shit when it came out. I remember when that leaked tech demo came out and people literally didn't believe it was running in real time because it was such a leap ahead in terms of physics, materials, the water, everything.

I'd love to be similarly amazed by the inevitable Half-Life 3 revelation, but I think the mantle of insane technology has been passed to Crytek and to a lesser extent Epic now.

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I think there's still lots of mindblowing stuff that only more powerful graphics technology will allow. I bet there are thousands of truly revolutionary ideas that have been impossible to implement just because the graphics hardware can't handle it. Without any deep understanding or knowledge of the technology, I often feel like the evolution of game visuals is being pushed really hard at some points by faster graphics cards, higher resolution textures and sweet shaders, but at the same time being really held back by the limitations of other hardware. I bet, if video game graphics people could magically make some technological change happen overnight, it wouldn't be even more on-board graphics memory or more GPUs, but something more fundamental and harder to change, having to do with core architecture stuff. As an example, it often feels like asset loading/streaming is a huge limitation, even in the most high-tech of games.

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Somehow it doesn't seem logical that Episode 2's cliff hanger would be followed by an open world game. But who knows. It's certainly been a while (wow, has it really been 5 years? I feel old now) so they must be doing something different from Episode 1 and 2.

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FEAR is still my gold standard for kinetic gunplay, and that's four years old now. That ain't right.

More like seven. ;(

I agree, more movement is needed in terms of things like AI and other such things that can really change the way shooters are played. That said, progress has been made — Crysis was a fantastic step in my opinion, although sadly Crytek seemed to have stumbled a bit with its sequel. The third looks like it's going to take the best elements of both and Crytek has been candid about them letting art dictate design too much in C2, so I'm optimistic.

I think a large part of this generation has been console developers finally being able to deliver good shooters, whereas before this generation they were relatively unpopular on consoles. So in a way I think this generation has been spent letting console players experience what the PC has had for much longer, and with the next generation people will start craving more original gameplay.

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His implication was that graphical fidelity will soon reach a similar tapering point, and I believe him. Nothing matches how Doom 3 gobsmacked me after several years of Half-Life mods anymore. I play Far Cry 2 or Counter-Strike: Source for a few hours, then load up Crysis or Metro 2033 and find no appreciable difference. I mean, I can enjoy the slightly better specular lighting, the better shadows, or well-placed bump-mapping, but those things look awkward or bad as often as they look good. At a certain point, the razor edge becomes invisible and disappears.

I feel like it's probably important to point out, though, that there have been some real world factors preventing us from going any further than Crysis.

The PC market changed, the economy was bad, people weren't buying fancy videocards. Ultra high-end PC-dedicated games like Crysis suddenly weren't viable anymore, too costly to develop and then sell on only one platform. Then you have the consoles, that's where those games went, and they sold well. (Call of Duty started out on the PC, of course.) There's that economy thing again though, it's a dangerous climate to launch new console hardware in, so we have this unending console cycle built on dated hardware that was obsolete when it was new, it's a huge bottleneck for graphical fidelity.

You see companies like Lucas Arts, Square Enix, Kojima Productions, Ubisoft, Crytek, Epic and more all showing off their next generation tech, the industry is bursting for new console hardware. These publishers and developers are making those reveals to coerce the platform holders into getting new shit out on the market so they can do new and even more ambitious things.

While outside of that, the PC market has kind of come back around. Visual fidelity in games having effectively been stagnant for years now, it no longer takes a monster PC to do something impressive, and the new business models are beginning to stabilize. So the hardware is affordable, free-to-play isn't a ghetto, and then suddenly you start seeing games that don't look like we've been regressing away from Crysis for the last four years.

It'll be new console hardware that sends things flying forward in earnest, though.

FEAR is still my gold standard for kinetic gunplay, and that's four years old now. That ain't right.

Dude, four years? Try seven, because FEAR came out in 05.

Also, memory has been jostled and i will say that Rage was a recent "oh shit" for me, subdued by the game fumbling all the gameplay intangibles and being kind of tragically blah. Still, tis a shame ZeniMax has IdTech 5 under lock and key.

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Maybe it's time the devs start to work on improving the other parts of the game which are not sounds and graphics.

The virtual world "we" live in is still one gigantic static mesh. And I don't mean physics, but more interactivity, but also, background activity. There's rarely anything happening in games except the things you do.

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Yeah, even the most vibrantly living, breathing worlds are pretty similar to the Virtual Theatre of Lure of the Temptress. Lots of identical people walking identically around static, solid environments, rotating and snapping into transition poses and saying the same things with the same voice. It's a thing we're used to and it doesn't really strike us as strange, but think of how much could be done here if the technology allowed it! I think there's much more interesting stuff still undiscovered between the layers of abstraction games use today and a perfect simulation, than what has been done in video games.

And that's, of course, only considering the obvious and probably rather misguided goal of more realism in games. Think of the things no-one has thought of! Sure it would be sweet if driving a Porca into a tree in some future GTA game fractured and deformed everything super-realistically, and affected all the local businesses and onlookers and a million bazillion FLOPS propagated the consequences of my actions throughout a detailed, complex simulation of a virtual city, but when that stuff is possible and expected and available as affordable middleware, think of what truly brilliant minds can come up with! Maybe Milo could be a reality!

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And that's, of course, only considering the obvious and probably rather misguided goal of more realism in games. Think of the things no-one has thought of! Sure it would be sweet if driving a Porca into a tree in some future GTA game fractured and deformed everything super-realistically, and affected all the local businesses and onlookers and a million bazillion FLOPS propagated the consequences of my actions throughout a detailed, complex simulation of a virtual city, but when that stuff is possible and expected and available as affordable middleware, think of what truly brilliant minds can come up with! Maybe Milo could be a reality!

Yeah, IMHO it would be awesome if games focused less on graphics (and even voice actors) and more on simulation. Even if GTA just started simulating things outside of the bubble surrounding the player, that would be pretty cool.

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While kind of the point of a simulation game, I found it refreshing just how much depth Maxis seem to be going into with the new SimCity's many simulation systems. I originally watched the videos wanting to be blown away by the graphics, but instead I was more fascinated by these intricate little systems that made me completely forget about the graphics — much like how I was dazzled more by Half-Life 2's physics and material simulations rather than its sheen. That's the kind of feeling I want from more games.

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