It doesn't seem to be mentioned here, but HL2 (which now includes the sequel episodes) is completely free to claim on Steam until the 18th, if you're new to the series.
Also I highly recommend Black Mesa, which is the remake of HL1 in the HL2 engine. The Xen levels went from what they were to possibly some of my favorite levels in the game, and the music scoring is top-notch. It feels great to play.
And regarding another fan project - turns out the Prologue for Project Borealis has been released on November 11th! They're trying to make HL3 according to the Epistle 3 post from a couple of years ago.
Thank you for your contribution! I'm sure it's frustrating to have your own work not be released for such a long time, but it definitely seems to have been worth it :)
Good stuff. I have seen a lot of "complaints" from various people that they shouldn't have chosen UE, as it will have made the game much slower to develop since everything needed to be done from scratch.
But the graphics looked much nicer in UE and not to mention the tooling is nicer than what one could use with mods. Surely, the upfront cost of porting aspects of HL2 over to UE is not investment lost.
I had a lot of issues getting black mesa to run on linux natively or via proton. Frequently crashes. Not uncommon per protondb. Food for thought of you're on a linux setup.
I think they are also merging Ep1 and Ep2 together into HL2 now and have gradual progression of HL2 to E1 and then to E2. I just browsed my Steam game library and can't find separate copies of E1 and E2 there because of being merged with HL2.
20-25 years ago a handful of companies had a weird hold on me. I’d jump on anything Google made back then. Blizzard could sell me any game they came up with. If it was from Blizzard, it was gonna be great.
Lost all of it obviously. Not a single company has my loyalty anymore.
Except if valve were to release a mystery black box with faint lambda symbol on it. I’d pay whatever they asked for it.
That's pretty much exactly the logic that got me to buy a Valve Index + Half Life Alyx and it was totally worth it. VR turned out to be cooler than I expected and both the game and the Index were just so satisfyingly well-executed. It's nice to have products which clearly had far more attention to detail and quality than was economically necessary. It's clearly the result of a different philosophy than I've seen at most tech companies.
I had the same experience with the Steam Deck: just very well done, including side things like the case that came with the device. I've grown used to accessories bundled with electronics ranging from basically garbage to okay (but not great), while Valve's case was as good as I'd expect from a high-end third-party product.
Unfortunately VR also showed the flipside of Valves approach to development - putting extreme amounts of money and effort into a project, then abruptly dropping it and moving on to something else. The Index was great at the time but now it's five years old, dated in numerous aspects, and hasn't even had a price cut since launch. Alyx is great but it came out four years ago and Valve has done nothing with VR games since, either themselves or by using their infinite bankroll to help fund third party PC VR development until it's more sustainable.
I think it's pretty obvious that Alyx didn't inspire the industry because it's a giga-budget game addressed to a tiny potential market, that Valve could only afford to make due to Steam being an infinite money printer. It wouldn't surprise me if Alyx never recouped its development costs despite the immense hype around it.
If Valve wanted more Alyx'es to happen they needed to spread their wealth around until the VR market gained more momentum and became self-sustaining.
> most VR people can't play Alyx without buying a whole new computer.
When Alyx first came out I had a PC that was the minimum recommended specs for VR from the day the Vive launched (4790K and Geforce 970). The game ran fine.
It sure as hell got better when I upgraded to a 3900X and 3070, but it plays just fine on the original minimum requirements VR PC which was a $1500 PC in 2015.
The idea that PC VR requires a massive rig is just nonsense. Computers that run VR perfectly fine are literally being forced in to retirement, they're officially obsolete.
Yeah, I think it's a pretty nonsense arguement if you've tried running it on constrained hardware. I played Alyx on a 1050ti and it was pretty much flawless for 72hz gameplay. Anything weaker than that outright isn't going to run anything in VR very well.
Also worth noting - you don't need Windows to play Alyx either. SteamVR supports Linux perfectly well, and other games that don't ship native Linux-native builds can still run through Proton. If you own VR in any capacity whatsoever, you should be capable of playing Half Life Alyx; that was Valve's selling point for anyone that had Steam and a headset.
There is a reason for that: Meta focused on VR with "infinite money", hiring almost the entire VR development team from Valve. Valve just could not compete. They could not spend 10 billion dollars like Meta did.
Creating a working nuclear fusion device could be cheaper than that.
I've been patiently waiting for an index 2 or a price cut. I will continue to patiently wait.
I threw my CV1 that I bought secondhand in the trash when facebook bought oculus then forced login. Maybe I'll return to the market when it supplies something I want.
For better or worse Facebook are the ones keeping VR on life support, without them it would have flatlined years ago. They have the only good affordable headsets, they throw tons of money around to bankroll VR game studios in exchange for exclusivity, and even for games they don't bankroll it's a no-brainer to prioritize their platform because >90% of sales happen there.
Even the minority who do buy VR games on Steam are mostly playing them on a cheap Meta headset, so without Meta those sales might not have happened either. The most recent Steam hardware survey shows that of the users who have a VR headset, nearly two thirds of them are using an Oculus/Meta model.
Try Metro Awakening too. It came out a week ago and I'm really impressed. Gameplay is excellent. It's no Alyx but it's good. And even on my old Quest 2 it doesn't look too horrible on the device itself (without PC)
My theory is that there's a period when a studio has huge early success (plus in the case of Valve, they started with huge amounts of money from being former MS employees) that lets them devote themselves to their mission of making games, before either mission creep or dilution with new hires occurs over time either from staff naturally changing over time or expanding. Another factor is that when aiming to 'go big' and realize what they can do with lots of resources, they need to partner/join with others that don't work the same way and will influence them.
Valve is still a top tier org, but they simply make too much money in the publishing business to bother with game development anymore. Any sales would be peanuts to what they are making through developer fees and the marketplace. This is why all of their releases in the last decade have been F2P.
Sounds like a perfect environment to make games. No budget or schedule pressure, virtually limitless resources so the staff can strive to make art with love and without the corruption of chasing a bottom line.
The entire media industry on almost every format is chasing nostalgia because they refuse to recreate the environment that made endearing stories and experiences in the first place.
Look at Star Citizen on other end... Too much resources can lead to endless scope creep, moving targets and potentially never actually shipping anything.
> virtually limitless resources so the staff can strive to make art with love and without the corruption of chasing a bottom line.
which means they have no obligation to ship. And so it is with the valve-time, they never shipped.
Some pressure (monetary usually) is required. Not to mention that "strive to make art" is not a commercially viable objective - the owners of steam will basically be operating a charity for these artists.
>the owners of steam will basically be operating a charity for these artists
If that's what it takes to make something worth playing, then so be it.
Was Bungie in its day a charity? Or did they just get it? 20 years later the magic is gone and Microsoft is desperately trying to figure out how to make the goose lay an egg. As long as they're optimizing quarterly reports they'll never get there.
Obligation to ship is overrated. Not everything has to be made in a crunch time marathon. There are lots of avenues to be explored without the constant pressure to perform. I think it's a good thing if they take their time crafting things.
Alyx wasn't just another HL game in isolation though, it was related to their adventures in VR along with developing hardware and APIs for it, and exploring how it works in a game
The hype died down a little since most people who wanted in got invites by now. Still has a healthy player base and is a very good game though imo. If you want an invite feel free to add me on Steam, my friend code is 216728
From 1995, Blizzard released one of the best games of all time every year for a decade (if you count expansions, which, for that time, you should). I don't think anything like that can happen again until we invent a new medium.
I’ve been following Larian trying to build a game of their dreams since early 2000s. It’s been immensely satisfying to see they finally succeed and achieve the popularity they deserved with the release of BG3.
I also highly recommend Divinity OS 1 and 2 for the same level of dedication to every single detail and free post-launch support, even if they didn’t have such an enormous blockbuster budget behind them.
Besides FromSoft as perhaps the exception to the rule as a subsidary to Kadokawa, private companies seem to be keeping their shit together fairly consistently. Larian and Wube are a pair of solid examples, although Valve is probably the most outstanding example.
Game developers and publishers start shitting the bed when they IPO and need to juggle the conflicting interests of managing investor relations as well as customer demands; that or when they're acquired and turned into a subsidiary.
Really? Most of the people I know that are huge Souls fans weren't big on Armored Core. Then I've never heard anyone mention 2018's Déraciné and if you go a couple more years back their track record becomes fairly poor.
Same here when the Raising the Bar reprint releases. I never managed to get the first edition, so I'm beyond excited they decided to make a second one after all this time. And as a fan, I need to have it.
The reprint with added content is wonderful news. I have a prized copy and wish I had the space for a coffeetable by which to flaunt and share it.
As neat as it is to see how rare it is these days (w.r.t. the asking prices I currently see online), I've always wished other fans could enjoy and appreciate it as much as I have.
Is it possibly because you were much younger back then and thus likely less jaded? I hear of people even back then who for example hated Microsoft with a burning passion, who were already older, even as today their image has been largely rehabilitated among many young devs.
Lots of people praise VSCode and have neutral to positive opinions about GitHub. I haven't heard any more complaints about Windows than I've been hearing over the past 20 years or so anyway.
VSCode is a good example, since you're talking specifically about devs. But I'm not sure how much that makes up for other crappy MS software (Windows, Teams, specific UX issues with OneDrive and the whole Office suite).
I haven't heard love or hate for post-acquisition GitHub changes.
As for Windows, I could be in a bubble. But I use Windows, and I hate the UX more every release. Ads, "suggestions", automatically reenabling features, UI complexity, hard to read text, unintuitive UI, performance issues, audio device issues, useless background processes, new layers on top of configuration UI rather than replacing/updating old layers. I think those have all gotten worse since Win7, some since XP. And I thought I saw that opinion corroborated generally. Maybe there's not literally more complaining, but that doesn't necessarily mean people don't agree it's getting worse. What are they going to do, type the complaint in increasingly larger font each year?
Microsoft came up with some objectively good products both for consumers and developers in the recent decade. For consumers, Xbox would be the biggest one, and for developers, VSCode, WSL/WSL2, Azure.
I think this is right, but both of those largely escape microsoft branding. I think a better example would be XBox and Windows as a gaming platform (vs macos, though Linux is definitely gaining ground). Windows itself, and especially Teams, have very negative reputations.
Teams, yes, but I don't hear many people having a worse opinion on Windows than the decades before, it seems like it's a vocal minority who care while most people just use Windows and get on with their lives.
For whatever reason, Ravenholm didn't particularly unsettle me. I don't know what it is, maybe expectation from the praise it receives left me underwhelmed, or maybe it's the fact that I was quite literally a toddler when the game came out and only first played it in 2019?
To be fair, I did enjoy it and could feel the intent of it being the horror section. I could see it usettling me if I played it at the time, but I see a lot of people saying it holds up really well so I still feel I've missed out on something.
I think an important aspect that's kinda faded away here is the visceral detail of the zombies, which were unusual at the time, mixed with the fact that you need to utilize the physics engine to get around, which created a unique kind of "panic" since at a glance there often seemed like there was no escape from certain circumstances.
If you want a similar feeling from a more modern game I recommend trying Prey (the new one). Terrible name that doesn't fit the title imo, but playing it felt similar to when I first played half life years ago, more than any other game I've played since then at least (except Half Life: Alyx).
It holds up well in gameplay because the gravity gun is still fun. But I think most of the hype was multiplied by HL2 being such a massive step up in graphics. Nobody in my friend group played Doom 3, so for us it was going straight from HL1 and CS 1.6 to HL2. Compare the 2 games side by side and HL2 literally looked futuristic, like it shouldn't even be possible with the hardware at the time. (And to be fair my graphics card burst into flames trying to push 15 fps in the canals section so maybe it wasn't).
Thank you. There was a lot of repetition and problem-solving. The headcrabs were the worst. Well, and the fast headcrabs/spiders. The final segment from the exit of the mine to the end of the level is also done however that posting is waiting for a rainy day.
8:54 Holy shit I don't even know one could do something like that, jumping back to the room and hide in complete safety, very smart.
Also, at 0:30, turning off that living place hazard is very kind of you. And you also saved Bob and Jim from being cut in half by doing that. Father Grigori might not like it, but he's crazy too.
It would be nice if it was again possible to run it in current Mac OS. The original Half life still lists Mac OS but with incompatible information (newer versions of Steam require recent versions, but HL only runs on old 32 bit OSX)
Is this a problem Valve should invest in fixing because it's an issues caused by them, or a problem Apple created for not caring about backwards compatibility on MacOS the same way Microsoft does on Windows?
If Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility on their platform, why should Valve or other developers be burdened with the added cost, especially on a platform with small market share that won't drive many sales?
Good enough doesn't mean optimal, though. Every layer adds a performance penalty and that's how we end up in situations where we have layers and layers of abstraction eventually making all programs slow even on ever increasing hardware.
The reason I asked is that macOS no longer runs 32-bit apps natively. So If they haven’t taken the time to make these 64 bit, there’s no real hope for a Mac native port again.
If you want a fun way to revisit the game but don't want to replay, the 50min "Developers React to 50 Minute Speedrun" is a ton of fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK_PdwL5Y8g
It highlights some of the architectural decisions (and how players exploit them), and has gems such as one of the commentators having their entire section skipped by the speedrunner.
Wow, seeing this made me surprisingly emotional as I realized that downloading the pre-release leaked source code for some testing levels of HL2 (which included an early version of what would become Steam, as well)
- and then debugging / figuring out how to hack together a version that would compile in Visual Studio (back when you had to have a license… in theory…) as a preteen -
had a way bigger impact on me than I gave it credit for at the time. I think seeing the sheer scope of that codebase and realizing how much I didn’t understand and still had to learn is part of what put me in my path into both the game industry and software startups. I found both Valve’s and Gabe’s stories that much more compelling after gaining an appreciation for how much there was under the hood.
Cheers to everyone who has worked on this engine, this project, and this company over the years. I suspect your influence runs deeper than you know.
For a while their stated reason was that they felt they couldn’t live up to the hype and the gaming community was too toxic and would have crucified them for it. True or not, I can see why they’d think that.
However it’s also worth noting that they were spending that time on other projects making them likely even more money. HL3 isn’t going to have live service or esports applications that make money like their other games do. It probably won’t be a big earner compared to those other games.
Valve are also a privately held company and the rumour is the top people there are crazy rich, and even those further down the ladder earn a lot more than they would elsewhere. They don’t need HL3.
One needs more than one yacht. Once you've hosted a massive orgy, you need a clean and sanitary retreat to escape to while the first one is worked on by your cleanup crew.
I believe they also said they don't want to do more of the same, they only want to work on something new. Hence why the only new Half-Life anything in 20 years is Alyx - it did something genuinely new.
We all want HL3, but other than the story it would probably be fairly stagnant in terms of gameplay - nothing new has really happened in the genre.
I wished they hire the Arkane team that got laid off. Put them to work on a new single player ip and let Victor Antonov add some of his design into it.
They dont have to do anything new, just make it good enough, like Titanfall 2.
> I believe they also said they don't want to do more of the same
I've heard this too, with Half Life they want each game to be groundbreaking. Arkane have done great games, but they're not all groundbreaking, and arguably none of them are to the level that HL1/2 were.
That's why they should hire someone else to do the leg work (That's what they used to do anyway). There isn't exactly a lot of unique things in Portal 2 compared to the original but the sheer polish and testing Valve applied to their games (when they want to) is still unmatched.
Portal 2 added co-op as the big gameplay change vs. 1.
But Gabe has said Half-Life specifically is what they consider their ground breaking series now. So there won't be a 3 until they can push a boundary again like the first 2 did.
It might not make as much money as live service but it might work like halo cars for the auto industry, giving them lots of press and attention and higher status as a game developer.
I think there is so much potential for a HL3. For example, messing with more recent discoveries such as the Higgs Boson to try to explain why stuff from another universe managed to be compatible with our universe, and have compatible DNA. That in itself would make for an intriguing plot.
According to leaks they tried several times and gave up. Which is strange, it's not like episodes 2 and 3 were revolutionary. They're just more of the same. Alyx too wasn't particularly deep, it's only innovation was showing that narrative action games can work in VR.
I doubt it'd be the guaranteed best seller you think. Most people spending a ton of money on video games weren't cognizant when HL2 came out. And those that were have been burned before/changed and would probably need to see raving reviews to be that interested.
Portal 3 seems like the easy money grab. That had more lasting pop culture relevance, and "it's more Portal" would be enough for a bunch of people to buy it.
The documentary on this page does explain why they didn't make it, at the very end (it's half the section on the HL2 episodes).
In short, they started working on episode 3, and made it about the point where the game development progresses from "here's demos of what could be set pieces in the episode" to putting together the sketch of the game narrative [1] when the developers were pulled to crunch for Left 4 Dead. After Left 4 Dead released, Gabe felt the window for an HL2e3 had closed, so it would be HL3 instead... and that because HL1 and HL2 had both heralded genre shifts, HL3 needed something to push that shift as well. But there weren't any such ideas for that shift (except maybe VR, which hasn't exactly panned out), and Gabe also felt that releasing a HL3 just to complete the story wouldn't cut it, so it never got made.
Which pretty much matches everybody's speculation for the past decade.
[1] About 18-24 months away from being releasable at that point, to give a sense of how far from complete it was.
For what it's worth, I never even wanted Half-Life 3. I just wanted Episode 3, which was what they originally promised. It didn't need to be some gigantic groundbreaking thing, just another episode to finish off the story.
Half-Life 3 would not align with Valve’s long-term focus on monopolising PC distribution, skins, microtransactions, and innovative hardware tech (hence Half-Life: Alyx instead of HL3)
I guess they could, if not flat structure and billion-dollar yachts and what else is there.
As everyone pointed out there’s lots of reasons Valve as a company hasn’t done it, but also the corner they wrote themselves into of convoluted story telling, everything about it was headed toward being a mess and unsatisfying. It’s almost better to be left undone so that nobody has to take responsibility for trying to tie all this randomly assembled stuff together
It makes me really happy to see old games getting remastered.
I was a Mac kid. There were a whole bunch of games that I wanted to play but didn't have access to. (At least we had Marathon!) American McGee's Alice was at the top of that list, with the Arkham Trilogy close behind.
The Steam Deck is giving me a chance to catch up on all the computer games that I didn't have the hardware for when they were popular. I've now caught up on Arkham, but I just can't get into Alice. The graphics and the controls are so bad from a modern perspective that it distracts from any desire I have to explore that world. I had to download a mod to even unlock the original Alice, because they don't sell the complete collection on Steam any longer.
Seeing that the Half Life games have been recently remastered, maybe it's time for me to give them a play through. I'm going to be spending lots of time on airplanes over the holidays!
It's extremely rare to revisit a game like this for fear of new regressions. I'm sure every game goes out the door with 10-20 bad bugs that would be easy to fix, but it's just too late to touch.
It also sounds like the fixed a lot of art/ambience regressions introduced by newer source engines over the years.
Anyway, it's exciting to see an update like this, and a testament to their prior engineering that they can turn up all these dials without weird repercussions.
In 2007 when The Orange Box was released, Half-Life 2 took forever to load on my dual-core Athlon 64 X2. It would run but the levels would take a solid minute to load. At the time I figured it was some incompatibility with the multiple cores as that was still rare and a lot of other software gave me trouble with it at that time.
I tried to play it much more recently, maybe six or so years ago on an Intel MacBook before they broke 32-bit, and once again even on modern hardware the game took FOREVER to load.
Maybe this is just my experience? I haven't heard anyone else complain about the terrible load times?
This was my experience too. IIRC they raytrace the lightmaps for the whole map on demand during loading instead of baking them ahead of time. But I might be misremembering
I don't think dual core was that rare in 2007. Conroe was released the year before. For gamers, dual core was the standard at that point (at least from what I remember of the time).
For anyone who wants a creative hobby, grab the game, download the SDK and start making maps/mods. It took a lot of effort to craft beautiful map, but comparing to later engines, HL2 is still easier to learn and make maps for.
(DOOM and Quake are also good targets and both have a large community)
It was revolutionary when it came out due to its physics engine, character facial animations, graphics, and most of all it had a captivating story and great gameplay.
It's a bit dated now, but at the time it was revolutionary. A bit like the genre-defining movies such as Star Wars, the Matrix, or Terminator 2.
It's hard to put a finger on it, but it was a combination of a truly imaginative setting on-par with a decent science fiction movie or novel and the "show, don't tell" style of proper world-building. It presented a uniquely interesting dystopia, discoverable through a game instead of a movie or book.
I think it was one of the first games I played that was dark. For example, the "police" are cybernetically enhanced, but in a disturbing way ("transhuman"). The low-ranked troopers "just" have permanently worn facemasks a bit like Darth Vader, with an implication that they may not be functional without them. The higher-ranked shock troops have increasing levels of augmentations until some have only a single central "eye" in their visor. You shudder to think what's hidden underneath.
If there is any game worthy of a remaster or remake it's HL2, and all of its episodes. It remains one of my most memorable gaming experiences, and not just because of nostalgia. The story, writing, characters, dialogue, environments, gameplay, graphics, audio... Everything was pretty much revolutionary back then. I remember being awed by the physics in the demo, and couldn't get enough of the gravity gun once I got the game. It was so brilliantly versatile and satisfying to use.
And yet these days we get "remasters" of games that are not even 5 years old. Most of the AAA industry is just putting out lazy cash grabs and predatory live service garbage. Valve itself has profited immensely from the live service business model. I just wish they would get back to development, or sell someone else the rights to their single-player franchises. Spinoffs like HL: Alyx and Aperture Desk Job don't really cut it for me.
Anyways, this update looks alright. I'm looking forward to the new commentary.
Only three more years until Team Fortress 2 hits a similar milestone. Which is crazy to think about, because I still play it online at least once a week.
In the video doc they talk about the failure to execute on Episode 3 or even a Half Life 3. Has a weird tone to it, the whole thing ends on a depressing note.
As Gabe says, they didn't fulfill their obligation towards their customer and fan base to complete the story. Alyx is cool, but niche.
> In a new two-hour documentary from Valve, current and former members of the company talk openly about the creation of Half-Life 2 as well as finally spilling the beans on what happened to Episode 3, and even showing gameplay of early prototypes of the canceled game.
The two hour documentary was just uploaded like an hour ago, so presumably nobody has watched it completely yet.
This would be an incredible way to stealth-release Episode 3, but I understand at this point it would be impossible for it to be not a disappointment, so I imagine nobody wants to risk trying to make it.
If you tried to pick up the crowbar at the top of the page and were disappointed, scroll all the way down, pick up the portal gun thing, and scroll back up, destroying the whole webpage in the process.
Props to the webmaster (do people still say that?), I love seeing easter eggs like this.
It doesn't seem to be mentioned here, but HL2 (which now includes the sequel episodes) is completely free to claim on Steam until the 18th, if you're new to the series.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/
Also try clicking on the gravity gun at the end of the anniversary page.
So if I already own HL2, that means I'd automatically be able to access those sequels / episodes?
Inside the trash can is the garden gnome from episode 2.
Also I highly recommend Black Mesa, which is the remake of HL1 in the HL2 engine. The Xen levels went from what they were to possibly some of my favorite levels in the game, and the music scoring is top-notch. It feels great to play.
And regarding another fan project - turns out the Prologue for Project Borealis has been released on November 11th! They're trying to make HL3 according to the Epistle 3 post from a couple of years ago.
https://projectborealis.com/prologue-release/
Looks great, and feels pretty close to HL2 mechanics! Definitely has to be optimized more, but a very promising start (albeit short, ~10-15 minutes).
I worked on this in the first year, on the gameplay code. Glad it’s finally bearing some fruit.
Thank you for your contribution! I'm sure it's frustrating to have your own work not be released for such a long time, but it definitely seems to have been worth it :)
Good stuff. I have seen a lot of "complaints" from various people that they shouldn't have chosen UE, as it will have made the game much slower to develop since everything needed to be done from scratch.
But the graphics looked much nicer in UE and not to mention the tooling is nicer than what one could use with mods. Surely, the upfront cost of porting aspects of HL2 over to UE is not investment lost.
I had a lot of issues getting black mesa to run on linux natively or via proton. Frequently crashes. Not uncommon per protondb. Food for thought of you're on a linux setup.
Black Mesa is also 75% off right now, incidentally. Seems like everything Half Life is either free or on deep discount for the anniversary.
Maybe even in a game period. Beautifully done remake.
I think they are also merging Ep1 and Ep2 together into HL2 now and have gradual progression of HL2 to E1 and then to E2. I just browsed my Steam game library and can't find separate copies of E1 and E2 there because of being merged with HL2.
This is in the article.
Also try playing with the can and the trash bin.
20-25 years ago a handful of companies had a weird hold on me. I’d jump on anything Google made back then. Blizzard could sell me any game they came up with. If it was from Blizzard, it was gonna be great.
Lost all of it obviously. Not a single company has my loyalty anymore.
Except if valve were to release a mystery black box with faint lambda symbol on it. I’d pay whatever they asked for it.
That's pretty much exactly the logic that got me to buy a Valve Index + Half Life Alyx and it was totally worth it. VR turned out to be cooler than I expected and both the game and the Index were just so satisfyingly well-executed. It's nice to have products which clearly had far more attention to detail and quality than was economically necessary. It's clearly the result of a different philosophy than I've seen at most tech companies.
I had the same experience with the Steam Deck: just very well done, including side things like the case that came with the device. I've grown used to accessories bundled with electronics ranging from basically garbage to okay (but not great), while Valve's case was as good as I'd expect from a high-end third-party product.
Unfortunately VR also showed the flipside of Valves approach to development - putting extreme amounts of money and effort into a project, then abruptly dropping it and moving on to something else. The Index was great at the time but now it's five years old, dated in numerous aspects, and hasn't even had a price cut since launch. Alyx is great but it came out four years ago and Valve has done nothing with VR games since, either themselves or by using their infinite bankroll to help fund third party PC VR development until it's more sustainable.
VR continues to lack a Killer App to sustain the field (I say this as owner of 3 VR devices, including the Index)
Valve tried to make it with Alyx, and while it is amazing, it did not inspire the industry to follow up on.
I do not blame Valve for moving on when nobody followed them.
I think it's pretty obvious that Alyx didn't inspire the industry because it's a giga-budget game addressed to a tiny potential market, that Valve could only afford to make due to Steam being an infinite money printer. It wouldn't surprise me if Alyx never recouped its development costs despite the immense hype around it.
If Valve wanted more Alyx'es to happen they needed to spread their wealth around until the VR market gained more momentum and became self-sustaining.
It's also a $60 purchase that requires a beefy Windows machine in addition to the headset.
VR is a small market to begin with, and most VR people can't play Alyx without buying a whole new computer.
> most VR people can't play Alyx without buying a whole new computer.
When Alyx first came out I had a PC that was the minimum recommended specs for VR from the day the Vive launched (4790K and Geforce 970). The game ran fine.
It sure as hell got better when I upgraded to a 3900X and 3070, but it plays just fine on the original minimum requirements VR PC which was a $1500 PC in 2015.
The idea that PC VR requires a massive rig is just nonsense. Computers that run VR perfectly fine are literally being forced in to retirement, they're officially obsolete.
Yeah, I think it's a pretty nonsense arguement if you've tried running it on constrained hardware. I played Alyx on a 1050ti and it was pretty much flawless for 72hz gameplay. Anything weaker than that outright isn't going to run anything in VR very well.
Also worth noting - you don't need Windows to play Alyx either. SteamVR supports Linux perfectly well, and other games that don't ship native Linux-native builds can still run through Proton. If you own VR in any capacity whatsoever, you should be capable of playing Half Life Alyx; that was Valve's selling point for anyone that had Steam and a headset.
Does Half Life Alyx not come with the headset anymore?
Even among people on Steam (who have those beefy Windows machines for VR), more than half of headsets are an Oculus, and only 17% are an Index:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Valve moved a lot of Indexes because of it.
Have you tried "I expect you to die"? It's a really compelling VR game.
There is a reason for that: Meta focused on VR with "infinite money", hiring almost the entire VR development team from Valve. Valve just could not compete. They could not spend 10 billion dollars like Meta did.
Creating a working nuclear fusion device could be cheaper than that.
I've been patiently waiting for an index 2 or a price cut. I will continue to patiently wait.
I threw my CV1 that I bought secondhand in the trash when facebook bought oculus then forced login. Maybe I'll return to the market when it supplies something I want.
For better or worse Facebook are the ones keeping VR on life support, without them it would have flatlined years ago. They have the only good affordable headsets, they throw tons of money around to bankroll VR game studios in exchange for exclusivity, and even for games they don't bankroll it's a no-brainer to prioritize their platform because >90% of sales happen there.
https://x.com/MuchRockness/status/1849543449906942094
Even the minority who do buy VR games on Steam are mostly playing them on a cheap Meta headset, so without Meta those sales might not have happened either. The most recent Steam hardware survey shows that of the users who have a VR headset, nearly two thirds of them are using an Oculus/Meta model.
I'm happy for them. I'd rather never touch VR again than plug my eyes into facebook.
> I'm happy for them.
It's a pyrrhic victory, they may have cornered the market but it's still losing them $4-5 billion every quarter with no end in sight.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/30/metas-reality-labs-posts-4po...
I have the Quest 3 and Arkham Shadow gives me all the same feels as Half Life Alyx. Before AS dropped I hadn't turned on my Q3 for over 6 months.
Try Metro Awakening too. It came out a week ago and I'm really impressed. Gameplay is excellent. It's no Alyx but it's good. And even on my old Quest 2 it doesn't look too horrible on the device itself (without PC)
My theory is that there's a period when a studio has huge early success (plus in the case of Valve, they started with huge amounts of money from being former MS employees) that lets them devote themselves to their mission of making games, before either mission creep or dilution with new hires occurs over time either from staff naturally changing over time or expanding. Another factor is that when aiming to 'go big' and realize what they can do with lots of resources, they need to partner/join with others that don't work the same way and will influence them.
Valve is still a top tier org, but they simply make too much money in the publishing business to bother with game development anymore. Any sales would be peanuts to what they are making through developer fees and the marketplace. This is why all of their releases in the last decade have been F2P.
Sounds like a perfect environment to make games. No budget or schedule pressure, virtually limitless resources so the staff can strive to make art with love and without the corruption of chasing a bottom line.
The entire media industry on almost every format is chasing nostalgia because they refuse to recreate the environment that made endearing stories and experiences in the first place.
Look at Star Citizen on other end... Too much resources can lead to endless scope creep, moving targets and potentially never actually shipping anything.
Right constraints make things happen.
> virtually limitless resources so the staff can strive to make art with love and without the corruption of chasing a bottom line.
which means they have no obligation to ship. And so it is with the valve-time, they never shipped.
Some pressure (monetary usually) is required. Not to mention that "strive to make art" is not a commercially viable objective - the owners of steam will basically be operating a charity for these artists.
>the owners of steam will basically be operating a charity for these artists
If that's what it takes to make something worth playing, then so be it.
Was Bungie in its day a charity? Or did they just get it? 20 years later the magic is gone and Microsoft is desperately trying to figure out how to make the goose lay an egg. As long as they're optimizing quarterly reports they'll never get there.
Obligation to ship is overrated. Not everything has to be made in a crunch time marathon. There are lots of avenues to be explored without the constant pressure to perform. I think it's a good thing if they take their time crafting things.
That's only the case if you are so blinded by advertising that you don't see the innovations happening in the low(er) budget media.
Also, supposedly the whole radically flat org structure thing.
Which I imagine doesn't lend itself to doing hard things like making Half Life 3...
Why would any game dev choose to go through a death march to perfection, if they had other project choices?
> Which I imagine doesn't lend itself to doing hard things like making Half Life 3...
Does it lend itself to do other hard things like half life alyx?
Alyx wasn't just another HL game in isolation though, it was related to their adventures in VR along with developing hardware and APIs for it, and exploring how it works in a game
I would hardly call making a sequel "perfection".
They might have had enough original ideas for HL2 (and then Alyx, driven by a new medium), but still not HL3...
From what I've read the flat structure goes in the bin when they've decided to go to the finish line on an idea
Valve still knows how to make excellent games. Deadlock is a Valve game in alpha, and I think it's going to be very popular once released.
Im sure I'd love Deadlock if I ever got a chance to play. Feel like it's losing its hype before it's even out.
The hype died down a little since most people who wanted in got invites by now. Still has a healthy player base and is a very good game though imo. If you want an invite feel free to add me on Steam, my friend code is 216728
Oh wow thanks, I will do that. I admit I haven't tried in awhile but thank you.
Np, I got your friend request. Sent the invite, it might take 1-2 days and it'll email you at the addy attached to your Steam acct.
yea just ignore artifact
From 1995, Blizzard released one of the best games of all time every year for a decade (if you count expansions, which, for that time, you should). I don't think anything like that can happen again until we invent a new medium.
I’ve been following Larian trying to build a game of their dreams since early 2000s. It’s been immensely satisfying to see they finally succeed and achieve the popularity they deserved with the release of BG3.
I also highly recommend Divinity OS 1 and 2 for the same level of dedication to every single detail and free post-launch support, even if they didn’t have such an enormous blockbuster budget behind them.
> Not a single company has my loyalty anymore.
FromSoft
Besides FromSoft as perhaps the exception to the rule as a subsidary to Kadokawa, private companies seem to be keeping their shit together fairly consistently. Larian and Wube are a pair of solid examples, although Valve is probably the most outstanding example.
Game developers and publishers start shitting the bed when they IPO and need to juggle the conflicting interests of managing investor relations as well as customer demands; that or when they're acquired and turned into a subsidiary.
Wube at this point could announce they made an arsenal of thermonuclear devices and I'd trust them with it.
I gotta have my poison bogs
Wondering when they show up in AC: Fires of Rubicon.
Every time I see "AC" I just think "Animal Crossing". Fires of Rubicon would be an interesting entry in that series.
Same for me with assassin's creed:D
I've never understood the saying "the exception that proves the rule" until now. Possibly one of the greatest runs in game company history?
Really? Most of the people I know that are huge Souls fans weren't big on Armored Core. Then I've never heard anyone mention 2018's Déraciné and if you go a couple more years back their track record becomes fairly poor.
I liked armored core well enough, but it's not like I can build my skills over multiple games like I can with fromsoft
Yes Really.
It's Larian for me
Same here when the Raising the Bar reprint releases. I never managed to get the first edition, so I'm beyond excited they decided to make a second one after all this time. And as a fan, I need to have it.
The reprint with added content is wonderful news. I have a prized copy and wish I had the space for a coffeetable by which to flaunt and share it.
As neat as it is to see how rare it is these days (w.r.t. the asking prices I currently see online), I've always wished other fans could enjoy and appreciate it as much as I have.
Is it possibly because you were much younger back then and thus likely less jaded? I hear of people even back then who for example hated Microsoft with a burning passion, who were already older, even as today their image has been largely rehabilitated among many young devs.
This. When was the last time you saw anyone write Micro$ith? Young devs wouldn't even know what you're talking about.
It was never about the quality of Windows, but their attacks against FOSS. And I think Nadella largely repaired the damage from that.
The image, sure. Their ethos never changed.
>their image has been largely rehabilitated among many young devs
Whoa, what? I only hear people complain more about Windows over time.
Lots of people praise VSCode and have neutral to positive opinions about GitHub. I haven't heard any more complaints about Windows than I've been hearing over the past 20 years or so anyway.
VSCode is a good example, since you're talking specifically about devs. But I'm not sure how much that makes up for other crappy MS software (Windows, Teams, specific UX issues with OneDrive and the whole Office suite).
I haven't heard love or hate for post-acquisition GitHub changes.
As for Windows, I could be in a bubble. But I use Windows, and I hate the UX more every release. Ads, "suggestions", automatically reenabling features, UI complexity, hard to read text, unintuitive UI, performance issues, audio device issues, useless background processes, new layers on top of configuration UI rather than replacing/updating old layers. I think those have all gotten worse since Win7, some since XP. And I thought I saw that opinion corroborated generally. Maybe there's not literally more complaining, but that doesn't necessarily mean people don't agree it's getting worse. What are they going to do, type the complaint in increasingly larger font each year?
Microsoft came up with some objectively good products both for consumers and developers in the recent decade. For consumers, Xbox would be the biggest one, and for developers, VSCode, WSL/WSL2, Azure.
I think this is right, but both of those largely escape microsoft branding. I think a better example would be XBox and Windows as a gaming platform (vs macos, though Linux is definitely gaining ground). Windows itself, and especially Teams, have very negative reputations.
Teams, yes, but I don't hear many people having a worse opinion on Windows than the decades before, it seems like it's a vocal minority who care while most people just use Windows and get on with their lives.
Public companies are slaves to the shareholders
Bethesda is the saddest example.
I will buy the next few games by Larian Stuidios after BG3 no matter what they are
My claim to fame on the 20th anniversary (84 views thus far) is to have completed Ravenholm without inflicting any deaths or receiving any injury:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_XN_RwjnqM
I've played through HL2 and its expansions so many times as a kind of meditative relaxation thing I couldn't tell you how many times.
I could never get used to Ravenholm though. Thinking about it even now years later stresses me out a tad.
For whatever reason, Ravenholm didn't particularly unsettle me. I don't know what it is, maybe expectation from the praise it receives left me underwhelmed, or maybe it's the fact that I was quite literally a toddler when the game came out and only first played it in 2019?
To be fair, I did enjoy it and could feel the intent of it being the horror section. I could see it usettling me if I played it at the time, but I see a lot of people saying it holds up really well so I still feel I've missed out on something.
I think an important aspect that's kinda faded away here is the visceral detail of the zombies, which were unusual at the time, mixed with the fact that you need to utilize the physics engine to get around, which created a unique kind of "panic" since at a glance there often seemed like there was no escape from certain circumstances.
If you want a similar feeling from a more modern game I recommend trying Prey (the new one). Terrible name that doesn't fit the title imo, but playing it felt similar to when I first played half life years ago, more than any other game I've played since then at least (except Half Life: Alyx).
It holds up well in gameplay because the gravity gun is still fun. But I think most of the hype was multiplied by HL2 being such a massive step up in graphics. Nobody in my friend group played Doom 3, so for us it was going straight from HL1 and CS 1.6 to HL2. Compare the 2 games side by side and HL2 literally looked futuristic, like it shouldn't even be possible with the hardware at the time. (And to be fair my graphics card burst into flames trying to push 15 fps in the canals section so maybe it wasn't).
I watched the whole thing. Impressive!
Thank you. There was a lot of repetition and problem-solving. The headcrabs were the worst. Well, and the fast headcrabs/spiders. The final segment from the exit of the mine to the end of the level is also done however that posting is waiting for a rainy day.
Heh I like the 'pascifist' angle.
8:54 Holy shit I don't even know one could do something like that, jumping back to the room and hide in complete safety, very smart.
Also, at 0:30, turning off that living place hazard is very kind of you. And you also saved Bob and Jim from being cut in half by doing that. Father Grigori might not like it, but he's crazy too.
I think I went off to make a cup of coffee IRL which is why I stayed in that room longer than needed ('Now brother step into the cart!')
It would be nice if it was again possible to run it in current Mac OS. The original Half life still lists Mac OS but with incompatible information (newer versions of Steam require recent versions, but HL only runs on old 32 bit OSX)
It should work in Wine, although I haven't tested this update yet.
(disclaimer: I work for CodeWeavers, we sell CrossOver which should be a great and easy way to play)
edit: tested out the 20th anniversary update on M2 Pro, it works great!
All, or at least most of Valve's games used to run natively on Mac, and now they don't (even on Intel Macs)
Is this a problem Valve should invest in fixing because it's an issues caused by them, or a problem Apple created for not caring about backwards compatibility on MacOS the same way Microsoft does on Windows?
If Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility on their platform, why should Valve or other developers be burdened with the added cost, especially on a platform with small market share that won't drive many sales?
Running native or emulated doesn’t really matter if the performance is good enough.
Better translation layers are what made the Steam Deck possible.
Good enough doesn't mean optimal, though. Every layer adds a performance penalty and that's how we end up in situations where we have layers and layers of abstraction eventually making all programs slow even on ever increasing hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law
What did you do to get it to run? I didn’t download load it because of the warnings. Just run in Rosetta?
I used CrossOver to install (Windows) Steam, then downloaded/ran (Windows) HL2 from there
Are these new windows releases also 64 bit or still 32 bit?
Still 32-bit
Shouldn't be a problem. Windows 11 and Wine can run most 32 bit Windows apps just fine. I managed to get Winamp 2.6 working on Windows 11.
The reason I asked is that macOS no longer runs 32-bit apps natively. So If they haven’t taken the time to make these 64 bit, there’s no real hope for a Mac native port again.
If you want a fun way to revisit the game but don't want to replay, the 50min "Developers React to 50 Minute Speedrun" is a ton of fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK_PdwL5Y8g
It highlights some of the architectural decisions (and how players exploit them), and has gems such as one of the commentators having their entire section skipped by the speedrunner.
> gems such as one of the commentators having their entire section skipped by the speedrunner
The day that dev looked at player time-location heatmaps, investigated outliers, and then cried...
Wow, seeing this made me surprisingly emotional as I realized that downloading the pre-release leaked source code for some testing levels of HL2 (which included an early version of what would become Steam, as well)
- and then debugging / figuring out how to hack together a version that would compile in Visual Studio (back when you had to have a license… in theory…) as a preteen -
had a way bigger impact on me than I gave it credit for at the time. I think seeing the sheer scope of that codebase and realizing how much I didn’t understand and still had to learn is part of what put me in my path into both the game industry and software startups. I found both Valve’s and Gabe’s stories that much more compelling after gaining an appreciation for how much there was under the hood.
Cheers to everyone who has worked on this engine, this project, and this company over the years. I suspect your influence runs deeper than you know.
I can never understand why they haven't made a HL3. Given that they could literally make approximately 3.88 bajillion dollars from it in 24 hours.
I suppose this is the very definition of developer integrity.
For a while their stated reason was that they felt they couldn’t live up to the hype and the gaming community was too toxic and would have crucified them for it. True or not, I can see why they’d think that.
However it’s also worth noting that they were spending that time on other projects making them likely even more money. HL3 isn’t going to have live service or esports applications that make money like their other games do. It probably won’t be a big earner compared to those other games.
Valve are also a privately held company and the rumour is the top people there are crazy rich, and even those further down the ladder earn a lot more than they would elsewhere. They don’t need HL3.
Gabe owns yachts worth a billion dollars. I'm sure the others are doing just fine as well.
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yach...
Damn. I do not understand owning more than one yacht. It's like private planes. Why more than one?
I would assume because moving yachts requires a lot of planning, so he'd likely have one in each location he wants to stay.
Not excusing this behaviour, but there is a reason for it.
One needs more than one yacht. Once you've hosted a massive orgy, you need a clean and sanitary retreat to escape to while the first one is worked on by your cleanup crew.
Holy hell, he spends hundreds of millions per year just maintaining that fleet.
I believe they also said they don't want to do more of the same, they only want to work on something new. Hence why the only new Half-Life anything in 20 years is Alyx - it did something genuinely new.
We all want HL3, but other than the story it would probably be fairly stagnant in terms of gameplay - nothing new has really happened in the genre.
I wished they hire the Arkane team that got laid off. Put them to work on a new single player ip and let Victor Antonov add some of his design into it.
They dont have to do anything new, just make it good enough, like Titanfall 2.
But that would go against
> I believe they also said they don't want to do more of the same
I've heard this too, with Half Life they want each game to be groundbreaking. Arkane have done great games, but they're not all groundbreaking, and arguably none of them are to the level that HL1/2 were.
That's why they should hire someone else to do the leg work (That's what they used to do anyway). There isn't exactly a lot of unique things in Portal 2 compared to the original but the sheer polish and testing Valve applied to their games (when they want to) is still unmatched.
Portal 2 added co-op as the big gameplay change vs. 1.
But Gabe has said Half-Life specifically is what they consider their ground breaking series now. So there won't be a 3 until they can push a boundary again like the first 2 did.
See the No clip documentary about how they did hire Arkane then backed out:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xMygnmB9Zw8
It might not make as much money as live service but it might work like halo cars for the auto industry, giving them lots of press and attention and higher status as a game developer.
I think there is so much potential for a HL3. For example, messing with more recent discoveries such as the Higgs Boson to try to explain why stuff from another universe managed to be compatible with our universe, and have compatible DNA. That in itself would make for an intriguing plot.
According to leaks they tried several times and gave up. Which is strange, it's not like episodes 2 and 3 were revolutionary. They're just more of the same. Alyx too wasn't particularly deep, it's only innovation was showing that narrative action games can work in VR.
Alyx is so far beyond any other VR game. It is a masterful accomplishment and a masterpiece in its own right.
No rumor needed, they’re a 500 employee company with billions in estimated profits.
I doubt it'd be the guaranteed best seller you think. Most people spending a ton of money on video games weren't cognizant when HL2 came out. And those that were have been burned before/changed and would probably need to see raving reviews to be that interested.
Portal 3 seems like the easy money grab. That had more lasting pop culture relevance, and "it's more Portal" would be enough for a bunch of people to buy it.
The documentary on this page does explain why they didn't make it, at the very end (it's half the section on the HL2 episodes).
In short, they started working on episode 3, and made it about the point where the game development progresses from "here's demos of what could be set pieces in the episode" to putting together the sketch of the game narrative [1] when the developers were pulled to crunch for Left 4 Dead. After Left 4 Dead released, Gabe felt the window for an HL2e3 had closed, so it would be HL3 instead... and that because HL1 and HL2 had both heralded genre shifts, HL3 needed something to push that shift as well. But there weren't any such ideas for that shift (except maybe VR, which hasn't exactly panned out), and Gabe also felt that releasing a HL3 just to complete the story wouldn't cut it, so it never got made.
Which pretty much matches everybody's speculation for the past decade.
[1] About 18-24 months away from being releasable at that point, to give a sense of how far from complete it was.
They already make 7.76 bajillion dollars every hour from Steam, they don’t need to make anything for money.
Half-Life: Alyx is as close as we got
For what it's worth, I never even wanted Half-Life 3. I just wanted Episode 3, which was what they originally promised. It didn't need to be some gigantic groundbreaking thing, just another episode to finish off the story.
I thought the guy who was in charge of writing the story left, and published the plot for HL3 as a thinly veiled short story.
Half-Life 3 would not align with Valve’s long-term focus on monopolising PC distribution, skins, microtransactions, and innovative hardware tech (hence Half-Life: Alyx instead of HL3)
I guess they could, if not flat structure and billion-dollar yachts and what else is there.
they made several money printers with cs and dota boxes
As everyone pointed out there’s lots of reasons Valve as a company hasn’t done it, but also the corner they wrote themselves into of convoluted story telling, everything about it was headed toward being a mess and unsatisfying. It’s almost better to be left undone so that nobody has to take responsibility for trying to tie all this randomly assembled stuff together
Because they live off the misery of others.
I extremely recommend scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page for this one.
Does anything happen if you throw the can at the cop? Experience was kind of bugging out on me.
Heh doesn’t work on Safari for me.
edit: on iPhone
nice, thanks for the easter egg
Nice, I wonder when the third documentary will be out
Valve can't count to 3!
It makes me really happy to see old games getting remastered.
I was a Mac kid. There were a whole bunch of games that I wanted to play but didn't have access to. (At least we had Marathon!) American McGee's Alice was at the top of that list, with the Arkham Trilogy close behind.
The Steam Deck is giving me a chance to catch up on all the computer games that I didn't have the hardware for when they were popular. I've now caught up on Arkham, but I just can't get into Alice. The graphics and the controls are so bad from a modern perspective that it distracts from any desire I have to explore that world. I had to download a mod to even unlock the original Alice, because they don't sell the complete collection on Steam any longer.
Seeing that the Half Life games have been recently remastered, maybe it's time for me to give them a play through. I'm going to be spending lots of time on airplanes over the holidays!
It's extremely rare to revisit a game like this for fear of new regressions. I'm sure every game goes out the door with 10-20 bad bugs that would be easy to fix, but it's just too late to touch.
It also sounds like the fixed a lot of art/ambience regressions introduced by newer source engines over the years.
Anyway, it's exciting to see an update like this, and a testament to their prior engineering that they can turn up all these dials without weird repercussions.
In 2007 when The Orange Box was released, Half-Life 2 took forever to load on my dual-core Athlon 64 X2. It would run but the levels would take a solid minute to load. At the time I figured it was some incompatibility with the multiple cores as that was still rare and a lot of other software gave me trouble with it at that time.
I tried to play it much more recently, maybe six or so years ago on an Intel MacBook before they broke 32-bit, and once again even on modern hardware the game took FOREVER to load.
Maybe this is just my experience? I haven't heard anyone else complain about the terrible load times?
Do you mean the start menu screen where they render a level in the background because why not?
No go back in time and relive a joyfull hl2.This was my experience too. IIRC they raytrace the lightmaps for the whole map on demand during loading instead of baking them ahead of time. But I might be misremembering
I don't think dual core was that rare in 2007. Conroe was released the year before. For gamers, dual core was the standard at that point (at least from what I remember of the time).
Fixes
> Reduced chances of birds getting stuck in the world.
I really think I give it a replay. It was such a great game and truly started a new area of gaming.
For anyone who wants a creative hobby, grab the game, download the SDK and start making maps/mods. It took a lot of effort to craft beautiful map, but comparing to later engines, HL2 is still easier to learn and make maps for.
(DOOM and Quake are also good targets and both have a large community)
You know it's a good remaster when no one complains about it overwriting the original. (yes it is called an update, but I think that proves my point)
I remember flipping through that Raising the Bar book at Barnes and Noble 20 years ago and playing HL2 with min setting on my paltry Geforce 2 Ti.
I am so getting the reissued book!
I never played it. What makes it being rated so good?
It was revolutionary when it came out due to its physics engine, character facial animations, graphics, and most of all it had a captivating story and great gameplay.
It's a bit dated now, but at the time it was revolutionary. A bit like the genre-defining movies such as Star Wars, the Matrix, or Terminator 2.
It's hard to put a finger on it, but it was a combination of a truly imaginative setting on-par with a decent science fiction movie or novel and the "show, don't tell" style of proper world-building. It presented a uniquely interesting dystopia, discoverable through a game instead of a movie or book.
I think it was one of the first games I played that was dark. For example, the "police" are cybernetically enhanced, but in a disturbing way ("transhuman"). The low-ranked troopers "just" have permanently worn facemasks a bit like Darth Vader, with an implication that they may not be functional without them. The higher-ranked shock troops have increasing levels of augmentations until some have only a single central "eye" in their visor. You shudder to think what's hidden underneath.
Excitedly checks to see whether it has been updated yet to support 64 bit Macs.
Sadly slinks away
Yeah, nope. But you can run it in CrossOver/Wine.
If there is any game worthy of a remaster or remake it's HL2, and all of its episodes. It remains one of my most memorable gaming experiences, and not just because of nostalgia. The story, writing, characters, dialogue, environments, gameplay, graphics, audio... Everything was pretty much revolutionary back then. I remember being awed by the physics in the demo, and couldn't get enough of the gravity gun once I got the game. It was so brilliantly versatile and satisfying to use.
And yet these days we get "remasters" of games that are not even 5 years old. Most of the AAA industry is just putting out lazy cash grabs and predatory live service garbage. Valve itself has profited immensely from the live service business model. I just wish they would get back to development, or sell someone else the rights to their single-player franchises. Spinoffs like HL: Alyx and Aperture Desk Job don't really cut it for me.
Anyways, this update looks alright. I'm looking forward to the new commentary.
Only three more years until Team Fortress 2 hits a similar milestone. Which is crazy to think about, because I still play it online at least once a week.
Any idea how much earbuds are worth nowadays? I got the originals for being a first-day mac player, then traded them for some absolute nonsense… rip.
https://backpack.tf/stats/Unique/Earbuds/Tradable/Craftable
8 keys, I guess?
783 keys, rather. $500. Volume looms pretty low though…
Portal will hit 20 years in 2027 as well.
It looks like the Mac and Linux ports are now gone
The Mac port seems to be missing, but the updated HL2 definitely has Linux support.
In the video doc they talk about the failure to execute on Episode 3 or even a Half Life 3. Has a weird tone to it, the whole thing ends on a depressing note.
As Gabe says, they didn't fulfill their obligation towards their customer and fan base to complete the story. Alyx is cool, but niche.
Oh well, Half Life 3 not confirmed, yet again.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42152003
Wonder if these bugfixes mean new speedruns?
Missed the chance to call it “Actinium”
One of the few mainstream game companies that cares deeply about their legacy and community. Kudos.
Direct link to the 20th anniversary documentary: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4
Trying to spend more time doing leisure activities again, so the developer commentary might make a fine excuse to crack this bad boy out again.
Can't wait to see episode 3. There have been some rumors they might be working on it, but I'm not holding my breath anymore.
Haven't most of the old writers left Valve by now?
Kotaku:
> In a new two-hour documentary from Valve, current and former members of the company talk openly about the creation of Half-Life 2 as well as finally spilling the beans on what happened to Episode 3, and even showing gameplay of early prototypes of the canceled game.
The two hour documentary was just uploaded like an hour ago, so presumably nobody has watched it completely yet.
So 3 is soon?
This would be an incredible way to stealth-release Episode 3, but I understand at this point it would be impossible for it to be not a disappointment, so I imagine nobody wants to risk trying to make it.
If you tried to pick up the crowbar at the top of the page and were disappointed, scroll all the way down, pick up the portal gun thing, and scroll back up, destroying the whole webpage in the process.
Props to the webmaster (do people still say that?), I love seeing easter eggs like this.
> pick up the portal gun thing
Didn't play Half Life 2 I gather?
Cool, but do I really feel like buying this game yet again?
Still holding out for HL 3. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's free for the next few days.
Half Life 3 is out, dude. It's titled "Alyx".
Isn't it more like 1.5? It takes place between hl1 and 2
I think it might be free at the moment. That's what happened on the HL1 anniversary anyway, so maybe check.
Yeah I'm also saving my $0 for a better investment.
I can double your investment in 24 hours. DM for details.
It’s literally free right now.
Half life 3 ffs
the article is stupidly short and unhelpful and people here still didn't read it
The black bar means someone died. A real computer scientist.
I hope it’s not a legend like ken or something, but it’s not obvious from the front page and #1 is a video game.
Tell me we’re not handing out black bars for anniversaries of software now?
Thomas E. Kurtz of BASIC fame https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42141761
RIP.
Legend.