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 when you buy an album on CD you just license it for personal use, you can't play it on the radio or in a commercial space. "Buying" a copy of some intellectual property always had strings attached even in the age of physical media.
Paranoia here is largely warranted. But people had fewer rights than they realized before. And finding a way to play older media is often a rather expensive endeavor.
Edit to add: I also find picking on Valve awkward here. Microsoft? Sony? I would be far more inline. Even Nintendo. Valve seems to be much more on favor of empowering users, though.
Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all have physical releases for most of their games that they can't take from my cold dead hands. Valve has singlehandedly killed that market for PC games.
3DS saved to the cart and had region-locking. Neither applies to Switch. You can get a JP copy of Splatoon 3, play it on your NA Switch, swap to the NA version of the game, and not lose anything.
Not contradicting your point, but adding tangential interesting information.
Blu-Ray UHD discs can no longer be played on modern computers as Intel has removed the trusted execution environment needed to decrypt them. Blu-Ray UHD players do a handshake that verifies the use of Intel SGX.
One might have always been skeptical of these discs, especially as AMD had never implemented those TEE instructions.
But I believe the interesting takeaway is that even physical media is becoming something you can’t count on using without the continued permission/assistance of some outside party.
Without regulation I would expect that all new media will eventually require players to be always-online.
The UHD DRM scheme requires some kind of secure enclave for key management, and SGX was the only suitable system for that on PCs. There is no non-SGX system they would certify.
To add to bdjsiqoocwk pointing out the self-evident, in many jurisdictions you have both the right, and the tools to make backups of media for personal use. What exactly is legally permissible and actually possible with non-physical stuff is much more complicated.
Tangential, irrelevant, "flamebait...generic tangents...internet tropes." "reminder" that the guidelines explicitly say to avoid. Nobody mentioned ownership or licensing or anything tangentially related until you did.
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.
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.
Hasn't Unreal Engine 5 gotten a bunch of criticism about a lot of the games made with it having high system requirements, and often playing like a stuttery mess? Though it's hard to tell where the technical decisions end and developers not caring much about optimization (or expecting people to use upscaling even for 1080p) starts.
Recently, it was revealed that even the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 benchmarks used upscaling and the problems with visually stunning but horribly performing games like The Forever Winter were also pretty obvious.
I did very much appreciate what Black Mesa did, though. Maybe Project Borealis will also be a success story in due time.
It's complicated. There is Unreal 5 tech that is extremely slow in and of itself (Lumen and Nanite come to mind), but most of the stutter comes from UE5's notorious shader compilation pipeline. Instead of pre-compiling shaders on first launch, UE5 will automatically compile and cache shaders while the user is playing which obviously hits the CPU and causes slowdown in unfamiliar areas.
However, it should be noted that this isn't an issue for consoles (where precompiled shaders come with the game) or Steam Deck (where shaders are compiled via Fossilize before the game is even launched). It's most notable on DirectX programs during the first run, which hits benchmarks quite badly but also becomes less stuttery as more shaders are cached.
Technically, nothing. It's perfectly possible to precompile shaders on Windows - it's just not convenient or logical for most PC users.
On console, precompiling makes sense because you know exactly what hardware a user will have and you can optimize for one or two sets of hardware. The effort required to automatically package and download these shaders for users on their first load is worth it, so it's a viable fix to shader stutter in games where it crops up.
On Linux, precompiling makes sense because shaders take an extra long time to process due to the DirectX -> Vulkan translation. Since this causes stutter in every game, a precompilation step is pretty much mandatory for everything but conveniently also solves the UE5 stutter issue at it's roots.
On PC, it's basically a maelstrom of worst case scenarios. You don't know what hardware a user will have, so you can't package precompiled shaders. You're not translating shader calls so you have to rely on each version of DirectX's specific DXIL features instead of the unified Vulkan 1.2+ SPIR-V that you get from DXVK. And of course, even if you did get a magic "Compile the Shaders!" program working most users wouldn't bother since they're impatient. Some games try adding optional precompilation screens, but I wager most people just skip them when given the opportunity.
Thank you for the explanation! Honestly, it feels like precompiling all the shaders should be done during loading the assets initially, with the in place option being optional.
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 :)
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.
That's really nice. This is what I would call a great value-add through goodwill directed at the community. I hope to do something similar if I ever get to run an enterprise.
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.
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.
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.
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
Which also shows yet another one of Valve's problems with making games, they treat their games like they're "tech demos", so unfortunately they're not as interested in actually moving the stories in their games forward or bringing them to a conclusion. They do a "tech demo", they move on from that tech, leaving the game
and it's world and community behind. Plot? What plot? Perhaps they're also stalling on making continuations or even new releases in search of some "gimmick technology" to pair a game with, instead of just telling a story through their games. For those people that do like the narratives and the worlds in their games, it sure is tough luck. There's more to a game than just 'tech', but alas.
For a while I though you could explain Valve best by thinking of them as a gaming technology lab rather than a 'simple' game developer, and most of their hit games have been acquired. The thing that sours me on where they've ended up is outside of steam which has become PC gaming infrastructure their projects have had little influence. The big standout project besides VR has been the deck, which I think is less important as a portable device and more as a baseline for low-spec gaming
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
Look at Star Citizen on other end... Too much resources can lead to endless scope creep, moving targets and potentially never actually shipping anything.
I think that's on the game's director, Chris Roberts, because it's not the only time it happened.
Roberts was the lead on Digital Anvil's "Freelancer", until the publisher (Microsoft), frustrated at the scope creep and protracted dev cycle, bought out the studio, demoted Roberts, and cut features so they could ship the thing.
Not at all. Where are the low and mid budget movies? Where are the games publishers on low budget games? Art as a business has transitioned to investor gambling rather than having any thought for the quality of the product. That's what I take issue with.
Sure single person self-funded passion projects exist. They always have and they always will. And sure what one person can do is more than they ever could in the past. It's still not the same as something that's forged by a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillsets.
Frost makes the point more well spoken and stylish than me often.
At Cannes and your local 'art' cinema ? To be fair, I don't watch movies much, but I do still go to these sometimes.
> Where are the games publishers on low budget games?
Who said anything about publishers ? (And Valve dumped theirs as soon as they could.)
> Sure single person self-funded passion projects exist. They always have and they always will. And sure what one person can do is more than they ever could in the past. It's still not the same as something that's forged by a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillsets.
Ok, I have no idea what you're talking about, are you "no-true-scotsmanning" here ?
We have a great recent example : "Factorio (: Space Age)", which started as a one-person idea, took form as a 3-person company, got after release a 20k€ Indiegogo funding, then blazed a trail of success over the next 12 years, now with something like 5 million sales for the base game and a 30 person company.
How is that not "a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillset" ?!
Or the amateurs at Spring-Recoil / Zero-K / BAR, which show how you can do that even better than the professional, commercial RTS.
Or indeed one person projects like Shadow Empire (with some publisher support), which show how you can make a brilliant 4X/Wargame on what I assume is a tiny budget...
And there are probably many other examples here...
Your examples account for less than 1% of the industry. Why are you cherry picking examples when discussing media industry trends? Are you saying "it isn't happening because of these few examples"?
I get that you're trying to discredit the argument by claiming fallacies, but these aren't just my views. Industry insiders (Frost in games and RedLetterMedia in movies) have been talking about this for nearly a decade.
Because "cherry picking" is what everyone does when what they are interested in is great media, and the more time-limited they are, the more this matters.
"Industry" insiders' opinions are irrelevant, they are just too bogged in the day to day details, they tend to forget that 99% of everything is crap and that's fine (and they do that because they have to make a living there, their incentives are different).
And you cannot predict greatness (you are the one that talked about 'visionaries', remember ?) - specifically of new teams you've never heard about before (of course once they did something great it's another thing, even with reversion to the mean they can have a lot of other successes).
Valve has demonstrated that it is not a perfect environment to make games because they just hardly made any. Perhaps it's precisely because there's no pressure, as well as their "flat structure" (which also results in a lack of pressure) that got blamed by their own employees for their lack of releases. (https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-unusual-corporate-structure-c...)
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
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'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.
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.
This is very interesting, I've wanted to play Alyx for a long time but could never justify the cost, assuming it needed a very expensive gaming pc. Maybe now I can afford it
Would be a huge selling point for the steam deck if it could manage it on min specs
I played on Legion Go. It's basically a Steam Deck with newer specs and native Windows support.
It ran, but barely. I probably spent half my playtime restarting the game, trying to find the happy coincidence of playability (because the other sessions were too rough). Being able to play Alyx was one of the reasons I chose the Go over the Deck.
> This is very interesting, I've wanted to play Alyx for a long time but could never justify the cost, assuming it needed a very expensive gaming pc. Maybe now I can afford it
Nope, no need for an expensive gaming PC, just an actual gaming PC.
As with cars, phones, etc. if your budget is tight you can always get so much more value by going for a used model from a generation or two back than you would get by spending the same money on something new.
> Would be a huge selling point for the steam deck if it could manage it on min specs
Steam Deck can technically run a few VR titles but it doesn't do it well. There is a lot of evidence that Valve has prototype standalone headsets running on Steam Deck derived hardware platforms (often referred to as "Deckard") but the hardware just isn't there for full quality PC VR.
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.
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)
I also own a Deck OLED and I have to disagree on the polish. When I first got it, there were so many little issues with compatibility, crashes, and straight up freezes, I even considered returning it. It got better since, but if you try to use anything but Steam games, it's death by 1000 papercuts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I stopped 2/3 of the way through the announcement. By the time I got to the final 1/3 of the story, I just couldn't imagine the ending living up to the expectations set in the first 2/3 of the announcement, and stopped.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
Amen. I didn't understand why Apple is one of the only companies that gets to break backward compatibility, and escape all blame when stuff breaks. It always seems to be put on the software developer to update with whatever Apple's new requirements are, even when it's older software (or ancient)!
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.
I just installed* it. It run well, although I don’t recommend playing it with a Magic Mouse.
* I first installed Whisky, a Wine/Game Porting toolkit/app thingy (https://getwhisky.app). Then I installed Steam for Windows inside Whisky, then downloaded HL2. The download was a little bit hiccup-y, but it worked. Testplay of HL2 was great, apart from the mouse.
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.
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.
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 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).
Trying to think about it, I think it was the dynamics of the "fast zombies". I think if you plunked me in a crude pixelated FPS with abstract enemies, but with the same sudden accelerating approach dynamics I probably would have a similar stress reaction. I've always preferred FPS gameplay that's more focused on problem-solving without time limits, or where there's more of a strategic dynamic, like Portal (reading about HL2 has actually if anything made me want to play Portal 2 again, although HL2 as well).
I definitely think the atmosphere of Ravenholm contributed to my feelings about it, but I suspect if it was just the slow zombies or was all puzzles or something I would actually really enjoy it. There was something about the atmosphere + claustrophobic spaces + fast zombies in places I didn't like. Or rather, I did like it but not as much as the rest of it.
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.
Yes, all one take :-) However there were many trials to get there with less than 20% chance of overall success I would estimate.
e.g. the bit where I hide behind behind a headstone in the graveyard is by no means reliable (maybe 80%?)
Thanks to HN the view count on YouTube has increased dramatically! If it gets past 1000 I'm going to have to record and upload the final section with the combine troops.
EDIT: assuming that is still possible: Valve have made some changes for the twentieth birthday which I noticed today.
e.g. there's more grass and bizarrely the lift button has switched to the other side of the elevator
While you sipping on that coffee, I was crouched down on the same roof surrounded by the awful sound of the incoming sporty zombies. I hate those things, I still do.
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.
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.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/
Also try clicking on the gravity gun at the end of the anniversary page.
Why does this even need to be spelled out...
Paranoia here is largely warranted. But people had fewer rights than they realized before. And finding a way to play older media is often a rather expensive endeavor.
Edit to add: I also find picking on Valve awkward here. Microsoft? Sony? I would be far more inline. Even Nintendo. Valve seems to be much more on favor of empowering users, though.
Again, Steam /could/ do this. Has it? The others have done the things.
Blu-Ray UHD discs can no longer be played on modern computers as Intel has removed the trusted execution environment needed to decrypt them. Blu-Ray UHD players do a handshake that verifies the use of Intel SGX.
One might have always been skeptical of these discs, especially as AMD had never implemented those TEE instructions.
But I believe the interesting takeaway is that even physical media is becoming something you can’t count on using without the continued permission/assistance of some outside party.
Without regulation I would expect that all new media will eventually require players to be always-online.
Indeed. Why did you bother?
I buy most of my games on GOG for that reason. At least you can download a DRM-free copy that can never be taken away.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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).
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.
Recently, it was revealed that even the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 benchmarks used upscaling and the problems with visually stunning but horribly performing games like The Forever Winter were also pretty obvious.
I did very much appreciate what Black Mesa did, though. Maybe Project Borealis will also be a success story in due time.
However, it should be noted that this isn't an issue for consoles (where precompiled shaders come with the game) or Steam Deck (where shaders are compiled via Fossilize before the game is even launched). It's most notable on DirectX programs during the first run, which hits benchmarks quite badly but also becomes less stuttery as more shaders are cached.
On console, precompiling makes sense because you know exactly what hardware a user will have and you can optimize for one or two sets of hardware. The effort required to automatically package and download these shaders for users on their first load is worth it, so it's a viable fix to shader stutter in games where it crops up.
On Linux, precompiling makes sense because shaders take an extra long time to process due to the DirectX -> Vulkan translation. Since this causes stutter in every game, a precompilation step is pretty much mandatory for everything but conveniently also solves the UE5 stutter issue at it's roots.
On PC, it's basically a maelstrom of worst case scenarios. You don't know what hardware a user will have, so you can't package precompiled shaders. You're not translating shader calls so you have to rely on each version of DirectX's specific DXIL features instead of the unified Vulkan 1.2+ SPIR-V that you get from DXVK. And of course, even if you did get a magic "Compile the Shaders!" program working most users wouldn't bother since they're impatient. Some games try adding optional precompilation screens, but I wager most people just skip them when given the opportunity.
Still holding out for HL 3. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
FromSoft
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.
I couldn't deal with my one of our party members, but have no issues with COD PUG's. Go figure.
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?
Does it lend itself to do other hard things like half life alyx?
Which also shows yet another one of Valve's problems with making games, they treat their games like they're "tech demos", so unfortunately they're not as interested in actually moving the stories in their games forward or bringing them to a conclusion. They do a "tech demo", they move on from that tech, leaving the game and it's world and community behind. Plot? What plot? Perhaps they're also stalling on making continuations or even new releases in search of some "gimmick technology" to pair a game with, instead of just telling a story through their games. For those people that do like the narratives and the worlds in their games, it sure is tough luck. There's more to a game than just 'tech', but alas.
They might have had enough original ideas for HL2 (and then Alyx, driven by a new medium), but still not HL3...
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.
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.
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.
Right constraints make things happen.
Roberts was the lead on Digital Anvil's "Freelancer", until the publisher (Microsoft), frustrated at the scope creep and protracted dev cycle, bought out the studio, demoted Roberts, and cut features so they could ship the thing.
Sure single person self-funded passion projects exist. They always have and they always will. And sure what one person can do is more than they ever could in the past. It's still not the same as something that's forged by a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillsets.
Frost makes the point more well spoken and stylish than me often.
https://youtu.be/gZffFoQekcc
At Cannes and your local 'art' cinema ? To be fair, I don't watch movies much, but I do still go to these sometimes.
> Where are the games publishers on low budget games?
Who said anything about publishers ? (And Valve dumped theirs as soon as they could.)
> Sure single person self-funded passion projects exist. They always have and they always will. And sure what one person can do is more than they ever could in the past. It's still not the same as something that's forged by a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillsets.
Ok, I have no idea what you're talking about, are you "no-true-scotsmanning" here ?
We have a great recent example : "Factorio (: Space Age)", which started as a one-person idea, took form as a 3-person company, got after release a 20k€ Indiegogo funding, then blazed a trail of success over the next 12 years, now with something like 5 million sales for the base game and a 30 person company.
How is that not "a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillset" ?!
Or the amateurs at Spring-Recoil / Zero-K / BAR, which show how you can do that even better than the professional, commercial RTS.
Or indeed one person projects like Shadow Empire (with some publisher support), which show how you can make a brilliant 4X/Wargame on what I assume is a tiny budget...
And there are probably many other examples here...
I get that you're trying to discredit the argument by claiming fallacies, but these aren't just my views. Industry insiders (Frost in games and RedLetterMedia in movies) have been talking about this for nearly a decade.
"Industry" insiders' opinions are irrelevant, they are just too bogged in the day to day details, they tend to forget that 99% of everything is crap and that's fine (and they do that because they have to make a living there, their incentives are different).
And you cannot predict greatness (you are the one that talked about 'visionaries', remember ?) - specifically of new teams you've never heard about before (of course once they did something great it's another thing, even with reversion to the mean they can have a lot of other successes).
It could be a decent environment for making great games if Gabe wantet it to be. It isn't one right now, Gabe is still a businessman first.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
VR is a small market to begin with, and most VR people can't play Alyx without buying a whole new computer.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
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.
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.
Would be a huge selling point for the steam deck if it could manage it on min specs
It ran, but barely. I probably spent half my playtime restarting the game, trying to find the happy coincidence of playability (because the other sessions were too rough). Being able to play Alyx was one of the reasons I chose the Go over the Deck.
Nope, no need for an expensive gaming PC, just an actual gaming PC.
As with cars, phones, etc. if your budget is tight you can always get so much more value by going for a used model from a generation or two back than you would get by spending the same money on something new.
> Would be a huge selling point for the steam deck if it could manage it on min specs
Steam Deck can technically run a few VR titles but it doesn't do it well. There is a lot of evidence that Valve has prototype standalone headsets running on Steam Deck derived hardware platforms (often referred to as "Deckard") but the hardware just isn't there for full quality PC VR.
Creating a working nuclear fusion device could be cheaper than that.
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.
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.
Whoa, what? I only hear people complain more about Windows over time.
Well sure, but windows has never exactly been highly praised outside the enterprise world. Much of the praise that is held is mostly nostalgic.
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?
It was never about the quality of Windows, but their attacks against FOSS. And I think Nadella largely repaired the damage from that.
edit: on iPhone
8 keys, I guess?
> 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.
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.
The day that dev looked at player time-location heatmaps, investigated outliers, and then cried...
(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!
Better translation layers are what made the Steam Deck possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law
One needs to realise graphics APIs have historically not been terribly efficient.
There was a reason Mantle/Vulkan came to be.
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?
* I first installed Whisky, a Wine/Game Porting toolkit/app thingy (https://getwhisky.app). Then I installed Steam for Windows inside Whisky, then downloaded HL2. The download was a little bit hiccup-y, but it worked. Testplay of HL2 was great, apart from the mouse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_XN_RwjnqM
I could never get used to Ravenholm though. Thinking about it even now years later stresses me out a tad.
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.
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).
I definitely think the atmosphere of Ravenholm contributed to my feelings about it, but I suspect if it was just the slow zombies or was all puzzles or something I would actually really enjoy it. There was something about the atmosphere + claustrophobic spaces + fast zombies in places I didn't like. Or rather, I did like it but not as much as the rest of it.
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.
e.g. the bit where I hide behind behind a headstone in the graveyard is by no means reliable (maybe 80%?)
Thanks to HN the view count on YouTube has increased dramatically! If it gets past 1000 I'm going to have to record and upload the final section with the combine troops.
EDIT: assuming that is still possible: Valve have made some changes for the twentieth birthday which I noticed today.
e.g. there's more grass and bizarrely the lift button has switched to the other side of the elevator
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
Legend.