Half-Life 2 (including Lost Coast, Episode 1, Episode 2, and Half-Life: Source) has been updated. This includes all the changes in the Beta since November 2013.
The following changes are included:
Improved readability of the UI in VR
Removed the IPD calibration tool. TF2 will now obey the Oculus configuration file. Use the Oculus calibration tool in your SDK or install and run "OpenVR" under Tools in Steam to calibrate your IPD.
Added dropdown to enable VR mode in the Video options. Removed the -vr command line option.
Added the ability to switch in and out of VR mode without quitting the game
By default VR mode will run full screen. To switch back to a borderless window set the vr_force_windowed convar.
Added support for VR mode on Linux
Added VR support to Half-Life: Source
Fix for an issue some players were seeing for the second train in Route Kanal getting stuck and blocking forward progress.
Replaying HL2 right now. I gotta admit... It hasn't aged well. This might just be my enormous hatred of the entire Route Kanal level talking, but holy shit this game can be super ugly looking. The facial animations are still really good looking, don't get me wrong, but Jesus, some of character models look really awful. The gunplay too has a weird feel to it. I think I'm just spoiled by iron sights. And I think it's a deadly sin to have grenades as a separate weapon in any FPS.
Don't get me wrong, the art design is still brilliant, and the audio is really, really good. I love the feel and tone of the Combine, with their godawful Soviet Russia meets War of the Worlds vibe.
HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
I get so sad when this thread is bumped but no real news *tear*
What I don't get is why everybody wants Half-Life 3, I mean who cares. What I want is Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Y'know, the thing that is supposed to finish out the story?
I don't want to get all 2edgy or anything, but I kinda stopped caring after a while. Like, if Half Life 3 becomes a thing I'll be all over it, but there hasn't been so much as a whisper in, what, ten years now? Valve has found it's niche in selling other people's games and making hat simulator.
HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
Honestly I'll never not care. Half-Life 1 came out when I was 15 and it shaped my teenage years, I was as heavy into the mod scene as any one boy with a 56k modem could be. It ruled my entire summer in 96 and it was glorious. By the time Half-Life 2 came out my mind was fertile and ready to be planted the seeds of more amazing valve-ness, and episodes 1 and 2 just continued the amazingness. I don't know if the games aren't actually as good as I think they are but god damn is Half-Life my favourite video game franchise and no matter what Episode 3 or whatever becomes I'll be there waiting for it, even if it takes another 20 years.
I can respect. Hell, I'd feel the same way about Bioshock. It's interesting to me just how influential HL2 was on a lot of stuff, from Bioshock to Dishonored. A lot of developers definitely learned a lot from it.
I get so sad when this thread is bumped but no real news *tear*
What I don't get is why everybody wants Half-Life 3, I mean who cares. What I want is Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Y'know, the thing that is supposed to finish out the story?
Stupid valve
As much as I agree with that, getting only an episode after like 7 or 8 years would be anticlimactic as hell.
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
You don't see releasing a 3-5 hour episode as the only content released in the span of probably 10+ years as anti-climatic? (If Ep3 came out this year, I doubt we'd see HL3 for at least 3 years afterwards, if not longer) Especially when it simply exists to wrap up seven-year-old plot threads. (Compare to the gap between HL1 and HL2, which was only a six year wait and was a radical departure from HL1.)
I mean, that's really the biggest issue facing Valve; they wrote themselves into a corner and are now faced with having to resolve the lingering HL2 plotthread before being able to move onto HL3, which puts them in a super weird position
-Do they keep HL2: Ep3 an episode? At only 4 or so hours? Do they expand it? Is it really an episode anymore at that point? Do they even have enough story left to make it more than four hours without feeling like filler?
-Do they try and maintain graphical and feature parity with the HL2 episodes? Do they make it look like a modern game?
-Would the market even care for a game that was the last act of a seven year old story? Would they have to re-release HL2/episodes alongside Ep3? Would they need to remaster them?
-Do they even bother making Ep3 at this point, or do they move directly to HL3? In which case, how would they resolve the lingering plot thread? Would that get in the way of generating a whole new feel like HL1 -> HL2 did?
No, Ep3 is never happening. Gabe even said he regrets the episodic structure. They'll take as long as they need to and release HL3, but they're going to be damn sure it revolutionizes the genre like HL2 did. That's why it's taking so long.
Though what's the hold up with the paid version of BMS? Coming up on 2 years since the mod release this September. Those guys work fucking slow, Xen + tweaks to the base game can't be that difficult.
No, Ep3 is never happening. Gabe even said he regrets the episodic structure. They'll take as long as they need to and release HL3, but they're going to be damn sure it revolutionizes the genre like HL2 did. That's why it's taking so long.
Though what's the hold up with the paid version of BMS? Coming up on 2 years since the mod release this September. Those guys work fucking slow, Xen + tweaks to the base game can't be that difficult.
It took them like 8 years to release Black Mesa in the first place, and they were talking like Xen was going to be a full game in itself. I wouldn't be shocked to not see anything for several years yet.
Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
I don't even know what Half-Life 3 would be anymore. A big element of the first two games was, and is, how downright revolutionary the execution of the development turned out to be. I'm kind of at a loss as to what would stand out in that way in the FPS genre any longer. Maybe that means I'm fully primed to get my mind blown in a few years, whenever the unveiling ultimately comes. But the second game also blew the doors off the premise of the first one so much I don't really see what room they have left for themselves to fit bigger surprises in.
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
You don't see releasing a 3-5 hour episode as the only content released in the span of probably 10+ years as anti-climatic? (If Ep3 came out this year, I doubt we'd see HL3 for at least 3 years afterwards, if not longer) Especially when it simply exists to wrap up seven-year-old plot threads. (Compare to the gap between HL1 and HL2, which was only a six year wait and was a radical departure from HL1.)
I mean, that's really the biggest issue facing Valve; they wrote themselves into a corner and are now faced with having to resolve the lingering HL2 plotthread before being able to move onto HL3, which puts them in a super weird position
-Do they keep HL2: Ep3 an episode? At only 4 or so hours? Do they expand it? Is it really an episode anymore at that point? Do they even have enough story left to make it more than four hours without feeling like filler?
-Do they try and maintain graphical and feature parity with the HL2 episodes? Do they make it look like a modern game?
-Would the market even care for a game that was the last act of a seven year old story? Would they have to re-release HL2/episodes alongside Ep3? Would they need to remaster them?
-Do they even bother making Ep3 at this point, or do they move directly to HL3? In which case, how would they resolve the lingering plot thread? Would that get in the way of generating a whole new feel like HL1 -> HL2 did?
you're confusing real market influences with my desire to finish the story. I don't care about other people, I just want Episode 3 still
I don't even know what Half-Life 3 would be anymore. A big element of the first two games was, and is, how downright revolutionary the execution of the development turned out to be. I'm kind of at a loss as to what would stand out in that way in the FPS genre any longer. Maybe that means I'm fully primed to get my mind blown in a few years, whenever the unveiling ultimately comes. But the second game also blew the doors off the premise of the first one so much I don't really see what room they have left for themselves to fit bigger surprises in.
Well, that's the thing. I don't know anyone who would have guessed "post-apocolyptic Eastern Europe dominated by a completely different group of aliens" after playing Half-Life 1, but that's what the game evolved into.
Ultimately, you have to ask the question of what the point of the Half-Life series is. Is it to tell a story in a cinematic matter, or is it to push the envelope of the entire genre?
Looking back on HL1 and HL2, while they feature major advancements in the areas of graphics, sound and storytelling (at least compared to the more popular contemporaries) they're still pretty standard shooters when it comes to gameplay. (Well refined shooters, but pretty standard). HL1 stood out a little bit due to the military's guys AI,, but it still played similar to what a shooter would play like. HL2 had the gravity stuff, which added a lot but it usually wound up being superficial. You either solved puzzles with it, or just used it as basically a rocket launcher.
So would Valve just make another linear shooter with some impressive visual and mechanical trappings? Is that even what people would want these days? We're seeing a big trend towards player driven narratives and content, but is Half-Life the right venue for that? Should Half-Life destined to become more open world, with characters that go about their lives when the player isn't there and where his actions can dramatically affect the world around him in unique ways?
These are certainly questions Valve has to answer, but that's one of the big reasons I'm still down for a Half-Life 3, because I believe Valve can answer them if they put their minds to it.
It would be impossible for them to release Ep3 now in the same fashion as the previous HL2 episodes. Doing it now, after seven years, and on the same seven-year-old tech, would just underline how long it's been and make them look ridiculous.
The best scenario I can think of for a hypothetical Ep3 would be to do it on the same engine/tech basis that HL3 hypothetically gets, but release it a few months before HL3 itself, at a low price, and use it as a HL3 teaser, tech demo, and apology for the long delay all rolled up into one. Sure you would "spoil" some of the presumably revolutionary mind-blowing features of HL3 itself, but if you do it right it will just whet people's appetites and build hype for the release of full-fledged HL3.
You don't see releasing a 3-5 hour episode as the only content released in the span of probably 10+ years as anti-climatic? (If Ep3 came out this year, I doubt we'd see HL3 for at least 3 years afterwards, if not longer) Especially when it simply exists to wrap up seven-year-old plot threads. (Compare to the gap between HL1 and HL2, which was only a six year wait and was a radical departure from HL1.)
I mean, that's really the biggest issue facing Valve; they wrote themselves into a corner and are now faced with having to resolve the lingering HL2 plotthread before being able to move onto HL3, which puts them in a super weird position
-Do they keep HL2: Ep3 an episode? At only 4 or so hours? Do they expand it? Is it really an episode anymore at that point? Do they even have enough story left to make it more than four hours without feeling like filler?
-Do they try and maintain graphical and feature parity with the HL2 episodes? Do they make it look like a modern game?
-Would the market even care for a game that was the last act of a seven year old story? Would they have to re-release HL2/episodes alongside Ep3? Would they need to remaster them?
-Do they even bother making Ep3 at this point, or do they move directly to HL3? In which case, how would they resolve the lingering plot thread? Would that get in the way of generating a whole new feel like HL1 -> HL2 did?
you're confusing real market influences with my desire to finish the story. I don't care about other people, I just want Episode 3 still
You're confusing the top half of my post (my response to your question about whether it's anti-climatic or not) with the bottom half, which was discussing the greater ramifications of the situation that Valve finds itself it. :P
Post release demo's are not all that uncommon. Blizzard did them all the time.
ya sure but if I recall it came out quite a ways later and was made out of cut content from the main game. like.. at that point is it really selling any new copies?
Post release demo's are not all that uncommon. Blizzard did them all the time.
ya sure but if I recall it came out quite a ways later and was made out of cut content from the main game. like.. at that point is it really selling any new copies?
The GOTY edition was coming out at the time I think, which would have been the "second wave" of sales.
Post release demo's are not all that uncommon. Blizzard did them all the time.
ya sure but if I recall it came out quite a ways later and was made out of cut content from the main game. like.. at that point is it really selling any new copies?
Probably. Half-Life continued selling for years.
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Zxerolfor the smaller pieces, my shovel wouldn't doso i took off my boot and used my shoeRegistered Userregular
I do wonder how much of game's longevity stemmed from people who bought it to play the Half-Life versus those who got it to play CounterStrike.
"This isn't college" -- 5 points off each day it's late; every 3 absences drops you a letter grade -- is the closest analogy I can come up with. We don't have to change the way we judge content because it took us years to see it. We don't need to imbue the product with expectations and speculation made over the interim years. We don't need to imagine that because we waited, it must be longer or more complete than that thing we didn't wait for.
I went to Target (iirc) with some birthday cash in late November 1998 to browse. I saw an orange box with a lambda on it. I opened the flap and read that enemies could hear you and track you by smell; I was sold. Last FPS I played (was still playing) was Doom. Picked it up then and there, and hadn't any idea that I was walking home with 'over 50 Game of the Year awards'.
More importantly, I didn't know that it had been delayed for over a year, that the community was full of people who had waited and waited for it.
It's not hard to take the long view and realize that, at some point, you'll be playing the entire series straight through, and when that happens? Those years of waiting (as if that's the only thing that happened in those years, instead of, y'know, life) won't mean anything at all.
My impression of this sort of logic - and I see it in every community to which I've ever paid attention - is that judging content releases based on the time you had to wait for it might be the worst sin a media consumer can commit. It's the easiest one at least; the most tempting. And one I could easily be guilty of, though I can't think of any examples.
Well, I'm glad that works for you, but putting larger chunks of time in front of me doesn't really make a seven year's wait retroactively get shorter, I'm afraid.
"This isn't college" -- 5 points off each day it's late; every 3 absences drops you a letter grade -- is the closest analogy I can come up with. We don't have to change the way we judge content because it took us years to see it. We don't need to imbue the product with expectations and speculation made over the interim years. We don't need to imagine that because we waited, it must be longer or more complete than that thing we didn't wait for.
I went to Target (iirc) with some birthday cash in late November 1998 to browse. I saw an orange box with a lambda on it. I opened the flap and read that enemies could hear you and track you by smell; I was sold. Last FPS I played (was still playing) was Doom. Picked it up then and there, and hadn't any idea that I was walking home with 'over 50 Game of the Year awards'.
More importantly, I didn't know that it had been delayed for over a year, that the community was full of people who had waited and waited for it.
I'm not making a judgment about the content, I'm making a judgment about the situation around the content. Certainly if an episode 3 came out I'd play the shit out of it and probably love it lots, even if it isn't great. (Because I am an awful fanboy about Half-Life ) However, I would still find only getting 3-4 hours of content after seven+ years super anti-climatic. Considering that in less time we got HL2 from HL1, I don't see how that situation would be anything BUT anti-climatic (Unless there was a HL3 trailer at the end that said "coming next year" I guess. )
It's not hard to take the long view and realize that, at some point, you'll be playing the entire series straight through, and when that happens? Those years of waiting (as if that's the only thing that happened in those years, instead of, y'know, life) won't mean anything at all.
If I'm, you know, still alive by then. Or if Valve even gets around to releasing new Half-Life games. :P Also, this kind of thinking is super myopic. "One day it won't matter." That's nice, like how one day I'll be able to retire. That doesn't negate the next 30-40 years of working I have ahead of me though.
My impression of this sort of logic - and I see it in every community to which I've ever paid attention - is that judging content releases based on the time you had to wait for it might be the worst sin a media consumer can commit. It's the easiest one at least; the most tempting. And one I could easily be guilty of, though I can't think of any examples.
Again, I'm not saying "I had to wait seven years, so Episode 3 must blow the pants off me!" I'm saying "It's a little disappointing to only get 3-4 hours of Half-Lifey goodness after a seven year long wait, and likely several more years waiting for HL3."
Half Life has always had an incredibly schizophrenic and loony plot. What it did so spectacularly was immerse and engross you in the gameplay so completely as Gordon with so much cool stuff happening all the time that you didn't care. You just had to keep playing.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
Well, that and Half-Life had the outright incredible entity and materials system. I don't think it can be overstated how big the change was. Half-Life 1 came out in a time when id was still the apex predator of the genre, but, the gameworlds themselves in the id games were still, largely, a 'level' with an environment where, even with all the texture mapping and work, still had this unmistakable feeling of being made out of the same 'stuff,' some kind of rigid, indestructible material. You might be able to get bullet hole details on some walls and things in Quake 2, but that was it. You might see some big chunky throne chairs and things, but there wasn't anything you could call furniture. There weren't destructibles. There certainly wasn't anything that resembled any kind of device beyond glorified switchboxes and elevator platforms. You might see a conveyor belt but you couldn't interact with it meaningfully. No vehicles. Quake 2 reintroduced the hub system into fps games last seen in the Heretic games, colored lighting, and gibbable corpses.
Half-Life had the guts to make a world that actually did a pretty damn good job of making a working facsimile of a modern place with lots of real-world objects and items. Suddenly, furniture. Vending machines and other devices, machines, vehicles, tram lines, objects and things that blurred the previous paradigm where things were either an enemy or an unyielding, indestructible chunk of level prefab. Each texture had a corresponding set of sounds and properties, reinforcing the role of wood, metal, ceramics, glass, etc, being those things instead of just visual skins projected onto the various facets of the level architecture as had been done in the id games. Some things break, shatter, bounce and scatter. Skeletal animation on the character models! Not just a set of canned attacks, where everything that moves is there for you to kill! Enemies with weak spots, or otherwise outright impervious to some forms of weaponry. Enemies that fill rooms, utterly breaking the assumed scale of fps enemies.
I mean, Half-Life wasn't the first fps game to have some of these elements, but it certainly was the first one to do all of them, and really believably introduce the illusion of being in some kind of real-world environment rather than a polygon arena with an exit. As someone who loved the original id stuff prior to Quake 2, it was revelatory.
Half-Life had the guts to make a world that actually did a pretty damn good job of making a working facsimile of a modern place with lots of real-world objects and items.
Everything you mention is true, but it's hilarious how awfully designed Black Mesa is if you look at it from a realism perspective.
Your tram ride takes you through a giant leaking two story tall drum spilling liquid so radioactive it is glowing, miles and miles of hallways dug out of the earth for no reason, multiple gargantuan nearly-bottomless pits, no cafeterias at all, no viable transportation method for getting to labs (the tram system is supposed to be extensive, but you only see it once, scientists that work in the labs you pass would have to walk extremely long distances to get to them and back every day), speaking of labs - very few actual labs for a "research facility", remarkably few security checkpoints for a super secret installation that handles material so dangerous the entire place was built under a giant slab of rock and requires armed security, an oddly extensive underground tram system that loops into itself multiple times for no reason, a hydroelectric dam that isn't actually actually large enough to house the machinery required to generate and store electricity and wouldn't be generating any if it was (there is no significant movement of water through the dam)... and during your entire trek through the place I think you come across a grand total of two bathrooms.
Black Mesa would be a world where 99% of the science staff would be:
A.) Dying of radiation poisoning
B.) Going into diabetic comas because the only nourishment available to them was generic grape/orange/lime soda
C.) Shitting in garbage cans
D.) All of the above
To be fair, a game where you wander through hundreds of identical hallways and generic labs wouldn't have been as fun, but still, Black Mesa is borderline Umbrella Corporation bad when it comes to interior design.
Yes, even if it was just a few hours of content, would not be disappoint at the appearance of Episode 3 in my Steam library - the intervening years make no difference, Alyx Vance's tears must be answered with my holy Gordon Freeman fury.
Like other's have said, Valve could certainly use it like a Episode 0 to a potential Half-Life 3 too - with significantly better reception than such attempts by game series like Dead Rising.
---
In regards to the unreality of the layout of Black Mesa, I bought into it simply because it had been attacked by the enslaved residents of another dimension. Their mad scientist experiments didn't need any normal rhyme or reason when it dealt with things not being normal. Besides, the game's setting clearly seems to hint that Gordon Freeman only went traipsing through only part of Black Mesa ...
Which makes me wonder, did anyone every try to make a visual or interpretation of Black Mesa that used the differing points of view from all the Half-Life 1 expansions as well? Blue Shift, Opposing Force, and Decay?
Posts
So.... HL3 confirmed?
Laidlaw said when he first made that account that it had nothing to do with Valve's production (or non-production) of the Half-Life franchise.
Don't get me wrong, the art design is still brilliant, and the audio is really, really good. I love the feel and tone of the Combine, with their godawful Soviet Russia meets War of the Worlds vibe.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
What I don't get is why everybody wants Half-Life 3, I mean who cares. What I want is Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Y'know, the thing that is supposed to finish out the story?
Stupid valve
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
*grumble*mightaswellbe10*grumble*
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
As much as I agree with that, getting only an episode after like 7 or 8 years would be anticlimactic as hell.
Especially since I would figure after this long if there was an Episode 3 released, it'd be pretty damned massive.
You don't see releasing a 3-5 hour episode as the only content released in the span of probably 10+ years as anti-climatic? (If Ep3 came out this year, I doubt we'd see HL3 for at least 3 years afterwards, if not longer) Especially when it simply exists to wrap up seven-year-old plot threads. (Compare to the gap between HL1 and HL2, which was only a six year wait and was a radical departure from HL1.)
I mean, that's really the biggest issue facing Valve; they wrote themselves into a corner and are now faced with having to resolve the lingering HL2 plotthread before being able to move onto HL3, which puts them in a super weird position
-Do they keep HL2: Ep3 an episode? At only 4 or so hours? Do they expand it? Is it really an episode anymore at that point? Do they even have enough story left to make it more than four hours without feeling like filler?
-Do they try and maintain graphical and feature parity with the HL2 episodes? Do they make it look like a modern game?
-Would the market even care for a game that was the last act of a seven year old story? Would they have to re-release HL2/episodes alongside Ep3? Would they need to remaster them?
-Do they even bother making Ep3 at this point, or do they move directly to HL3? In which case, how would they resolve the lingering plot thread? Would that get in the way of generating a whole new feel like HL1 -> HL2 did?
Though what's the hold up with the paid version of BMS? Coming up on 2 years since the mod release this September. Those guys work fucking slow, Xen + tweaks to the base game can't be that difficult.
The story will be finished in Half-Life 3.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
It took them like 8 years to release Black Mesa in the first place, and they were talking like Xen was going to be a full game in itself. I wouldn't be shocked to not see anything for several years yet.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Well, that's the thing. I don't know anyone who would have guessed "post-apocolyptic Eastern Europe dominated by a completely different group of aliens" after playing Half-Life 1, but that's what the game evolved into.
Ultimately, you have to ask the question of what the point of the Half-Life series is. Is it to tell a story in a cinematic matter, or is it to push the envelope of the entire genre?
Looking back on HL1 and HL2, while they feature major advancements in the areas of graphics, sound and storytelling (at least compared to the more popular contemporaries) they're still pretty standard shooters when it comes to gameplay. (Well refined shooters, but pretty standard). HL1 stood out a little bit due to the military's guys AI,, but it still played similar to what a shooter would play like. HL2 had the gravity stuff, which added a lot but it usually wound up being superficial. You either solved puzzles with it, or just used it as basically a rocket launcher.
So would Valve just make another linear shooter with some impressive visual and mechanical trappings? Is that even what people would want these days? We're seeing a big trend towards player driven narratives and content, but is Half-Life the right venue for that? Should Half-Life destined to become more open world, with characters that go about their lives when the player isn't there and where his actions can dramatically affect the world around him in unique ways?
These are certainly questions Valve has to answer, but that's one of the big reasons I'm still down for a Half-Life 3, because I believe Valve can answer them if they put their minds to it.
The best scenario I can think of for a hypothetical Ep3 would be to do it on the same engine/tech basis that HL3 hypothetically gets, but release it a few months before HL3 itself, at a low price, and use it as a HL3 teaser, tech demo, and apology for the long delay all rolled up into one. Sure you would "spoil" some of the presumably revolutionary mind-blowing features of HL3 itself, but if you do it right it will just whet people's appetites and build hype for the release of full-fledged HL3.
You're confusing the top half of my post (my response to your question about whether it's anti-climatic or not) with the bottom half, which was discussing the greater ramifications of the situation that Valve finds itself it. :P
Another Half Life: Uplink? I could go for that.
Also it always made me laugh back in the day that Uplink came out after Half-Life was actually released
The GOTY edition was coming out at the time I think, which would have been the "second wave" of sales.
Probably. Half-Life continued selling for years.
slept on this, so if it's still coming across as too snippy, I'm sorry.
no, I don't.
"This isn't college" -- 5 points off each day it's late; every 3 absences drops you a letter grade -- is the closest analogy I can come up with. We don't have to change the way we judge content because it took us years to see it. We don't need to imbue the product with expectations and speculation made over the interim years. We don't need to imagine that because we waited, it must be longer or more complete than that thing we didn't wait for.
I went to Target (iirc) with some birthday cash in late November 1998 to browse. I saw an orange box with a lambda on it. I opened the flap and read that enemies could hear you and track you by smell; I was sold. Last FPS I played (was still playing) was Doom. Picked it up then and there, and hadn't any idea that I was walking home with 'over 50 Game of the Year awards'.
More importantly, I didn't know that it had been delayed for over a year, that the community was full of people who had waited and waited for it.
It's not hard to take the long view and realize that, at some point, you'll be playing the entire series straight through, and when that happens? Those years of waiting (as if that's the only thing that happened in those years, instead of, y'know, life) won't mean anything at all.
My impression of this sort of logic - and I see it in every community to which I've ever paid attention - is that judging content releases based on the time you had to wait for it might be the worst sin a media consumer can commit. It's the easiest one at least; the most tempting. And one I could easily be guilty of, though I can't think of any examples.
Well, I'm glad that works for you, but putting larger chunks of time in front of me doesn't really make a seven year's wait retroactively get shorter, I'm afraid.
I'm not making a judgment about the content, I'm making a judgment about the situation around the content. Certainly if an episode 3 came out I'd play the shit out of it and probably love it lots, even if it isn't great. (Because I am an awful fanboy about Half-Life
If I'm, you know, still alive by then.
Again, I'm not saying "I had to wait seven years, so Episode 3 must blow the pants off me!" I'm saying "It's a little disappointing to only get 3-4 hours of Half-Lifey goodness after a seven year long wait, and likely several more years waiting for HL3."
Half-Life had the guts to make a world that actually did a pretty damn good job of making a working facsimile of a modern place with lots of real-world objects and items. Suddenly, furniture. Vending machines and other devices, machines, vehicles, tram lines, objects and things that blurred the previous paradigm where things were either an enemy or an unyielding, indestructible chunk of level prefab. Each texture had a corresponding set of sounds and properties, reinforcing the role of wood, metal, ceramics, glass, etc, being those things instead of just visual skins projected onto the various facets of the level architecture as had been done in the id games. Some things break, shatter, bounce and scatter. Skeletal animation on the character models! Not just a set of canned attacks, where everything that moves is there for you to kill! Enemies with weak spots, or otherwise outright impervious to some forms of weaponry. Enemies that fill rooms, utterly breaking the assumed scale of fps enemies.
I mean, Half-Life wasn't the first fps game to have some of these elements, but it certainly was the first one to do all of them, and really believably introduce the illusion of being in some kind of real-world environment rather than a polygon arena with an exit. As someone who loved the original id stuff prior to Quake 2, it was revelatory.
I owned a disc-based copy of Counter-Strike for years before purchasing a copy of Half-Life.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Everything you mention is true, but it's hilarious how awfully designed Black Mesa is if you look at it from a realism perspective.
Your tram ride takes you through a giant leaking two story tall drum spilling liquid so radioactive it is glowing, miles and miles of hallways dug out of the earth for no reason, multiple gargantuan nearly-bottomless pits, no cafeterias at all, no viable transportation method for getting to labs (the tram system is supposed to be extensive, but you only see it once, scientists that work in the labs you pass would have to walk extremely long distances to get to them and back every day), speaking of labs - very few actual labs for a "research facility", remarkably few security checkpoints for a super secret installation that handles material so dangerous the entire place was built under a giant slab of rock and requires armed security, an oddly extensive underground tram system that loops into itself multiple times for no reason, a hydroelectric dam that isn't actually actually large enough to house the machinery required to generate and store electricity and wouldn't be generating any if it was (there is no significant movement of water through the dam)... and during your entire trek through the place I think you come across a grand total of two bathrooms.
Black Mesa would be a world where 99% of the science staff would be:
A.) Dying of radiation poisoning
B.) Going into diabetic comas because the only nourishment available to them was generic grape/orange/lime soda
C.) Shitting in garbage cans
D.) All of the above
To be fair, a game where you wander through hundreds of identical hallways and generic labs wouldn't have been as fun, but still, Black Mesa is borderline Umbrella Corporation bad when it comes to interior design.
Like other's have said, Valve could certainly use it like a Episode 0 to a potential Half-Life 3 too - with significantly better reception than such attempts by game series like Dead Rising.
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In regards to the unreality of the layout of Black Mesa, I bought into it simply because it had been attacked by the enslaved residents of another dimension. Their mad scientist experiments didn't need any normal rhyme or reason when it dealt with things not being normal. Besides, the game's setting clearly seems to hint that Gordon Freeman only went traipsing through only part of Black Mesa ...
Which makes me wonder, did anyone every try to make a visual or interpretation of Black Mesa that used the differing points of view from all the Half-Life 1 expansions as well? Blue Shift, Opposing Force, and Decay?