Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
It is very funny that Valve managed to hit that mark where they were making SO much money from Steam and all these other developments that it completely overwrote the identity of the company. Usually you have to be a publicly traded company to do that.
I'd be curious how much of that pitch would have survived to a finalized game (had it been released) after it got pushed through a zillion iterations.
It'd be interesting to go back over the various concept art that has been leaked over the years with this in mind (not that there's a staggering amount of it).
Yeah, obviously the Arctic stuff is no surprise, but maybe some of the other bits would slot into that snippet of narrative.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Episodey Afterthoughts: The map is not the territory. A sketch is only a starting point. Everything changes as you try to make it real, everyone who works on it will have ideas, and new opportunities will appear and change everything, but even on a story level, you will find as you get closer that some things just won't work. Would Alyx really shoot and kill Judith Mossman? Is that too harsh? What if Alyx pushed Judith into a timeloop or portal bubble instead, leaving her fate open?
Is there a role in all this for the former security guard Barney? What about d0g? What if the final explosion powers a huge timeloop singularity that puts Gordon back on the Black Mesa Research Facility Inbound Train, and it all never happened?
...or is about to happen again?
Also, how do you tell it? Do you start on the Borealis and have physical timeloops that function as flashbacks? How would that work? Do you start with glimpses of a Combine interrogation cell? Do you hint the entire experience is provoked fantasy as a means of getting info? Or is a straightforward linear experience the most satisfying? It takes a team to work this stuff out. Vignettes are easy.
And then what do you do if the brilliant actor who plays Wallace Breen...dies?
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Handsome CostanzaAsk me about 8bitdoRIP Iwata-sanRegistered Userregular
I'd be curious how much of that pitch would have survived to a finalized game (had it been released) after it got pushed through a zillion iterations.
It'd be interesting to go back over the various concept art that has been leaked over the years with this in mind (not that there's a staggering amount of it).
Yeah, obviously the Arctic stuff is no surprise, but maybe some of the other bits would slot into that snippet of narrative.
There's artic concept art showing a combine research facility surrounded by an ice field that also happens to have a turret visible in the middle of said field, with gordon and Alyx looking on it from the foreground.
edit: also I wonder if those celestial looking beings in some of the leaked concept art had something to do with the borealis and it's shenanigans. like creatures that inhabit some kind of area between time and space that the borealis see's when it travels.
edit: hey srs question, should we still be spoilering this stuff? I mean it seems kind of silly to be putting quotes from a blog post in spoiler tags, but I just figured it was better to be safe than sorry.
What if the final explosion powers a huge timeloop singularity that puts Gordon back on the Black Mesa Research Facility Inbound Train, and it all never happened?
Whoa.. that would have been a mind fuck. Especially if you're playing it and all of a sudden it's HL1 with the classic graphics and all.
Then maybe you have to stop the resonance cascade in the first place.
All these snippets make it sound like it would have been a great game to play.
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DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
All Valve's writers quit and their next new game is a collectible card thing.
I'm not expecting single-player narrative anything from now on.
Of their FPS properties, I'd say another Team Fortress or a Left 4 Dead game is still possible/probable.
Which of course aren't "single-player narrative" except for Left 4 Dead when taking with a very loose definition. There's story, but it's quite subtle.
There's also a pretty large community on reddit dedicated to making it a game. They already have professional sound engineers n other devs on the project iirc.
There's also a pretty large community on reddit dedicated to making it a game. They already have professional sound engineers n other devs on the project iirc.
That project is aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaabsolutely not ever going to happen. There is literally no chance of it getting off the ground
There's also a pretty large community on reddit dedicated to making it a game. They already have professional sound engineers n other devs on the project iirc.
That project is aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaabsolutely not ever going to happen. There is literally no chance of it getting off the ground
Didn't you say Black Mesa was never going to be released?
Probably at one point. I played it two or three years before it came out and it was pretty much as shipped, so it was a pretty educated guess :P For a very long time nothing was moving and the leads were insisting they'd ship the whole thing, including xen, or nothing at all.
But this is an entirely different situation, in a different time, and that reddit is a bunch of teenagers pretending to know how to make stuff. I was on teams that looked like that when I was a kid. They're not devs, and they won't attract devs because it isn't a project worth their working on.
Anywho, I was thinking of nabbing the website I mentioned above and putting a translated version of Laidlaw's post on there, peppered with concept art.
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Handsome CostanzaAsk me about 8bitdoRIP Iwata-sanRegistered Userregular
Probably at one point. I played it two or three years before it came out and it was pretty much as shipped, so it was a pretty educated guess :P For a very long time nothing was moving and the leads were insisting they'd ship the whole thing, including xen, or nothing at all.
But this is an entirely different situation, in a different time, and that reddit is a bunch of teenagers pretending to know how to make stuff. I was on teams that looked like that when I was a kid. They're not devs, and they won't attract devs because it isn't a project worth their working on.
Forgive me but it kind of seems like you're pulling this out of your ass based on a general distrust of reddit communities. For all you know half the original half life 2 dev team could have volunteered. As @Undead Scottsman noted, Black Mesa started in a very similiar way. If you really are up on how that particular volunteer project is going, then I apologize and retract my statement, but I doubt it. Don't get me wrong the odds are against it for sure simply because of what it is and how the project started, but to say that there's 100% not a chance just because reddit is pretty unfair.
Black Mesa started development thirteen years ago.
It still isn't finished.
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KoopahTroopahThe koopas, the troopas.Philadelphia, PARegistered Userregular
edited August 2017
@LaCabra 's actually an experienced game developer and posts in the [GameDev] thread every day. I think his post is reading from past experiences and stating an opinion that the project almost certainly doesn't have legs, not necessarily attacking the people working on the project or the project itself.
I don't use Reddit, and it often seems like a bad place second-hand, but I don't count myself knowledgeable enough about Reddit to discount anything "because reddit". I actually don't see how I could have given that impression either, so I guess maybe that just happens a lot?
It's something I'm saying as a game developer. This is some hecka pie-in-the-sky stuff for logistical reasons alone. Like, I really want to make a first-person adventure game set in pre-disaster Black Mesa, and I have the unusually-specific skillset to do it (to the level of quality I would aim for), but I never will, because those same skills can make me money if I do stuff it's actually legal to profit from. Game dev is difficult and fraught at the best of times, and working on someone else's IP, without substantial input from them, with/under the leadership of a group of internet randos, likely for free, is the worst of times.
All things being equal, and regardless of the team, this idea is a worse starting point for a project than Black Mesa for a bunch of reasons. It's off to a similar start - a bunch of teenagers on a forum who don't know what they're doing. However, with Black Mesa, they eventually were able to project competence enough to be joined by active and skilled members of the then-active HL2 modding community, which was able to exist because this was a time when there was no feasible route to a similar paid position (pre-indie games being big, pre-cheaply licensable engines), and most of those workers weren't old enough to have to support themselves yet. These days there are a lot more options!
So, now more than then, for a game developer with any faith in their abilities, committing any time at all to a project like this is basically burning money.
This doesn't even touch on why this would be a bad project to throw your weight behind even if it paid - the many many impracticabilities - but hey
I would point out that there are several fan-made Half-Life projects being sold on steam (Black Mesa, Prospekt, A Place in the West) so there are non-money-pit avenues, but anyway....
Someone made the Epistle 3 ending in Source Filmmaker.
I would point out that there are several fan-made Half-Life projects being sold on steam (Black Mesa, Prospekt, A Place in the West) so there are non-money-pit avenues, but anyway....
Someone made the Epistle 3 ending in Source Filmmaker.
DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
edited September 2017
Hey guys... maybe we are Episode 3!
I'm being kind of silly but now that I think about it, Tolkien wanted to put MIddle Earth in the public domain basically. Valve seems to be doing that sort of thing. As @Undead Scottsman has already pointed out, there's a tiny metric butt-load of indie Half Life projects showing up on Steam. This does sort of have that Marathon Infinity feel to it in that we can imagine all kinds of cool stuff with what Laidlaw put out. The community can spin stuff out of those story strokes for a while. Then BAM fucking HALF LIFE 3 BABY! (I'll never stop believing)
Having put some distance between the reveal and now, here's some thoughts about Epistle 3, if it had truly been the Episode 3 we got.
I dislike the ending. (I mean, I disliked the ending to HL2 as well, but thought the direction where the Episodes were heading was interesting.). HL1 pretty much closed the book on the Vortigaunts/Nihilanth as antagonists and HL2 unveiled a new enemy, making the universe seem larger. Here, showing that the Combine are essentially undefeatable, at least implies they're going to be major antagonists for the next game, and I feel like that constricts the universe. And quite frankly, I'd be okay with not having to deal with the combine for like the fifth time. A game and three episodes is more than enough, especially when the foundations of the series never lay with the Combine.
On the other hand, the Gman snagging Alyx instead of Gordon and leaving him to die, essentially "firing" Freeman, says to me that the Gman and his employers have moved into the antagonist category; and trying to deal with them AND deal with an essentially unstoppable Alien Army (that you've already punched in the nads like 4 times now) seems a little divided for attention. While revealing a mystery tends to cheapen it, I feel like letting a mystery percolate forever cheapens it as well, so I'd be find with a reveal of the Gman's true nature, even if it is the most mind-blowingly incredible revelation, ever.
That said, regarding other things in the write-up: The reveal of the Borealis' time-shifting state is cool, Breen coming back is a bit fankwanky (Or, more probable, the author REALLY wanting to delve into a concept that was mentioned briefly back in HL2) IMO, but still cool. The conflict between Ayx and Mossman and it's resolution likely would have genuinely shocked me. (Also, I wonder if that act is what finally makes Alyx 'viable' for whatever the Gman has planned. Killing Combine and zombies are one thing, but killing a normal human who was a colleague and friend of her father's is kinda hardcore.)
Also I would have shit my pants in glee if Ep3 ended with the the beginning of HL1 again.
Overall, I think that was a very good foundation that, after lots of iteration, could have been turned into a fitting end of the Episodic story and set things up well for HL3. Shame Ep3 never got released and now who knows what the fuck will happen with HL3 now.
I had a different takeaway from the "undefeatable combine" thing; they're undefeatable but also very very far away and their portals have been shut, so they're still cut off, and presumably the borealis moving off/getting destroyed closes another potential door for them. So I'd see it as freeing the series of the combine without actually having to destroy 'em. Fair points tho.
It's interesting (to me) that the gman hasn't mentioned his employers since hl1; I pretty much think of him as being in business for himself now. Not sure if that's right.
If I'm not wildly off base here, part of the problem is that Valve works partly based on what employees are 'excited for'. Of course, it's likely more complicated than that, and there is a lot of baggage and expectation tied to Half Life 2: Episode 3 (or Half Life 3, or whatever it might be), and I know there's further complications tied to IP and people making things and using ideas that non-employees made, but... for most companies I would see the passion and enthusiasm shown for 'Epistle 3' and hope that the dollar signs would show up in their eyes and the money sitting on the table untaken might get their attention.
With Valve, I'd hope that some of this passion and creativity might spark an idea, an interest, in progressing.
Yes, I accept that this is a minute hope. There's no need to dash those hopes further, as I said above I am comfortable with the 'fanfic' we got possibly representing the end of the story.
But if there was anything that might spur on actual progress, perhaps an outpouring of creativity might be it?
Or maybe I'm just still clinging to hopes that should be dead and buried.
I'll let someone bold that and farm 'agrees' with it at their leisure. Something something kids get off my grass something.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Problem is that money doesn't really motivate Valve anymore. They rake in so much money off of Steam and Hats that even if Half-Life 3 was the bestest selling game of all time, it still probably wouldn't be as an effective cost-to-return ration as, say, DOTA2's cosmetic market.
If HL3 comes out of Valve, it'll be because the people working there have a desire to make it, and they manage to make something they're happy with. As you've mentioned, there's a lot of expectations tied to Half-Life and that's going to make it difficult to create something that can even remotely live up to the hype, as well as being as groundbreaking as HL1 and HL2 were back in the day.
EDIT: While it sucks that we've lost a lot of the old guard who rightly should be in charge of finishing out this section of the Half-Life saga, Valve is still hiring new people, and I'm betting a lot of those people grew up playing Half-Life and would love nothing more to help produce the next Half-Life. As great as Epistle 3 is at giving some finality to the saga, I'll never truly move on from the idea that we may see a new Half-Life some day.
Valve has certainly blown money on worse ideas (PowerPlay, Steam Machines). Hell, they keep spending money on VR and we've seen how tepid that launch was.
That's, I think, the weird thing about Half-Life 3 and Valve's business model. If Valve is purportedly as flat and enthusiasm-driven as we're lead to believe... I mean, I have to believe that Half-Life is now old enough that many of Valve's newer hires grew up on the franchise. You'd think there'd be tremendous excitement to produce the next entry in the series. Especially given the trippy, inventive setting laid out by Laidlaw.
That's, I think, the weird thing about Half-Life 3 and Valve's business model. If Valve is purportedly as flat and enthusiasm-driven as we're lead to believe... I mean, I have to believe that Half-Life is now old enough that many of Valve's newer hires grew up on the franchise. You'd think there'd be tremendous excitement to produce the next entry in the series. Especially given the trippy, inventive setting laid out by Laidlaw.
I'm sure many of the newcomers have this enthusiasm. I imagine every single one shows up, bright eyed and bristling with ideas and hope. But I'd wager there's enough of the old guard left who are haunted by the project that they've been working on, in one form or another, for over ten years now. I imagine there's a lot of exhaustion, second guessing and dogmatic opinions stemming from a project like that. That's a lot of momentum for a newcomer to overcome.
And even then, getting the ball rolling doesn't guarantee anything will ultimately come of it.
Posts
It'd be interesting to go back over the various concept art that has been leaked over the years with this in mind (not that there's a staggering amount of it).
Yeah, obviously the Arctic stuff is no surprise, but maybe some of the other bits would slot into that snippet of narrative.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Heh, Laidlaw basically just posted about this.
Translated and compiled
edit: also I wonder if those celestial looking beings in some of the leaked concept art had something to do with the borealis and it's shenanigans. like creatures that inhabit some kind of area between time and space that the borealis see's when it travels.
edit: hey srs question, should we still be spoilering this stuff? I mean it seems kind of silly to be putting quotes from a blog post in spoiler tags, but I just figured it was better to be safe than sorry.
Resident 8bitdo expert.
Resident hybrid/flap cover expert.
Then maybe you have to stop the resonance cascade in the first place.
All these snippets make it sound like it would have been a great game to play.
HL 3 confirmed.
Lol
Grabs pillow
Shhh, it's okay
*begins smothering you*
It's okay, really. Go to sleep...
Of their FPS properties, I'd say another Team Fortress or a Left 4 Dead game is still possible/probable.
Which of course aren't "single-player narrative" except for Left 4 Dead when taking with a very loose definition. There's story, but it's quite subtle.
There's also a pretty large community on reddit dedicated to making it a game. They already have professional sound engineers n other devs on the project iirc.
Resident 8bitdo expert.
Resident hybrid/flap cover expert.
EDIT: Aw, they didn't have Barney look at the right surveillance monitor when Freeman walked by.
That project is aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaabsolutely not ever going to happen. There is literally no chance of it getting off the ground
Didn't you say Black Mesa was never going to be released?
But this is an entirely different situation, in a different time, and that reddit is a bunch of teenagers pretending to know how to make stuff. I was on teams that looked like that when I was a kid. They're not devs, and they won't attract devs because it isn't a project worth their working on.
Anywho, I was thinking of nabbing the website I mentioned above and putting a translated version of Laidlaw's post on there, peppered with concept art.
Forgive me but it kind of seems like you're pulling this out of your ass based on a general distrust of reddit communities. For all you know half the original half life 2 dev team could have volunteered. As @Undead Scottsman noted, Black Mesa started in a very similiar way. If you really are up on how that particular volunteer project is going, then I apologize and retract my statement, but I doubt it. Don't get me wrong the odds are against it for sure simply because of what it is and how the project started, but to say that there's 100% not a chance just because reddit is pretty unfair.
Resident 8bitdo expert.
Resident hybrid/flap cover expert.
It still isn't finished.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
It's something I'm saying as a game developer. This is some hecka pie-in-the-sky stuff for logistical reasons alone. Like, I really want to make a first-person adventure game set in pre-disaster Black Mesa, and I have the unusually-specific skillset to do it (to the level of quality I would aim for), but I never will, because those same skills can make me money if I do stuff it's actually legal to profit from. Game dev is difficult and fraught at the best of times, and working on someone else's IP, without substantial input from them, with/under the leadership of a group of internet randos, likely for free, is the worst of times.
All things being equal, and regardless of the team, this idea is a worse starting point for a project than Black Mesa for a bunch of reasons. It's off to a similar start - a bunch of teenagers on a forum who don't know what they're doing. However, with Black Mesa, they eventually were able to project competence enough to be joined by active and skilled members of the then-active HL2 modding community, which was able to exist because this was a time when there was no feasible route to a similar paid position (pre-indie games being big, pre-cheaply licensable engines), and most of those workers weren't old enough to have to support themselves yet. These days there are a lot more options!
So, now more than then, for a game developer with any faith in their abilities, committing any time at all to a project like this is basically burning money.
This doesn't even touch on why this would be a bad project to throw your weight behind even if it paid - the many many impracticabilities - but hey
Someone made the Epistle 3 ending in Source Filmmaker.
That...was pretty damn good, all told.
The HEV suit doesn't protect against cold, as evidenced by the part in "Apprehension" where you have to run through a large freezer area.
Fashion-Life 3.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
I'm being kind of silly but now that I think about it, Tolkien wanted to put MIddle Earth in the public domain basically. Valve seems to be doing that sort of thing. As @Undead Scottsman has already pointed out, there's a tiny metric butt-load of indie Half Life projects showing up on Steam. This does sort of have that Marathon Infinity feel to it in that we can imagine all kinds of cool stuff with what Laidlaw put out. The community can spin stuff out of those story strokes for a while. Then BAM fucking HALF LIFE 3 BABY! (I'll never stop believing)
On the other hand, the Gman snagging Alyx instead of Gordon and leaving him to die, essentially "firing" Freeman, says to me that the Gman and his employers have moved into the antagonist category; and trying to deal with them AND deal with an essentially unstoppable Alien Army (that you've already punched in the nads like 4 times now) seems a little divided for attention. While revealing a mystery tends to cheapen it, I feel like letting a mystery percolate forever cheapens it as well, so I'd be find with a reveal of the Gman's true nature, even if it is the most mind-blowingly incredible revelation, ever.
That said, regarding other things in the write-up: The reveal of the Borealis' time-shifting state is cool, Breen coming back is a bit fankwanky (Or, more probable, the author REALLY wanting to delve into a concept that was mentioned briefly back in HL2) IMO, but still cool. The conflict between Ayx and Mossman and it's resolution likely would have genuinely shocked me. (Also, I wonder if that act is what finally makes Alyx 'viable' for whatever the Gman has planned. Killing Combine and zombies are one thing, but killing a normal human who was a colleague and friend of her father's is kinda hardcore.)
Also I would have shit my pants in glee if Ep3 ended with the the beginning of HL1 again.
Overall, I think that was a very good foundation that, after lots of iteration, could have been turned into a fitting end of the Episodic story and set things up well for HL3. Shame Ep3 never got released and now who knows what the fuck will happen with HL3 now.
It's interesting (to me) that the gman hasn't mentioned his employers since hl1; I pretty much think of him as being in business for himself now. Not sure if that's right.
Another SFM video doing the ending
A 50 hour mapping challenge
http://www.runthinkshootlive.com/posts/50-hour-mapping-challenge-epistle3ville/
A game jam
https://itch.io/jam/epistle-3-jam
EDIT: Apparently I uninstalled the 2013 SDK at some point so I guess I need to reinstall it.
With Valve, I'd hope that some of this passion and creativity might spark an idea, an interest, in progressing.
Yes, I accept that this is a minute hope. There's no need to dash those hopes further, as I said above I am comfortable with the 'fanfic' we got possibly representing the end of the story.
But if there was anything that might spur on actual progress, perhaps an outpouring of creativity might be it?
Or maybe I'm just still clinging to hopes that should be dead and buried.
I'll let someone bold that and farm 'agrees' with it at their leisure. Something something kids get off my grass something.
If HL3 comes out of Valve, it'll be because the people working there have a desire to make it, and they manage to make something they're happy with. As you've mentioned, there's a lot of expectations tied to Half-Life and that's going to make it difficult to create something that can even remotely live up to the hype, as well as being as groundbreaking as HL1 and HL2 were back in the day.
EDIT: While it sucks that we've lost a lot of the old guard who rightly should be in charge of finishing out this section of the Half-Life saga, Valve is still hiring new people, and I'm betting a lot of those people grew up playing Half-Life and would love nothing more to help produce the next Half-Life. As great as Epistle 3 is at giving some finality to the saga, I'll never truly move on from the idea that we may see a new Half-Life some day.
Valve has certainly blown money on worse ideas (PowerPlay, Steam Machines). Hell, they keep spending money on VR and we've seen how tepid that launch was.
I'm sure many of the newcomers have this enthusiasm. I imagine every single one shows up, bright eyed and bristling with ideas and hope. But I'd wager there's enough of the old guard left who are haunted by the project that they've been working on, in one form or another, for over ten years now. I imagine there's a lot of exhaustion, second guessing and dogmatic opinions stemming from a project like that. That's a lot of momentum for a newcomer to overcome.
And even then, getting the ball rolling doesn't guarantee anything will ultimately come of it.