Got nostalgic and started looking through the various old archives on my computer dating back to when I was in highschool, and rewatched the E3 2003 demo for HL2.
It's difficult to describe how hard that hit back then. It was like a lightning bolt. How 'Oh my god, this is the future' that game felt. The facial animation demo with the Gman, the incredible tech demo with the breaking wood and the dynamic camera, dropping those traps in Raveholm, the gravity gun, the big fight scene with Barney, controlling the antlions, the huge car map, throwing F-U at the Strider. It was kind of mind blowing, and it was coming out in four and a half months! I can't stress how utterly hyped and obsessed I was with that video. It was just unbelievable.
Granted some of that stuff turned out to be way more scripted than they had let on, but we didn't know that at the time! Game was also had no chance of coming out then, but Valve wasn't able to admit it until days before the date arrived. It's also funny that the audio stutter issue that plagued the launch is prominent in this video.
I specifically remember people ooh and aahing about how the telephone wires moved when the combine helicopter was near, or how the suspensions on junked cars would move around like a separate but connected part, rather the the thing being a solid chunk. There was just a level of physical interaction in that game that looked so realistic.
I wondered while rewatching it if I'll ever feel that way about a game again. Probably not, but that's what getting older gets you.
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
I never felt that way about Half-Life 2, though I was still interested enough to, uh, "obtain" a copy of it the year of launch during my first year at university, so I clearly still wanted to play it, and I did play through it at least once. I think between the release delay, and the end product looking clearly different in some ways from the initial technology teaser, led me to completely adjust my expectations. The Sims 2, which predated it by two months and was one of the first games I ever pre-ordered, was closer to an obsession that changed how I would play video games forever. Half-Life 2's staying power, for me, came in the incredible creativity of the modding community (which was the only reason I got into Half-Life 1 in the first place), especially before things like the implementation of Forge in Halo.
It was absolutely not a "better" game by any means, but I remember being blown away much more by Doom 3's visual finish (not to mention not being able to run it, unlike HL2) a few months earlier and then F.E.A.R. a year later. I tinkered with HL2, mostly through Gary's Mod, for the better part of a decade (unlike Doom 3), but it was never the visuals so much as what you could do with it as a sandbox.
I never felt that way about Half-Life 2, though I was still interested enough to, uh, "obtain" a copy of it the year of launch during my first year at university, so I clearly still wanted to play it, and I did play through it at least once. I think between the release delay, and the end product looking clearly different in some ways from the initial technology teaser, led me to completely adjust my expectations. The Sims 2, which predated it by two months and was one of the first games I ever pre-ordered, was closer to an obsession that changed how I would play video games forever. Half-Life 2's staying power, for me, came in the incredible creativity of the modding community (which was the only reason I got into Half-Life 1 in the first place), especially before things like the implementation of Forge in Halo.
It was absolutely not a "better" game by any means, but I remember being blown away much more by Doom 3's visual finish (not to mention not being able to run it, unlike HL2) a few months earlier and then F.E.A.R. a year later. I tinkered with HL2, mostly through Gary's Mod, for the better part of a decade (unlike Doom 3), but it was never the visuals so much as what you could do with it as a sandbox.
I actually didn't care about HL2 when it came out because I never played HL1 (still haven't ever finished HL1) and I guess I didn't see much about it beforehand, but a buddy of mine was super excited about it and convinced me to try it out at his place. His PC could barely run the game, but I still remember being blown away by all the small details and physics and animations and whatnot. I loved it enough to eventually get a lambda tattoo, even!
Like you I also tooled around with mods for HL2, though not as much as some. I messed around with Gary's Mod, of course, and some CS:S and Sourcefort and The Hidden, while NeoTokyo and Dystopia are still two of my favorite bits of cyberpunk-themed videogame ever made. Hell, those two are my favorite mods for one of my favorite games, and NeoTokyo even has one of my favorite game soundtracks of all time.
I never felt that way about Half-Life 2, though I was still interested enough to, uh, "obtain" a copy of it the year of launch during my first year at university, so I clearly still wanted to play it, and I did play through it at least once. I think between the release delay, and the end product looking clearly different in some ways from the initial technology teaser, led me to completely adjust my expectations. The Sims 2, which predated it by two months and was one of the first games I ever pre-ordered, was closer to an obsession that changed how I would play video games forever. Half-Life 2's staying power, for me, came in the incredible creativity of the modding community (which was the only reason I got into Half-Life 1 in the first place), especially before things like the implementation of Forge in Halo.
It was absolutely not a "better" game by any means, but I remember being blown away much more by Doom 3's visual finish (not to mention not being able to run it, unlike HL2) a few months earlier and then F.E.A.R. a year later. I tinkered with HL2, mostly through Gary's Mod, for the better part of a decade (unlike Doom 3), but it was never the visuals so much as what you could do with it as a sandbox.
I actually didn't care about HL2 when it came out because I never played HL1 (still haven't ever finished HL1) and I guess I didn't see much about it beforehand, but a buddy of mine was super excited about it and convinced me to try it out at his place. His PC could barely run the game, but I still remember being blown away by all the small details and physics and animations and whatnot. I loved it enough to eventually get a lambda tattoo, even!
Like you I also tooled around with mods for HL2, though not as much as some. I messed around with Gary's Mod, of course, and some CS:S and Sourcefort and The Hidden, while NeoTokyo and Dystopia are still two of my favorite bits of cyberpunk-themed videogame ever made. Hell, those two are my favorite mods for one of my favorite games, and NeoTokyo even has one of my favorite game soundtracks of all time.
Though I was familiar with CounterStrike (it was probably the reason I borrowed a copy of HL1, back when that was still a thing people could, and did do--I lent my copy of Warcraft 3 out for years) and Day of Defeat, the thing that pushed me over the edge was, ironically, The Specialists, which I played many years into HL2's release. Like everyone else, I hated Steam on its initial launch shortly before that, but its general awfulness kept me away (when that was still an option) until GMod compelled me to put up with its by-then mediocrity. I was still much more obsessed with games that, funny enough, were not on Steam, principally Warcraft 3, The Sims 2, Il-2 Sturmovik, Flight Simulator X and Silent Hunter 3, all of which featured fantastic modding communities. That, combined with buying my first console in a decade (the Xbox and Gamecube both were a lot more convenient in a dormitory setting than a PC) probably all led to me seeing HL2 not so much as a game as a tool to play around with when I actually had the free time to do it. Even the mods I tried for HL2, unlike HL1, were not so much games as creative toolsets like Gmod.
It's kind of fitting that, now that Steam is a great deal less optional on the PC side, my most played Steam games--Skyrim LE and AE--with hundreds of hours each, are overwhelmingly characterized by "trying to get mods to work properly, then occasionally playing the game" (though ironic in those particular cases, Steam is no longer a requirement for modded gameplay)
I never felt that way about Half-Life 2, though I was still interested enough to, uh, "obtain" a copy of it the year of launch during my first year at university, so I clearly still wanted to play it, and I did play through it at least once. I think between the release delay, and the end product looking clearly different in some ways from the initial technology teaser, led me to completely adjust my expectations. The Sims 2, which predated it by two months and was one of the first games I ever pre-ordered, was closer to an obsession that changed how I would play video games forever. Half-Life 2's staying power, for me, came in the incredible creativity of the modding community (which was the only reason I got into Half-Life 1 in the first place), especially before things like the implementation of Forge in Halo.
It was absolutely not a "better" game by any means, but I remember being blown away much more by Doom 3's visual finish (not to mention not being able to run it, unlike HL2) a few months earlier and then F.E.A.R. a year later. I tinkered with HL2, mostly through Gary's Mod, for the better part of a decade (unlike Doom 3), but it was never the visuals so much as what you could do with it as a sandbox.
I actually didn't care about HL2 when it came out because I never played HL1 (still haven't ever finished HL1) and I guess I didn't see much about it beforehand, but a buddy of mine was super excited about it and convinced me to try it out at his place. His PC could barely run the game, but I still remember being blown away by all the small details and physics and animations and whatnot. I loved it enough to eventually get a lambda tattoo, even!
Like you I also tooled around with mods for HL2, though not as much as some. I messed around with Gary's Mod, of course, and some CS:S and Sourcefort and The Hidden, while NeoTokyo and Dystopia are still two of my favorite bits of cyberpunk-themed videogame ever made. Hell, those two are my favorite mods for one of my favorite games, and NeoTokyo even has one of my favorite game soundtracks of all time.
haha, I've never finished Half Life either. I did complete Blue Shift years ago.
But mostly I wanted to agree with you that the Neotokyo soundtrack is incredible and one of the best things ever.
My first intro to Half-Life was playing Counter-Strike at a LAN center years ago before I had a decent gaming PC of my own.
The computers there had all sorts of mods installed on them and I eventually drifted from Counter-Strike to Team Fortress Classic and finally Natural Selection.
It wasn't until I finally got my own PC that I realized these mods had an actual, full-length game attached to them.
I was stoked for HL2 when it came out. Both episodes as well. Still bummed about Episode 3's cancellation and HL3's apparent demise. And for the story to end on such a fucking note.
I was glad my PC could handle both Half-Life 2 and DOOM 3 with ease at the time. I had thought F.E.A.R. was in roughly the same wheelhouse, graphically speaking, but for some reason that game tanked the shit out of my PC.
I knew about Half-Life but I hadn't bought it when it came out. At one point a friend wanted to play Counterstrike with me so he gave me his copy of Half-Life (he had also bought Counterstrike, which had recently been released as a retail game, because he wasn't proficient enough with computers to install it as a mod, but I was, so that's why he gave me Half-Life). I figured I'd check out Half-Life too to see if it was worth playing. Other people were around so I turned off the sound and loaded it up. I started a new game, watched the opening train cutscene, and then at the end nothing was happening so I assumed the game had crashed and I quit out and didn't touch it for months. Later I would realize that wasn't a cutscene and the reason nothing moved at the end was because I was supposed to be moving around myself.
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The_SpaniardIt's never lupinesIrvine, CaliforniaRegistered Userregular
I still remember the day I got Half-Life. I was about 13, I was excited for SiN, and just had gotten the latest issue of PC Gamer with Cartman on the cover promoting the South Park FPS.
I even remember the amazing "Run, Think, Shoot, Live" series of ads for Half-Life leading up to release, but for some reason I was really looking forward to SiN. I opened the magazine and gawked at the review for SiN, It was something like a 94/95%. Incredible, such high scores for shooters were rare as diamonds. Then I flipped a few pages past it and came across the Half-Life review. As I read I became more and more interested in the game. The effusive praise of this not genre defining, but genre creating game of a generation dripped off every page. Then I got to the final page of the review and the score, a whopping 97%, SiN was dethroned as the shooter of the year the month it came out. I was convinced, Half-Life was the proper choice over SiN. I asked my mom for the game and we went to Fry's to pick up a copy, and through some error, or gamer kinship felt by the clerk, this brand new release only cost 30 bucks! I got home, installed it, and after sitting through the tram-ride intro that wasn't a cutscene or pre-rendered I burst into the living room losing my mind to an apathetic family about how this was the most incredible game experience I've had so far and I'm only 10 minutes in.
That was the start of my love of Half-Life and all things Valve. Even though I got rid of my CD copy of the game, I never gave up the box. Poor SiN... I never did end up playing it. I did buy it though, twice even. CD copy from a bargain bin a few years after release, and eventually on Steam, but just never took the time to boot it up and play through it. Better luck with the upcoming remaster, I know I'd actually like to play it this time around for old time's sake.
How was news about Half-Life Team Fortress 2 out before Half-Life was reviewed?
Because Team Fortress 2 started off as a planned Half-Life mod (with a realistic, modern military design.) They were even developing new tech and techniques for it. (Blended animations and player mouths moviing in synch to voice chat, for example). Eventually, it got so big that Valve decided it'd be a standalone, retail game, so Valve made Team Fortress Classic as a mea culpa to the TF fans who bought Half-Life so they could play TF2.
TF2 would wind up in development hell for nearly a decade, going through multiple redesigns, until the Orange box came out and it released with it's cartoonish design.
I was big into Doom, which extended to Duke Nukem 3D, Quake and Quake II. Half-Life was basically the next game in that lineage. 1998 also had Unreal and SiN, but Unreal was still mired in the 1992-1997 style of gameplay, so it was down to SiN and Half-Life. SiN felt like the next step in the shooter evolution, but Half-Life felt like a revolution. Before Half-Life "better AI " in shooters meant they could navigate spaces better and maybe had some trick to them, but with Half-Life, better AI meant that they had tactics they could follow; taking cover, flushing you out with grenades, flanking) Games were getting better at narratives, but a game like SiN still had most of the narrative in cutscenes or radio voiceovers; Half-Life took that stuff and put it front in center in front of the player; dialog was given by NPC's in the gameworld, who's mouths even move!
Even the opening sequence, as others have mentioned, was an in-game sequence rather than a cutscene. People just weren't equipped to think stuff like that was possible (Even though if you go back and watch that sequence, it's laughably designed. Literal rooms with no doors and big gaping open spaces above bottomless pits where windows should be).
So take that hype, add in four+ years of hearing NOTHING about a sequel, and then BAM a big magazine spread about Half-Life 2; but that couldn't compare to the impact the E3 demo did. Like a year before the Doom 3 E3 demo blew everyone's socks off as the next evolution of the underlying technology, but the HL2 demo felt like the next step in game design, period.
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
edited May 2022
tl;dr: Valve is a weird shitty company that almost certainly won't make a new Portal game in time for Ellen McLain to still be able to play the character:
Honestly, I don’t think there *needs* to be a Portal 3. It pretty much tied up that story quite well. Unless they’re going to run with the… thing… from the end of Desk Job, but I think I’d be okay with letting it lie.
Things that also don’t need to exist: VNN videos, since he’s a bit of a twat.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
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Handsome CostanzaAsk me about 8bitdoRIP Iwata-sanRegistered Userregular
i'm surprised there is demand for a portal 3, i loved the first 2 but as far as I remember there was no sequel setup in the 2nd one?
Episode 3 however....
The coop campaign had a sequel hook
Basically GlaDOS realizes it's not fun testing the robots because they just come right back after being destroyed, so she has them find the cryogenics facility so she'll have a giant amount of human test subjects to run.
Also the Perpetual Testing Initiative kinda has a story, told via a cutscene and voice clips from Cave Johnson that play at the start of each user map.
while NeoTokyo and Dystopia are still two of my favorite bits of cyberpunk-themed videogame ever made.
Man that brings me back. I was one of the Dystopia teams play testers for ages. Fun times.
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
If Erik Wolpaw wants to make a Portal 3, and is hard up enough to make it happen that he is attempting to garner support for it by talking about it openly to the public, then I want to see what the fuck that game's going to be.
Basically GlaDOS realizes it's not fun testing the robots because they just come right back after being destroyed, so she has them find the cryogenics facility so she'll have a giant amount of human test subjects to run.
I think the extra co-op DLC established that she ran through that fresh supply of humans in a matter of months. It's so hard to stop sciencing, you know.
So she has to resort to the robots to fight The Beast.
Apparently that Valve News Network guy decided to dox a bunch of Valve employees because he's mad at them for the lack of TF2 updates.
Isn't TF2 like fifteen years old? He should be happy the game is getting updates at all.
I was being a little... diplomatic... when I said the dude was a twat earlier. He's a known shithead who has a tendency to harass content creators in the attempt to try to squeeze a leak or scoop about upcoming events or updates from them. Whenever I see a VNN video my first thought is "oh my god fuck off."
The situation is a bit... more complex... than just not receiving updates. I've been following it for obvious reasons. There hasn't been a Capital U Update in ages. There's been smaller ones that have pushed out some community content like maps once in a while, but Jungle Inferno was back in 2017.
There's also the bigger problem that the Casual matchmaking queue is completely bot infested, and nearly impossible to actually play on. You'll walk out of spawn and instantly get blasted by a horde of aimbot snipers. The bots will also change their name to mimic human players and will co-ordinate vote-kick calls on human players to keep their numbers down so you can't actually use the in-game tools to get rid of them. Also a few of them, if they actually *do* get kicked, try to DDOS and crash the server they were on so *everyone* gets booted as well.
Community servers are basically one of the few ways to actually play it normally now, but the option's kind of buried in the menus and not obvious for new players. And some of the servers in the server browser that look to be real are actually fake and will redirect you to a different, bot-infested server. And that still requires a active moderation team keeping a eye on the server and actively booting bad actors before they can over-run it.
Which, fine, but there's been absolutely *no* word from Valve on what they're doing to combat it, or if they are. Harassing employees like this is never acceptable.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I never played Neotokyo but listen to its soundtrack all the time.
It's gooooooood.
Funny story, the neotokyo soundtrack isn't actually used in the game. Except maybe on the title menu? It's been over a decade since I played it, heh. I think they must have had the soundtrack made then realized sound was too important to the gameplay to have music on, like in counterstrike, listening for footsteps and stuff. Glad they did though because it does indeed rule.
i'm surprised there is demand for a portal 3, i loved the first 2 but as far as I remember there was no sequel setup in the 2nd one?
Episode 3 however....
There was no sequel set up for the first one either, they patched in the player being dragged back into the facility after the ending in the lead up to 2 releasing :P
Got nostalgic and started looking through the various old archives on my computer dating back to when I was in highschool, and rewatched the E3 2003 demo for HL2.
It's difficult to describe how hard that hit back then. It was like a lightning bolt. How 'Oh my god, this is the future' that game felt. The facial animation demo with the Gman, the incredible tech demo with the breaking wood and the dynamic camera, dropping those traps in Raveholm, the gravity gun, the big fight scene with Barney, controlling the antlions, the huge car map, throwing F-U at the Strider. It was kind of mind blowing, and it was coming out in four and a half months! I can't stress how utterly hyped and obsessed I was with that video. It was just unbelievable.
Granted some of that stuff turned out to be way more scripted than they had let on, but we didn't know that at the time! Game was also had no chance of coming out then, but Valve wasn't able to admit it until days before the date arrived. It's also funny that the audio stutter issue that plagued the launch is prominent in this video.
I specifically remember people ooh and aahing about how the telephone wires moved when the combine helicopter was near, or how the suspensions on junked cars would move around like a separate but connected part, rather the the thing being a solid chunk. There was just a level of physical interaction in that game that looked so realistic.
I wondered while rewatching it if I'll ever feel that way about a game again. Probably not, but that's what getting older gets you.
For me it was the MGS2 demo that destroyed my fragile child mind as to what games could be, but that was only because I had to wait a bit longer before I could play HL2. It's one of those generation leaps I don't think we're likely to see again, unless we just plug into full Holodeck VR.
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
Apparently that Valve News Network guy decided to dox a bunch of Valve employees because he's mad at them for the lack of TF2 updates.
Isn't TF2 like fifteen years old? He should be happy the game is getting updates at all.
It's still making money off of cosmetic sales though, which I think should make Valve at least partially responsible for attempting to reduce the number of their servers filled with robot snipers instantly aimbotting you while playing Mein Kampf in the voice chat or whatever the fuck is going on.
There are people interested in fixing TF2 at Valve, but they are reasonably certain that if they spend company time doing something as mundane as working on TF2 their coworkers will vote to have them fired from the company at employee review time.
Valve is a privately owned company staffed by millionaires and billionaires so they could just throw money at an outside company to try to put the fire out, but that would require one of the billionaires at the top to give a shit about one of Valve's signature games becoming a trash fire, instead of... whatever they actually care about. Making enough money to freeze their brains in anticipation of digital immortality when the singularity finally hits or some shit I'm guessing.
Playing through Half-Life Source: Remastered V3 and Half-Life 2 with the MMOD has been a fantastic time. I really hope we get more stuff sooner... but you know how that goes.
ThegreatcowLord of All BaconsWashington State - It's Wet up here innit? Registered Userregular
Not sure how much overlap there is here in the community, but the esteemed Alfabusa and his crew of the "If the Emperor had a Text to Speech Device" started a new short animation series poking fun at the Half Life universe. First episode came out last week and it's a bunch of wacky hilarity poking fun at some of the classic HL2 memes.
I was stoked for HL2 when it came out. Both episodes as well. Still bummed about Episode 3's cancellation and HL3's apparent demise. And for the story to end on such a fucking note.
Just out of curiosity, have you played HL: Alyx? Or at least have you seen/read how that game ends?
I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say that it surprisingly sets things up in a way that unambiguously promises some kind of continuation from Episode 2. Not sure if that means Episode 3 or a proper HL3 or something else, but I highly doubt they would have ended it the way they did if they didn't intend to eventually pick that story back up in one form or another.
I was stoked for HL2 when it came out. Both episodes as well. Still bummed about Episode 3's cancellation and HL3's apparent demise. And for the story to end on such a fucking note.
Just out of curiosity, have you played HL: Alyx? Or at least have you seen/read how that game ends?
I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say that it surprisingly sets things up in a way that unambiguously promises some kind of continuation from Episode 2. Not sure if that means Episode 3 or a proper HL3 or something else, but I highly doubt they would have ended it the way they did if they didn't intend to eventually pick that story back up in one form or another.
You could say the same about the end of Episode 2 proper, and that took 13 years to get a new Half-Life game, and even then
they didn't really push the narrative forward so many as shifted where it was going.
I'm sure Valve has all sorts of Half-Life ideas and plans; that was never the problem, the question is if they'll be able to follow through, or if Alyx was just a fluke that arose due to wanting to push a specific technology.
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anoffdayTo be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it.Registered Userregular
Half-Life Source: Remastered V3? What is this? I just started a replay of the original, but curious what this is.
Steam: offday
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Big DookieSmells great!Houston, TXRegistered Userregular
I was stoked for HL2 when it came out. Both episodes as well. Still bummed about Episode 3's cancellation and HL3's apparent demise. And for the story to end on such a fucking note.
Just out of curiosity, have you played HL: Alyx? Or at least have you seen/read how that game ends?
I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say that it surprisingly sets things up in a way that unambiguously promises some kind of continuation from Episode 2. Not sure if that means Episode 3 or a proper HL3 or something else, but I highly doubt they would have ended it the way they did if they didn't intend to eventually pick that story back up in one form or another.
You could say the same about the end of Episode 2 proper, and that took 13 years to get a new Half-Life game, and even then
they didn't really push the narrative forward so many as shifted where it was going.
I'm sure Valve has all sorts of Half-Life ideas and plans; that was never the problem, the question is if they'll be able to follow through, or if Alyx was just a fluke that arose due to wanting to push a specific technology.
I mean fair point, it's definitely possible that they could completely drop it again, since there's obviously precedent for that. Still, seems like it would be odd to end it the way they did if they had no intention of following up with it eventually. It definitely could be a while, but I was just pointing out that not all hope should be lost on some sort of continuation. One day.
Posts
Noclip's Black Mesa documentary is almost here.
It's difficult to describe how hard that hit back then. It was like a lightning bolt. How 'Oh my god, this is the future' that game felt. The facial animation demo with the Gman, the incredible tech demo with the breaking wood and the dynamic camera, dropping those traps in Raveholm, the gravity gun, the big fight scene with Barney, controlling the antlions, the huge car map, throwing F-U at the Strider. It was kind of mind blowing, and it was coming out in four and a half months! I can't stress how utterly hyped and obsessed I was with that video. It was just unbelievable.
Granted some of that stuff turned out to be way more scripted than they had let on, but we didn't know that at the time! Game was also had no chance of coming out then, but Valve wasn't able to admit it until days before the date arrived. It's also funny that the audio stutter issue that plagued the launch is prominent in this video.
I specifically remember people ooh and aahing about how the telephone wires moved when the combine helicopter was near, or how the suspensions on junked cars would move around like a separate but connected part, rather the the thing being a solid chunk. There was just a level of physical interaction in that game that looked so realistic.
I wondered while rewatching it if I'll ever feel that way about a game again. Probably not, but that's what getting older gets you.
or anything at all, really
I never felt that way about Half-Life 2, though I was still interested enough to, uh, "obtain" a copy of it the year of launch during my first year at university, so I clearly still wanted to play it, and I did play through it at least once. I think between the release delay, and the end product looking clearly different in some ways from the initial technology teaser, led me to completely adjust my expectations. The Sims 2, which predated it by two months and was one of the first games I ever pre-ordered, was closer to an obsession that changed how I would play video games forever. Half-Life 2's staying power, for me, came in the incredible creativity of the modding community (which was the only reason I got into Half-Life 1 in the first place), especially before things like the implementation of Forge in Halo.
It was absolutely not a "better" game by any means, but I remember being blown away much more by Doom 3's visual finish (not to mention not being able to run it, unlike HL2) a few months earlier and then F.E.A.R. a year later. I tinkered with HL2, mostly through Gary's Mod, for the better part of a decade (unlike Doom 3), but it was never the visuals so much as what you could do with it as a sandbox.
I actually didn't care about HL2 when it came out because I never played HL1 (still haven't ever finished HL1) and I guess I didn't see much about it beforehand, but a buddy of mine was super excited about it and convinced me to try it out at his place. His PC could barely run the game, but I still remember being blown away by all the small details and physics and animations and whatnot. I loved it enough to eventually get a lambda tattoo, even!
Like you I also tooled around with mods for HL2, though not as much as some. I messed around with Gary's Mod, of course, and some CS:S and Sourcefort and The Hidden, while NeoTokyo and Dystopia are still two of my favorite bits of cyberpunk-themed videogame ever made. Hell, those two are my favorite mods for one of my favorite games, and NeoTokyo even has one of my favorite game soundtracks of all time.
Though I was familiar with CounterStrike (it was probably the reason I borrowed a copy of HL1, back when that was still a thing people could, and did do--I lent my copy of Warcraft 3 out for years) and Day of Defeat, the thing that pushed me over the edge was, ironically, The Specialists, which I played many years into HL2's release. Like everyone else, I hated Steam on its initial launch shortly before that, but its general awfulness kept me away (when that was still an option) until GMod compelled me to put up with its by-then mediocrity. I was still much more obsessed with games that, funny enough, were not on Steam, principally Warcraft 3, The Sims 2, Il-2 Sturmovik, Flight Simulator X and Silent Hunter 3, all of which featured fantastic modding communities. That, combined with buying my first console in a decade (the Xbox and Gamecube both were a lot more convenient in a dormitory setting than a PC) probably all led to me seeing HL2 not so much as a game as a tool to play around with when I actually had the free time to do it. Even the mods I tried for HL2, unlike HL1, were not so much games as creative toolsets like Gmod.
It's kind of fitting that, now that Steam is a great deal less optional on the PC side, my most played Steam games--Skyrim LE and AE--with hundreds of hours each, are overwhelmingly characterized by "trying to get mods to work properly, then occasionally playing the game" (though ironic in those particular cases, Steam is no longer a requirement for modded gameplay)
haha, I've never finished Half Life either. I did complete Blue Shift years ago.
But mostly I wanted to agree with you that the Neotokyo soundtrack is incredible and one of the best things ever.
It's gooooooood.
The computers there had all sorts of mods installed on them and I eventually drifted from Counter-Strike to Team Fortress Classic and finally Natural Selection.
It wasn't until I finally got my own PC that I realized these mods had an actual, full-length game attached to them.
I was stoked for HL2 when it came out. Both episodes as well. Still bummed about Episode 3's cancellation and HL3's apparent demise. And for the story to end on such a fucking note.
I was glad my PC could handle both Half-Life 2 and DOOM 3 with ease at the time. I had thought F.E.A.R. was in roughly the same wheelhouse, graphically speaking, but for some reason that game tanked the shit out of my PC.
I even remember the amazing "Run, Think, Shoot, Live" series of ads for Half-Life leading up to release, but for some reason I was really looking forward to SiN. I opened the magazine and gawked at the review for SiN, It was something like a 94/95%. Incredible, such high scores for shooters were rare as diamonds. Then I flipped a few pages past it and came across the Half-Life review. As I read I became more and more interested in the game. The effusive praise of this not genre defining, but genre creating game of a generation dripped off every page. Then I got to the final page of the review and the score, a whopping 97%, SiN was dethroned as the shooter of the year the month it came out. I was convinced, Half-Life was the proper choice over SiN. I asked my mom for the game and we went to Fry's to pick up a copy, and through some error, or gamer kinship felt by the clerk, this brand new release only cost 30 bucks! I got home, installed it, and after sitting through the tram-ride intro that wasn't a cutscene or pre-rendered I burst into the living room losing my mind to an apathetic family about how this was the most incredible game experience I've had so far and I'm only 10 minutes in.
That was the start of my love of Half-Life and all things Valve. Even though I got rid of my CD copy of the game, I never gave up the box. Poor SiN... I never did end up playing it. I did buy it though, twice even. CD copy from a bargain bin a few years after release, and eventually on Steam, but just never took the time to boot it up and play through it. Better luck with the upcoming remaster, I know I'd actually like to play it this time around for old time's sake.
Because Team Fortress 2 started off as a planned Half-Life mod (with a realistic, modern military design.) They were even developing new tech and techniques for it. (Blended animations and player mouths moviing in synch to voice chat, for example). Eventually, it got so big that Valve decided it'd be a standalone, retail game, so Valve made Team Fortress Classic as a mea culpa to the TF fans who bought Half-Life so they could play TF2.
TF2 would wind up in development hell for nearly a decade, going through multiple redesigns, until the Orange box came out and it released with it's cartoonish design.
Even the opening sequence, as others have mentioned, was an in-game sequence rather than a cutscene. People just weren't equipped to think stuff like that was possible (Even though if you go back and watch that sequence, it's laughably designed. Literal rooms with no doors and big gaping open spaces above bottomless pits where windows should be).
So take that hype, add in four+ years of hearing NOTHING about a sequel, and then BAM a big magazine spread about Half-Life 2; but that couldn't compare to the impact the E3 demo did. Like a year before the Doom 3 E3 demo blew everyone's socks off as the next evolution of the underlying technology, but the HL2 demo felt like the next step in game design, period.
Things that also don’t need to exist: VNN videos, since he’s a bit of a twat.
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I had a pre-order on Amazon for TF2 that got cancelled before HL2 was even revealed.
Resident 8bitdo expert.
Resident hybrid/flap cover expert.
Episode 3 however....
The coop campaign had a sequel hook
Also the Perpetual Testing Initiative kinda has a story, told via a cutscene and voice clips from Cave Johnson that play at the start of each user map.
Also the recently released Aperture Desk Job has it's own potential hook
Man that brings me back. I was one of the Dystopia teams play testers for ages. Fun times.
So she has to resort to the robots to fight The Beast.
Isn't TF2 like fifteen years old? He should be happy the game is getting updates at all.
I was being a little... diplomatic... when I said the dude was a twat earlier. He's a known shithead who has a tendency to harass content creators in the attempt to try to squeeze a leak or scoop about upcoming events or updates from them. Whenever I see a VNN video my first thought is "oh my god fuck off."
The situation is a bit... more complex... than just not receiving updates. I've been following it for obvious reasons. There hasn't been a Capital U Update in ages. There's been smaller ones that have pushed out some community content like maps once in a while, but Jungle Inferno was back in 2017.
There's also the bigger problem that the Casual matchmaking queue is completely bot infested, and nearly impossible to actually play on. You'll walk out of spawn and instantly get blasted by a horde of aimbot snipers. The bots will also change their name to mimic human players and will co-ordinate vote-kick calls on human players to keep their numbers down so you can't actually use the in-game tools to get rid of them. Also a few of them, if they actually *do* get kicked, try to DDOS and crash the server they were on so *everyone* gets booted as well.
Community servers are basically one of the few ways to actually play it normally now, but the option's kind of buried in the menus and not obvious for new players. And some of the servers in the server browser that look to be real are actually fake and will redirect you to a different, bot-infested server. And that still requires a active moderation team keeping a eye on the server and actively booting bad actors before they can over-run it.
Which, fine, but there's been absolutely *no* word from Valve on what they're doing to combat it, or if they are. Harassing employees like this is never acceptable.
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Funny story, the neotokyo soundtrack isn't actually used in the game. Except maybe on the title menu? It's been over a decade since I played it, heh. I think they must have had the soundtrack made then realized sound was too important to the gameplay to have music on, like in counterstrike, listening for footsteps and stuff. Glad they did though because it does indeed rule.
There was no sequel set up for the first one either, they patched in the player being dragged back into the facility after the ending in the lead up to 2 releasing :P
For me it was the MGS2 demo that destroyed my fragile child mind as to what games could be, but that was only because I had to wait a bit longer before I could play HL2. It's one of those generation leaps I don't think we're likely to see again, unless we just plug into full Holodeck VR.
It's still making money off of cosmetic sales though, which I think should make Valve at least partially responsible for attempting to reduce the number of their servers filled with robot snipers instantly aimbotting you while playing Mein Kampf in the voice chat or whatever the fuck is going on.
There are people interested in fixing TF2 at Valve, but they are reasonably certain that if they spend company time doing something as mundane as working on TF2 their coworkers will vote to have them fired from the company at employee review time.
Valve is a privately owned company staffed by millionaires and billionaires so they could just throw money at an outside company to try to put the fire out, but that would require one of the billionaires at the top to give a shit about one of Valve's signature games becoming a trash fire, instead of... whatever they actually care about. Making enough money to freeze their brains in anticipation of digital immortality when the singularity finally hits or some shit I'm guessing.
Wud yoo laek to lern aboot meatz? Look here!
Just out of curiosity, have you played HL: Alyx? Or at least have you seen/read how that game ends?
I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say that it surprisingly sets things up in a way that unambiguously promises some kind of continuation from Episode 2. Not sure if that means Episode 3 or a proper HL3 or something else, but I highly doubt they would have ended it the way they did if they didn't intend to eventually pick that story back up in one form or another.
Oculus: TheBigDookie | XBL: Dook | NNID: BigDookie
You could say the same about the end of Episode 2 proper, and that took 13 years to get a new Half-Life game, and even then
I'm sure Valve has all sorts of Half-Life ideas and plans; that was never the problem, the question is if they'll be able to follow through, or if Alyx was just a fluke that arose due to wanting to push a specific technology.
I mean fair point, it's definitely possible that they could completely drop it again, since there's obviously precedent for that. Still, seems like it would be odd to end it the way they did if they had no intention of following up with it eventually. It definitely could be a while, but I was just pointing out that not all hope should be lost on some sort of continuation. One day.
Maybe.
Oculus: TheBigDookie | XBL: Dook | NNID: BigDookie