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Half life alex11/10/2022 ![]() The challenge became, “take Half-Life 2 and make it work in VR.” That’s something I can write code on today. We’d made a prototype of Half-Life 2 in VR, and realized that a lot of Half-Life 2’s core gameplay experience is multiplied by the benefits you get from moving into VR. With Half-Life or Half-Life 2, we started with the opportunity at the forefront. Whereas on this project, I think we cheated on that. You have to accept the very real possibility that you do that for six months or a year and at the end, still have nothing. It’s hard to start writing code on that today. It’s a hard thing to work on a product – you want to think about the word “intimidating” – it’s really intimidating to work on something that people want to be Half-Life 3, but you’re just searching for that opportunity. I think one of the problems over the years after Half-Life 2’s episodes is that we were always searching for that next opportunity. We thought there were real opportunities for gameplay with those kinds of technologies. So we worked on the technology there, and at the same time, it was the birth of the sort of physics engines that eventually went on to become things like Havok. We really thought that there was an opportunity around the way we were representing characters, people, in video games and in those sorts of narrative approaches that we’d started in the first game. Then you go forward to Half-Life 2, and there were a couple of opportunities there, as well. Less perhaps a focus on the story itself, but the way that you can tell stories in that medium. We thought there was a real opportunity in that medium for being a way to deliver stories that perhaps hadn’t really been done before. They were fun to play, but very focused on combat. If you go back to the first Half-Life, we were looking at first-person shooters at the time. Half-Life products have always started with some opportunity or some technology that we felt were really interesting, in terms of the way we could use it to create some new experience for the player. I think that speaks to what you were saying about how in some other company, we’d be on our ninth sequel. ![]() I was curious how intimidating it was to try to get back into developing Half-Life at all. GW: Anyway, it’s been 13 years since the last Half-Life game, which feels like an eternity in Internet time. GW: I guess there is that debeaked one in Half-Life 2, isn’t there. In anyone else’s hands, Half-Life would be on its ninth sequel, a second Hollywood film, a breakfast cereal, a cartoon show with adorable headcrabs… GW: Well, that’s the downside of having created some of the most passionately admired IPs out there. Us hedging is just us avoiding saying something that we know is just not actually true. Statements we make at any point in time are an accurate reflection of how we feel at that time. That’s a laughable thing to go and read, given what we’re shipping, but we don’t regard that as a failure on our part. If you go back far enough, you can find us saying how we weren’t sure we were going to make single-player games again. We don’t like to make plans that go too far out because we couldn’t maintain that flexibility. We have the freedom to look at what’s coming, look at what’s changing, and try and adapt to that. One of our strengths as a company is that we don’t have any external investors. I think anyone who thinks they know exactly what the state of the video game industry is going to be like five years from now is quite likely to be wrong. ![]() We really don’t know what we’re going to be doing a year from now. It’s just the accurate representation of the way we work. It always sort of bums me out, because it’s not an attempt on our part to be obtuse. RW: I think one of the things that’s confusing for fans, and people in general about Valve, is our unwillingness to ever really say whether something is completely on or off the table. Robin Walker, programmer on Half-Life: Alyx. That’s kind of all hands on deck right now. Is In the Valley of the Gods still happening?
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