Half-Life ended on a tram, and Half-Life 2 begun on a train! Valve has no care for quality!
Have Live end on Citadel
Epitisle 1 start on not Citadel
Gabe explain
This isn't 1995.
VR has enough going for it that it will have an audience for it.
I consider that bad design, personally. I don't care how "immersive" it's supposed to be. I'd rather be less immersed, lest I go insane traversing the same corridors over and over. I'm not trying to role play a crazy person or anything! Not my cup of tea. And good level design doesn't necessarily mean having large neon arrows pointing explicitly to the next destination either. Subtle hints and cues (lighting, noises, combat encounters, prop placement, etc.) are supposed to be used to drive the player onward. There were many times when I was legimately questioning whether there was "a way forward" from where I was and many combat encounters, I felt, were overturned or sometimes outright impossible (ie. one of the street battles, IIRC, had respawning enemies? I haven't played in a while so I don't quite remember).
Now that you mention it, G-man didn't even try saving Alyx there. What point was it for him to "pluck" her from Black Mesa if he doesn't even bother saving her from the explosion? Did he anticipate some sort of intervention (vorts) or did he just not think that far ahead and only wanted Breen dead? Or maybe this is just another plot hole :P
Well.. the main character in Prospero was named Aleph. Close enough :P
Personally I think that the thing that has aged worst about Half-Life is the story and the "this is a cutscene but you can move around in a limited space" immersion.
I would much prefer if most modern games did "cutscenes" this way, honestly.
Making games cinematic removes the entire artistic cliche that makes them wholly different from other entertainment medias, that being dynamic interaction with the characters and environment in the story. It fits where it fits, but imo the "cinematic" trend waters down the experience. If you want an action film, those exist.
Downside is that you can't skip that on your re-plays, while with generic cutscenes you usually can
It can't really be one or the other, all the time, every time. Half Life's cutscenes have no good reason to be interactive. They were innovative and novel at the time but now, when I replay Half Life 2, I don't really feel any more engaged in watching NPCs talk to each other than I would if I were say, watching a well choreographed and 'shot' cutscene.
Of course there is absolutely merit to not wanting to watch a movie when you play a game. I don't really like sitting down and watching lengthy game cutscenes either - but Half Life's approach of just letting the player run around the environment while important story stuff happens isn't exactly perfect. Half Life 2 basically has to give up on this approach when it comes to the Breen confrontation because of how narratively limiting it is.
I'm actually a bit into how some of the Metal Gear Solid games did their cutscenes, with camera control enabled to a slight degree. It allowed the best of both worlds: you got a nice looking, well paced cutscene to watch, and you had some degree of interaction available that allowed players to pick up on hidden details. It's an overly simplistic combination of the two concepts, and obviously MGS is known for it's movie-length cutscenes, but it still works.
This whole discussion comes with the caveat that it fundamentally depends on the game, of course. There's always going to be room for games with Half Life-style cutscenes, a dedication to never leaving the protags perspective. But it certainly isn't the end-all.
I understand what you guys are saying, don´t get me wrong, and I am not dissing half-life way of doing cutscenes as a concept. What I am saying is that they aged badly in half-life because it was a brand new concept at the time and because of that you get stupid things like "Gordon climbs into a Combine holding device so Breen can exposit at you for ten minutes" and "The slow teleport because we need to get back to City 17 and for a week to pass for the story to make sense".
You also get stunning immersive moments such as the despondent couple during the apartment raid and the improvised rebel hospital just before you get the buggy car. Ravenholm is also great because in any other game you would get a overly dramatic reveal of Father Grigori complete with zoom-in and a overview of the city for maximum melodrama.
So, not saying it sucks, just saying the cracks show a bit now.
make it an option to break down the door so that people who are bored of watching the same cutscenes can literally escape from it.
Double Nope. The Combine weren't even a thing originally. HL2 was originally going to take place on Xen once again, fending off Aliens. They aren't genius masterminds that plan everything from the start. Even the story we know got it's basis from a completely unrelated game that eventually formed into Half-Life 2.
Don't even think there was a story bible, just vague outlines and written story details made to layout ideas that may or may not end up on the cutting room floor for good.
Where did you get this information about Xen? I've literally never heard it before. Granted, I haven't read all of Half-Life: Raising the Bar (I don't own a physical copy - I just read part of the draft copy that was leaked a while back), but I don't recall anything about Half-Life 2 being set on Xen. And there is no information whatsoever about this on Combine Overwiki.
I meant Xen forces on other planets. Seems I misread it. It's on here on the wiki.
The Nililanath was talking about the Gman. Who else would be "waiting for you"? Combine didn't even know about Freeman until he came back.
Was there ever a full version of the HD footsteps restoration from the HL1 sounds? I remembered there was one on Gamebanana, but it's only got the concrete sounds.
Okay so I haven't done any modding in ages and I had GCFScape on my old computer since like 2010, but long story short I lost most of my data last year. Is this still the go-to for peeling through Valve's GCF and VPK files?
Yeah, I believe everyone still uses GCFScape and VTFEdit, at-least I still do
GCFScape was updated to support the newer files, so yeah it should work. I've never used any other tool for that.
I have a similar story of a GCFScape .exe that's been there since I had issues with HL2 not being able to use it's own fonts for HUD (so, what, 2005?), resulting in this (not my screenshot).
I've moved data across HDDs of course, so the metadata says 2014, unfortunately
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/295357100724748278/4AAE48FC969EB73FD853F72C53B3E2BA99D218D0/
Just one problem: neither of us read the quote carefully enough. "Their slaves... we are their slaves... we are..." There is no way he is referring to just G-Man with this line, given that the line you quote refers to G-Man as a singular entity.
Funnily enough, I feel like the Call of Duty games (Modern Warfare onward) have done a good job with balancing the two styles. Cutscenes that rely strictly on proper pacing play out the exact same way and are even pre-rendered with remarkably good CGI from Advanced Warfare onward, but there's also a good number of "minor cutscenes" wherein dialogue, exposition, or full-fledged story events play out but the player still has control over movement and sometimes even the ability to shoot and interrupt, changing how that scene plays out.
I also like how Naughty Dog has improved how they deliver story. They still have their amazing cutscenes, but the gameplay dialogue has been made immensely better by the ability to continue playing as normal and characters will pretty naturally interrupt their own conversations and then naturally restart them once that interruption has passed.
While I would never want a theoretical Half-Life 3 to move away from the cutscene format that Valve implemented, I do agree that it has its own limitations and, especially now, may not appeal as much as it used to.
Also who is Nihilanth refer to as "we"? Is it refering to both Gordon and itself as "we" or the Nihilanth and its followers/xen life? There could be several ways to propose that. I think it does make sense that the Combine were at least hinted at since HL1 but it seems more like HL2 trying to accommodate for HL1 canon (like Nihilanth's prosthetics/amputations). Indeed, "their" is super ambiguous and for good reason. They likely didn't know where to go from there for a while before settling on the Combine.
Also on an off-note, the formatting on the forum really bothers me. Why does it wrap parts of a word around instead of wrapping the whole word to the next line. What the hell kind of design choice was this? :|
That's why HL1's implementation is my favorite, limited as it is. You can only do so much with it but on a replay having the cutscene "skip" being able to be a near total psycho shooting everything in the head adds a lot to replay value.
In fact, even though none of the other series games do this, the first STALKER game lets you kill anyone outside of 3 NPCs and you just grab their PDA or a flash drive with the info you need for the quest, which reminds me of HL1 and it works well there too.
A quick read through RtB and analyzing the WC maps would show that Valve were just throwing whatever they can think of at the wall and see what sticks.
The "specific look of Combine tech" didn't even exist until 2003 when the bluish Combine metal textures started appearing. Before that, they had no specific tech since they were meant to reuse human materials and technology to make themselves look more ambiguous. And way before that, the Combine didn't even exist.
At first, one of the initial ideas for HL2 was for Gordon to go through multiple dimensions to fight Xen aliens (which was immediately shot down). After that, it's Gordon waking up on a ship to find that Earth has been occupied by three different alien races so he must travel the globe to fight them off (warrior aliens that uses synths in America, bug aliens in the Middle East, and spy aliens with a Citadel in Europe). It's only after this that the ideas are condensed (warrior aliens + synths + spy aliens became the initial idea for the Combine while bug aliens became Antlions) and City 17 became a thing.
As for Nihilanth's "Their slaves... we are their slaves... we are...", it's just to indicate that his species (we) are the slaves to whatever the antagonist species in the sequel would be (they).
I like playing Half-Life 2 in G-Mod and listen to about half the exposition and then just shoot Kleiner/Eli/whoever and noclip through the wall.
My god what are you doing?! STAHP!
Meanwhile, in Boreal Alyph:
Careful. It's loud.
https://youtu.be/kB558TtaqQc
The code description of him being a "misunderstood servant of the people" answers that entirely. Why put yourself and your "employers" at risk when you can have other people do it for you?
Any GoldSrc modders out there? What is the good way to disable HEV voice? Replacing the sounds with empty WAVs seems amateurish, so I suppose there's a way to do it through coding?
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Half-Life Chat V11 - 20th anniversary edition
