[QUOTE=itisjuly;47115103]Can you blame them? Ep2 ended in a huge cliffhanger to a great series.[/QUOTE]
It's not really a [I]huge[/I] cliffhanger, a character died and they will simply move on. Dog killed/scared away the attackers too.
[QUOTE=archangel125;47118542]No matter how good HL3 is, it'll get poor ratings and be considered a failure. The new Duke Nukem game wasn't awful, but the same thing happened for the same reasons.[/QUOTE]
I didn't realize that the next Half life game is plagued by financial troubles, has changed developers several times meaning several different teams have worked on it with different visions for the game, has had a complete engine change half way through development and has finally ended up up with developer that don't really know what they are doing or care enough to put much effort and just want to get it rushed out, who are eventually just going to release it as a 'modernized' version of what it was originally intended to be, meaning it's now nothing like the original in any way except the vague idea and the name.
No. They Half life isn't in the same situation at all. There are many reasons why DNF failed but being 'overhyped' because of the 15 years it took to release was the least of it's problems. A developer simply taking their time with making a game does not in any way mean the game is going to fail.
[QUOTE=Coyoteze;47120057]for a second I didn't know you mean duke nukem forever and started to wonder what the dutch national flag problem has to do with anything[/QUOTE]
I thought he meant "did not finish"
because at the rate we're going that's pretty much true
I have no doubt that someone is working on HL3 at Valve.
I have strong doubts that it's ever going to release, without a substantial paradigm shift at Valve.
Valve's laissez-faire development strategy where devs work on basically whatever they want is sustainable because they rake in money hand-over-fist from Steam, but it's not the kind of focused environment that is ever going to deliver the gaming messiah everyone is hopeful for. Team Fortress 2 is, all things considered, a much more limited-scope, focused game, yet it took nearly ten years of continuous cycles of 'concept, development, scrap and redo everything' to finally get it out the door. It went through the same development process as Duke Nukem Forever, and for the exact same reasons- unfocused dev team, no deadlines forcing them to actually release the game.
HL3's certainly been through the same thing. When a game takes a long time to release, generally everything up to the last two years of development is scrapped and it's only the last two years (at most) where content is developed that ends up in release. There's this idea that if a game takes five years, the team is 'taking their time', developing a game in two years and then spending three years refining and polishing it, but that's not really how it works. If a game takes five years, the team has decided after around three years of abortive development that they need to actually release a game and then spend two years going through a standard development cycle. I can count on one hand the number of games I've seen where actual development takes longer than that, and I've seen a lot of teams take concepts well beyond their scope and find that they can't do it, because by the time they have anything substantial developed, it's already out of date.
So until someone high up at Valve puts together a big enough team and takes the reins, it's going to be stuck in development hell until there's enough impetus to get it done within a two-year window. That's just how these things go.
[QUOTE=Mkt778;47126242]Valve has no 'higher ups'. They're flatter than Kansas.[/QUOTE]
Sort of. Newell and Lombardi are nominally in charge but take a hands-off approach. This has proven great for allowing maximum creative flexibility and it's made them extremely responsive and innovative in meeting customer and player needs in Steam and their existing games. But if you look at Valve's track record, they haven't released much of substance since '07, mostly just incremental releases to existing products. If it weren't for the money-printer that Steam is, they'd have folded a long time ago.
Creatives don't flourish in a rigid, authoritarian model, but some degree of authority is needed to keep a large project on-task and within deadlines.
[QUOTE=Coffee;47125163]It fades to black at the end of episode 2.
Valve can literally say "gordon passed out", and have him wake up on the helicopter flying over some new snowy location.
The Half Life series is built around retcons.[/QUOTE]
That would imply the hilariously evil scenario that the rebels dragged Gordon's unconscious body from the horrific scene over to the helicopter so he could complete yet another impossible mission for them.
[QUOTE=catbarf;47126112]I have no doubt that someone is working on HL3 at Valve.
I have strong doubts that it's ever going to release, without a substantial paradigm shift at Valve.
Valve's laissez-faire development strategy where devs work on basically whatever they want is sustainable because they rake in money hand-over-fist from Steam, but it's not the kind of focused environment that is ever going to deliver the gaming messiah everyone is hopeful for. Team Fortress 2 is, all things considered, a much more limited-scope, focused game, yet it took nearly ten years of continuous cycles of 'concept, development, scrap and redo everything' to finally get it out the door. It went through the same development process as Duke Nukem Forever, and for the exact same reasons- unfocused dev team, no deadlines forcing them to actually release the game.
[/QUOTE]
Valve being a developer who doesn't just rush something and release it unfinished is not a bad thing, and neither is them being willing to scrap something they aren't happy with rather than continue with it knowing it isn't working properly for them. It has not in any way gone through the same development process as Duke Nukem Forever, the only similarity is the long development time, which was not the reason DNF failed or was a bad game. Saying "no deadlines forcing them to actually release the game." is basically the same as "No deadline for releasing the game in whatever state it's in by that point, regardless of it's done or not". Deadlines are good for getting a game released by a certain time and that's about it, they don't do anything to make the game itself good and are more likely to negatively effect it. Nothing suggests they are an unfocused dev team, either - they don't have set 'roles' as such, but that doesn't mean the ones who are working on the game aren't focused on it.
[QUOTE=Flapjacks;47126723]That would imply the hilariously evil scenario that the rebels dragged Gordon's unconscious body from the horrific scene over to the helicopter so he could complete yet another impossible mission for them.[/QUOTE]
I would imagine the game would have 20 minutes before Gordon and Alyx left just to have the player adjust to the game.
[QUOTE=Mehis;47125334]Link?[/QUOTE]
Just some personal REing I had done when I was bored
[QUOTE=Flapjacks;47126723]That would imply the hilariously evil scenario that the rebels dragged Gordon's unconscious body from the horrific scene over to the helicopter so he could complete yet another impossible mission for them.[/QUOTE]
Well I think that's what they'd have to do, since the rebels realised that they need to destroy the technology on the borealis to prevent the combine from getting it as soon as possible.
Hl3 better come with the cure for cancer
[QUOTE=nightlord;47126851]Valve being a developer who doesn't just rush something and release it unfinished is not a bad thing, and neither is them being willing to scrap something they aren't happy with rather than continue with it knowing it isn't working properly for them.[/QUOTE]
Being willing to scrap something rather than continue with a poor decision is a good quality for a team, but when work is constantly being scrapped and redone rather than ever reach a state of 'good enough', it reaches development hell. Duke Nukem Forever, STALKER, and Alan Wake all fell into this trap and took far longer than anticipated to release.
It's not that the developers were lazy and not doing their jobs, it's that they had high standards and requirements and continually revised, excised, and re-did old content. Eventually their publishers resorted to forcing them to release, which meant removing unfinished content and cutting corners. Alan Wake is especially notable since the eventual deadline forced them to turn an open-world game into a linear one, and it suffered for it- but six years of trying to force an unworkable concept well beyond the limitations of their team ended up being a waste of time.
[QUOTE=nightlord;47126851]It has not in any way gone through the same development process as Duke Nukem Forever, the only similarity is the long development time, which was not the reason DNF failed or was a bad game. Saying "no deadlines forcing them to actually release the game." is basically the same as "No deadline for releasing the game in whatever state it's in by that point, regardless of it's done or not". Deadlines are good for getting a game released by a certain time and that's about it, they don't do anything to make the game itself good and are more likely to negatively effect it.[/QUOTE]
I'm not sure if you're aware, but Half-Life was originally nearly completed in late 1997 before Valve decided to scrap most of what they'd done and re-do it, saving little more than broad concept and art. The team was given a hard deadline to release by the end of 1998, and barely scraped by, including code revision in the last few [i]days[/i] before release. Half-Life, in all its awesomeness, was essentially built by a small team in a year operating under a tight schedule.
Half-Life 2 was also developed under a strict deadline. Originally slated for a late 2003 release, it was only the source code leak that caused the release to be pushed back to 2004. Raising the Bar indicates that almost all of the work on the game was done in 2002-2003, putting development time at about two years.
Good project management is recognizing when a deadline is unworkable or going to result in an inferior product, and moving it as appropriate. Poor project management is failing to make a deadline at all. Any project plan, regardless of whether it's following a traditional waterfall model software development cycle or an alternative like agile, has to have an overall schedule to establish scope, requirements, and cost. If the team doesn't follow a schedule, or just does what they feel like, then there is no clearly defined scope or division of labor. That's not how you get work done in any field, let alone one as tightly focused and prone to obsolescence as software.
Valve is the only successful company in the industry that takes this kind of development approach, and it's not because everyone else is too stupid to just let developers do whatever they want. They're not a business-oriented company so much as an art house, artificially sustained with a more practical side business. Make no mistake, I'm a big fan of Valve as a developer, but I can't see a game as huge as Half-Life 3 releasing under the conditions they're in without a substantial paradigm shift.
[QUOTE=Mkt778;47126242]Valve has no 'higher ups'. They're flatter than Kansas.[/QUOTE]
Gabe does get involved on occasion, like during the Hatred fiasco.
[QUOTE=Cold;47118284][url]http://kotaku.com/5795355/valve-probably-done-with-single-player-games[/url][/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Vintage]Good!!! KILL SINGLE PLAYER VALVE! DO IT! I feel this is a step in the right direction. i absolutely hate single player only games and constantly wish there was multiplayer/co-op modes (that i feel force devs to get more creative in many different ways to keep the game alive) i could be playing instead with my friends.
the people who say this is a bad move are definitely the forever alone types.[/QUOTE]
Who actually thinks like this.
[QUOTE=FunnyStarRunner;47137316]Who actually thinks like this.[/QUOTE]
His definition of "me time" must be a massive masturbation session.
Mine is just a quick wank and then a good single player game.
Cue jokes regarding masturbation and single player being the same thing.
Fact of it is, Half-Life is Valve's baby. It is the game that put them on the map of game development and was their first killer app. We can all assume that Half-Life 3 will put an end to the main story arch and Valve simply doesn't want to fuck it up. I would rather wait ten years for a polished incredibly amazing game than have Valve rush it. I may be a grandparent by the time it's released, but it's going to be simply mind blowing.
[QUOTE=Talvy;47125711]It's not really a [I]huge[/I] cliffhanger, a character died and they will simply move on. Dog killed/scared away the attackers too.[/QUOTE]
Lots of disagrees but no talk.
There's is no dilemma; Eli is dead. A cliffhanger is when you are left hanging, not knowing what happened. Unresolved plot threads are not a cliffhanger.
Like I said, cliffhanger or not, it's not a [I]huge[/I] one.
[QUOTE=Mkt778;47126242]Valve has no 'higher ups'. They're flatter than Kansas.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Former Valve employee Jeri Ellsworth has spoken of the company’s famous flat management structure, calling out several shortcomings as part of an interview for the Grey Area podcast.
....
“It is a pseudo-flat structure where, at least in small groups, you’re all peers and make decisions together,” she said. “But the one thing I found out the hard way is that there is actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company and it felt a lot like high school. There are popular kids that have acquired power in the company, then there’s the trouble makers, and everyone in between.”
[/QUOTE]
I look forward to the day it's released. But I don't look forward to the disappointment of the "Authoring Tools" that follow. Cause I'm pretty sure it won't have open parts of the game libraries like we did with HL2. So we'll only be able to make maps, models, and textures. No code. Having code access it what made HL2 so modder friendly. You could change how the game plays entirely. You had all the HL2 assets to utilize and the code to make it play however you want.
It's funny to think we get small HL3 leaks as often as Ubisoft announces a new Assassin's Creed game. If not less often.
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