You know, usually I get all bothered by Valve playing light with Half-Life 3, but I always liked Gabe's occasional cute references to it. Ricochet 2, the "these things, they take time" bit, and now this - I don't know, I just find it all really dorky and adorable.
Maybe I'm just weak willed, and I stop being mad at Valve, the faceless corporation that killed my favorite game franchise, and just see Gabe himself.
Majority of FP was built off of HL and a lot of us here, including me, were introduced to videogames and the gaming community through HL. I, and I'm sure many others here, grew up with HL, mods, gmod, everything. I remember searching for everything HL related to read and take in. It is personal for a lot of us.
They aren't purposefully trying to make fun of the community. Assuming it is so is incredibly stupid.
A new half life would not sell in today's market. It would not be economically a good idea. Especially when they're making this much money.
Well tbf, personal in an online sense. I mean we don't think about valve stuff at all outside computing, right? But the good ol' times that we grew up with deserves a proper sequal. Problem is I have no idea what makes a good hl3 game.
If they were sitting on the brand and refusing to let anyone do things with it, this would be fair. But Black Mesa happened, the RTS game on the HL universe happened, and Hunt Down The Refund happened.
That's what makes it sting all the more to many. The perfect time to release a hl3 has long passed, and now the game has expectations that will be impossible to meet, even by Valve's highest standards.
Gaming standards have changed, devs have left, and really, the half life fanbase has evolved and changed for the most part. I assume so many people got butthurt over this video because jokes about hl3 are no longer innocent fun about how long it's taking, but rather it's poking fun at a game franchise many consider to be truly and thoroughly dead.
Are people still holding out for HL3 at this point?
the video didn't exactly offend me because I know it's coming from the same self-deprecating place it always has, but it does make him seem a bit out of touch when this is the state of their biggest fans.
I'm sure it will come out at some point. Just like how a good Blade Runner sequel came 35 years after the original, and how the sequel bait in 2049 will eventually become a sequel in 35 more years.
I'd find the joke funny if they actually made and released Half-Life 3.
SPOILER: Once you've played 1,000,000 matches of Artifact, HL3 is downloaded automatically onto your PC. When the game begins, you find yourself on a wagon with a few other citizens of Skyrim.
you know maybe people wouldn't be so pissed if valve hadn't promised to make episode 3 all those years ago and then went completely silent on the project without any actual word on whether it was still alive or not
Gaben just retire.
Why should someone retire just because they're not "relevant"? Afaik Gabe has never been super involved in projects, his biggest contribution to HL1 was saying "you can't show a really big bomb and not let the
player blow it up"
waiting for more games with 2 in the title
https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/485g25/gabe_states_that_ricochet_2_has_started/
Sorry, FP. I love you and all, but I'm going to be that guy.
I'm confused by the way some people are reacting to this. Sure, Half Life 1 and 2 were good games. They were revolutionary, they were fun, many FPers, myself included, grew up with them and they've got a special place in our hearts. But Valve hasn't made anything good since Portal 2. Which was seven years ago. Half Life 2 Episode 2 came out eleven years ago. You guys honestly mean to tell me people are still mad about Valve giving up on Half Life? To the point they're not allowed to joke about it?
Personally I think that was hilarious - A voice pack featuring Gabe Newell as an announcer where he can't count to three. Just the sort of reference that only gaming enthusiasts of our generation will get.
Look. Half Life was great while it lasted, but it's gone now. We know it's never coming back, because Valve doesn't need to make games to make money.
We had amazing memories with it - with Garry's mod, with the whole community that was built around Source engine games and the modding therein.
How many amazing games have you played since Half Life 2? How many genre-defining, ground-breaking titles have you experienced? With the indie market being so big now there's been a lot of trash out there, sure. But there have been some gems that shine at least as brightly as Half Life 2 ever did. And there are many such games. It's a great time to be a gamer, with so much variety and innovation out there, and gaming computers being more powerful than ever.
I think it's time we let it go. Stop treating the Half Life franchise like some sacred icon that Valve can't make jokes about.
There's lots of shit that gaming companies do that we should be up in arms about. A voice pack with a joke reference to a dead IP isn't one of them.
When it comes to business matters, they're no joke. Other businesses would kill to get IPs worth the same as Valve's and services like Steam and Steamworks DRM.
From the perspective of the employees, it's going swimmingly for them, they can do what they're passionate about with two week paid vacation every April and yuge bonuses. (If that horrid stuff mentioned
recently has been mitigated like I've heard)
I really wish I didn't care.
Doesn't do me any good, I've completely flipped to the "it's never coming out, or if it does it won't be recognizable" side. Now it just makes me mildly sad and a little angry that the game company I loved as a kid getting into 3D (for it's games, but also it's open source super modder-friendly engine) has stopped doing everything I loved it for. Games I cared about stopped coming out, and they let the tools for their engine fall to shambles. They still work, sure, but with a fair bit of workarounds that didn't used to be necessary.
There was a time that working at Valve was my dream, but that time is long past.
I appreciate Steam, but that's about it.
It'll be the 20th anniversary for the franchise in November and it's been more than 10+ years since the last game. Valve don't care any more, no matter how much they say they do.
Money and assets like IPs and services are what matter in the grand scheme of things with companies. Gabe was already rich before starting Valve, he wanted to make games and so started Valve. But the
inklings of what Valve is now have been around a good while. They had plans for Steam so they forced people to use it for HL2, Gabe was talking about selling fan content and microtransactions in fucking 2005.
Gabe always said piracy was a service problem, that people pirate when it's inconvenient to buy a game. They definitely were conceptualizing a digital storefront in the late 90s-early 2000s, and games like HL2 and the Orange Box titles gave Steam the install base to pull it off. Gabe said that about what he called "micro payments" when talking about how Xbox Live brought the internet to consoles, they were considering
stuff like this for years probably, even before they brought economists like Yanis Varoufakis on board.
No, they said the opposite. Gearbox said they'd be afraid if they were Valve
If I'm not a frequent here I would honestly be one of those guys from elsewhere who point and laugh at all the mad and salty ppl in this thread
I've never seen people get this uninimaginably upset about a guy spending half a day or so in a recording booth. Lighten up you drama queens it's a video game
As an almost decade long FP user and a Half-Life fan, I found the video pretty funny. I think it's okay that they show some self awareness of the situation, even after all this time. The game will come out sooner or later, or just not. There was a point in life when I said I'm okay with that, but god damn if that ends up coming out someday, alive or not.
a b s o l u t e l y s a t a n i c a l
This used to be a joke when I was younger and we were waiting on the next episode. Well, jokes on me because I actually do have grey hairs now. I never thought it would come to this :\
and ending on a cliffhanger
"But what's my motivation."
Sums up Valve's internal structure perfectly.
Even Duke Nukem: Forever got released before Half-Life 3/Episode 3, and that was 10+ years of George Broussard shoving every slightly new idea he could find into his game.
In the future, the half life franchise will only have... artifacts, to show for itself...
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
