Half-Life 3 Speculation

Posted in entertainment by Adam

21 March 2015

Some thoughts on the possible direction (very generally) Valve might take with Half-Life 3.

Gabe Newell, head of Valve, recently gave an interview (SoundCloud: GameSlice: “#1: Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson from Valve”) where he spoke briefly about the possibility (or lack thereof) of Half-Life 3. This isn’t the first time he’s said things along the lines of, ‘we want to do it, but we don’t know how to do it with what we know now.’

Valve started out in the single-player world of games. The first Half-Life had multiplayer, but it was deathmatch only. Where the multiplayer code shined was in mods like Counter-Strike. Since then Valve has gone on to do more and more multiplayer and a lot of different market strategies with that.

It’s like seeing what you can do with the tools in a buddy’s woodshop with fancy powertools and then going back to a pocket knife and a stick. They don’t want to make another single-player linear game like Half-Life was, and they don’t know how to build into that universe in a multiplayer way (or if they do, they’ve not said so).

But they have a lot of data:

Team Fortress 2’s Mann versus Machine mode

They have some idea of how cooperative gameplay against an AI opponent can work. That’s not to say a potential multiplayer HL3 would look anything like MvM, but it is data they’d consider in building it.

Dota 2

They have some idea how cooperative and competitive go together, including AI friends and foes. All of these are present in Dota 2. It’s not clear if people would want to play as the Combine in a new HL3 game, but the possibility exists they would and could.

Others’ games

Valve also learns a lot from other games. Games like Borderlands 2 that feature cooperative play might give one possibility for a HL3 that isn’t all player characters, but where the core of heroes are people. Whether Valve would attempt a mission-driven game with maps like Borderlands 2 is an open question.

Valve also has content that never saw the light of day. Things like the commander class for earlier iterations of Team Fortress 2, which would have made it a partial RTS game might be something they look at and revamp for HL3 or it might not.

Ultimately, what HL3 will be isn’t as important as what it will contain:

Freeman
Scientists and allies
Hostile aliens (headcrabs and zombies, plus others) and hostile humanoids (Combine or military)
Gman

That’s the essence of Half-Life. The main challenge for multiplayer HL3 is that everyone wants to be Freeman. That was part of the appeal of the series, that you’re this lowly scientist that’s saving the world (and yourself). To suddenly break away from that and say “We’re all Robert Paulson” is a little cheap, but probably a necessity of a multiplayer Half-Life game.

It can be done, and done successfully. The message of mass movements is that everyone can carry part of the load, and that’s a very powerful message. But you still have the hanging string of Freeman to deal with. Is he dead? Moved up to management? Missing? Selling vacuums door-to-door?

Rise and shine, Mister Freeman. Your vacuum route awaits.

Steam on Linux: Half-Life

Posted in linux by Adam

26 January 2013

It’s been 15 years, but native Linux Half-Life is now here.

It was the mid-to-late 1990s. Computers were becoming more popular, and computer games with them. In the early 1990s there was Myst. It was about the story, something like Zork but first-person. In 1996, there was Quake. It was about battling baddies, like its predecessors, Doom and Wolfenstein.

Around that time, Valve software must have licensed the new Quake Engine (the underlying software that created the Quake world on your computer). In 1998 they released Half-Life. It was in many ways a closer marriage of the first-person shooter with the story games and puzzle games that came before. Around a two-to-one ratio. Lots of action, but a bit more story than before. You had Non-Player Characters (NPCs), which are presences you don’t kill, either neutral or allied with you. You had movable boxes.

It’s a game that paved the way for a lot of the modern games.

Every discussion I saw prior to the announcement came to the conclusion that we probably wouldn’t see this happen. Most of those centered around Counter-Strike 1.6, which uses the same GoldSrc Engine as Half-Life. The feeling was that Valve would focus on their newest titles first, and worry about these oldest games later, if ever.

A few years back, Valve began opening up to the Apple Macintosh systems, and most of their new games made their way over. But never the old ones. With this release, those systems now have these oldest games too.

One wonders why. When the first news of Steam coming to Linux arrived, it was published that their title Left 4 Dead 2 was their vehicle of experimentation.

When the beta began, it was instead Team Fortress 2. That made enough sense, in that it’s free-to-play. It meant they didn’t have to give away a game that beta testers might have bought. It wouldn’t be costly to give the game to a few, in a small, closed beta. But when you open it up in the large, to a largely untested audience, it risks some loss.

Valve is very committed to the Linux platform, especially with the announcement of the forthcoming Steam boxes, basically set-top computers. They want to be as catalog-complete to help drive adoption. They also had the opportunity to hit two platforms at once, which wasn’t there when it was only Apple Macintosh.

Finally, with their flagship game sequels coming, they want to be able to have people play the original. There is a certain aspect to human psychology that values completeness. People want to have read every book, seen every episode. They want every achievement, to have left no stone unturned.

The question now is when we will see the rest of the Valve catalog for Linux. My guess is by summer. They probably don’t have as much work with the newer games which have all been ported to Apple Macintosh. There is some work, yes, but a lot of it will be simply replicating previous work. They are likely targeting those releases for the time when the Steam platform leaves beta.

Other tasks will take longer, including their plans to release their SDKs for Linux. That will mean porting work that hasn’t been done for the Apple Macintosh systems. These will be very welcome, as they will mean both new blood into the mod/mapping/development community and faster compilation of assets.

Attack of the Undead Penguins

Posted in linux by Adam

4 August 2012

Pep rally post about my hopes for Steam on Linux.

Steam coming to Linux, you say?

People following the Valve/Steam/Linux news already know that the awesome hackers at Valve have Left 4 Dead 2 running on Ubuntu like a champ. They know that Valve has been doing some work toward a so-called three meter display (ie, for television display), and have probably speculated that they are at least considering building a console.

This is a post about what I’m looking forward to seeing out of Valve on Linux.

Playing Games

Foremost, I’m looking to playing games without even the minor inconveniences of WINE. Often there are tweaks, there’s turning off features, or some minor thorn of just about every game I’ve played on WINE. WINE is awesome, and it’s made some money for game companies, as there are games I bought because I knew that I could play them.

But it’s not perfect, and for people that eschew yak shaving to play a game, the set of titles they might purchase and play drops (I’m not thinking about side projects like PlayOnLinux, as I’ve not tried them).

For a lot of games, if they make it to Linux, that means getting full eye candy. Full features.

Building Games

Secondly, I’m hopeful that the game creation tools will be coming to Linux. Some of these kind-of-sort-of run under WINE, but my experience with these hasn’t been nearly as good as with games. Even if the current generation tools don’t make it, maybe the next generation will.

The lower the barrier to entry for creating game content, the more that will be created, and the better games we will see. That’s true of technology in general.

I’ve made a few maps years ago under Windows, but the few times I tried to build maps under WINE it was much clunkier and fraught with peril. I’m very hopeful that in another decade or so it will be commonplace for gamers to be mappers and modelers, even if their extent of mapping and modeling is just to customize existing maps and models.

Building Bridges

But, like others, my biggest hope is that this work will result in greater support from the four corners of the earth for Open Source and Linux. That it will widen the market for gaming, while making governments and businesses evaluate Linux as a greater possibility for their employees.

Just like Android has pushed a device with Linux to far more hands than ever before, a Valve console could do it again. But so can Steam for Linux. There’s plenty of people that keep a second computer or dual booting just for games. There also a general perception that Windows is the king because of gaming. Linux getting more gaming means that even Apple may end up supporting iTunes for Linux one day.

A side bet is, assuming the success of Steam for Linux, could that competition bring Microsoft back from the brink? For years Microsoft has had the capacity to push the computing world far beyond its current state. But it’s had no reason. That’s harmed its server market, which hasn’t been very competitive.

Conclusion

In any case, as a long-term fan of Valve’s games, I look forward to playing Half-Life 3 on Linux (just like I played Half-Life 2 here), and with any luck the Black Mesa modification can be playable on Linux too.