Half-Life 25th Anniversary

They re-enabled the ability to turn shadows on!
r_shadows 1
is the command.

They're a bit funny looking up close, but from a distance it adds some value.
If I remember right they took the character model, flattened it, and tied it to the one we see, so they theoretically can do different poses.

If I'm remembering wrong though, feel free to correct me. I just discovered this while messing with the console last night.
 
scojer said:
They re-enabled the ability to turn shadows on!
r_shadows 1
is the command.

They're a bit funny looking up close, but from a distance it adds some value.
If I remember right they took the character model, flattened it, and tied it to the one we see, so they theoretically can do different poses.

If I'm remembering wrong though, feel free to correct me. I just discovered this while messing with the console last night.
Click to expand...

Post a pic of shadows on vs off? Plz and TY sir! (Can't find it on Google..)
 
scojer said:
Created a compelling trilogy of games
Click to expand...

It's funny that they made Half-Life 1, then Half-Life 2, then.... Nope not Half-Life 3

They decided to jump on hte episodic bandwagon and do episodic releases for Half-Life 2 and made Episode 1, and Episode 2, then.... abandoned episode 3.

Because they wanted to make a brand new engine, Source 2 to make a brand new game...... nope, not Half-Life 3.

They instead made Half-Life Alyx.

After they renamed Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to Counter-Strike 2 I don't know what to think. The can't count to 3 meme is real, and Vavle is as bad as Microsoft Windows when it comes to counting, even more incentive for Microsoft to buy them.
 
sharknice said:
It's funny that they made Half-Life 1, then Half-Life 2, then.... Nope not Half-Life 3

They decided to jump on hte episodic bandwagon and do episodic releases for Half-Life 2 and made Episode 1, and Episode 2, then.... abandoned episode 3.

Because they wanted to make a brand new engine, Source 2 to make a brand new game...... nope, not Half-Life 3.

They instead made Half-Life Alyx.

After they renamed Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to Counter-Strike 2 I don't know what to think. The can't count to 3 meme is real, and Vavle is as bad as Microsoft Windows when it comes to counting, even more incentive for Microsoft to buy them.
Click to expand...
I honestly don't care much about it anymore. When I think about the amazing value of both the original Half Life and the Orange Box - Valve is great in my book. Those two retail packages gave me so many thousands of hours of entertainment with all the mods, and Valve's own packaging of their own mods they bought up like TFC, etc.

Although I will admit Valve is absolutely at the point where we do need a #3 orange box style release. All of the source mod remakes like DoD, TF2, etc are pretty ancient at this point. I'd love to see a DoD 2, TF3, etc.
 
Mchart said:
I honestly don't care much about it anymore. When I think about the amazing value of both the original Half Life and the Orange Box - Valve is great in my book. Those two retail packages gave me so many thousands of hours of entertainment with all the mods, and Valve's own packaging of their own mods they bought up like TFC, etc.

Although I will admit Valve is absolutely at the point where we do need a #3 orange box style release. All of the source mod remakes like DoD, TF2, etc are pretty ancient at this point. I'd love to see a DoD 2, TF3, etc.
Click to expand...
All the multiplayer games are F2P now, so there will never be another Orange Box.

I'm kind of surprised they never made a new Team Fortress. When Overwatch came out it revitalized the genre, now there are all sorts of games like that. I guess they must make enough in TF2 microtransactions they see no need.
 
FiveDollarBill said:
What do you feel Half-Life did to make PC gaming worse?
Click to expand...
How the game plays out in a linear fashion moving from set piece to set piece is how we got Call of Duty, Gears of War, and the deluge of other vanilla shooters that followed.
 
Armenius said:
How the game plays out in a linear fashion moving from set piece to set piece is how we got Call of Duty, Gears of War, and the deluge of other vanilla shooters that followed.
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What is this logic??

"They were the first to really do this thing, but they never actually should have done it because people did similar things after"

So basically they made gaming worse by making something new and exciting
 
socK said:
What is this logic??

"They were the first to really do this thing, but they never actually should have done it because people did similar things after"

So basically they made gaming worse by making something new and exciting
Click to expand...
What he is describing is the opposite of “vanilla” shooters. It makes the game world feel alive and populated, instead of just a series of corridors you progress through.
 
I just (briefly) made it to the surface after We've Got Hostiles. Holy moly I am having an absolute blast. Replaying old classics at 4K / 120Hz with G-Sync and OLED blacks is one of the simple pleasures in life. Black Mesa is an awesome piece of work and I'm sure will be how most will prefer to experience Half-Life going forward, but man you really have to appreciate what the folks at Valve were able to do 25 years ago.

It's really neat, too, playing it after watching the documentary and recalling things that they talked about during the development. One thing that Gabe and others had a great grasp of early on was the importance of tension, and they exhibited a mastery of it. Little things like hearing the beeps of a turret echoing down a hallway before you see it, knowing you're going to have to contend with it. And the headcrabs in the vents are perfectly placed to scare the crap out of you and chip away at your health. Then long sections of dark vent that make you feverishly scan ahead with the flashlight, only for there to be nothing but ambient noise. It's all sewn together like a handmade quilt to create tension and immersion.

Indeed, I do not fault it for any worse games that came after it. People were going to want a piece of the success that this game had, or to try to recreate or even outdo it, but few would be up to the task of producing anything that came close to the quality of it.

I have to appreciate this even more as we come to an end of what was in my mind a pretty lackluster year in gaming. Lots of big releases that either disappointed, or people moved on from quickly. There were some bright spots but even the ones I enjoyed pale against the memory I have of playing this game for the first time on a Pentium II 300Mhz w/Voodoo 2 SLI cards. :) I'm having more fun replaying it 25 years later than with a lot of newer games. It holds up amazingly well.
 
I actually played the “Uplink” demo first, and then got the full game. I think Uplink was released before the full game. I had certainly never experienced anything like it. I had a Voodoo II card already in for Dark Forces II.

It was a remarkably unique and quirky game. I think more than anything else Half Life made clear how far ahead the PC was over console.
 
socK said:
What is this logic??

"They were the first to really do this thing, but they never actually should have done it because people did similar things after"

So basically they made gaming worse by making something new and exciting
Click to expand...
You're twisting my words. I never said they should not have done it. It was just a more streamlined way of making a game because it's easier to control what the player does, which makes it easier to balance things out. One of the philosophies mentioned in the documentary was that they wanted the player to be interacting with something every 3-5 seconds, and that is much easier to do when you keep the player on a rail like Half-Life does. I think that is ultimately why people don't like Xen because all of the sudden that tight curation of player experience goes out the window, but to me it felt like giving the player back some agency. Something like Doom 2016 took the idea of Half-Life and expanded it with more open exploration, so it felt like the player is making more decisions than you did in Half-Life despite being ultimately driven to the same outcomes. Contrast that to Call of Duty 2003 which took Half-Life's design paradigm and literally copied it. Gears of War 2006 was the same, only in third person, and even more constrained due to Unreal Engine 3 and the target hardware.
Lateralus said:
I just (briefly) made it to the surface after We've Got Hostiles. Holy moly I am having an absolute blast. Replaying old classics at 4K / 120Hz with G-Sync and OLED blacks is one of the simple pleasures in life. Black Mesa is an awesome piece of work and I'm sure will be how most will prefer to experience Half-Life going forward, but man you really have to appreciate what the folks at Valve were able to do 25 years ago.

It's really neat, too, playing it after watching the documentary and recalling things that they talked about during the development. One thing that Gabe and others had a great grasp of early on was the importance of tension, and they exhibited a mastery of it. Little things like hearing the beeps of a turret echoing down a hallway before you see it, knowing you're going to have to contend with it. And the headcrabs in the vents are perfectly placed to scare the crap out of you and chip away at your health. Then long sections of dark vent that make you feverishly scan ahead with the flashlight, only for there to be nothing but ambient noise. It's all sewn together like a handmade quilt to create tension and immersion.

Indeed, I do not fault it for any worse games that came after it. People were going to want a piece of the success that this game had, or to try to recreate or even outdo it, but few would be up to the task of producing anything that came close to the quality of it.

I have to appreciate this even more as we come to an end of what was in my mind a pretty lackluster year in gaming. Lots of big releases that either disappointed, or people moved on from quickly. There were some bright spots but even the ones I enjoyed pale against the memory I have of playing this game for the first time on a Pentium II 300Mhz w/Voodoo 2 SLI cards. :) I'm having more fun replaying it 25 years later than with a lot of newer games. It holds up amazingly well.
Click to expand...
Sound design and world interaction is part of the "making games better" statement I made, which unfortunately has been lost in the last decade. Developers don't give attention to those little details anymore, and is why most modern games feel empty and stale. Making the world feel alive in how it reacts to the player is part of the Valve magic that made Left 4 Dead the great game that it is.
 
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