Half-Life Fallout: A Call for Communication - Half-Life Fallout

suicide_mission, on 01 February 2012 - 07:05 PM, said:

Agree with what you said about the scripting...

Also there is the issue of us becoming a lot more jaded. For example back in 1998 simply the fact that there were so many friendly NPCs around me was impressive. The fact that I could get them to follow me around, and that they would make random comments and heal me or fight by my side- all that was a big deal at the time and made the game feel real.

Fast forward to 2004 and despite trying very hard the character interaction in HL2 does not feel organic compared to certain other games out at the time- specifically role playing games like Knights of the Old Republic. Maybe this is not any fault on Valve's part- perhaps it's just a genre limitation. But the bottom line is now that we have gotten used to more intimate character interaction via RPGs like Mass Effect it's not easy to be impressed with a script like Kliener's lab in HL2. It feels more like a watching a movie than playing a game where you are the protagonist. I think it could still work if they were able to create scripts that were truly compelling to sit through thanks to story revelations- but the in game story is not too gripping and the big questions are never tackled so that doesn't work either.

Brumisator, on 01 February 2012 - 05:12 PM, said:

I'm in, but you already knew that. ^^'

A few days ago I also started playing HL2 again, and it's just so great, and a beautifull game !!
Some screenshots:






And by accident I got lost and stradned somehow on my very old imageshack account, and found some old screenshots I took (must be like 8 years ago)
Geforce 3 @ 1024x768 VS HD5850 @ 1920x1080








Bonus picture (when Garrymod was new and free ):

they also added all the HDR stuff into HL2, so everything might look better than the first time you played it.

Shampoo, i'm guessing the geforce 3 struggled with Half Life 2?

DrMatta, on 01 February 2012 - 08:23 AM, said:

Every single first person shooter released in the past eight years.

Half-Life 2 > everything.

Sorry other developers but you're small time. Don't **** with Aria!

Crysis 2 4 lyf.

Crysis 2 is a reasonable excuse for genocide of the German people.

What was wrong with Crysis 2? I want more games like it and Far Cry 2 where you're placed in an open area with plenty of enemies and can approach it however you want. Rambo: The Game basically. Better than yet another title where you run around corridors triggering enemies with the exact same results every time.

Half-Life's cinematic nature has been run into the ground by most shooters this generation and there's not much else it has going for it that other games haven't already done to death. Valve has also changed so much since then that I can't see them making anything groundbreaking in terms of gameplay in a first person shooter. If anything it will be a collection of forced cutscenes and flashy events like modern shooters are.

lol, they can still siphon off digipen

El Inspector, on 02 February 2012 - 06:15 AM, said:

As far as first person shooter devs are concerned Valve are actually quite innovative. They were the first to do realistic physics simulation on a big scale in-game. And they released games based on manipulating portals. Not to mention the gravity gun.

Not directly related to the gameplay front but still worth mentioning is that they also tried (and failed) to pull off an episodic release model, and in TF2 they released a game with cartoonish art style.

I don't see any reason why they won't keep trying things. This is Valve and Half Life. Not Call of Duty. Valve can also easily afford (financially) to take a risk and fail. A privilege few devs have.

So what time will this be happening GMT? Around 7pm? I used a time zone converter but I'm unsure whether its PDT or EST.

It's PDT according to the poster, 6 PM GMT.

Rykane, on 02 February 2012 - 11:22 AM, said:

6 PM GMT as far as I can tell.

PDT = GMT - 7