We take them for granted in modern games. But some of the more dated elements of Half-Life are hard to miss upon revisiting Black Mesa. They are everywhere. The voice acting is quite uneven.
The AI is buggy. The same handful of character models are repeated ad nauseam. If we really want to scrutinize a landmark game an unfair number of years after its release, there is a lot of room for improvement in Half-Life. There are subtle nods to the camp of B-horror movies.
Half-Life was clearly a labor of love, but it never took itself fully seriously. It oozed personality and provoked curiosity at a time when first-person shooters mainly peddled inarticulate machismo. It was only after receiving countless accolades that Half-Life evolved into something that completely revolutionized the online gaming landscape. But who cares? At the time, IGN was right. The bread and butter of the game was so clearly the single-player experience.
Was Valve forced to tack on a trendy online game mode? Did it even care about providing an online multiplayer experience?
Valve also created a piece of level-editing software called Worldcraft later renamed Valve Hammer Editor , which the company used to design all its game environments.
Both the GoldSrc engine and the Worldcraft level editor were eventually released to the public, for free. Valve provided documentation and resources to anyone trying to understand their tools.
From then on, your job is to get him out of there alive. The game progresses not as a power fantasy, but a survival story. From here, you stagger through a series of sequences that work like disaster-movie scenes: pockets of survivors — gravely injured scientists, desperate security guards — drip-feed you information, drawing you further into the plot.
Meanwhile, the monsters scuttle about unseen: you hear them in the ducts and behind locked doors; you see the eviscerated bodies of your workmates. Half-Life wants you to know that other things are happening in the world. Black Mesa, with its sterile high-tech labs and futuristic living areas, is a theatre set: behind the stainless steel panels and flatscreen wall displays is an intestinal labyrinth of work tunnels, ceiling cavities and air ducts, patched with rust and grime and dripping in goo.
As you progress through the game, you travel deeper into these nightmarish no-go zones, like an urban explorer traversing the sewers beneath a glittering city. And although the team received positive feedback, they were not totally happy with the product. They did not feel that it would be able to released by Christmas of that year, and upon further inspection, decided that they needed to break apart everything they had done, take the pieces, and start over again.
On a post on Gamasutra, Ken Birdwell outlined what they felt about that original version, and the process by which the new version of the game was designed.
What they came to realize was that Half-life, as it was, was no better than a Quake Total Conversion. Basically Quake with different graphics. They knew that adding just a few more months to the development cycle would result in a game that was more polished, but not any better. The team designed a single level that had all the design elements and technology that they had created over the previous year for the initial version of the game. Once that exercise was complete, they moved on to the next version of the game, with a design led be a committee.
There was no lead game designer on Half-Life, or Director that many present day games have. Instead what they had they referred to as The Cabal. The Cabal was cross-disciplinary team team that would spend several hours a day, several days a week working out the high level details of level design, as well as scripted events. This team included three engineers, a level designer, a writer, and an animator. The main Cabal would have a rotating membership to ensure a cross-section of the company was represented, and to prevent burnout.
According to Birdwell, collaborative teams sprung up in other departments to solve smaller problems once the success of the Cabal became evident. After the first month, they had compiled a page design document, and appointed someone to manage it.
Play testing started in the third month of the re-do. Sierra handled pulling in players from the area and during each session, a member from the Cabal, the level designer, and occasionally an engineer would sit and silently observe the player and take notes. Ultimately there were over play-test sessions, with each session giving the team on average action items.
That is about 20, action items that were generated from the playtest sessions alone! The use of data in the design of the game was fascinating. According to Birdwell they began tracking every data point as players played through the game and graphed them. For example when they saw that a player would go through a level with too much health for too long, they made the determination that the level was too easy, or if there was too much time between encounters, too boring.
As they fine tuned the levels the collaborative process common for the level designers as well. Although each level had a lead level designer, the other level designers would ultimately make tweaks and edits as well. Birdwell mentions this worked particularly well because each of the designers had a particular strength they could bring to the table, whether that be enemy placement, or the geometry of the level.
At the risk of opening old wounds, this quote from Ken Birdwell made me chuckle the more I thought about it. All the AI was gone, and we gutted the levels. In reality, Half-Life got delayed because of Half-Life. All kidding aside, the development of the first Half-Life game can show just how easy it is to let games slide down the calendar.
With an initial expectation of Spring, , the game quickly found itself being pushed out the door finally around Thanksgiving for This port has been criticized, however, for not utilizing many of the features of the Source engine found in Half-Life 2 , as it still used textures and models from the original game.
Due to this, a third-party remake called Black Mesa was released on March 6, On June 10, , Valve announced through their Steam update news service an upcoming port of Half-Life Deathmatch: Source , the multiplayer portion of the original game, much in the same fashion as the earlier released Half-Life: Source.
No exact release date was given, simply the words "In the coming weeks Marines sent to cover up the incident. It introduced several new weapons most notably the M SAW LMG and a Barnacle grappling gun , new non-player characters, both friendly and hostile Otis Laurey the security guard and the Race X aliens, respectively and new, previously unseen areas of the facility.
The expansion is much shorter than Half-Life , having Twelve chapters to the original's nineteen. Half-Life: Opposing Force unlike most expansion packs for video games received critical acclaim, and an overwhelmingly positive response from fans.
Blue Shift returns the player to Half-Life' s storyline once more, this time as one of the facility's security guards. Originally developed as a bonus mission for the canceled Dreamcast version, Blue Shift came with an optional High Definition Pack that could update the look of Half-Life , Opposing Force , and the new Blue Shift content. In particular, the models' polygon count and texture resolutions were increased, and some changes were made to the in-game sounds, most notably the Shotgun.
Blue Shift had relatively little new content compared to Opposing Force : aside from a few models jacket-less scientists and security guards, Otis, and Dr. Rosenberg , all content was already present in the original Half-Life. While the critical reception was mixed, the reception has very much warmed to the game in recent years, praised for its atmosphere and details. Decay was another expansion by Gearbox, released only as an extra with the PlayStation 2 version of Half-Life.
The add-on featured co-operative gameplay in which two players could solve puzzles and fight alongside against the many foes in Black Mesa.
The critical reception was mostly very positive, praise went towards its effective portrayal in a co-op game. In , a pack titled the Half-Life: Platinum Collection was released, with these games included:. After its release in , Half-Life saw fervent support from independent game developers, due in no small part to support and encouragement from Valve Software.
Worldcraft , the level-design tool used during the game's development, was included with the game software. Printed materials accompanying the game indicated Worldcraft's eventual release as a retail product, but these plans never materialized. Valve also released a software development kit, enabling developers to modify the game and create mods. Both tools were significantly updated with the release of the version 1.
Many supporting tools including texture editors, model editors, and rival level editors like the multiple engine editor QuArK were either created or updated to work with Half-Life. Half-Life' s code has been released and is being used as a base for many multiplayer mods such as the immensely popular Counter-Strike. Some mods, such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat , that began life as the work of independent developers self-termed "modders" , later on received aid from Valve.
There was even a free team-based multiplayer mod called Underworld Bloodline created to promote the Sony Pictures film Underworld. Numerous single-player mods have also been created, such as USS Darkstar , a futuristic action-adventure on board a zoological research spaceship , The Xeno Project 1 and 2 —, a two-part mod starting in Xen and again including spaceships , Edge of Darkness , which features some unused Half-Life models , Half-Life: Absolute Redemption , which brings back Gordon Freeman for four additional episodes and another encounter with the G-Man , They Hunger —, a survival horror total conversion trilogy involving zombies , Poke , a follow-up to the original Half-Life story with improved graphics , and Xen-Warrior —, based on Half-Life: Chronicles , the player controls an Alien Grunt , similar to Point of View in which players take on the role of a Vortigaunt and Half Life: Zombie Edition , where the player plays as a Headcrab.
Some Half-Life modifications eventually landed on retail shelves. Counter-Strike was the most successful, unexpectedly becoming the biggest selling online game to date and having been released in five different editions: as a standalone product , as part of the Platinum Collection , Counter-Strike: Condition Zero , and the newest addition, Counter-Strike: Source , which runs on Half-Life 2 ' s Source engine. Team Fortress Classic has had a visual upgrade to the Source engine, becoming the stylized Team Fortress 2.
Gunman Chronicles , a futuristic Western movie-style total conversion with emphasis on its single-player mode was also released as a stand-alone product.
The sequel Half-Life 2 was merely a rumor until it was finally revealed at E3 in May , which ignited a firestorm of hype surrounding the game. The player again takes the role of Gordon Freeman , this time several years after the Black Mesa Incident in the dystopian City 17 , where he must fight as part of a rebellion against an oppressive alien regime.
After a series of controversies and delays, Half-Life 2 was released on November 16, Half-Life's soundtrack consists of tracks specially composed by Kelly Bailey , who was also responsible for the in-game sounds.
0コメント