Nice writeup. FWIW, I never saw Michael Abrash wear a tie. :)
We were very into 3D cards back then. We had a lot of ties to that part of the world. I had been doing video drivers for OS/2 and NT. I got to know Abrash from his writing on the VGA, 8514, and, of course, asm. At Valve, we hired a couple of great guys from 3dfx. I still have a 3dfx hat somewhere that I bust out on special occasions. The killer setup back then was hooking up two 3dfx cards (SLI). But I usually played on a standard card because I wanted/needed to see it run like most people would experience it.
We had a deal with one of the companies, maybe 3dfx, but I forget who, to include the first three levels of HL with their card. Even though the game wasn't anywhere near finished, we sent off a disk to the company with our first three finished levels so we could get paid. Somehow, it leaked. We were pissed at first, but then it took off. People loved it. It really gave us the confidence that we were on the right track. It was our first game. The validation was just what we needed.
This is how I was introduced to Half-Life - I got it with my GPU and played Day One.
Unfortunately I also don't recall which it was. I do recall I had a Voodoo, then moved to a TNT2 and then later a GeForce 2. The TNT2 came out well after Half-Life, so it must have been 3dfx at least.
I bought a 3dfx just to play Half Life, 3dfx because of that association between your game and their tech, figured it was the obvious choice, likewise so did most of my gamer mates.
Tried it when it was release, then bought it myself in 1999, after I finally had managed to purchase a new PC - can't remember if it was a Nvidia TNT2 or 3dfx Voodoo 3 card I bought with it. But it was the first time I could play the game without it being sluggish and looking like crap. We had bought a family PC 4 years earlier, which had cost a fortune - but by 1998/1999 it was woefully outdated. Also, a thought: Imagine purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years.
One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years. I also vividly remember downloading all the new iterations of counter-strike, which really took off - until settling on 1.6
On a side not, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well - having only been a teenager back then, and in 25 years I'll be this old man. Wonder if all the memories from LAN-parties etc. will be as fresh in 25 years, as they are now.
> On a side note, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well
I also remember it like it was yesterday when, after school on a hot summer's day, a friend showed me this "cool new mod" he recently downloaded for Half-Life. It was an early version of Counterstrike. It took him an entire night to download the mod, and it only ran on his machine with a 320x240 resolution. It looked like crap and was basically unplayable. 6 months and a hardware upgrade later, we all played it for hours each day, and often non-stop for 12 hours on LAN parties. I also remember that you could contact the internet provider (Telekom) by mail, and after a few weeks they would activate something called "Fast-Track" for your connection, which would drop the latency from around 110ms to only 35ms, a huge advantage for MP games... it really blows my mind that all of this was 25 years ago.
In the early 2000s, CS was arguably better known than the original HL. I had some friends who probably played CS for thousands of hours, but never even touched the original HL.
I was just reminiscing about this with a friend last night. We had tons of free time and games like Counter-Strike were the wild west of creativity. My fondest memory was a Spring afternoon in 2000 after school playing some janky fan made map whose name I don't remember and feeling so happy. Everyone was playing. We played every day. We went to a 300 person LAN party that summer. We formed a 5 man team and competed online.
It was so fun cobbling together a computer that could run it. Trying every trick to squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Trying to shave a few milliseconds off my dial up ping. Going to that one guy's house who had broadband internet.
It really felt like a golden age back then.
My friends and I planned our own mod and started working on it, but our ambition outstripped our ability. That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.
About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular, but seems very focused on competitive play. I wanted to experience that public lobby on a janky fan made map feel. I found a server running custom 'zombie' maps which scratched that itch for a few days. Then I got busy again and haven't touched it since.
CS2 community servers are nothing like the 1.6 or Source golden era. Those games are still going, but the playerbase has shrunk considerably.
I'm glad I got to experience it all (primarily in Source): gun game, deathmatch, RPG, surf, jailbreak, zombie mod and escape, iceskate, sliderace, hide'n'seek, trickz, xtreme climbing, multigames, deathrun, knifeball, HE wars, vehicle maps, bob, nipper maps, even hack vs hack, and the many many communities, each uniquely flavored and with their own story.
I totally feel that. The most fun I ever had gaming was back in my teens playing various different game modes in source. And yeah the communities really made it so special, to this day I'm good friends with some people that I initially met in CSS.
I can't help but feel Valve dropped the ball with cs:go and cs2. I mean, they did become incredibly popular but IMO there was potential for so much more if they would've supported custom game modes even just a little bit.
I think they may have been possible with Metamod: Source and SourceMod but now that it's on the Source 2 engine, server plugins are once again an unsupported hack.
> About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular
I played the "original" CS (at least a version that looked like 1.6) around 3 years ago, and was surprised how painless it was to install it on Linux using Steam. I was also surprised that it was still no problem to find a de_dust server with > 20 players.
> That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.
Yes. It was so easy back then to play around with game development, web development, or desktop development. Around 2002, I hosted a web site for months on my local desktop server, reachable via a DynDNS solution.
Sorry for getting nostalgic, but it was even easier in the mid-90ies. As a 9 year old, I created a Dyna Blaster clone using a Demo-Version of "Klik&Play" on Windows 3.11 [0]. You could develop quite advanced games by just dragging around sprites, animating them, listening to mouse and keyboard events and object collisions. You could even "compile" the game into a single portable .exe! It was dead simple, but it introduced me to the basic concepts of programming and animation, and I didn't even realize it. A little later, I was able to teach myself BASIC by just reading the DOS man pages. We didn't even have internet back then. I very clearly remember realizing that "if ... then ... else" statements and variables were exactly what was missing in my "Klik&Play" demo-version. In the demo, you had to simulate these concepts by triggering the spawn of a hidden moving object and listening for the collision with another object. The hidden objects encoded the game state. Basically, the developers tried to remove Turing-completeness from the demo version, but failed and forced kids like myself to restore it via wild tricks (I remember feeling very clever when I had the idea for this trick). I only realized 2 decades later how useful these experiences were for a career in computer science.
The first web site I ever made was for my CS clan. I hosted it on the Linux server in my university dorm room that also hosted our CS server. I don't remember what I did for DNS back then. I learned so much that I still use to this day.
I also think its neat, guessing based on your ISP, that you had such similar experiences at the same time half a world away from me (in the US).
I ran a server that was primarily rat surf maps with a Warcraft/RPG server mod for years back then. It was super fun and something that modern games just can't touch in terms of that kind of niche.
It's still tons of fun but definitely different now, and since they came out with counter-strike 2 a while ago, it's me being specced out on my old gaming computer all over again - as with you I'm way too busy as a working adult to get too deep into it, was fun to play a lot during the pandemic though.
The craziest innovation I seen is counter strike 1.6 in the browser, fully playable multiplayer. Not sure how safe letting that much execution happen in wasm environment truly is but was still pretty funny to see how far the game has come in terms of graphics. Basically a bunch of the same maps still even though a couple have always been way skewed to one side or the other.
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods.
Another game from that time that was also easy to mod was The Sims 1.
For a bit of context, EA/Maxis released modding tools BEFORE the game was released, to let players create custom content for the game (like walls and floors) before the game was even released!
And installing custom content was also easy, just drag and drop files in folders related to what you downloaded and that's it.
Imagine any game nowadays doing that? Most games nowadays don't supporting modding out of the box, but of course, there are exceptions, like Minecraft resource packs/data packs. I don't think Fortnite and Roblox fit the "modding a game" description because you aren't really modding a game, you are creating your own game inside of Fortnite/Roblox! Sometimes you don't want to play a new game inside of your game, you just want to add new mods to enhance your experience or to make it more fun. There isn't a "base game Roblox", and while there is a "base game Fortnite" (Battle Royale... or any of the other game modes like Fortnite Festival or LEGO Fortnite) Epic does not let you create mods for the Battle Royale game. You can create your own Battle Royale map, but you can't create a "the insert season here Battle Royale map & gameplay but with a twist!".
Of course, sadly EA/Maxis didn't release all of the modding tools they could (there isn't a official custom object making tool for example, or a official way of editing the behavior of custom objects) but they still released way more modding tools than what current games release.
I think that most modern games don't support that easiness of modding because the games themselves are complex, because as an example: The Sims 1 walls are like, just three sprites, so you can generate a wall easily with a bit of programming skill, the skin format is in plain text in a format similar to ".obj", so on and so forth.
Lately I've been trying to create my own modding tools for The Sims 1, and it is funny when you are reading a page talking about the technical aspects of the game file formats and the author writes "well this field is used for xyzabc because Don Hopkins said so".
That seems an easy fix until one gets nervous about working a month just to release a single -purchase game engine. That's a journey that you can take but you might at least consider a license.
The hype was so hot and fast around HL when it came out, that I remember playing it without a dedicated graphics card (I think I was running on a motherboard integrated gpu) in the lowest resolution possible because there was this feeling of "you have to try it".
I got by for years on a Pentium 75 and 8mb of RAM. The specs always said the game wouldn’t work, but it did. You could get away with this right up until PC gaming (finally) moved away from DOS. One big issue was the real mode DOS Plug n play drivers (dwcfgmgr.sys - burned into my brain) which occupied just enough of my 640k that most games would fail to start cause they couldn’t claim the whole lot.
I'm 100% certain your memory is incorrect. Radeon came after Rage in 2000 and was the first Ati 3D accelerator with hardware T&L. Your 1MB 2D only Ati card was most likely a Mach64 or original Rage 3d.
I just replaced my HP z800 from 2008 because it was holding it's own with the addition of a few ssd's and an RX580 GPU over the years. Went from 6c12t Xeon to 16c32t (R9950x) and 7900xt.
Performance just hasn't out paced people's needs in the last 15 years the way it used to...
Wait are you me? i shut down my z800 about a year ago (was my mainmachine for about 13 years) i buyd a second cpu for like 10$ after 5 years and upraded the ram to max, i think it was 46gb, also ssd's....and a rx580 which is still in use.
Now it's FreeBSD14.1-RELEASE with a AMD Ryzen9 7950x (no 3d) still my old RX580, 64GB 4800 ECC Ram, 2x pci4 2TB nvme one for windows one for FreeBSD (i plan to buy a pci5 later that year), and two HD's 6TB mirrored for backup's and archive-stuff (just accessible from FreeB).
>I gotta figure out what to do with the old machine now...
It think i will sell/gift it to someone, since i have a ML350p Gen8 server too...but to be honest it hurts a little bit, that was such a good warhorse.
BTW: I will probably buy a new GPU if pci5 card's are on the market and affordable and the driver is in FreeBSD...so let's say in a year or more ;)
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years.
Modding still exists. It’s just called “UGC” now. Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft have thriving and accessible options. GTA has an unbelieveable number of players playing role playing mods of it too.
It's not the same though, most FPS' games lock down their code and require you to use their servers. More or less murdering any chance of modding. For example, the same time I played halflife and all the mods (including this mod named counter strike), I played the shit out of battlefield 1942. It's modding community was insane! With total conversion mode that game was like 10 different games. And for a poor teen, that and half life were god sends for getting me into gaming
Traditional modding still exists, especially for PC RPGs, where the community is huge. Also UEFN is an extremely powerful tool that sits closer to modding Fortnite than UGC for Roblox, say.
The problem is that multiplayer games and any game with a server component - and the engines that make them - are specifically designed to have security against cheating and hacks. No-one wants to play against a modded game. That makes supporting mods, even solo mods, all the more difficult, and it’s harder to make the business case for doing so.
Au contraire. There are plenty of people who would like to play against a modded game. They just might not want to play against a game that's modded differently from their own.
Oh for sure yes. I meant that modding can make it trivially easy for someone to enable hacks and other things that can unbalance and ruin the experience for other players. Unhappy players leave, so there’s an arms race to eliminate cheats and hackers, and modding can be collateral damage.
>Traditional modding still exists, especially for PC RPGs
Yes, I've recently been playing Fallout: London, which is a total conversion mod for Fallout 4. It obviously changes the setting to post-apocalyptic London, but also adds new quests, monsters and things. And it's pretty good quality -- in fact the mod kept getting delayed because Bethesda saw the mod in progress and kept hiring the people working on it because they were so impressed.
There are games like Deep Rock Galactic that have really good support multiplayer for multiplayer mods; it tells you what you're getting into in the server browser, and IIRC even separates them into tiers (simple HUD mods you can use in any game without effecting anyone, big changes have to be run on a server that everyone agrees to).
It’s not the same but the environment isnt the same anymore.
There are lots of games that will let you mod the ever loving crap out of them. UEFN and Roblox are modding with distribution platforms. Cyberpunk has Bethesda level modding. Games like lethal company are existing in an indie space that was just unfathomable when I was playing those games.
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding.
I'm generally skeptical about the use cases for current-gen AI, but very hopeful that it can help us get back to this golden age of game Modding.
I think many people, like me, got lost in all the polygons and shaders soon after Half-Life 1. But if AI tools can make it easier to express Modern game outcomes, the way we could make a funky HL1 mod with the IDEs back then; it could be swing things back.
Which in turn led to an exploding mod scene, clans, hosting and
communities. Truly a world-changing game at a golden moment in game
history (beside Unreal). And yes, like a good story book a generation
have memories of escaping the crumbling Black Mesa facility chased by
alien horrors. Mission accomplished Valve.
Modding was amazing back then. I wasn’t a modder myself, but it felt like something new and crazy was happening every week. The excitement for every beta release of Counter-Strike. The buzz around newcomers like Action HL, The Specialists, and PVK. Experiments like Science & Industry that didn’t last long but were a fun romp nonetheless. Endless rounds of TFC and DoD. And there were always populated community servers for any mod you plucked fom Fileplanet.
> It was far from flawless, but it was really trying to push the boundaries of a young medium.
Great read, it made me realize how far we've come. Video games as an art are really in an interesting spot right now - big budget projects all end up being bland, buggy, cookie cutter rehashes of the same couple templates.
Companies that once represented the pinnacle of creativity and what could be achieved with high budgets - Blizzard, Bethesda, Ubisoft, etc - are now the laughing stock of gamers. Not that it matters when the bulk of gamers are still putting dozens of hours and plenty of microtransaction dollars into decade old games like Fortnite/Minecraft/GTA every week.
What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression? What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?
Thankfully, there are a bunch of indie developers that still release fresh experiences - but they too kind of end up falling into the same tropes (if you like 2D roguelike/platformer/puzzler there's plenty of choice, otherwise...).
Not too unlike the state of the film industry. It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Elden Ring and its DLC, probably. The Japanese games industry is doing far better than their western counterparts, there have been huge headlines that in 2024's Game Awards, 4 of 5 games nominated for Game of the Year came from Asia (3 Japan, 1 China). The last game (Balatro) was an indie game developed by one person.
Not a single nominee was from a major western company like Ubisoft, EA, etc. They may be financially successful now, but the games industry is imploding. This is what happens when you treat developers poorly and chase greedy trends while expecting consumers to put up with it. Like you said, most AAA games releasing these days are either dead on arrival or completely unnotable and miss expectations.
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Kingdom come deliverance, baldirs gate are two massive titles in the last 12 months. God of war, spiderman, Indiana jones are other titles that are just stand alone artistic experiences, again in the last little while.
> What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?
I think it’s funny you mention that because the games you sniped at (Fortnite Minecraft GTa) were seismic shifts in gaming - in the last few years - Fortnite wrote the book on live service games IMO. But, when they’re “popular” suddenly they’re not cool anymore.
> It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.
What do you want? IMO the industry is in an ok place - aside from the mass layoffs over the last 24 months. But for consumers there’s so much choice - there’s massive hundred million dollar budget tiles with new content every year (Ubisoft/CoD/ Sony/microsoft doing these) there’s “smaller” budget games in the 50-80millon mark that are achieving critical success on PC and Console, there’s AA-budget games in the 15-30 million mark coming out every month that are hits and misses, there’s a thriving indie scene for every genre you could possibly imagine, and many you can’t (e.g. trombone champ).
There’s options at every level, dozens of games coming out every year - more than any single person could ever play.
disclaimer: I’ve worked on one of the titles you’re talking about here, but don’t anymore. Opinion is mine, not theirs.
In my experience working there - it comes and goes in waves. Layoffs happen, people leave and start their own studios. We saw consolidation under publishers in the 90’s and people laud it as one of the best periods of games.
I do think we lost our way a little from around about 2018-2022 where we had these absolutely gargantuan flops like Concord that were a symptom of many things, but I really really believe we’re in another golden age right now.
I haven't played many different games over the last few years, but both Half-Life: Alyx and Zelda: Breath of the Wild left strong impressions. Both games have a rare sense of place that's hard to replicate in other mediums—the same thing that stood out for me after the first time I played Half-Life 2. These games feel less like a movie I've seen or a story I've read and more like somewhere I've been.
This isn't unique to video games—I've had the same feeling from, say, 2666 or Stalker—but video games seem especially well-suited to do this as a medium.
For one, id software is still making great big budget single player experience, see Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and the soon-to-be-released Doom the dark ages.
I'm playing through that now. Just finished the main question, and doing Hearts of Stone. Probably the best single-player game I've played. Maybe it's the "next-gen-update", but the graphics are still great.
CP2077's not American but it largely came out of the usual mould of big-budget, big-studio game software, especially after CD Projekt Red ended up abandoning promises to do certain things differently.
Spoilers: nothing short of a complete story rewrite could salvage what Cyberpunk 2077 ended up being. It's less of a No Mans Sky redemption story and more of a Duke Nukem Forever one.
I haven't played it, but I got the impression it didn't fizzle out so much as that it simply had one single player campaign and no reason to keep playing once it's finished, and that many people seem to have forgotten games with a finite nr of playing hours like that exist because of the roguelikes, hero shooters, MMORPGs, Minecraft-likes, etc that keep you hooked for as long as possible.
Very true, there is still a loyal following of new game plus players, including myself, holding down the fort but having a linear single player campaign was refreshing.
I have my opinions on the execution quality (or range of execution quality) of the game itself but it still served as my favorite “AAA/AA” major release of 2024.
I don't think it counts as big budget, but I've recently gotten into Last Train Home and it's a fantastic and unique premise (with gameplay that's a mix of Company of Heros + XCOM + This War Of Mine).
Don't get me wrong, I love Talos Principle, but I did not feel a strong connection to the world of #2 vs #1. The sequel levels just seemed like, "Here is some sexy stuff the art team designed." No real connection or unifying theme. Super pretty, but that is true of any number of AAA games these days with big action set pieces.
At least in one, it felt a bit more cohesive in that you could imagine that canned video game assets had been corrupted and copy-pasted into new configurations.
That checks out; I think I should not have included it as an example, given that context. Maybe it instead reinforces the point that we rely on smaller companies for the gems.
I recently got to play Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Gameplay is virtually the same as the previous entry in the series, but the story is interesting and entertaining.
GTA5 had a super big budget yet received very good feedback from gamers and critics alike, and is still played to this day. So not sure you can just discard big budgets as a whole.
And then Star Citizen is quite innovative in many regards and has virtually unlimited budget, and would not exist in the first place without a long runway
> Video games as an art are really in an interesting spot right now - big budget projects all end up being bland, buggy, cookie cutter rehashes of the same couple templates.
hardly. I bet GTA6 will be a major success just like GTA5 was at the time, which will again counter the argument that big budget is killing the creativity in games. And I see no counter against Star Citizen yet
I haven’t played V or online but after III/Vice/San Andreas, GTA is the last game I’d use to argue for creativity in the gaming industry. It’s just the only game series in the “run over streetwalkers in a stolen car” genre, which is still a profitable niche apparently.
(But I don’t play many video games these days so what do I know)
What do you think HackerNews is for? And playing the franchise for over a decade isn’t “wholly unfamiliar.” Why are you using language you’re apparently quite wholly unfamiliar with?
GTA5 was criticized for dumbing down the driving and other mechanics, and generally being way more goofy and casual than 4 and even San Andreas & Vice City
I was knee-deep working as a technical game designer + engine programmer on Soldier of Fortune when Half-Life came out. I can't put into words the impression that the opening that game left on me; I still remember very distinctly experiencing the tram ride, just being utterly entranced, and then being deeply irritated when an artist walked over to my cubicle, saw the game, and jokily asked what was going on, pulling me out of the experience. For me, it was one of those singular experiences you only have a very, very rarely in gaming.
It's funny, though - I would say in retrospect that Half-Life had the typical vexed impact of a truly revolutionary game made by a truly revolutionary team. In terms of design, the Half-Life team was asking and exploring a hundred different interesting questions about first person gaming and design, very close to the transition from 2d to 3d. And their influence, a few years later, often reduced down to a small handful of big ideas for later games influenced by them. After Half-Life, because of the impact of their scripted sequences, FPS games shifted to much more linear level designs to support that kind of roller coaster experience (despite many of Half-Life's levels actually harkening back to older, less linear FPS design). The role of Barneys and other AI character also really marked the shift to AI buddies being a focus in shooters. And the aesthetic experience of the aggressive AI from the marines as enemies also cast a long shadow, too, highlighting the idea of enemy AI being a priority in single player FPS games.
Certainly, those were the biggest features of Half-Life that impacted our design in Soldier of Fortune, which did go on to shift to much more linear levels, much more focus on scripted events, and would have resulted in much more emphasis on AI buddies too if I hadn't really put my foot down as a game programmer (and in my defense, if you go back to FPS games from that era, poorly implemented AI buddies are often, by a wide margin, the most frustrating aspect of that era of games, along with forced poorly done stealth missions or poorly implemented drivable vehicles - the fact that Barneys were non-essential is why they worked well in the original Half-Life). You can see this shadow pretty clearly if you compare Half-Life to, afterwards, the single player aspects of Call of Duty and Halo. Both are series that, in their single player form, are a lot more focused and a lot less varied than Half-Life was, but they clearly emphasize those aspects of Half-Life I just mentioned. And in practice, those were the single player FPS games that were in practice actually copied for quite a while.
Thank you for soldier of fortune. It was a pioneer in its own way with how brutal the enemy destruction was. I loved it. Incredible game that is up there with DOOM, Half Life and Halo for me.
Hey, thanks! I ran myself ragged on that project, so that's nice to hear. And yeah, I think we really did nail a particularly kind of visceral experience.
I literally got the t-shirt (came with the game), and later became a particle physicist, working at CERN, we received a crowbar for the initial startup of the LHC.
> Newell and Harrington had long enjoyed playing games. Now, it seemed, there were huge piles of money to be earned from making them.
The gaming market today is completely different, very competetive, very saturated, ranging from huge stakes at the top end, to an enormous number of indie studios and individuals toward the other end that are trying to make ends meet.
Yet, I've been seriously thinking for a while to start-up a game studio. The hope being that it would be one of these crazy ideas that everybody recommends against ("it can't be done") until you actually do it and prove them wrong.
Ideally, I would like to start the studio as a loose group of like-minded people that have time for developing a game solely a hobby, and if that pans out, transition it into a business. Not AAA, of course, but with the definite goal of making the best game that such a setup could realisitically produce.
The thing is, with today's tech, you can get started with very little capital if you begin doing this as a hobby.
I sorta want to do this, but developing completely open source games.
Maybe even developing my own game engine.
Of course all this costs a lot of money with no clear way to make it back. If I had to come up with a monetization model, I would come up with an ad network similar to Unity.
If Unity needs 2 billion in revenue to barely keep going, I reckon a more focused engine could be funded for 20 million a year.
It's a moot point since I'll never have that much money or be able to raise a VC round.
But HN, let's dream. Imagine a .net or JavaScript engine that's web first. With mobile and PC support coming later( PC can just run a local server). The engine developers dog food their own engine, making very high quality examples for the community.
Keep the engine focused on small lightweight games.
Unity's ultimate problem is they keep trying to do literally everything.
I wouldn't do that. I'd say straight up this engine isn't going to do AAA gaming. It's not going to scale. I'm not supporting 800 design patterns.
Don't write your own engine, unless you want to do that just for fun. But if you actually want to make a game, use one of the exiting engines.
If you want to develop a game engine as a product to make money of, it's probably better to forget that idea. There are enough very sophisticated engines out there, so why would any third-party developer take the risk and use yours instead? I mean, even the big open source engines that already exist today have trouble gaining traction.
Which license would be best to get out of the hell of "30% to the distribution store" "25% to UDK" so 50% of your revenue is skimmed off the top before you see a dime.
I don't have the money to do this anyway, it's a moot point.
But the idea is you build the engine, and make better tools for advertising hooked into your own commercial service. That's by and large how Unity makes money.
I want to actually make quality open source games, and I want to use one easy language, like C# from the engine to the scripting.
IMO, that's not a feature that would set your engine apart enough from the existing ones. And if it were, the big ones could add that feature as well.
Thousand of man hours have gone into the development of the big commercial engines. You'd have to match that and then add your new feature on top in order to become a serious competitor.
What's the advantage of making your game open source? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a big free software fan but what do you think will come out of that?
The indie market is a bloody red sea right now. But as long as you don't care about money or can expense your hardware and internet costs, I think it's good enough.
> Not AAA, of course, but with the definite goal of making the best game that such a setup could realisitically produce.
have a read up on Savage Game Design and the SOG Prairie Fire CDLC for Arma 3.
hands down, the best DLC ever created for Arma3. a good chunk of the original team were Unsung modders. they went down the road of CDLC, now they’re working on their own standalone game and a bunch of other stuff (look through Rob/Eggbeast’s posts on the SOG PF discord for more info).
Arma is actually a great way to hack something together for basically nothing. buy Arma, start scripting sqf to build a gamemode, create new assets in blender and stick ‘em in a mod, host a server. though the engine has lots of weird bugs/footguns, your costs are basically Arma+devtime+servers.
disclaimer: i’m a maintainer on the Mike Force multiplayer gamemode they released. do it in my spare time for kicks (although been slacking recently).
server sync? do you mean remoteExec? that did take me a minute to get my head round. a lot of headaches the first time i needed to JIP without understanding i needed to JIP.
scheduled/unscheduled environment is another fun one.
The problem is - there are literally thousands of indie devs that don't make the cut. The days of Mojang or Fez are long over, the novelty of the indie dev has worn off, unfortunately.
Yeah, I mean, for every indie dev who's successful enough to make a career out of it, there'll be countless others who try and fail. But it's still technically possible to break through, in the sense that you don't need a huge team or tons of resources to make a hit game. (And having a huge team and tons of resources isn't a guarantee of success, either :P)
True. There is always the chance that you get lucky - case in point, Minecraft. If you read the old devlogs when Notch first started to develop the game, it's really interesting how quickly it started to generate genuine interest, if only among other indie game devs at first who frequented the same forum. But that's a one in a million strike of luck - hitting on a fresh idea and being able to implement it in a way that appeals to a sufficent market.
Like you say, just from raw statistics, if you're an indie dev, most likely you're going to fail.
Also, if you go back in time, Minecraft wasn't even the only "Lego/block building game" of the era. Blockland is 7 years earlier.
The sad dirty secret is that wild success depends on so many factors out of your control that the best you can do for is aim for mild success and hope lightning strikes (while avoiding as many things that could ground out lightning, I guess).
In a way, it's the difference between a lifestyle business and a startup.
Yeah, similarly, there's quite a few established games/genres just waiting to be disrupted because of the incumbents losing their ways and their charm. The most obvious, blatant example is Minecraft - a game where you can survive, thrive, build anything and mod it to your hearts' desire. That's not true about it anymore - but any game which would fulfill this would probably go big.
It's one of those things where someone's going to eventually do it. As they say, "watch this space".
One of the saddest things in my gamer resume is that I was never able to get into Half-Life. I can absolutely see what everybody likes in the game - both technically and in terms of gameplay. But I was never into its uneven pace when compared to Doom, not even back in the day. I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure, what the article refers to as "friction".
The Orange Box console versions also suffered from a non-adjustable field of view that made me feel sick after a few minutes of playing.
> I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure
I think I remember reading an interview with the dev team where they explained that playing action for too long was boring, as well as solving puzzles, so they consciously designed the game with interleaved phases of action/puzzle. Your recompense for solving a puzzle is action, and your recompense for killing all the bad guys is a relaxing puzzle.
It's funny you didn't liked that, because for me it was the complete opposite. I like pure action shooters, and I like pure puzzle adventure games, but I really loved Half-Life and I didn't know why until I read that explanation.
It’s a long time ago now so my recollection is likely very flawed, but with HL I didn’t like the feeling of a created path that must be followed, irrespective how of the interleaving of different aspects. There are lots of modern games like this too - which on the face of it are relatively open-world, but underneath the apparent freedom there’s a strict path to find and follow for success. (I’d definitely include one of the modern Doom games —I forget which it was I tried— in this category, - it was so linear that it felt but one step removed from the old-fashioned shooters where you’re literally on a conveyor belt and shoot whatever appears.)
In the original Doom, in contrast, the only requirement was to make it to the end of the level, figuring out the map and puzzles along the way. Anything else (did you chase 100% kill and 100% secrets?) was optional. I guess it just felt more… honest?
I did not mind this linearity in Half-Life, because the story was engaging. You wanted to know what happened next. And I found the enemies did had some advanced "AI" for that time; like the first time the commandos came was a big moment. They were nothing like the enemies you had seen in other games.
I played through the single player, but like you I think I preferred doom.
That said, half-life mods were imo the golden age of gaming. Vampire slayer let you scare the shit out of your friends at 3am in a LAN. Day of defeat and firearms were the cod and mw of the day. Natural Selection crushed it in terms of fps/RTS hybrid, teamplay and overall quality and polish. Science & industry? Pirates Vikings & knights? Tfc? Several attempts at matrix mods & the opera. So much amazing diversity - it's such a shame that CS (the most banal, vanilla, milquetoast game ever) got all the mindshare. Even when CS ventured into making things more interesting/diverse (hostage rescue, shield, etc.) those things seem to have died off back to the 'standard' game mode (80% of players dead and spectating while "the bomb has been planted" sound effect plays).
The variety sometimes meant you only played your favorite mod a few times at the LAN parties. Because people had so many other things to play as the 90s and early aughts progressed.
AHL was great, but The Specialists was GOAT. Never felt more like a badass after disarming an opponent, hitting slow motion, and chucking a katana at their head while diving.
I deeply miss Science and Industry. Half life is still being modded these days just isn't as popular. Jollywangcore features some of the single player mods
I disagree, the CS betas were great. I miss the as_ maps the most — sneaking away to victory as the VIP with all my teammates dead and seconds left on the clock.
At that time in 1998 I mostly played Q1/Q2 online and contemporaries wise I preferred Unreal and SiN over HL's single player experience. Also Unreal's graphics were just truly next level on the Voodoo2 vs anything else. HL DM at LAN parties was surprisingly good and a bit overlooked though; the beginning of the game until the dimensional rift was definitely fun. What stood out the most to me was the soldier AI actually. I always felt the series was a bit hyped but I've come around as I returned to the games on my Steam Deck OLED last fall. In retrospect; clearly classics and the high praises were well earned after all. SDOLED apart from actual CRT setup is maybe the perfect way to experience it today IMO.
Of course DOOM is its own thing completely; a timeless distillation of the 80s - the arcade, Super Mario and D&D all astonishingly abstracted into an unreasonably blissful bleeding-edge hellscape; 93 till infinity.
SiN did have more character and tried some innovations of its own, but the gameplay needed a bit more polish. Bullets felt so slow you could run past them. JK/DF2 had this problem too.
Wonderfully written article, but especially delighted to see extensive mention of DF2: Jedi Knight. This game absolutely dominated mine and friends free time for multiple years, both single player and multiplayer. Up there as one of my favourite of all time, certainly most played.
Lucasarts absolutely ruled on the story based games genre merges. See of course all the point and clicks such as Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, but also of course XWing and Tie Fighter.
The same author has full articles on Jedi Knight [1] and X-Wing/TIE Fighter. [2]. If you go through his archives [3], he's also written a lot about LucasArts' adventure games; I think the first posts that talk about them are the three "A New Force in Games" posts.
Probably also because graphics nowadays are "good enough". I would rather have a new game with current-gen graphics and awesome story/physics/mechanics/world, than a game with shitty gameplay but slightly better textures.
I got my start in the tech industry thanks to Half-Life - or more specifically thanks to the Half-Life mod Team Fortress Classic.
I built an early fan news site for that game (effectively a blog before I knew they were called blogs) which got me a job with an early online gaming company ~1999 where I got paid to learn how web development works.
Man, TFC was the greatest. I’m surprised there aren’t more threads mentioning it here. Got overshadowed by Counter-Strike of course (also great) but TFC was the “prototype mod” released by Valve themselves as an example of what could be done with the HL SDK and it was a great game in its own right. I spent many hours perfecting rocket jumps and timing those grenade throws to wipe out unsuspecting enemies. 2fort ftw.
Oh those screenshots. Faded memories resurrect... It was the year 2000, our college dorm room. Friend's PC which was completely naked, fan pointed at it, in the summer heat of western-central India. Half-Life running at less than half the recommended FPS. Yet we played. And yet the chills ran down the spine.
To add to the nostalgia train. My friend Chris had it installed on his computer (my family computer was far too old to run it). F5 quick save had been a godsend in that game for all the surprise traps (which the article calls out). Anyways, he accidentally F5'd falling into a pit. His only save IIRC, which meant he had to restart the game.
A bummer, but made for a good story and fond memories
I feel like the “no cutscenes” thing is overplayed. I’m not saying it wasn’t huge, but there was a lot more to HL’s storytelling than just the “animatronics on a fairground ride” stuff. They could have done that without the constantly evolving gameplay that kept pace with the story. Who can forget playing the soldiers against the aliens, working your way through a ridiculous set of traps, calling down a satellite strike against something otherwise unlikeable, and my personal favourite: the moment you get an RPG and then hear the sound of that damn helicopter.
The observation that Doom was on more PCs than Windows was very astute. Doom was everywhere at the time - it was not uncommon to find the shareware on computers inside many typical office jobs
The shareware version of DooM was more of a complete game than many boxed games at the time. It’s no wonder it spread so far - especially because it was also an amazing hardware demo.
Half-Life and subsequently Counter-Strike changed my life. I was addicted, and it captured me in a way hard to explain for about 3-4 years. The gameplay, competitive drive, the simplistic sprites and world building. It touched all sensory inputs in a way that games prior hadn't. It's the only video game, or digital media for that matter, that makes me feel nostalgic.
There's still a lot of value in playing the original, but what the Black Mesa team achieved with what is effectively a fan project is incredible. And in a world where Take Two goes after people doing cool stuff with 20 year old GTA games, it's great that it got the official blessing from Valve.
Just a quick bullet point list of differences from the top of my head:
- Half Life has much faster run and gun gameplay (stemming from it's quake roots no doubt), while in Black Mesa it's much slower paced
- The AI in the game is completely different, Black Mesa's soldiers feel way more aggressive, again encouraging a slower pace of play compared to the original
- Lots of levels have small changes - some are cool, others kinda feel like they're just different for the sake of being different
- Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo
Black Mesa is a great game, one thing I have nothing but praise for is it's presentation - it's really nice to look at and they did a bang up job with the graphics and animations. But which is better is a matter of opinion, and personally I much prefer how HL1 actually feels to play.
A couple to add, with my own biases included because I love Black Mesa
- Joel Nielsen's great sound track / sound design work in Black Mesa ... I believe he admitted in an interview that some of the "squelching" sounds are recorded by slapping someone's arse O_o
- The reworked Gonarch fight is, hands down, one of the most entertaining and intense boss fights for me in recent memory. It's way better than the original for sure, which I remember just being frustrating (lack of ammo).
> Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo
I see both takes. Like, in the original game I actually liked Xen (except Gonarch). It felt otherwordly and empty, as if one of the reasons for earth being invaded was because there was nothing left. But BM Xen is literally another world. I prefer BM Xen, but I did enjoy the original at the time.
For a deeper look into Black Mesa / Half-Life and some of the changes, Soup Emporium did a great video here, where he only stole some of the points he raises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d8KAq78gco
Other people have already given great answers: it plays faster, the levels are different, etc.
But to me the main problem of "remake replaces the original" approach is that it's a a very "content-consuming"-way to look at media. Videogames are art in their own way, old games can still be enjoyed for what they are and for what they were - same thing with movies. Silent Hill 2 (2024) doesn't replace the original Silent Hill 2. RoboCop (2014) doesn't make RoboCop (1987) obsolete.
That's my take on re_makes_, at least. With re_masters_ I'd be much more willing to recommend them over the originals (although the preservationist in me would still like the originals to be available in some way)
The game mechanics and how the story is told is worth experiencing by itself in it’s original form before seeing the modern interpretation in Black Mesa
Overall I think Xen was much better in Black Mesa than HL1, but why they felt the need to make it so long is a mystery to me. Half to two-thirds of the play time could have been cut and it would have only improved things.
It is so long, and I did not enjoy my time there. "Alright, here is the third or fourth energy door unlocking puzzle to slog through". It was so much slower paced you lose the thread from the human world of what you are even doing anymore.
Just finished playing through HL1 and HL2 again.. as I do every 3-5 years. Maybe it's all nostalgia at this point but I just love being in that universe. The familiar sounds of a crowbar on metal, a sliding door etc. I was never very good at the relentless keyboard gymnastics required for other FPSs so I fell in love with this game that had puzzles and varied pacing and felt like a movie.
Two major contributions that I think Half-Life did to the gaming industry:
1. Shew that FPS games can be more than pure shooters and still succeeded;
2. First time that an official, easy to use level editor (Worldcraft) was included in the CD of a major hit FPS. Doom and Quake definitely started the modding scene but arguably Half-Life made it more popular.
> And then there are an awful lot of jumping puzzles, shoehorned into a game engine that has way more slop in it than is ideal for such things.
I was taken aback by this comment. The original Half Life engine has super tight and responsive movement, to the point where the average "tryhard" in a server would be executing all kinds of movement tricks that require frame-perfect inputs or very close to it. Watch some speedruns or HL:DS games and you can easily find examples of gameplay involving super precise movement. In CS there was a huge scene of movement based maps like surf_, bh_, and deathrun_.
Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.
Super tight and responsive movement wouldn't necessarily mean jumping puzzles make sense in a 90s single player FPS. Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.
My memory is that it wasn't the controls but the sizes of the spaces you had to jump to and the clarity of where they were so you could adequately position yourself that were the issue. The latter of which is probably more down to texture usage than the engine itself.
Turok on the n64 had way more instances of jumping puzzles while controlling like a boat and having a nauseating FOV by even today's console standards. Yet the game was praised and well liked back in the day. Half-Life on a 90s PC in comparison is a much better playing game.
All that said, I still enjoy both. Maybe I've got enough muscle memory to plow trough the BS and enjoy the level design and challenge, specially regarding Turok on original hardware lol. Meanwhile people who didn't grow up with those games are off put whenever a hard jumping puzzle appears or the lack of direction gets them stuck.
> Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.
Fair, my point is more that in order for it to be possible for mere 12 year old mortals to learn to casually execute these tricks, the game has to have predictable, responsive and reproducible movement. In other words, the opposite of slop.
I suppose it's possible that they're viewing those factors as being inherent in the original Quake engine rather than something Valve should be credited for and relying on them in their fork so heavily when it didn't suit the overall game was a bad mishmash.
It's more likely they're just conflating how ugly a lot of those later levels are with the engine.
My favorite pasttime in HL/CS back in the day was bhopping and kz_. To some degree I think it has too responsive movement. I recently went back to play HL and I fell down so many crates due to the instant movement, having been used to some inertia in games since.
I remember never quite getting into Counter-Strike: Source because of the difference in inertia. I had friends who were masters of movement there so I know it wasn't a sloppy game, but my muscle memory from 1.6 just made it feel... uncanny :)
Well it was responsive but it wasn't physically accurate at all, which makes it non-intuitive. The whole reason side-games like KZ and surf could exist was due to the bad physics. I competed in local IRC KZ tourneys and also surfed a lot in 1.6. The fact that you gained speed by moving left and right repeatedly doesn't make any intuitive sense. The surf scene was also heavily infected with frame-rate tricks (hotkeys to increase fps-limit in the air, and then lowering it on the ramps) since you floated more in the air the higher your FPS was. In the beginning you needed to have a PC that could support 250+ FPS to be a high-end surfer. This was fixed later with server-set fps limits etc. though.
It created an entire universe of movement based mini-games that I treasured more than the base-game, but it was mostly based on unintuitive physics and engine bugs.
I do agree that the modern game's "inertia" and slow heavy movement feels bad though. Last modern game that I remember had really fast and rapid movement was The Talos Principle.
> Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.
I distinctly remember a noticeable delay between moving the mouse and the view turning, even when the frame rate was high. I think the fix was switching from DirectX to OpenGL.
I liked Xen when I played it. I thought the boss fights were terrible, but I think most FPS boss fights are terrible. The other complaint is that the healing pools were too slow. The navigation and obscure puzzles were great, though. They scratched an exploration itch I didn't know I had.
I remember buying a Riva TNT to play Half-Life better. Those were fun times! Then there was Counter Strike, many hundreds of hours were spent playing that too.
I only ever played Half-Life on a friend’s PC, but it still made a big impression. Especially the start, how you arrive at this massive research facility and get to just walk around before things really kick-off. Part of the appeal also in the Hitman games, I think.
I remember playing Deus Ex on our iMac which was barely powerful enough to run it. Severe slow down during intense moments, and some major lighting problems. And yet, it remains probably my fondest gaming experience. Something about the way game worlds can capture your imagination when you’re young.
> how many computers were currently running Microsoft Windows in the United States. The number of 20 million that he got back was impressive. Yet he was shocked to learn that Windows wasn’t the most popular single piece of software to be found on American personal computers; that was rather a game called DOOM. Newell and Harrington had long enjoyed playing games. Now, it seemed, there were huge piles of money to be earned from making them.
Later on they also found out that introducing gambling to kids is indeed a much better business than just selling games. Going on for many years without anyone cracking down, and doing workarounds when governments try to make it illegal.
I'm reminded of my art professor whose friend worked designing lottery scratch offs, and found it unfulfilling yet well paid. While my professor struggled teaching at a B-tier state university and contracting for prestigious brands.
Around the same time I gave up my dream of making videogames because pay and hours were terrible, and I had no prospects in the Midwest.
This was the game that brought me into counter-strike and in my opinion still one of the best stories there is. Well done, especially when you think about how limited their possibilities were in the days back then.
this balancing act between scripted story and open gameplay with "conscious" AI defense is so hard to pull off. In the scripted entertainment league Half-Life rules I think. Crysis had the tech to do the real thing and failed - too much cinema and a bad story. But the realism, the mechanics of movement and physics - it was all there in god tier quality.
there were other brilliant ideas bridging nascent technology for the sake of gameplay, like surround sound to locate some fast (nearly impossible to see coming) enemies. It really was perfectly executed.
Great early examples of simulated acoustic spaces matching geometry,
like delay networks for metallic ducting in the crawl spaces. And
notable firsts in sound management - before there were really "sound
engines".
> Mark Laidlaw, the sometime science-fiction novelist who wrote the script, makes no bones about the limits to his ambitions for it. “You don’t have to write the whole story,” he says. “Because it’s a conspiracy plot, everybody knows more about it than you do. So you don’t have to answer those questions. Just keep raising questions.”
That's an amazingly humble insight. It's so simple, so true, and so totally not common knowledge.
I wonder if he secretly enjoys sharing it as a "say what's wrong about The Matrix sequels without mentioning The Matrix at all"
What was really revolutionary, IMO, about Half-Life was how moddable it was, and how Valve supported the modding community and often acquihired good modders.
Oh, and when they purchased the Counter-Strike IP, and started selling it shrinkwrapped, if you owned Half-Life, you just kept using the mod as you already were
In these modern times, I suspect that would be monetised somehow now. Upgrade to a premium user to get golden lootboxes, likely.
But yeah, I knew people who bought Half-Life just to play CS when it was early beta.
Likewise, less famous, but still being played today, Day of Defeat - I was hooked as the experience of "Yeah the rifles can kill you in one shot, and grenades will kill you, it's not CS dude. Oh and press B if that icon comes up, it means you're bleeding"
(Still unsure how I feel about them taking bleeding out.)
I was completely blown away when I realized that the opening cinematic was the actual game engine. First time I'd ever seen it and the scenes cleverly foreshadowed what was coming.
One of the unfortunate fallouts of Half-life was Quake 3 arena, which could be viewed as it's exact opposite. I am convinced that after half life people just couldn't appreciate the opposite - just shooting, without any story. And it didn't create the deserved following.
Instead we had almost 15 years of Spunkgargleweewee-s as defined by Zero Punctuation.
> John Carmack famously said: “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”
I feel like these days many games, especially expensive ones, went with completely opposite take. That gameplay is something that's supposed to be there but not important. With terrible results.
Great article on the single player aspect of the game and absolutely accurate about how exceptional it was - and still is - in the canon of modern gaming.
What really gave Half-Life its legs was the multiplayer component. It came in just as broadband internet was appearing in households across the United States and Canada. The ability to host servers and coordinate through ICQ and message boards created a one-of-a-kind community.
I know because I lived it.
The [R]age Board for the Elites. The CLQ. Adrenaline Gamer and Counter Strike.
Half-Life was incredible and still has an online presence of note - mostly in developing countries. Their hardware matches the lift to run at decent FPS and join games. Now and then I still hop on a server through Steam.
The di clan video - digital immortality - can do more to highlight “why” HLDM and its physics and weapons were such a game changer, even compared to Q3 and UT at the time. There is nothing like using the long jump and tau cannon to literally fly around maps. Other games have tried, but I’ve never gotten the same high as with HL.
Mostly I miss the community, as juvenile and crass as it was. Like the NFL, it was a young man’s game. Most of us were under 25 with rare exceptions. I’ll never forget when Neo Maximus Babson went missing.
This article bring back a lot of memories and than you for sharing… -p$ychos!s- out (LMS, CML, syn, di)
Nice writeup. FWIW, I never saw Michael Abrash wear a tie. :)
We were very into 3D cards back then. We had a lot of ties to that part of the world. I had been doing video drivers for OS/2 and NT. I got to know Abrash from his writing on the VGA, 8514, and, of course, asm. At Valve, we hired a couple of great guys from 3dfx. I still have a 3dfx hat somewhere that I bust out on special occasions. The killer setup back then was hooking up two 3dfx cards (SLI). But I usually played on a standard card because I wanted/needed to see it run like most people would experience it.
We had a deal with one of the companies, maybe 3dfx, but I forget who, to include the first three levels of HL with their card. Even though the game wasn't anywhere near finished, we sent off a disk to the company with our first three finished levels so we could get paid. Somehow, it leaked. We were pissed at first, but then it took off. People loved it. It really gave us the confidence that we were on the right track. It was our first game. The validation was just what we needed.
Fun times.
It was called Half Life Day One, and I remember seeing it as a bundle with some hardware, not sure which one.
This is how I was introduced to Half-Life - I got it with my GPU and played Day One.
Unfortunately I also don't recall which it was. I do recall I had a Voodoo, then moved to a TNT2 and then later a GeForce 2. The TNT2 came out well after Half-Life, so it must have been 3dfx at least.
It might have been the nvidia. The tnt 2 was almost contemporary. The days of AGP.
I bought a 3dfx just to play Half Life, 3dfx because of that association between your game and their tech, figured it was the obvious choice, likewise so did most of my gamer mates.
So hope you had shares in them :D
Getting my hands on a 3dfx Voodoo3 felt like such a dream.
Thank you (and the whole team of course) for creating something so amazing
I was wondering which Mike this was - Mike Harrington I see!
Thanks - Half-Life is a great legacy.
What was the other fish?
Perhaps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picnik
Tried it when it was release, then bought it myself in 1999, after I finally had managed to purchase a new PC - can't remember if it was a Nvidia TNT2 or 3dfx Voodoo 3 card I bought with it. But it was the first time I could play the game without it being sluggish and looking like crap. We had bought a family PC 4 years earlier, which had cost a fortune - but by 1998/1999 it was woefully outdated. Also, a thought: Imagine purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years.
One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years. I also vividly remember downloading all the new iterations of counter-strike, which really took off - until settling on 1.6
On a side not, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well - having only been a teenager back then, and in 25 years I'll be this old man. Wonder if all the memories from LAN-parties etc. will be as fresh in 25 years, as they are now.
> On a side note, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well
I also remember it like it was yesterday when, after school on a hot summer's day, a friend showed me this "cool new mod" he recently downloaded for Half-Life. It was an early version of Counterstrike. It took him an entire night to download the mod, and it only ran on his machine with a 320x240 resolution. It looked like crap and was basically unplayable. 6 months and a hardware upgrade later, we all played it for hours each day, and often non-stop for 12 hours on LAN parties. I also remember that you could contact the internet provider (Telekom) by mail, and after a few weeks they would activate something called "Fast-Track" for your connection, which would drop the latency from around 110ms to only 35ms, a huge advantage for MP games... it really blows my mind that all of this was 25 years ago.
In the early 2000s, CS was arguably better known than the original HL. I had some friends who probably played CS for thousands of hours, but never even touched the original HL.
I was just reminiscing about this with a friend last night. We had tons of free time and games like Counter-Strike were the wild west of creativity. My fondest memory was a Spring afternoon in 2000 after school playing some janky fan made map whose name I don't remember and feeling so happy. Everyone was playing. We played every day. We went to a 300 person LAN party that summer. We formed a 5 man team and competed online.
It was so fun cobbling together a computer that could run it. Trying every trick to squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Trying to shave a few milliseconds off my dial up ping. Going to that one guy's house who had broadband internet.
It really felt like a golden age back then.
My friends and I planned our own mod and started working on it, but our ambition outstripped our ability. That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.
About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular, but seems very focused on competitive play. I wanted to experience that public lobby on a janky fan made map feel. I found a server running custom 'zombie' maps which scratched that itch for a few days. Then I got busy again and haven't touched it since.
CS2 community servers are nothing like the 1.6 or Source golden era. Those games are still going, but the playerbase has shrunk considerably.
I'm glad I got to experience it all (primarily in Source): gun game, deathmatch, RPG, surf, jailbreak, zombie mod and escape, iceskate, sliderace, hide'n'seek, trickz, xtreme climbing, multigames, deathrun, knifeball, HE wars, vehicle maps, bob, nipper maps, even hack vs hack, and the many many communities, each uniquely flavored and with their own story.
Back then I took it for granted...
I totally feel that. The most fun I ever had gaming was back in my teens playing various different game modes in source. And yeah the communities really made it so special, to this day I'm good friends with some people that I initially met in CSS.
I can't help but feel Valve dropped the ball with cs:go and cs2. I mean, they did become incredibly popular but IMO there was potential for so much more if they would've supported custom game modes even just a little bit.
I think they may have been possible with Metamod: Source and SourceMod but now that it's on the Source 2 engine, server plugins are once again an unsupported hack.
I spent long hours playing CS Surf. What a wacky mod. Good times, odd memories.
You may be interested in KSF. They host skill surf servers and publish chill WR runs: https://youtube.com/@ksfrecords
The more modern surf maps are aesthetically quite pleasing and smooth to play.
Oh waw, that's a trip straight to nostalgia lane. CS surf was so fun, good times.
> About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular
I played the "original" CS (at least a version that looked like 1.6) around 3 years ago, and was surprised how painless it was to install it on Linux using Steam. I was also surprised that it was still no problem to find a de_dust server with > 20 players.
> That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.
Yes. It was so easy back then to play around with game development, web development, or desktop development. Around 2002, I hosted a web site for months on my local desktop server, reachable via a DynDNS solution.
Sorry for getting nostalgic, but it was even easier in the mid-90ies. As a 9 year old, I created a Dyna Blaster clone using a Demo-Version of "Klik&Play" on Windows 3.11 [0]. You could develop quite advanced games by just dragging around sprites, animating them, listening to mouse and keyboard events and object collisions. You could even "compile" the game into a single portable .exe! It was dead simple, but it introduced me to the basic concepts of programming and animation, and I didn't even realize it. A little later, I was able to teach myself BASIC by just reading the DOS man pages. We didn't even have internet back then. I very clearly remember realizing that "if ... then ... else" statements and variables were exactly what was missing in my "Klik&Play" demo-version. In the demo, you had to simulate these concepts by triggering the spawn of a hidden moving object and listening for the collision with another object. The hidden objects encoded the game state. Basically, the developers tried to remove Turing-completeness from the demo version, but failed and forced kids like myself to restore it via wild tricks (I remember feeling very clever when I had the idea for this trick). I only realized 2 decades later how useful these experiences were for a career in computer science.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/e2e98t/making_ga...
Very cool.
The first web site I ever made was for my CS clan. I hosted it on the Linux server in my university dorm room that also hosted our CS server. I don't remember what I did for DNS back then. I learned so much that I still use to this day.
I also think its neat, guessing based on your ISP, that you had such similar experiences at the same time half a world away from me (in the US).
Rats maps or the ones with a ton of vehicles were the most fun before the game got way too serious (before 1.5)
I ran a server that was primarily rat surf maps with a Warcraft/RPG server mod for years back then. It was super fun and something that modern games just can't touch in terms of that kind of niche.
Surf maps were so strange as a concept. Dunno how stuff like that can become such a big thing.
I miss the custom games of Warcraft 3 and the likes. The creativity was running wild.
It is sad that hats, loot boxes amd dlc has killed modding in commercial games.
I still remember the name "gimli", a creator of high-quality maps around 1.3.
He still publishes maps!
It's still tons of fun but definitely different now, and since they came out with counter-strike 2 a while ago, it's me being specced out on my old gaming computer all over again - as with you I'm way too busy as a working adult to get too deep into it, was fun to play a lot during the pandemic though.
The craziest innovation I seen is counter strike 1.6 in the browser, fully playable multiplayer. Not sure how safe letting that much execution happen in wasm environment truly is but was still pretty funny to see how far the game has come in terms of graphics. Basically a bunch of the same maps still even though a couple have always been way skewed to one side or the other.
I think you meant "FastPath"? - an alternative error correction scheme for DSL connections.
I did!
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods.
Another game from that time that was also easy to mod was The Sims 1.
For a bit of context, EA/Maxis released modding tools BEFORE the game was released, to let players create custom content for the game (like walls and floors) before the game was even released!
And installing custom content was also easy, just drag and drop files in folders related to what you downloaded and that's it.
Imagine any game nowadays doing that? Most games nowadays don't supporting modding out of the box, but of course, there are exceptions, like Minecraft resource packs/data packs. I don't think Fortnite and Roblox fit the "modding a game" description because you aren't really modding a game, you are creating your own game inside of Fortnite/Roblox! Sometimes you don't want to play a new game inside of your game, you just want to add new mods to enhance your experience or to make it more fun. There isn't a "base game Roblox", and while there is a "base game Fortnite" (Battle Royale... or any of the other game modes like Fortnite Festival or LEGO Fortnite) Epic does not let you create mods for the Battle Royale game. You can create your own Battle Royale map, but you can't create a "the insert season here Battle Royale map & gameplay but with a twist!".
Of course, sadly EA/Maxis didn't release all of the modding tools they could (there isn't a official custom object making tool for example, or a official way of editing the behavior of custom objects) but they still released way more modding tools than what current games release.
I think that most modern games don't support that easiness of modding because the games themselves are complex, because as an example: The Sims 1 walls are like, just three sprites, so you can generate a wall easily with a bit of programming skill, the skin format is in plain text in a format similar to ".obj", so on and so forth.
Lately I've been trying to create my own modding tools for The Sims 1, and it is funny when you are reading a page talking about the technical aspects of the game file formats and the author writes "well this field is used for xyzabc because Don Hopkins said so".
Factorio has an extensive modding community - one of the community mods was adopted and became an official expansion.
The official toolkit for modding Baldur’s Gate 3 is extremely extensive. You can make an entirely different game on top of the game if you wanted
Really? Officially they don't even support modifying or creating new levels: https://baldursgate3.game/news/community-update-27-official-.... You are mostly limited to visual changes, UI mods and balance / tuning changes.
That seems an easy fix until one gets nervous about working a month just to release a single -purchase game engine. That's a journey that you can take but you might at least consider a license.
The hype was so hot and fast around HL when it came out, that I remember playing it without a dedicated graphics card (I think I was running on a motherboard integrated gpu) in the lowest resolution possible because there was this feeling of "you have to try it".
I got by for years on a Pentium 75 and 8mb of RAM. The specs always said the game wouldn’t work, but it did. You could get away with this right up until PC gaming (finally) moved away from DOS. One big issue was the real mode DOS Plug n play drivers (dwcfgmgr.sys - burned into my brain) which occupied just enough of my 640k that most games would fail to start cause they couldn’t claim the whole lot.
Specs similar to mine. Not far after that I got a diamond nv3 ..
1MB ATI Radeon all the way baby :)
ATI 3D Rage (1996), 500 nm, 50mhz or so.
Had to look it up, didn't know they had 1MB 3D accelerators.
I think my first was 8MB and it blew my hair back for sure.
It wasn’t a Rage it was a Radeon :) not even a 3D accelerator :) this was the first generation of graphics cards that had hardware acceleration for 2D
Was just about time for MDK, Quake, Tomb Raider etc even though it was way outside the official specs for these.
I'm 100% certain your memory is incorrect. Radeon came after Rage in 2000 and was the first Ati 3D accelerator with hardware T&L. Your 1MB 2D only Ati card was most likely a Mach64 or original Rage 3d.
I went and looked it up and you are right. Memory failing me. I got a card in 2004 that was a Radeon which must be the mixup …
EDIT thanks for the push. I’m nearly certain it was an S3 Trio based card
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Trio
Oh wow, I stand corrected. Didn't know they brought back the moniker.
No you were originally correct. The Ati card mentioned was most likely a Mach64 or original Rage 3d.
Nightmare House was a super fun mod that I found at some point.
I don’t remember where or how, but it scared the heck out of me.
> purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years.
A time when technology changed that fast, too.
Should be changing faster today, it’s just not always visible.
I just replaced my HP z800 from 2008 because it was holding it's own with the addition of a few ssd's and an RX580 GPU over the years. Went from 6c12t Xeon to 16c32t (R9950x) and 7900xt.
Performance just hasn't out paced people's needs in the last 15 years the way it used to...
Wait are you me? i shut down my z800 about a year ago (was my mainmachine for about 13 years) i buyd a second cpu for like 10$ after 5 years and upraded the ram to max, i think it was 46gb, also ssd's....and a rx580 which is still in use.
So, what's your replacement machine consist of?
I used to use the hardware raid to stripe 2x ssd's to get over 1GB/s from my sata drives.
New machine has a pcie5 gen5 m.2 nvme. Stupid fast at 12GB/s.
I gotta figure out what to do with the old machine now...
>So, what's your replacement machine consist of?
Now it's FreeBSD14.1-RELEASE with a AMD Ryzen9 7950x (no 3d) still my old RX580, 64GB 4800 ECC Ram, 2x pci4 2TB nvme one for windows one for FreeBSD (i plan to buy a pci5 later that year), and two HD's 6TB mirrored for backup's and archive-stuff (just accessible from FreeB).
>I gotta figure out what to do with the old machine now...
It think i will sell/gift it to someone, since i have a ML350p Gen8 server too...but to be honest it hurts a little bit, that was such a good warhorse.
BTW: I will probably buy a new GPU if pci5 card's are on the market and affordable and the driver is in FreeBSD...so let's say in a year or more ;)
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years.
Modding still exists. It’s just called “UGC” now. Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft have thriving and accessible options. GTA has an unbelieveable number of players playing role playing mods of it too.
It's not the same though, most FPS' games lock down their code and require you to use their servers. More or less murdering any chance of modding. For example, the same time I played halflife and all the mods (including this mod named counter strike), I played the shit out of battlefield 1942. It's modding community was insane! With total conversion mode that game was like 10 different games. And for a poor teen, that and half life were god sends for getting me into gaming
Traditional modding still exists, especially for PC RPGs, where the community is huge. Also UEFN is an extremely powerful tool that sits closer to modding Fortnite than UGC for Roblox, say.
The problem is that multiplayer games and any game with a server component - and the engines that make them - are specifically designed to have security against cheating and hacks. No-one wants to play against a modded game. That makes supporting mods, even solo mods, all the more difficult, and it’s harder to make the business case for doing so.
> No-one wants to play against a modded game.
Au contraire. There are plenty of people who would like to play against a modded game. They just might not want to play against a game that's modded differently from their own.
Oh for sure yes. I meant that modding can make it trivially easy for someone to enable hacks and other things that can unbalance and ruin the experience for other players. Unhappy players leave, so there’s an arms race to eliminate cheats and hackers, and modding can be collateral damage.
>Traditional modding still exists, especially for PC RPGs
Yes, I've recently been playing Fallout: London, which is a total conversion mod for Fallout 4. It obviously changes the setting to post-apocalyptic London, but also adds new quests, monsters and things. And it's pretty good quality -- in fact the mod kept getting delayed because Bethesda saw the mod in progress and kept hiring the people working on it because they were so impressed.
There are games like Deep Rock Galactic that have really good support multiplayer for multiplayer mods; it tells you what you're getting into in the server browser, and IIRC even separates them into tiers (simple HUD mods you can use in any game without effecting anyone, big changes have to be run on a server that everyone agrees to).
But yeah, they're few and far between.
It’s not the same but the environment isnt the same anymore.
There are lots of games that will let you mod the ever loving crap out of them. UEFN and Roblox are modding with distribution platforms. Cyberpunk has Bethesda level modding. Games like lethal company are existing in an indie space that was just unfathomable when I was playing those games.
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding.
I'm generally skeptical about the use cases for current-gen AI, but very hopeful that it can help us get back to this golden age of game Modding.
I think many people, like me, got lost in all the polygons and shaders soon after Half-Life 1. But if AI tools can make it easier to express Modern game outcomes, the way we could make a funky HL1 mod with the IDEs back then; it could be swing things back.
I loved world building with the valve map tools. It was fantastic. Almost as much fun as the game itself.
Worldcraft was so much fun!
At least until "LEAK LEAK LEAK" appeared
Hah, that reminds me how I started leakfree.org, where Black Mesa got started. That was a long time ago.
Which in turn led to an exploding mod scene, clans, hosting and communities. Truly a world-changing game at a golden moment in game history (beside Unreal). And yes, like a good story book a generation have memories of escaping the crumbling Black Mesa facility chased by alien horrors. Mission accomplished Valve.
The crazy thing is there are still a few people playing Half Life!
Modding was amazing back then. I wasn’t a modder myself, but it felt like something new and crazy was happening every week. The excitement for every beta release of Counter-Strike. The buzz around newcomers like Action HL, The Specialists, and PVK. Experiments like Science & Industry that didn’t last long but were a fun romp nonetheless. Endless rounds of TFC and DoD. And there were always populated community servers for any mod you plucked fom Fileplanet.
We’ve lost something along the way.
> It was far from flawless, but it was really trying to push the boundaries of a young medium.
Great read, it made me realize how far we've come. Video games as an art are really in an interesting spot right now - big budget projects all end up being bland, buggy, cookie cutter rehashes of the same couple templates.
Companies that once represented the pinnacle of creativity and what could be achieved with high budgets - Blizzard, Bethesda, Ubisoft, etc - are now the laughing stock of gamers. Not that it matters when the bulk of gamers are still putting dozens of hours and plenty of microtransaction dollars into decade old games like Fortnite/Minecraft/GTA every week.
What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression? What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?
Thankfully, there are a bunch of indie developers that still release fresh experiences - but they too kind of end up falling into the same tropes (if you like 2D roguelike/platformer/puzzler there's plenty of choice, otherwise...).
Not too unlike the state of the film industry. It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Elden Ring and its DLC, probably. The Japanese games industry is doing far better than their western counterparts, there have been huge headlines that in 2024's Game Awards, 4 of 5 games nominated for Game of the Year came from Asia (3 Japan, 1 China). The last game (Balatro) was an indie game developed by one person.
Not a single nominee was from a major western company like Ubisoft, EA, etc. They may be financially successful now, but the games industry is imploding. This is what happens when you treat developers poorly and chase greedy trends while expecting consumers to put up with it. Like you said, most AAA games releasing these days are either dead on arrival or completely unnotable and miss expectations.
the nominees did, but the winner ultimately was still indicative of the circus that is US gaming awards
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Kingdom come deliverance, baldirs gate are two massive titles in the last 12 months. God of war, spiderman, Indiana jones are other titles that are just stand alone artistic experiences, again in the last little while.
> What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?
I think it’s funny you mention that because the games you sniped at (Fortnite Minecraft GTa) were seismic shifts in gaming - in the last few years - Fortnite wrote the book on live service games IMO. But, when they’re “popular” suddenly they’re not cool anymore.
> It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.
What do you want? IMO the industry is in an ok place - aside from the mass layoffs over the last 24 months. But for consumers there’s so much choice - there’s massive hundred million dollar budget tiles with new content every year (Ubisoft/CoD/ Sony/microsoft doing these) there’s “smaller” budget games in the 50-80millon mark that are achieving critical success on PC and Console, there’s AA-budget games in the 15-30 million mark coming out every month that are hits and misses, there’s a thriving indie scene for every genre you could possibly imagine, and many you can’t (e.g. trombone champ).
There’s options at every level, dozens of games coming out every year - more than any single person could ever play.
disclaimer: I’ve worked on one of the titles you’re talking about here, but don’t anymore. Opinion is mine, not theirs.
My concern is that consolidation has hit the industry pretty hard in the last decade and is only a bad thing for its future IMO.
In my experience working there - it comes and goes in waves. Layoffs happen, people leave and start their own studios. We saw consolidation under publishers in the 90’s and people laud it as one of the best periods of games.
I do think we lost our way a little from around about 2018-2022 where we had these absolutely gargantuan flops like Concord that were a symptom of many things, but I really really believe we’re in another golden age right now.
Kingdom Come was from 2018?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1771300/Kingdom_Come_Deli...
I haven't played many different games over the last few years, but both Half-Life: Alyx and Zelda: Breath of the Wild left strong impressions. Both games have a rare sense of place that's hard to replicate in other mediums—the same thing that stood out for me after the first time I played Half-Life 2. These games feel less like a movie I've seen or a story I've read and more like somewhere I've been.
This isn't unique to video games—I've had the same feeling from, say, 2666 or Stalker—but video games seem especially well-suited to do this as a medium.
For one, id software is still making great big budget single player experience, see Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and the soon-to-be-released Doom the dark ages.
>What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Witcher 3 comes to mind. But I just realised it was released 10 years ago...
I'm playing through that now. Just finished the main question, and doing Hearts of Stone. Probably the best single-player game I've played. Maybe it's the "next-gen-update", but the graphics are still great.
Cyberpunk 2077 I hear is great now after its many bug fixes and DLC
I hope Stalker 2 gets to this point as well, with more A-Life brought back in after whatever performance optimisations they can squeeze out.
not from a large American gaming production company. Black myth wukong comes to mind but also in the same bucket
CP2077's not American but it largely came out of the usual mould of big-budget, big-studio game software, especially after CD Projekt Red ended up abandoning promises to do certain things differently.
Spoilers: nothing short of a complete story rewrite could salvage what Cyberpunk 2077 ended up being. It's less of a No Mans Sky redemption story and more of a Duke Nukem Forever one.
Black Myth Wukong had a fairly hot entrance onto the market but fizzled out a bit, keep an eye out for the upcoming DLC though.
I haven't played it, but I got the impression it didn't fizzle out so much as that it simply had one single player campaign and no reason to keep playing once it's finished, and that many people seem to have forgotten games with a finite nr of playing hours like that exist because of the roguelikes, hero shooters, MMORPGs, Minecraft-likes, etc that keep you hooked for as long as possible.
Very true, there is still a loyal following of new game plus players, including myself, holding down the fort but having a linear single player campaign was refreshing.
I have my opinions on the execution quality (or range of execution quality) of the game itself but it still served as my favorite “AAA/AA” major release of 2024.
Developers really put their hearts into it. I loved the Dziady reference.
Uh.
That’s the “new game” I’m still meaning to start.
God time gets weird as you pass through middle age.
BG3 was great.
I don't think it counts as big budget, but I've recently gotten into Last Train Home and it's a fantastic and unique premise (with gameplay that's a mix of Company of Heros + XCOM + This War Of Mine).
Last train home is coming up soon on my todo list and I’m pretty psyched to get around to playing it, the demo 100% sold me on it
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
To add to the other answers - Half-Life: Alyx ;)
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Talos Principle 2. Does that count as big budget?
Don't get me wrong, I love Talos Principle, but I did not feel a strong connection to the world of #2 vs #1. The sequel levels just seemed like, "Here is some sexy stuff the art team designed." No real connection or unifying theme. Super pretty, but that is true of any number of AAA games these days with big action set pieces.
At least in one, it felt a bit more cohesive in that you could imagine that canned video game assets had been corrupted and copy-pasted into new configurations.
Croteam is quite small, 40 employees total.
That checks out; I think I should not have included it as an example, given that context. Maybe it instead reinforces the point that we rely on smaller companies for the gems.
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Elden Ring. You’d need to go quite a bit further back for the last one before that though.
Definitely Elden Ring.
As evidence, even Harper's Magazine wrote about it:
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/11/dying-is-a-form-of-educa...
Brilliant article, thank you for sharing.
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Control was very good!
I recently got to play Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Gameplay is virtually the same as the previous entry in the series, but the story is interesting and entertaining.
GTA5 had a super big budget yet received very good feedback from gamers and critics alike, and is still played to this day. So not sure you can just discard big budgets as a whole.
And then Star Citizen is quite innovative in many regards and has virtually unlimited budget, and would not exist in the first place without a long runway
GTA5 released more than 10 years ago fwiw, the zeitgeist has changed significantly in the last 5-7years.
In what way(s)?
The way the parent suggests.
> Video games as an art are really in an interesting spot right now - big budget projects all end up being bland, buggy, cookie cutter rehashes of the same couple templates.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/indies-games-...
hardly. I bet GTA6 will be a major success just like GTA5 was at the time, which will again counter the argument that big budget is killing the creativity in games. And I see no counter against Star Citizen yet
I haven’t played V or online but after III/Vice/San Andreas, GTA is the last game I’d use to argue for creativity in the gaming industry. It’s just the only game series in the “run over streetwalkers in a stolen car” genre, which is still a profitable niche apparently.
(But I don’t play many video games these days so what do I know)
Pulling off 'tasteful obscenity' while still toeing the line is a high-wire act.
Why are you opining on things you’re wholly unfamiliar with
What do you think HackerNews is for? And playing the franchise for over a decade isn’t “wholly unfamiliar.” Why are you using language you’re apparently quite wholly unfamiliar with?
gTAV was much more than that.
GTA5 was criticized for dumbing down the driving and other mechanics, and generally being way more goofy and casual than 4 and even San Andreas & Vice City
I was knee-deep working as a technical game designer + engine programmer on Soldier of Fortune when Half-Life came out. I can't put into words the impression that the opening that game left on me; I still remember very distinctly experiencing the tram ride, just being utterly entranced, and then being deeply irritated when an artist walked over to my cubicle, saw the game, and jokily asked what was going on, pulling me out of the experience. For me, it was one of those singular experiences you only have a very, very rarely in gaming.
It's funny, though - I would say in retrospect that Half-Life had the typical vexed impact of a truly revolutionary game made by a truly revolutionary team. In terms of design, the Half-Life team was asking and exploring a hundred different interesting questions about first person gaming and design, very close to the transition from 2d to 3d. And their influence, a few years later, often reduced down to a small handful of big ideas for later games influenced by them. After Half-Life, because of the impact of their scripted sequences, FPS games shifted to much more linear level designs to support that kind of roller coaster experience (despite many of Half-Life's levels actually harkening back to older, less linear FPS design). The role of Barneys and other AI character also really marked the shift to AI buddies being a focus in shooters. And the aesthetic experience of the aggressive AI from the marines as enemies also cast a long shadow, too, highlighting the idea of enemy AI being a priority in single player FPS games.
Certainly, those were the biggest features of Half-Life that impacted our design in Soldier of Fortune, which did go on to shift to much more linear levels, much more focus on scripted events, and would have resulted in much more emphasis on AI buddies too if I hadn't really put my foot down as a game programmer (and in my defense, if you go back to FPS games from that era, poorly implemented AI buddies are often, by a wide margin, the most frustrating aspect of that era of games, along with forced poorly done stealth missions or poorly implemented drivable vehicles - the fact that Barneys were non-essential is why they worked well in the original Half-Life). You can see this shadow pretty clearly if you compare Half-Life to, afterwards, the single player aspects of Call of Duty and Halo. Both are series that, in their single player form, are a lot more focused and a lot less varied than Half-Life was, but they clearly emphasize those aspects of Half-Life I just mentioned. And in practice, those were the single player FPS games that were in practice actually copied for quite a while.
Thank you for soldier of fortune. It was a pioneer in its own way with how brutal the enemy destruction was. I loved it. Incredible game that is up there with DOOM, Half Life and Halo for me.
Hey, thanks! I ran myself ragged on that project, so that's nice to hear. And yeah, I think we really did nail a particularly kind of visceral experience.
I literally got the t-shirt (came with the game), and later became a particle physicist, working at CERN, we received a crowbar for the initial startup of the LHC.
This game defined my life.
Wow that's inspiring. Let us know when you are asked to send a crystal into the testing chamber. I'll go to the mountains.
Let us know if we need to prepare for "unforseen consequences".
Also I am really sorry but I messed up your lunch in the microwave earlier.
Well, please be bloody careful and don't create any resonance cascade scenarios.
Lokimedes doesn't need to hear all this. He's a highly trained professional.
Lokimedes, we have complete confidence in you.
they’re waiting for you Lokimedes, in the the chamberrr
We boosted the anti-mass spectrometer 105 percent. Bit of a gamble, but we need the extra resolution.
> Newell and Harrington had long enjoyed playing games. Now, it seemed, there were huge piles of money to be earned from making them.
The gaming market today is completely different, very competetive, very saturated, ranging from huge stakes at the top end, to an enormous number of indie studios and individuals toward the other end that are trying to make ends meet.
Yet, I've been seriously thinking for a while to start-up a game studio. The hope being that it would be one of these crazy ideas that everybody recommends against ("it can't be done") until you actually do it and prove them wrong.
Ideally, I would like to start the studio as a loose group of like-minded people that have time for developing a game solely a hobby, and if that pans out, transition it into a business. Not AAA, of course, but with the definite goal of making the best game that such a setup could realisitically produce.
The thing is, with today's tech, you can get started with very little capital if you begin doing this as a hobby.
I sorta want to do this, but developing completely open source games.
Maybe even developing my own game engine.
Of course all this costs a lot of money with no clear way to make it back. If I had to come up with a monetization model, I would come up with an ad network similar to Unity.
If Unity needs 2 billion in revenue to barely keep going, I reckon a more focused engine could be funded for 20 million a year.
It's a moot point since I'll never have that much money or be able to raise a VC round.
But HN, let's dream. Imagine a .net or JavaScript engine that's web first. With mobile and PC support coming later( PC can just run a local server). The engine developers dog food their own engine, making very high quality examples for the community.
Keep the engine focused on small lightweight games.
Unity's ultimate problem is they keep trying to do literally everything.
I wouldn't do that. I'd say straight up this engine isn't going to do AAA gaming. It's not going to scale. I'm not supporting 800 design patterns.
Don't write your own engine, unless you want to do that just for fun. But if you actually want to make a game, use one of the exiting engines.
If you want to develop a game engine as a product to make money of, it's probably better to forget that idea. There are enough very sophisticated engines out there, so why would any third-party developer take the risk and use yours instead? I mean, even the big open source engines that already exist today have trouble gaining traction.
Which license would be best to get out of the hell of "30% to the distribution store" "25% to UDK" so 50% of your revenue is skimmed off the top before you see a dime.
Assuming you'll make _some_ money.
I don't have the money to do this anyway, it's a moot point.
But the idea is you build the engine, and make better tools for advertising hooked into your own commercial service. That's by and large how Unity makes money.
I want to actually make quality open source games, and I want to use one easy language, like C# from the engine to the scripting.
Or maybe one day I'll learn Rust and Bevy...
IMO, that's not a feature that would set your engine apart enough from the existing ones. And if it were, the big ones could add that feature as well.
Thousand of man hours have gone into the development of the big commercial engines. You'd have to match that and then add your new feature on top in order to become a serious competitor.
What's the advantage of making your game open source? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a big free software fan but what do you think will come out of that?
I don't exactly have commercial goals here.
I want to go open source so people have something to learn from.
I think Unity, Unreal, and even Godot try to do too much at once. I want an engine to do one thing really well.
The indie market is a bloody red sea right now. But as long as you don't care about money or can expense your hardware and internet costs, I think it's good enough.
> Not AAA, of course, but with the definite goal of making the best game that such a setup could realisitically produce.
have a read up on Savage Game Design and the SOG Prairie Fire CDLC for Arma 3.
hands down, the best DLC ever created for Arma3. a good chunk of the original team were Unsung modders. they went down the road of CDLC, now they’re working on their own standalone game and a bunch of other stuff (look through Rob/Eggbeast’s posts on the SOG PF discord for more info).
Arma is actually a great way to hack something together for basically nothing. buy Arma, start scripting sqf to build a gamemode, create new assets in blender and stick ‘em in a mod, host a server. though the engine has lots of weird bugs/footguns, your costs are basically Arma+devtime+servers.
disclaimer: i’m a maintainer on the Mike Force multiplayer gamemode they released. do it in my spare time for kicks (although been slacking recently).
I love a bit of SQF although trying to get missions to work with server sync was a PITA.
Often thought about making a lost in the woods sort of game using Arma 3 and Chernarus.
server sync? do you mean remoteExec? that did take me a minute to get my head round. a lot of headaches the first time i needed to JIP without understanding i needed to JIP.
scheduled/unscheduled environment is another fun one.
There’s a ton left that can be done by small companies - factorio is just one example out of the hundreds waiting to be discovered.
Find a niche and polish it to perfection and you can make headway.
Most big-budget games have more to do with interactive movies than with gameplay, anyway.
Balatro also comes to mind. And that one's the work of a solo dev!
The problem is - there are literally thousands of indie devs that don't make the cut. The days of Mojang or Fez are long over, the novelty of the indie dev has worn off, unfortunately.
Yeah, I mean, for every indie dev who's successful enough to make a career out of it, there'll be countless others who try and fail. But it's still technically possible to break through, in the sense that you don't need a huge team or tons of resources to make a hit game. (And having a huge team and tons of resources isn't a guarantee of success, either :P)
True. There is always the chance that you get lucky - case in point, Minecraft. If you read the old devlogs when Notch first started to develop the game, it's really interesting how quickly it started to generate genuine interest, if only among other indie game devs at first who frequented the same forum. But that's a one in a million strike of luck - hitting on a fresh idea and being able to implement it in a way that appeals to a sufficent market.
Like you say, just from raw statistics, if you're an indie dev, most likely you're going to fail.
Also, if you go back in time, Minecraft wasn't even the only "Lego/block building game" of the era. Blockland is 7 years earlier.
The sad dirty secret is that wild success depends on so many factors out of your control that the best you can do for is aim for mild success and hope lightning strikes (while avoiding as many things that could ground out lightning, I guess).
In a way, it's the difference between a lifestyle business and a startup.
I mean, you just need a novel idea that isn't some farm-sim with 8-bit graphics
Yeah, similarly, there's quite a few established games/genres just waiting to be disrupted because of the incumbents losing their ways and their charm. The most obvious, blatant example is Minecraft - a game where you can survive, thrive, build anything and mod it to your hearts' desire. That's not true about it anymore - but any game which would fulfill this would probably go big.
It's one of those things where someone's going to eventually do it. As they say, "watch this space".
One of the saddest things in my gamer resume is that I was never able to get into Half-Life. I can absolutely see what everybody likes in the game - both technically and in terms of gameplay. But I was never into its uneven pace when compared to Doom, not even back in the day. I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure, what the article refers to as "friction".
The Orange Box console versions also suffered from a non-adjustable field of view that made me feel sick after a few minutes of playing.
> I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure
I think I remember reading an interview with the dev team where they explained that playing action for too long was boring, as well as solving puzzles, so they consciously designed the game with interleaved phases of action/puzzle. Your recompense for solving a puzzle is action, and your recompense for killing all the bad guys is a relaxing puzzle.
It's funny you didn't liked that, because for me it was the complete opposite. I like pure action shooters, and I like pure puzzle adventure games, but I really loved Half-Life and I didn't know why until I read that explanation.
Well in HL2 there were a lot of puzzles to show off their new Havok physics engine
It’s a long time ago now so my recollection is likely very flawed, but with HL I didn’t like the feeling of a created path that must be followed, irrespective how of the interleaving of different aspects. There are lots of modern games like this too - which on the face of it are relatively open-world, but underneath the apparent freedom there’s a strict path to find and follow for success. (I’d definitely include one of the modern Doom games —I forget which it was I tried— in this category, - it was so linear that it felt but one step removed from the old-fashioned shooters where you’re literally on a conveyor belt and shoot whatever appears.)
In the original Doom, in contrast, the only requirement was to make it to the end of the level, figuring out the map and puzzles along the way. Anything else (did you chase 100% kill and 100% secrets?) was optional. I guess it just felt more… honest?
I did not mind this linearity in Half-Life, because the story was engaging. You wanted to know what happened next. And I found the enemies did had some advanced "AI" for that time; like the first time the commandos came was a big moment. They were nothing like the enemies you had seen in other games.
I played through the single player, but like you I think I preferred doom.
That said, half-life mods were imo the golden age of gaming. Vampire slayer let you scare the shit out of your friends at 3am in a LAN. Day of defeat and firearms were the cod and mw of the day. Natural Selection crushed it in terms of fps/RTS hybrid, teamplay and overall quality and polish. Science & industry? Pirates Vikings & knights? Tfc? Several attempts at matrix mods & the opera. So much amazing diversity - it's such a shame that CS (the most banal, vanilla, milquetoast game ever) got all the mindshare. Even when CS ventured into making things more interesting/diverse (hostage rescue, shield, etc.) those things seem to have died off back to the 'standard' game mode (80% of players dead and spectating while "the bomb has been planted" sound effect plays).
Let's not forget Action Half Life.
The variety sometimes meant you only played your favorite mod a few times at the LAN parties. Because people had so many other things to play as the 90s and early aughts progressed.
AHL was great, but The Specialists was GOAT. Never felt more like a badass after disarming an opponent, hitting slow motion, and chucking a katana at their head while diving.
I deeply miss Science and Industry. Half life is still being modded these days just isn't as popular. Jollywangcore features some of the single player mods
Jolly's Hardcore Mod is still one of my favourite youtube videos -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL8rxqodeRI
I disagree, the CS betas were great. I miss the as_ maps the most — sneaking away to victory as the VIP with all my teammates dead and seconds left on the clock.
At that time in 1998 I mostly played Q1/Q2 online and contemporaries wise I preferred Unreal and SiN over HL's single player experience. Also Unreal's graphics were just truly next level on the Voodoo2 vs anything else. HL DM at LAN parties was surprisingly good and a bit overlooked though; the beginning of the game until the dimensional rift was definitely fun. What stood out the most to me was the soldier AI actually. I always felt the series was a bit hyped but I've come around as I returned to the games on my Steam Deck OLED last fall. In retrospect; clearly classics and the high praises were well earned after all. SDOLED apart from actual CRT setup is maybe the perfect way to experience it today IMO.
Of course DOOM is its own thing completely; a timeless distillation of the 80s - the arcade, Super Mario and D&D all astonishingly abstracted into an unreasonably blissful bleeding-edge hellscape; 93 till infinity.
SiN did have more character and tried some innovations of its own, but the gameplay needed a bit more polish. Bullets felt so slow you could run past them. JK/DF2 had this problem too.
Wonderfully written article, but especially delighted to see extensive mention of DF2: Jedi Knight. This game absolutely dominated mine and friends free time for multiple years, both single player and multiplayer. Up there as one of my favourite of all time, certainly most played.
Lucasarts absolutely ruled on the story based games genre merges. See of course all the point and clicks such as Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, but also of course XWing and Tie Fighter.
I've been waiting decades for a re-visit of the Jedi Knight series; preferably in the breadth of Jedi Outcast. I hope to see it soon.
The same author has full articles on Jedi Knight [1] and X-Wing/TIE Fighter. [2]. If you go through his archives [3], he's also written a lot about LucasArts' adventure games; I think the first posts that talk about them are the three "A New Force in Games" posts.
[1] https://www.filfre.net/2024/04/jedi-knight-plus-notes-on-an-... [2] https://www.filfre.net/2021/02/the-second-coming-of-star-war... [3] https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
It's incredible how fast games evolved in the 90s. As the article mentions, Half-Life released less than five years after Doom.
These days, people will still cite games up to 10 years old (e.g. The Witcher 3) as looking graphically top notch.
Probably also because graphics nowadays are "good enough". I would rather have a new game with current-gen graphics and awesome story/physics/mechanics/world, than a game with shitty gameplay but slightly better textures.
It's not just that though. CPU and graphics performance also isn't increasing at anywhere near the rate it did back then.
I got my start in the tech industry thanks to Half-Life - or more specifically thanks to the Half-Life mod Team Fortress Classic.
I built an early fan news site for that game (effectively a blog before I knew they were called blogs) which got me a job with an early online gaming company ~1999 where I got paid to learn how web development works.
Man, TFC was the greatest. I’m surprised there aren’t more threads mentioning it here. Got overshadowed by Counter-Strike of course (also great) but TFC was the “prototype mod” released by Valve themselves as an example of what could be done with the HL SDK and it was a great game in its own right. I spent many hours perfecting rocket jumps and timing those grenade throws to wipe out unsuspecting enemies. 2fort ftw.
Oh those screenshots. Faded memories resurrect... It was the year 2000, our college dorm room. Friend's PC which was completely naked, fan pointed at it, in the summer heat of western-central India. Half-Life running at less than half the recommended FPS. Yet we played. And yet the chills ran down the spine.
To add to the nostalgia train. My friend Chris had it installed on his computer (my family computer was far too old to run it). F5 quick save had been a godsend in that game for all the surprise traps (which the article calls out). Anyways, he accidentally F5'd falling into a pit. His only save IIRC, which meant he had to restart the game.
A bummer, but made for a good story and fond memories
I feel like the “no cutscenes” thing is overplayed. I’m not saying it wasn’t huge, but there was a lot more to HL’s storytelling than just the “animatronics on a fairground ride” stuff. They could have done that without the constantly evolving gameplay that kept pace with the story. Who can forget playing the soldiers against the aliens, working your way through a ridiculous set of traps, calling down a satellite strike against something otherwise unlikeable, and my personal favourite: the moment you get an RPG and then hear the sound of that damn helicopter.
The observation that Doom was on more PCs than Windows was very astute. Doom was everywhere at the time - it was not uncommon to find the shareware on computers inside many typical office jobs
The shareware version of DooM was more of a complete game than many boxed games at the time. It’s no wonder it spread so far - especially because it was also an amazing hardware demo.
Why do we all have to wear these ridiculous ties?
Half-Life and subsequently Counter-Strike changed my life. I was addicted, and it captured me in a way hard to explain for about 3-4 years. The gameplay, competitive drive, the simplistic sprites and world building. It touched all sensory inputs in a way that games prior hadn't. It's the only video game, or digital media for that matter, that makes me feel nostalgic.
Obligatory mention that if you want to enjoy Half-Life today (in spirit if not exactly the same game), Black Mesa is the best option for doing so: https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/
There's still a lot of value in playing the original, but what the Black Mesa team achieved with what is effectively a fan project is incredible. And in a world where Take Two goes after people doing cool stuff with 20 year old GTA games, it's great that it got the official blessing from Valve.
As someone who's actively playing through GTA1 right now, what cool things are people doing with GTA?
Yes and no. The original is still very much playable, one does not replace the other, both are very good
As someone who has played both, why not just play Black Mesa?
Just a quick bullet point list of differences from the top of my head:
- Half Life has much faster run and gun gameplay (stemming from it's quake roots no doubt), while in Black Mesa it's much slower paced
- The AI in the game is completely different, Black Mesa's soldiers feel way more aggressive, again encouraging a slower pace of play compared to the original
- Lots of levels have small changes - some are cool, others kinda feel like they're just different for the sake of being different
- Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo
Black Mesa is a great game, one thing I have nothing but praise for is it's presentation - it's really nice to look at and they did a bang up job with the graphics and animations. But which is better is a matter of opinion, and personally I much prefer how HL1 actually feels to play.
A couple to add, with my own biases included because I love Black Mesa
- Joel Nielsen's great sound track / sound design work in Black Mesa ... I believe he admitted in an interview that some of the "squelching" sounds are recorded by slapping someone's arse O_o
- The reworked Gonarch fight is, hands down, one of the most entertaining and intense boss fights for me in recent memory. It's way better than the original for sure, which I remember just being frustrating (lack of ammo).
> Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo
I see both takes. Like, in the original game I actually liked Xen (except Gonarch). It felt otherwordly and empty, as if one of the reasons for earth being invaded was because there was nothing left. But BM Xen is literally another world. I prefer BM Xen, but I did enjoy the original at the time.
For a deeper look into Black Mesa / Half-Life and some of the changes, Soup Emporium did a great video here, where he only stole some of the points he raises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d8KAq78gco
> some of the "squelching" sounds are recorded by slapping someone's arse O_o
Quite reminiscent of deadmau5' famous trick: https://youtu.be/4mx_P_gPyiE
Other people have already given great answers: it plays faster, the levels are different, etc.
But to me the main problem of "remake replaces the original" approach is that it's a a very "content-consuming"-way to look at media. Videogames are art in their own way, old games can still be enjoyed for what they are and for what they were - same thing with movies. Silent Hill 2 (2024) doesn't replace the original Silent Hill 2. RoboCop (2014) doesn't make RoboCop (1987) obsolete.
That's my take on re_makes_, at least. With re_masters_ I'd be much more willing to recommend them over the originals (although the preservationist in me would still like the originals to be available in some way)
The game mechanics and how the story is told is worth experiencing by itself in it’s original form before seeing the modern interpretation in Black Mesa
Black Mesa is a recreation but it's not identical to the original either. So... Yes if you want modern graphics, no if you want the real thing
Black Mesa is not the same game!
Skip Xen if you're playing this.
Overall I think Xen was much better in Black Mesa than HL1, but why they felt the need to make it so long is a mystery to me. Half to two-thirds of the play time could have been cut and it would have only improved things.
Why skip Xen? Xen in Black Mesa is really good. I found it to be much better than the original.
It is so long, and I did not enjoy my time there. "Alright, here is the third or fourth energy door unlocking puzzle to slog through". It was so much slower paced you lose the thread from the human world of what you are even doing anymore.
Does it run on MacOS? (That page suggests not?)
ymmv but runs under CrossOver https://old.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1e4pomu/black_me...
While the original version did not get a port to Mac OS, later on the updated version did for Mac OS X
I really didn't like black Mesa at all. It's different for the sake of being different
Just finished playing through HL1 and HL2 again.. as I do every 3-5 years. Maybe it's all nostalgia at this point but I just love being in that universe. The familiar sounds of a crowbar on metal, a sliding door etc. I was never very good at the relentless keyboard gymnastics required for other FPSs so I fell in love with this game that had puzzles and varied pacing and felt like a movie.
Two major contributions that I think Half-Life did to the gaming industry:
1. Shew that FPS games can be more than pure shooters and still succeeded;
2. First time that an official, easy to use level editor (Worldcraft) was included in the CD of a major hit FPS. Doom and Quake definitely started the modding scene but arguably Half-Life made it more popular.
> And then there are an awful lot of jumping puzzles, shoehorned into a game engine that has way more slop in it than is ideal for such things.
I was taken aback by this comment. The original Half Life engine has super tight and responsive movement, to the point where the average "tryhard" in a server would be executing all kinds of movement tricks that require frame-perfect inputs or very close to it. Watch some speedruns or HL:DS games and you can easily find examples of gameplay involving super precise movement. In CS there was a huge scene of movement based maps like surf_, bh_, and deathrun_.
Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.
Super tight and responsive movement wouldn't necessarily mean jumping puzzles make sense in a 90s single player FPS. Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.
My memory is that it wasn't the controls but the sizes of the spaces you had to jump to and the clarity of where they were so you could adequately position yourself that were the issue. The latter of which is probably more down to texture usage than the engine itself.
Turok on the n64 had way more instances of jumping puzzles while controlling like a boat and having a nauseating FOV by even today's console standards. Yet the game was praised and well liked back in the day. Half-Life on a 90s PC in comparison is a much better playing game.
All that said, I still enjoy both. Maybe I've got enough muscle memory to plow trough the BS and enjoy the level design and challenge, specially regarding Turok on original hardware lol. Meanwhile people who didn't grow up with those games are off put whenever a hard jumping puzzle appears or the lack of direction gets them stuck.
> Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.
Fair, my point is more that in order for it to be possible for mere 12 year old mortals to learn to casually execute these tricks, the game has to have predictable, responsive and reproducible movement. In other words, the opposite of slop.
Slop is an unfair word to use, agreed.
I suppose it's possible that they're viewing those factors as being inherent in the original Quake engine rather than something Valve should be credited for and relying on them in their fork so heavily when it didn't suit the overall game was a bad mishmash.
It's more likely they're just conflating how ugly a lot of those later levels are with the engine.
My favorite pasttime in HL/CS back in the day was bhopping and kz_. To some degree I think it has too responsive movement. I recently went back to play HL and I fell down so many crates due to the instant movement, having been used to some inertia in games since.
I remember never quite getting into Counter-Strike: Source because of the difference in inertia. I had friends who were masters of movement there so I know it wasn't a sloppy game, but my muscle memory from 1.6 just made it feel... uncanny :)
Well it was responsive but it wasn't physically accurate at all, which makes it non-intuitive. The whole reason side-games like KZ and surf could exist was due to the bad physics. I competed in local IRC KZ tourneys and also surfed a lot in 1.6. The fact that you gained speed by moving left and right repeatedly doesn't make any intuitive sense. The surf scene was also heavily infected with frame-rate tricks (hotkeys to increase fps-limit in the air, and then lowering it on the ramps) since you floated more in the air the higher your FPS was. In the beginning you needed to have a PC that could support 250+ FPS to be a high-end surfer. This was fixed later with server-set fps limits etc. though.
It created an entire universe of movement based mini-games that I treasured more than the base-game, but it was mostly based on unintuitive physics and engine bugs.
I do agree that the modern game's "inertia" and slow heavy movement feels bad though. Last modern game that I remember had really fast and rapid movement was The Talos Principle.
> Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.
I distinctly remember a noticeable delay between moving the mouse and the view turning, even when the frame rate was high. I think the fix was switching from DirectX to OpenGL.
I assumed it was a general complaint about Xen.
I liked Xen when I played it. I thought the boss fights were terrible, but I think most FPS boss fights are terrible. The other complaint is that the healing pools were too slow. The navigation and obscure puzzles were great, though. They scratched an exploration itch I didn't know I had.
I also found it very weird back then.
I remember buying a Riva TNT to play Half-Life better. Those were fun times! Then there was Counter Strike, many hundreds of hours were spent playing that too.
I only ever played Half-Life on a friend’s PC, but it still made a big impression. Especially the start, how you arrive at this massive research facility and get to just walk around before things really kick-off. Part of the appeal also in the Hitman games, I think.
I remember playing Deus Ex on our iMac which was barely powerful enough to run it. Severe slow down during intense moments, and some major lighting problems. And yet, it remains probably my fondest gaming experience. Something about the way game worlds can capture your imagination when you’re young.
> how many computers were currently running Microsoft Windows in the United States. The number of 20 million that he got back was impressive. Yet he was shocked to learn that Windows wasn’t the most popular single piece of software to be found on American personal computers; that was rather a game called DOOM. Newell and Harrington had long enjoyed playing games. Now, it seemed, there were huge piles of money to be earned from making them.
Later on they also found out that introducing gambling to kids is indeed a much better business than just selling games. Going on for many years without anyone cracking down, and doing workarounds when governments try to make it illegal.
I'm reminded of my art professor whose friend worked designing lottery scratch offs, and found it unfulfilling yet well paid. While my professor struggled teaching at a B-tier state university and contracting for prestigious brands.
Around the same time I gave up my dream of making videogames because pay and hours were terrible, and I had no prospects in the Midwest.
This was the game that brought me into counter-strike and in my opinion still one of the best stories there is. Well done, especially when you think about how limited their possibilities were in the days back then.
this balancing act between scripted story and open gameplay with "conscious" AI defense is so hard to pull off. In the scripted entertainment league Half-Life rules I think. Crysis had the tech to do the real thing and failed - too much cinema and a bad story. But the realism, the mechanics of movement and physics - it was all there in god tier quality.
there were other brilliant ideas bridging nascent technology for the sake of gameplay, like surround sound to locate some fast (nearly impossible to see coming) enemies. It really was perfectly executed.
Great early examples of simulated acoustic spaces matching geometry, like delay networks for metallic ducting in the crawl spaces. And notable firsts in sound management - before there were really "sound engines".
Half Life is my favorite game franchise of all time.
Played all the canon games and SO MANY mods.
Still obsessed with it.
Dupes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42478326
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42472847
> Mark Laidlaw, the sometime science-fiction novelist who wrote the script, makes no bones about the limits to his ambitions for it. “You don’t have to write the whole story,” he says. “Because it’s a conspiracy plot, everybody knows more about it than you do. So you don’t have to answer those questions. Just keep raising questions.”
That's an amazingly humble insight. It's so simple, so true, and so totally not common knowledge.
I wonder if he secretly enjoys sharing it as a "say what's wrong about The Matrix sequels without mentioning The Matrix at all"
I remember playing on the computers at university. Someone had modded the campus map, was so fun to play.
What was really revolutionary, IMO, about Half-Life was how moddable it was, and how Valve supported the modding community and often acquihired good modders.
Oh, and when they purchased the Counter-Strike IP, and started selling it shrinkwrapped, if you owned Half-Life, you just kept using the mod as you already were
In these modern times, I suspect that would be monetised somehow now. Upgrade to a premium user to get golden lootboxes, likely.
But yeah, I knew people who bought Half-Life just to play CS when it was early beta.
Likewise, less famous, but still being played today, Day of Defeat - I was hooked as the experience of "Yeah the rifles can kill you in one shot, and grenades will kill you, it's not CS dude. Oh and press B if that icon comes up, it means you're bleeding"
(Still unsure how I feel about them taking bleeding out.)
I played this game on 512MB of ram and a 20GB HDD
I was completely blown away when I realized that the opening cinematic was the actual game engine. First time I'd ever seen it and the scenes cleverly foreshadowed what was coming.
One of the unfortunate fallouts of Half-life was Quake 3 arena, which could be viewed as it's exact opposite. I am convinced that after half life people just couldn't appreciate the opposite - just shooting, without any story. And it didn't create the deserved following.
Instead we had almost 15 years of Spunkgargleweewee-s as defined by Zero Punctuation.
I loved Q1 and Q2, but Q3A just felt like half a game to me.
> John Carmack famously said: “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”
I feel like these days many games, especially expensive ones, went with completely opposite take. That gameplay is something that's supposed to be there but not important. With terrible results.
This reviewer's criticism of Half Life's pacing, difficulty and gameplay is painfully plebian.
Great article on the single player aspect of the game and absolutely accurate about how exceptional it was - and still is - in the canon of modern gaming.
What really gave Half-Life its legs was the multiplayer component. It came in just as broadband internet was appearing in households across the United States and Canada. The ability to host servers and coordinate through ICQ and message boards created a one-of-a-kind community.
I know because I lived it.
The [R]age Board for the Elites. The CLQ. Adrenaline Gamer and Counter Strike.
Half-Life was incredible and still has an online presence of note - mostly in developing countries. Their hardware matches the lift to run at decent FPS and join games. Now and then I still hop on a server through Steam.
The di clan video - digital immortality - can do more to highlight “why” HLDM and its physics and weapons were such a game changer, even compared to Q3 and UT at the time. There is nothing like using the long jump and tau cannon to literally fly around maps. Other games have tried, but I’ve never gotten the same high as with HL.
Mostly I miss the community, as juvenile and crass as it was. Like the NFL, it was a young man’s game. Most of us were under 25 with rare exceptions. I’ll never forget when Neo Maximus Babson went missing.
This article bring back a lot of memories and than you for sharing… -p$ychos!s- out (LMS, CML, syn, di)
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