What is the deal with Valve?

[FrikaC]

[Squirt]

Yeah nothing wrong with Valve. If they only would show some love to the original Team Fortress mod, I'd like them a tiny bit more.

I'm trying to avoid Steam since I bought a game last year and wasn't able to return it even though it didn't run and my laptop was way over the required system specs.

[mh]

[scar3crow]

[daemonicky]

[Dr. Shadowborg]

Can't speak for scar3crow, but this is my opinion regarding Valve's game "quality" having played the original Half-Life:

Sure you can test something until it works and doesn't crash (i.e. this is what I call stability), but...

How can you call a game that has zero replay value quality?

Example: The scene with the grunts hiding in a dark room knocking out Freeman in a badass power suit with a single punch might be funny once, but gets real old and nonsensical by the time of the second playthrough (I mean seriously, a single punch can stop a man in a power suit capable of stopping even the most powerful rockets?)...Imagine how much more replay value might have been had, had they made it such that you could suprise the grunts instead spinning the storyline off on a different tangent? Hell you wouldn't even have to stop there, you could add storyline branches at various points throughout the game!

Having played Half-Life, it's two missionpacks OpForce and BlueShift, I can't really say that it has the replay value of say Doom, Quake, DN3D, etc. (indeed, the level design in some of those three listed have levels that can be played in at least two or three different ways through use of divergent paths!)

There's only one way to play Half-Life, often with very little deviation for even secrets, and always with only one way to get into a room, let alone exit it. Contrast that with something like SiN for example, SiN has TONS of replay value simply because you can do actions in one level that will affect later levels, and frequently has different routes you can take to finish the map unit / mission at hand.

And this is the biggest problem I have with Valve. Confusing game stability with game quality.

[daemonicky]

[Spike]

[Squirt]

[frag.machine]

Quake is all about immediately jumping into action, grab the best weapon you can get, shoot everything that moves. The monsters are stupid and there just to be shot, there's a small fragment of story and the maps are there primarily to serve the onslaught, either against monsters or against other players. In this regard, Quake follows Carmack's philosophy of "games needs a story as much as porn movies". And it's all right with that, because the final result is quite enjoyable if you're playing it for what it is.

Half Life is a different animal. It tries to tell a story. Okay, a B-movie story, full of cliches, but stills a story. Sure, there's some action and puzzles, there are monsters here and there, but the main objective is to tell a story. they're not only there to be mauled; they are telling you a story. Every Black Mesa laboratory, depot or room, every scientist attacked by a headcrab, every Barney clone, every soldier. It's as close of an interactive movie as you could be back in 1998. And it's all right with that, because the final result is quite enjoyable if you're playing it for what it is.

Personally, I don't see why I should dislike one because I like other. They're different, and they're great games that stand higher among the crowd.

BTW, if there's anyone here that never saw it before, I suggest checking out the machinima series. You'll never see Half Life the same way again.

[mankrip]

The best thing Valve did in HL was ditching morph-target animation in favor of skeletal animation.

It was this that made mods like possible, something which simply can't be achieved to the same extents in Quake.

[scar3crow]

[Labman]

[revelator]

mostly like the story the engine im less impressed about (yeah im a sucker for sci-fi adventures).

agree unreal looked more polished but then unreal is not as story driven as half-life, i think what caught most peoples attention with HL was the story (its not "half" bad phun intended).

half-life 2 engine is still quite solid allthough the age is starting to show but its nowhere near horribly dated looking.

newer incarnations of the source engine actually looks quite fine compared with say crysis (at less than half the gfx load).

in the end if its a good game then i could care less about not having the latest of the latest stuff as long as i enjoy myself

[Ranger366]

Half-Life's weapons were awesome, would like to see them in Quake though.
I already ported some over, but I can't release them... because of Valve

I'm sure following the developement of HL was interesting, the people out there are collecting media and other content from the beta versions of HL. You can find alot in the official SDK.