IGN
Valve's Managing Director talks Episode Two, Team Fortress, and episoic content.
In the corner of the business center in Leipzig's convention hall is a large wooden box. No, make that a huge box -- about the size of a large shed, the outside of which is stamped with
To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 20 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. logos. It's an interesting spectacle, but it's what's inside the box that really has us excited. Valve is showing off new trailers for Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 and all three are looking absolutely mind-blowing. Luckily Gabe Newell, Valve's Managing Director, was on hand with smelling salts to bring us round...
IGN: How does Episode Two continue the Half-Life story? To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 20 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. Episode Two picks up where Episode One left off. Gabe Newell: In Half-Life 1 you started off as an anonymous guy in the crowd and through the course of the game you turned into a hero, with the G-Man acting as this mysterious face who oversaw that transformation. In Half-Life 2, the game is much more about the G-Man using you. To him you're a tool -- you don't know who he is and you're not sure what his motives are or what he's trying to achieve. All you know is he's trying to unleash you on this world for his own purposes. At the end of the three episodes the G-Man beings to lose control of you and there are other forces starting to come into play, so the player learns the consequences of becoming a more independent agent rather than this tool for the G-Man.
IGN: What new additions can we expect for the next installment? Newell: In Episode Two we're taking the player out City 17 and into new areas. We've also developed the player's relationship with the Vortagons and how they become a companion to you. You also start to see the consequences of what you've done in previous episodes: Gordon isn't necessarily an allied force for good and the fall of the citadel has had pluses and minuses. He's now coming to the attention of other parts of the Combine, who so far have had their way with the Earth. Now they're surprised that a single person can have such a disruptive effect on their plans.
IGN: What effect has episodic development had on Half-Life? To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 20 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. Episode One marked the beginning of a new direction for Valve.
Newell: As a company we've had growing concerns of how much the budget of a game dominates the risk a developer can take. Worryingly that seems to be accelerating rather than reaching some sort of equilibrium, so if things continue we'll start seeing $200 million budgets in the not-to-distant future. This means that unless we figure out a solution as an industry, games will become very conservative. Developers won't have the freedom to take risks with design. Instead they'll be asked to do the same game they did before, only with better graphics.
With the episodic approach we've had the freedom to experiment with things like Portal. We've been able to try some that's disruptive, to experiment with AI and physics and how we can incorporate these portals into a game. As a result all space-based puzzles are no longer viable -- anything that makes the player think "that's too far away" is no longer the case when you add portals to the mix. Not all developers have this freedom and have to be very cautious because, for example, they're working on a project that will ship the same day as the movie. At Valve we think this kind of disruptive experience is at the very core of what makes games interesting and creating episodic games allows us to try out things.
Also, we get a lot out of the fan community. One of the hardest things about
To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 20 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. was we never got any feedback until we were done, whereas after episode one shipped I got 7,000 emails from people telling us what was good, what was bad, what was confusing and what was a revelation. I read every email and all of that information has been fed back into the game. Take Dog for example: his significance has been elevated because of the feedback we've received. People want to see more of him, so that's what we did.
IGN: So how does Portal fit into Half-Life? To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 20 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. Portal creates some seriously cool gameplay scenarios. Newell: Right now Portal is a separate game, but over time we're looking to incorporate it into Half-Life. What actually scared us about Portal is that some people get it very quickly -- they get the idea that this gun connects any two points in space. But other people are very puzzled by the idea and cannot work out how to use it. I'm not sure we can get the majority of game players to understand those aspects in a game straight off so we built Portal to take people by hand and walk them through the idea.
It looks like it's going to be very successful experiment, which means we'll be able to move it into our single-player game much sooner. It's like the gravity gun. Prior to Half-Life 2, we did a bunch of experiments to find out how to make physics more important in a game. Up until that point we felt they had only been used for presentation, to bounce objects around in the world that didn't matter. We wanted it to make people stop and say, "That's not just a saw-blade lying on the ground it's a tool I can use to cut zombies in half!"
If we were working episodically around the time of Half-Life 2 we could have released a small game based around the gravity gun and learned from feedback before including it in the game. Instead we had to wait for the whole game to ship. There's no doubt Half-Life 2 would've been a better game if we'd been able to get the feedback along the way. With Portal we're able to get that feedback much sooner and we can then incorporate that into the next episode.
IGN: What about Team Fortress 2? Stylistically it's certainly a very different departure for Valve... To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 20 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. Team Fortress 2's classes are very different from each other.
Newell: In the multiplayer arena we already have the gritty realism provided by Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike, so for Team Fortress 2 we wanted to do something different and not just a remake of games that people already have. We made the focus of the game the different classes of the soldiers, so each troop type has a different role that is complementary to the next. What's clever is that if a player learns one role as well as how other people play their roles they become much better player. That's because the game is completely dependent on teamwork.
We also wanted to make each class readable, even from a distance. If you see a player in the distance in Counter-Strike it's not particularly important to know a lot about that character. In Team Fortress 2 knowing the difference between a sniper and the pyro guy is incredibly important. That's we decided to opt for very stylized graphics, because the easiest thing to read from a distance is the silhouette of an object. The outline of the different classes therefore varies a lot, so the player can recognize the type of enemy they're up against even when they're only a couple of pixels high. It's the same with the way they move: the scout, for example, doesn't move realistically but his exaggerated strides make it much easier for gamers to pick out.
IGN: Do you think TF2 will become as popular as Counter-Strike? Newell: You can never tell. We work hard and give the product to our customers. The rest is up to them.
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