Half-Life 2, first four hours, plus Thief 3 thoughts

[solipsistnation]

After an hour or so of messing around waiting for my client to contact the Steam servers and verify that I had, in fact, bought a copy of the game (resulting in a dialog box saying "We were unable to contact Steam in order to verify your purchase, but for now you can play Half-Life 2 Retail Version and we'll let you know when your purchase is verified." Gee, thanks.), and another half-hour watching the game decrypt, I finally got to sit down and play Half-Life 2.

In many ways, this year's game releases have been the culmination of my entire PC-owning experience. My first gaming PC was based around a Pentium Pro 200 (512k cache, oooh) I acquired from gweepprefect in a complicated trade involving a bunch of his crap and a bunch of my crap and neither of us ending up with emptier closets. "Well," I thought, "whatever will I do with a PC? Maybe I'll play that game Mike Romatelli was talking about testing." That year, Thief: The Dark Project and Half-Life were released, and I played them both in the living room of a dive apartment in Waltham.

This year, the third Thief game was released, and now Half-Life 2. Thief 3 was very disappointing, if only for how close they came to being a worthy successor-- it was so close that the places they fell short were thrown into sharp, vivid relief, and while there were definitely moments in the game that stand alongside moments in any of the other two games, the game overall was a disappointment. Playing through Thief 2 again, I realized what was missing from the third game. In Thief 2, there is always a sense of space, and of being in the middle of a really really huge city. The city levels (the one where you escape an ambush and sneak home and the one where you track a courier through the city, unseen) are VAST. Sure, there are a lot of fake doors and expanses of wall, but there are also lots and lots of nooks, crannies, patches of shadow, windows to climb through, shops, the canal, the sewers, the graveyard-- all sorts of things! The level is HUGE. It takes a long time to walk across it, and you can get lost in the streets if you aren't careful. Compare this to the city hub levels of Thief 3-- they're tiny. Each one is only a couple of streets, and while there are a few places to explore in each, there's not a lot of stuff to discover-- one place where you can creep along the rafters and into the next building, one or two open windows, and just... smallness. In my Thief 2 replay, I just reached the rooftop tour level, and I'm looking forward to a good hour or two of leaping from building to building, peering in windows and stealing things. And I keep finding things I didn't find the first two times I played through the game. I will probably play Thief 3 again, but I don't expect to find much I didn't the first time through.

Half-Life 2 has big shoes to fill, especially considering how many good games (many modeled on the original Half-Life, with various additions) have come out in the intervening years. Even just considering Far Cry, Half-Life 2 has ridiculously high standards to meet.



So far, and with me in the third chapter ("Water Hazard," where you get to zip around in a little boat! VROOM! Wheeee!), HL2 has entirely lived up to its hype. It's entirely possible that it'll pull and Unreal and after a very promising first few levels, it'll suddenly turn into a lengthy travelogue with guns. I don't think so, though. Knowing what little I know of the upcoming plot, I expect it'll keep going at a pretty fast clip, will involve lots of jumping and being freaked out by things, will include some sneaky physics-engine-based puzzles, and will be highly entertaining overall. Already there have been a bunch of different puzzles based around using items from the environment in various ways to, among other things, blow up those damn barnacle-tongue-things (which I tend to refer to as "Apostles," but that might be sort of an obscure reference), release floating barrels under one end of a ramp to raise it high enough to jump a wall with, move bricks in order to lower a basket on a rope, and some other very neat and very clever things. Where in DX2 and (sadly) Thief 3 (along with Max Payne 2-- along with HL2, all 3 of these used the Havok.com physics engine), the physics engine was mostly used for window-dressing, with one or two clever bits of physics-use, in HL2 the game appears to have been designed from the start around the use of the physics engine, around interaction with the environment, around use of items in the environment, and so on. There's no "tacked-on" feel to any of it.

Half-Life 2 also marks the point where people in games look right, talk right, and have actual facial expressions. DX2 was almost there, but had some shortcomings. I watched carefully in HL2 while being talked at by various scientists and people, and wow, they did it right. They've made it past the Uncanny Valley and into realism, finally. (Well, the G-Man is still very firmly stuck down in the cusp there, but that's the point of him...) The usual gang from the first game show up-- Barney! The bald scientist! The black scientist! And a pet headcrab, in one of the best parts of the unusually lengthy "As you don't know but really should, Bob" segment. If you loved Half-Life like I did (and I think that I, disconcertingly, am probably less of a fan-boy than most), that whole segment should have you grinning and cackling with glee. Of course, it follows a harrowing rooftop chase through totalitarian City 17... And that chase? As you flee, citizens of City 17 will call out to you: "In here! Quick! To the roof!" and they'll cry and ask "Why us?" and gesture and EVERYTHING IS RIGHT. No suspension of disbelief necessary. No, "Heh, that weird blocky person thinks I should go that way." Nope, it's "Damn, that guy needs to shave. Oh wait, I'm being chased, right. To the roof then!"

Overall, it's a blast. Driving the boat is better than driving any of the vehicles in Far Cry, or, dare I say it, Halo.

Of course, the basic premise of the game is pretty harsh. Remember all that crap you did in Half-Life? Shooting all those creepy aliens who were invading and stuff? Hopping dimensions, fighting off hordes of zappy guys and grunts and all that? And finally the giant horrible space fetus with the glowing brain? All that time and effort and murder and terror?

Well, ha, too bad. You lost.

Yeah, now pick it up from there.

...man, now I want to go home. Maybe I'll claim I'm not feeling well... "Half-Life 2 Flu."

Comments

[archdukechocula.livejournal.com]

Ok, I've played it now and, needless to say, Valve delivered the 18 karat beauty I was hoping for. This game is the most realistic and atmospheric game I have played in ages. I have officially been wowed. I shall now retreat to my cave of visceral electronic pleasures, from whence I am unlikely to return for a great deal of time.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

I LOVE the scientist and his pet headcrap. "Don't worry, she's been debeaked." (She? He? I forget.)

Did you see that he was trying to coax her onto his HEAD? Where, presumably, he carries her around? FREAKY. "Oh, she may try to... couple... with your head."

But, yes indeed.

[jon3.livejournal.com]

I notice mine is taking like 30 seconds to switch between zones.

You notice it taking that long? I wonder if thats problem with my computer.

Its a 2.53G 1.5G ram, 9700pro box.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Actually, yes-- I forgot that part when writing this up. That's the single biggest complaint I have with the game.

I have an AthlonXP 3000+ (2.1GHz, 400MHz FSB), 1GB RAM, 9800 Pro system.

What kind of disk do you have? Standard old-fashioned ATA100 sort of thing?

[jon3.livejournal.com]

Yeah. ATA. The thing is though, if you watch the disk activity, it only loads from disk for about 5-10 seconds, and the other half of the time is the disk idle, and it (unloading?) or something.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Huh. On mine, the light comes on and stays on the whole time. (And it's REALLY BRIGHT, so it's hard to miss.)

[jon3.livejournal.com]

Hrm. I may test it when I go home with a watch.

I wonder if SATA would be any better.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

First generation wouldn't be, but newer drives may...

Hm. I have this spare 9GB FWSCSI drive... Pity I don't have a spare PCI slot. Or a spare drive bay. (Oh, wait, I do-- no floppy!) But at least I have a teensy little computer...

[jon3.livejournal.com]

Both of my drivers are 7200rpm with 8M cache though. a WD 120 and a WD 160.

I wonder if more video memory would help.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Why do you think? Low video memory, I'd think, would cause problems with frame rates as textures and shaders are swapped in and out of VRAM as needed.

I think it's just loading in tons and tons of model and texture data... The game is, what, 3GB or something? Or larger?

Or perhaps it's decrypting it on the fly. :P

[jon3.livejournal.com]

I only would think more video memory might help would be if it was smart enough to load 2 sequences at the same time. I might try the game tonight with the graphics quality turned down a notch or two for speed.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

If you have the option of enabling compressed textures (it might be a secret config file thing), that would speed loading textures into the card...

If by "sequences" you mean multiple sub-chapters, between the loading screens, I don't think more VRAM would help that. I suspect that the textures are so large that they spend more time in system RAM than on the card itself.

I'm guessing that the stuff that takes a long time is the map itself and stuff around it, along with scripted behaviors for the AI people and critters. There's also a TON of audio content, very detailed person behavior and movement (watch the guys jumping down into the canal and how they move), and so on. I know from talking to game developer people that the havok engine is pretty bright about how it handles objects-- they're effectively static until you actually start to interact with them, at which point all of a sudden they assume the properties they've been given. This means that the engine doesn't have to constantly worry about dealing with their behavior until it absolutely needs to, and speeds things up.

They really didn't skimp on the environments, though, which is part of what I find really impressive. It's not like you come into a room and there's a single barrel in there, so you start looking around for what that single barrel can do-- there's crap EVERYWHERE, and boards and bits of stuff and things that don't really _need_ to be objects, or could be entirely static-- there's a walkway around a circular thing somewhere underground that's made of boards and pieces of plywood or something carefully arranged on a narrow framework, counterbalanced with bricks and stuff. I started off merrily across it, and was surprised to note that the boards were moving around as I walked, and that if I ran into and kicked one of the bricks off of the end of one of them, I was likely to knock the walkway down and have a hard time getting back if I needed to. They didn't need to do that, but they did, and it makes it REAL.

I usually play games through twice to get the feel of them-- once I just blow through, seeing the plot, doing what I need to and exploring a bit, and then again for the full-detail experience, poking around and finding everything I can, including things like weird ways to get onto roofs in Thief and so on. HL2 is going to be a BLAST for that kind of thing, I think.

[gambl0r.livejournal.com]

I'm moving through the game pretty slowly, fooling with every possible object I can find. That part you mentioned with the two baskets and the bricks... After getting the goodies inside the one basket I managed to throw one brick in each basket, hoping to get the basket 'scales' to balance... but one still immediately dropped to the ground :(

Still, the possible interaction with objects is AMAZING. Before the big chase sequence you were talking about, I leisurly hung out in some of the people's apartments, breaking all their windows and throwing all their posessions onto the street below. In the end these people had no chairs, lamps, pots + pans, crates (what did they need crates for anyway), or bicycles. I brought the bike all the way up from the first floor just to throw it out the window :D

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2004-11-17

Heh heh.

I'm saving that kind of thing for the second run through.

I did like the guard who knocks something on the ground and says, "Hey, you. Pick that up." Just, you know, 'cause he could.

And the guy who, when you peer through the slot at somebody being interrogated, slams it shut.

It really makes me not feel too bad about running them over with the little boat.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, Deus Ex: Invisible War had that same confined-feeling-levels problem compared to the original Deus Ex. DX never had really huge-feeling levels, but you did at least have the sense of being outdoors in the levels that were set outdoors (like the one involving the streets of Paris). In Invisible War, I always felt like I was indoors, even in the levels that were obviously set outside.

To an extent, I think that was by design - they were trying to convey a sense of how compartmented and confined society had become by the time of the game - but even so, I would've expected to get a certain sense of being outdoors in, say, the Cairo-slums level. There was only one level in DXIW that gave me that sense, and even that felt more like I was just in a really big building.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

It did, and for much the same reason-- when they decided to release those games on the Xbox (using the same codebase rather than porting from one to the other), they had to make the levels small enough to fit in the limited RAM of the console system. DXIW and Thief 3 were both based on the same engine and share quite a lot of the same code.

DX did have large and relatively detailed levels, though, although not quite to the same scale as Thief 2's city streets and rooftops. You certainly felt the scale while roaming Liberty Island, for example, and realizing that from the top of the statue you could see people walking around all over the island and that the whole thing was there at once.

That's a good observation about feeling like you were indoors even when supposedly outside-- I think that sums it up really well.

I am more inclined to say that they said, "Hey, our maps are little and compartmentalized, let's put the divides along where our society would put them" rather than the other way around. From reading interviews with Warren Spector during the anticipation phase of both of those games, I got the impression that the platform was driving the design more than other aspects of the game.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

when they decided to release those games on the Xbox (using the same codebase rather than porting from one to the other), they had to make the levels small enough to fit in the limited RAM of the console system.

Ah, that explains it. Although even there, I have to wonder - I mean, the outdoor levels in Halo certainly feel big, and that was originally an Xbox game, so you'd expect that problem to be even more pronounced. The outdoor levels in Halo aren't very detailed, though, I admit. Everything's pretty much static except for the characters. It's not like there are a lot of doors or even very complex geometry. The only levels that have anything like that are the indoors ones.

Possibly that just means the Halo designers were cleverer about balancing the limitations of the platform against their level designs than the ones for DXIW.

You certainly felt the scale while roaming Liberty Island, for example, and realizing that from the top of the statue you could see people walking around all over the island

... assuming you were so sloppy as to leave any of them alive before ascending the statue. :)

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Yeah, look at how many people (with scripts and responses and so on), items, and so on there are in DXIW... Lots of 'em, while Halo mostly has guys to shoot who share more or less the same scripts.

I suspect that if they had started off thinking in terms of making Xbox games rather than deciding partway in, they would have been less ambitious in certain areas, which would have let them be more ambitious in others. Considering that the physics engine stuff really didn't make a lot of difference in either DXIW or Thief 3 (I mean, sure, it's pretty, and ragdoll corpse physics is fun, especially when you stack 20 or 30 dead guys in a closet and throw in a grenade and watch them bounce around), but was it necessary to the game? That's one thing I'm greatly enjoying about HL2-- the way the world works around you _matters_.

And what you call "sloppy" I call "stealthy." And I bet I got a better reception from the supply seargant when I got in from the first mission, too. 8)

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Actually, I developed the habit of sneaking around and tranking everybody with the crossbow after my stealth/evasion skills were up to the task. All the sneakiness without any of the danger of having some dude you sneaked past earlier come up behind you on his patrol route and bugger you with a sniper rifle while you're trying to work out how to climb the wall. So amend my previous remark to read "conscious" rather than "alive". :)

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, then. 8)

I got very tired of the lenghthy "Ooh! Ow! Ow! Oooh!" phase of the tranq darts, though. Especially when other guards noticed the one with the thing sticking out of his butt running around freaking out about it.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

If you hit 'em in the neck, they only do that once. :)