I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.
Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2’s cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck’s sake, Gabe.
Instead we got Half Life: Alyx
Only if you’re rich enough to afford VR setup. Fuck me for being born in a third world country, right Gabe?
Haha you’re poor
Choke on my toes
Don’t threaten them with a good time.
And are physically abled to play in VR.
I had a VR Headset (Vive Cosmos), but my eyes just aren’t up scratch, so I could never enjoy it.
It was the same for HL2 though. I played it like 10 years after it was released, didn’t make the game worse. With VR the first experience will probably be even better in the future.
It was the same for HL2 though
Literally how? All you needed was a computer that could run games, which if you were into gaming on PC, you already had.
It required a good computer which I living in a third-world country didn’t have.
But that was not exclusive to HL2. That’s for every AAA PC game released at the time. Don’t tell me you could run GTA:VC but not HL2.
VR is not exclusive to Alyx as well. I could run Diablo 2 but not HL2.
False equivalency. Most games these days, and for the foreseeable future, aren’t VR.
This. I didn’t (and still don’t) need groundbreaking gameplay for Episode 3. I just wanted an ending to the plot.
Shame Ubisoft doesn’t feel this obligation to gamers. If they did, we’d probably only have 4 assassin’s Creed games
Is assassin’s creed any good? Once a game becomes a franchise with a bajillion releases I just tune it out. Feel the same way about marvel movies. Maybe they’re good, maybe they’re bad, but I’m more annoyed that they’re trying to shove it down my throat, so I tune out.
AC4 Black Flag is peak
Best sea shanty simulator of all time
The series should’ve ended with AC3, but Ubi milks IPs like crazy (think POP, both the 2008 reboot and whatever we got in last year)
Rogue had a great story though, I’d take it as a spinoff AC
I’ve played pretty much all but the most recent. They have their ups and downs. The first was almost like a proof of concept. Kinda boring, but the story sets up the sequels. There was a good overall story arc in the Desmond/Ezio trilogy (Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations) that hasn’t been duplicated since.
AC3 was a bit of a breath of fresh air, being part of the American revolution, but it wasn’t for everyone. The story was being deviated from earlier games too much. AC4 is, for me, still the best single-player pirate game out there. It continues with Rogue. Both of those games I highly enjoyed.
Unity (Paris during French Revolution) and Syndicate (Victorian London) both have fantastic maps and character design, but gameplay and story just wasn’t as interesting to me. The series was feeling stale.
To Ubisoft’s credit, they knew that too and entirely revamped the gameplay and menu system starting with Origins (Ancient Egypt), then Odyssey (Ancient Greece), and Valhalla (Vikings during 9th Century). Valhalla was really fun. I love how they change certain villages up throughout the year… adding festivals/challenges depending on when you play. The maps were just getting too huge and overwhelming at this point.
I play the games now mainly for exploration. Gameplay and story are secondary as they aren’t as interesting anymore. They really put a lot of detail into their surroundings and do their research on history, whether real or fantastical. It’s escapism to another land in another time.
Ubisoft is not Rockstar. The story is no longer the reason to play these games. They are forgettable. The Desmond/Ezio storyline of the earlier games are no more. However, we don’t have to wait several years to play a sequel.
Valhalla was the only one that I paid full price for since it was 2020 and we were still basically trapped in our homes, but definitely got my money’s worth. They seemed to take more time making Mirage so I’ll check that out eventually. They are remastering some of their old games so I’d play those over the dated originals.
The Far Cry series has a similar feeling for me, but with a first person perspective. New lands to explore, new stories and characters, but some are better than others.
Obviously subjective, but I was a very big fan of the series for the first several entries, kinda began losing interest around Unity (although in hindsight, Unity is probably one of the best ones in a few ways, but at release it was a very buggy mess).
I am not personally a fan of the way they have ignored the modern day story line after around 3, as I am one of the few on the planet that actually found that part of the narrative compelling and the part I was really playing for.
I don’t like they gameplay changes since Origins, and it has increasingly become more of an action game over time and less of a dope assassin game.
AssCreed4 is the best game of the series. Black Flag’s combat was great and the ship combat keeps me coming back to the game years on.
There’s two or three good ones in the series. Thankfully the rest aren’t as bad as Far Cry which is just about the shittiest franchise I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
The first one was meh, the second one was good. Haven’t played most of the others but people seem to enjoy them.
We’ve been waiting for so long that games don’t even remember Half-Life. It’s all “silksong copium” memes now lol
Clearly this just means that Silksong IS Half-life 3.
I think HL3’s meme status is the only reason a lot of gamers today do know it. If it had come out, it would’ve been forgotten.
That depends on how good it was but yeah when has the third in a trilogy ever been good?
I. Do. Not. Care. About. The. Tech.
Gabe, you created an obligation when you ended Episode 2 on a cliff hanger. You should have just let Marc Laidlaw and the game devs just make more games.
As long as it had kept the core writers, I’m sure everyone would be happy. Hell, any “innovation” is being handled by the modding continuity. Breadman of Entropy: Zero created a more fun combat loop then any of the HL2 games have. Singularity has a better physics weapons just by being able to use it independent of the selected weapon and making the object transparent.
Unfortunately devs at Valve eventually will be swallowed by the money making machine called Steam. It’s the way the company is structured, the people working on the most profitable projects are rewarded the most.
Like the team working on In the Valley of Gods has disintegrated after Valve bought Campo Santo. The devs are all working on other things inside Valve.
I think that’s the thing that annoys me the most. Sometimes, a game doesn’t get a sequel because sales were bad or the studio was bought out or even went bankrupt. Here, it’s just because the guy running the company doesn’t feel like it. They have a constant stream of free money from Steam sales to fall back on, so why not just let your game devs do something? I haven’t kept up to date, but wasn’t there this huge gap of time where none of the TF2 devs had logged and played any TF2?
Meh. They might have not wanted to make Ep3, but the fans sure did.
I understand Valve works or used to work very differently, people collaborating without a strong top-down steering from management. Yet whatever explanation they have, we were punched in the gut at the end of Ep2, then left waiting, holding our breath. It’s just a piece of media, but it was an important part of my teenage years, and I could never experience the end of the story (outside of reading it in a blog) I waited so much for.
This made me really resent Valve, and soured my experience/memories with the series, I haven’t touched HL or other Valve game for 10+ years, and I don’t think I will in the future.
Half-Life 2 doesn’t even have a good combat loop. Half-Life 1 has more variety in the weapons and the map team in HL1 actually talked to the AI team. Notice how the combine just stand in doorways or out in the open? It’s lost, but I once saw a video showing that the combine can flank the player and do other complex maneuvers if the maps are properly designed, but Gabe was too obsessed with the Gravity Gun and everything else suffered. The “puzzles” are all either busy work or another seesaw task. I remember being hyped when Gabe said that Ep2 would have the biggest physics puzzle in it, but it ended up just being a huge seesaw “puzzle” that was solved just by clearing the cars off of it.
Every time I do a Half Life replay, I always end up getting bored in HL2 and skip to the community made stuff. Half-life Echoes and Entropy: Zero are musts.
HL2 still did more for the industry than probably any other game on the market. Also, Minerva is a must to play, one of the best HL2 mods.
There are so many landmark games. I’d say HL1 was more influential then HL2 anyway. Hell, I’d say Portal did more for first person puzzle games then HL2 did for FPS games.
It just handicapped itself by making the gravity gun such busy work and ignoring other aspects.
HL2 is more than just the gravity gun. The art style, the open levels on the beaches, the facial animations, the improved storytelling from HL1, the antlion army, game was so much more than just an updated half life. Without HL2, portal wouldn’t have any legs to stand on, valve took on narbacular drop, hired the team and put them to work on the source engine to make portal. Counter strike source was the defacto mp shooter for years if not decades, hell even the portal 2 goo came from half life 2 ep 3 just like they mention in the documentary. Saying they ignored all other aspects of the game for the gravity gun does half life 2 a disservice to what it accomplished.
antlion army,
Hey, here’s this cool thing. You can summon Antlions to fight with you, but only in two areas and never again. Oh, that boss fight in Ep2 where you could have gotten it again? Nope, but here’s a Defend Against Waves set piece instead.
What I’m saying is that the combat loop got ignored for the gravity gun. Where’s the Gluon Gun? Why is the Tau Cannon only mounted to the buggy? Why are both the SMG and AR2 full auto, spread weapons? If we’re doing wide open areas, the AR2 should really have a tighter spread for long range engagements.
Halo did wide open environments, did vehicles with mouse or analog stick steering was a joy to drive and actually used them in more then one area before HL2. Keyboard steering sucks.
What HL2 excels at is presentation of the story. It’s really not that deep of a story.
Also, never liked CS or military shooters, so that’s not exactly a going to sell me. And don’t get me started on the hat shit.
I’d have done it just to conclude the story, but then agian, I like stories…
Of ylu watch the video other core half life devs state they regret not finishing episode 3 with estimates thagbitbwoulf have only taken another ~2 years of work.
Although theybalsp pointed out we probably would have not gotten another game in exchange, like maybe portal or tf2
Why does Gabe newell look like Richard stallman,Funny enough they have different goals and oppose each other.
The man has aged since that famous photo from like 20 years ago.
shock
gasp
~questions asked at parliament~
frr
So just leaving the series dead on a cliffhanger is somehow not a copp out to gamers??
It’s spelled coppp-out
The rest of the word is gonna be part of the Chapet 2 expansion of my comment. There will be no third.
Zero punctuation on the orange box. https://youtu.be/_dlEm_2ke8k?si=bsTqae8W64qKny93
deleted by creator
“I was just stumped,” Newell said, sipping a drink on one of his many yachts. “Maybe I’ll get unstumped with my next yacht purchase.”
Overhearing the conversation, George RR Martin, sitting on a pile of money, quipped, “Yes, and I am thiiiis close to finishing the next book.”
How greedy of the man, to checks notes admit to not wanting to make a cash grab and instead leaving the series unfinished because they didn’t think they could do it justice.
His cash grab was steam, lol.
Damn that bastard for making the best platform for buying and playing games. How dare he.
I’m not complaining, just noting that it was very lucrative. Folks are really overreacting with the downvotes. Chill people.
It sure sounded like you were. It’s because you said cash grab. That’s a negative attribute. You basically said it’s garbage but made him a lot of money. Along the lines of like the last 4 terminator movies.
Well, I use Steam a ton and have a Steam Deck. But, Steam dev effort to income ratio is probably ridiculously skewed. The company pretty much prints money. In that way, Steam is a cash grab.
I do question if Steam hadn’t been such a success if Valve might have released HL3 by now.
It has Google vibes to it. Google makes so much money in ad revenue that a lot of their other products just get cancelled.
I do like Valve overall though and am a fan. I’m a fan that wants to know the ending of HL3.
cash grab
noun
plural cash grabs
: the greedy pursuit of an opportunity for making money especially when done without regard for ethics, concerns, or consequences
