Did You Really Enjoy Half-Life?

I never really finished Half-Life when it came out in 1998. I'm not sure why, but I grew bored around the Blast Pit and stopped playing the single-player campaign. It just wasn't doing it for me.

So what made Half-Life so popular? Why is it widely known to be so good? It has an honest, solid, single-player campaign. It's marginally innovative, has a decent (though confusing and irreconcilable) story, and the physics engine is solid. The AI is certainly impressive, particularly given the release date in 1998.

These points make a respectable and highly successful game, but they don't make a blowout like Half-Life turned out to be.

My theory is that community mods made Half-Life. Action Half-Life, Science and Industry, Day of Defeat, Frontline Force, and of course Team Fortress Classic were, at the time, prime selling points for the game. I personally bought Half-Life because I wanted to play TFC, after all. Half-Life was just an add-on in my teen eyes.

After playing TFC competitively in a clan for over a year, I learned about Counter-Strike. It was in beta at the time, but you could tell it was going to be something special. As soon as 2000 rolled around and Valve started assisting with Counter-Strike development, the mod took off like a rocket. Today it's still one of the most popular multiplayer shooters out there. Gamers play it over Counter-Strike: Source, even.

Sure, Half-Life is a solid game in its own right. But it wouldn't have been a real blockbuster without its community mods. There's really something to be said for providing APIs and modding tools to your customers.

PlanetSide 2 Release

Back in 2003 Sony Online Entertainment released a uniquely interesting massively multiplayer online role-playing first person shooter known as PlanetSide. A couple of friends and I played for a few months. I think it was my first MMO, and I didn't even have a credit card. We payed with those pre-paid game time cards you could buy in a store.

What stands out most about PlanetSide is the sheer scale. The worlds are huge, the warring teams are massive, and the scale of the constant planetary war is awesome. On top of that, the game is simply fun. It's a shooter to the core, and you can shape and grow your character as you choose. It's a bit of an RPG in that respect; you earn experience and spend it on skills and abilities.

Astonishingly, PlanetSide is still active today. You can download and play it, though there's still a monthly fee.

A few years ago PlanetSide 2 was announced, but I never expected to actually see it come out. MMOs don't seem to be Sony's deal anymore. Let's face it, the days of Everquest are long gone. Not to mention the fact that an MMOFPS has limited appeal.

Interestingly, it's not necessarily a bad thing to sell a product with limited appeal. Just look at EVE. It may only have 400,000 subscribers but they are fiercely loyal and stick with the game for a very, very, long time.

Anyway, PlanetSide 2 sneaked up on me. It came out today, and I'm pleasantly surprised. I have numerous misgivings about it being free to play, but I'll give it a shot. Stay tuned.

Weekly Report - 11/23/2012

This report is sort of a two-weeker; since this week is a holiday and whatnot. Some progress in Half-Life these past two weekends, but next to nothing was accomplished during the weeks. It's been a bad month.

Following a bout of real-life paintball last weekend, the group gathered for some DayZ. After spawning in disparate parts of Charnarus we spent roughly two hours merely to meet up in-game. Fortunately we all have a respectable sense of direction so we did eventually find each other. The most amazing part of our DayZ experience is the amount of items and equipment we found. After about three hours of raiding everyone had full inventories and backpacks - one of us even had a full ALICE pack. Very few other players were online, however, so we called it a night. I have to say the DayZ experience is undoubtedly superior when playing with friends. There's simply no contest.

After DayZ we pulled up Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. We always start playing gravity gun-only for hilarious, toilet-throwing fun, but someone always picks up the bolt thrower or RPG and suddenly it's an all-out free for all. This match lasted almost two hours and ended well into the early hours of the morning. If you haven't played HL2DM, I highly recommend it (with friends).

Retail or Digital Download?

Reports of the second disc in the Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 PC retail package actually containing data from Mass Effect 2 got me thinking about distributing games via retail versus digital download.

It seems certain owners of the Black Ops 2 PC retail package cannot install the game from disc. Once the installer prompts for disc 2, their PC reports that disc 2 is instead minted with the Mass Effect 2 installer.

It is more likely the real Mass Effect 2 installer a few years ago erroneously triggered Windows to mark its installation package file types as ME2-specific file types and these BO2 users are running into just that: a BO2 disc in actuality, but Windows thinks it's ME2 due to some error in the registry caused long ago.

In the event the discs actually are mixed up, someone, not at Treyarch or Activision or Electronic Arts, but at the manufacturing plant responsible for minting the discs has made a huge mistake. If this is the case, I feel real sorry for the users who received a copy of the game with this error. Retail stores won't take it back, because the package is already open (even though you have to open the package to read the license agreement which,  if you disagree with it, you yet again cannot return the product to the store). Their only hope is a 6-8 week turnaround from the game publisher. I bet the consumer will have to pay shipping, too.

I generally buy retail so I have a physical copy of the game I can keep in case the digital distributor later goes out of business or pulls the game and I can never re-download a copy. But if the game must be activated online upon installation anyway, there's little point in buying retail unless you just don't have the bandwidth to download a 15GB game.

Weekly Report - 11/09/2012

Another very light week for gaming. At least I finished Arma 2 and Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead. The final mission of Arma 2 is an absolute bear; I think it took me over four hours to complete.

Arrowhead, on the other hand, was shorter - the whole game - than the final mission of Arma 2 alone! I finished the game in less than three hours. The only improvement I could find over Arma 2 is the addition of the apache chopper. Flying is great fun, but it's pretty challenging too. I recommend a joystick for flight.

After Arma I played a round of one of my favorite games ever - Left 4 Dead 2 - and decided to look through my backloggery for an unbeaten title to tackle. Turns out it's time to finally beat Half-Life.

Questioning the Industry

One perk of working at a college is the constant stream of speakers, presenters, and authors who visit campus. Occasionally they'll bring in someone interesting. Today I sat through an hour-long presentation from a former Electronic Arts game producer.

Turns out he didn't work on massive, AAA titles but I did recognize some of his work. The talk, as you might expect, was focused at instructing college students what sort of skills and technologies they would need  to be familiar with in order to get into the game development industry: C++, Lua, Python, and XML to name a few.

The most interesting - and disheartening - portion of his talk was about where the industry is heading. Most indications point toward Free to Play (F2P) as the future of gaming. I've never been keen on DLC, where publishers (not even necessarily the developers!) try to eke more cash out of consumers for a paltry amount of extra content. I'm even less keen on F2P titles where publishers literally nickel and dime gamers until outright fatigue sets in.

F2P encourages casual, pick-up-and-play gaming. It also encourages hurry-up-and-drop-it gaming because the content seriously wants for depth. There aren't any story-driven F2P games as far as I'm aware, and that's the sort of game I like to play most.

F2P titles where you buy items, upgrades, and equipment in order to gain a competitive advantage (Pay to Win or P2W) is another story altogether.

This alarming trend toward the casual and mainstream really got to me. It might soon be time to go back to playing cards. People don't play cards as much as they used to.

P.S. Bonus reading on Free to Play methodology

DayZ Wishlist

I probably shouldn't do this, just in case I ever wanted to make a massively multiplayer zombie apocalypse survival game. But seeing as that's rather unlikely, here's my wishlist for features in DayZ (or a DayZ-like game).

• Character skills. Characters should, over time or through practice, improve in some measurable way. Examples include marksmanship, stamina, speed, etc. Since characters are apt to die and lose all progress, the benefits of advancing through the skill system should be attainable a la Enemy Territory.
• Players should be able to train dogs for hunting, tracking, and other purposes. Dogs could be really interesting for tracking other players.
• More quiet weapons. Crossbows are good, but we need longbows and melee weapons too.
• More lights. It's impossibly dark at night. Sure, it's a pass at realism, but it's not a fun way to play.
• A party system.
• Some way to tell one player from another. It's hard to report cheaters when you have no idea who just clipped through the wall and killed you with a hunting knife for your can of pork and beans.
• Manufacturing. Seriously, there are abandoned factories all over the place. How awesome would it be to skill up and create your own ammunition, tools, fuel, and food?
• Bug fixes. That is all.

As it stands, the game is really hurting for lasting value and reasons to keep playing. I think some character building would fit the bill rather well. There need to be some goals or the game will end up a passing fad, at best.

Weekly Report - 11/01/2012

It's been an outright wash this week. I haven't even turned on my gaming PC since last weekend!

That said, I did make some progress in Arma 2. I have made it roughly halfway through the final mission which requires you, apparently, to conquer every single village in Chernarus. Charnarus is 225 square kilometers of foothills, forests, dirt roads, villages, factories, and a few larger towns. Fortunately you have access to a variety of vehicles and multiple squads of AI infantry and armor to assist.

In between bouts of Arma 2 I started to rebuild my ice HCE Embermage in Torchlight 2. The previous one was one-shotted through a wall by an unseen champion monster. This time around I'll be ignoring Dexterity and putting all attribute points into Focus and Vitality; I'm skeptical of the pitiful dodge rate granted by a handful of Dexterity points. I think it might also help to wield a one-handed wand instead of a two-handed staff so I can carry a shield. It's worth thinking about.