More Cake is Coming (Portal 2)

[ray245]

Depends on price. I'll pay $10 for it, max. Otherwise its not worth my cash. Its DLC level content, IMO.

If it's the same length as episode 2 then yes, it'd be on a par with say Broken Steel, but I get the impression that it will be significantly longer.

I thought that the length of most games nowadays are more or less the same with HL2:E2?

[born in shadow]

BorderlandsDiablo has procedural generation of gunsweapons and armor.

Fixed it for you Procedural stuff has been around for awhile, since all those old Diablo/Dungeon Siege/etc. games, likely earlier. I will be wowed when procedural stuff reaches more like what Borderlands was supposed to have, with procedural terrain/mobs/loot/etc. Stuff like that shows up in more than a few strategy games/RPGs, but I'd like to see it in more shooter/exploration based games.

Then again, I'd also like to see AI that does more than "walk towards player, shoot, dive right." Tough luck on that one

[Stark]

Are you stupid? Random weapons have been around since fucking Rogue in the text-only period. At least Borderlands has a system of combining component models to create visibly different weapons, which is a step above 'green /' and 'white /' and 'the one sword bitmap'. It's still not what Starglider was talking about (ie the procedural generation of the actual assets themselves, although Borderlands was apparently designed with this in mind originally.

[Starglider]

I thought that the length of most games nowadays are more or less the same with HL2:E2?

Only due to the recent FPS trend of making the single player campaign a demo / training session for the multiplayer mode - and really, not even then. Personally I blew through HL2:E2 in about half the time of say Battlefield:Bad Company or GoW2 single player campaigns.

Of course I never played those games again, whereas I replayed HL2:E2 on hard, then again on hard with the bloody gnome, but then we all have our little mental problems.

[Stark]

How did it take you more than 2 hours to finsih ep 2?

[Starglider]

How did it take you more than 2 hours to finsih ep 2?

Making sure I squished all the bugs and found all the caches? Because hey, can't make a modern game without at least some filler.

The more relevant question is 'why did it only take 7 hours to finish Bad Company'.

[Alyeska]

Yeah yeah, gameplay over graphics, blah blah blah. I don't give a shit, as far as I'm concerned the Source engine simply isn't good enough nowadays - games like Left 4 Dead and what not are possible because the Source engine is so ancient that any computer can run Left 4 Dead's content and not be taxed in the least, and thats great- for Left 4 Dead.

However, remember when Half Life 2 came out and it looked amazing? Yeah, I want that again. I don't want to wait years and years for a few hours of content produced on an ancient engine. I could get another Crysis in that time- oh wait, I am.

Note I never restricted my comments to graphics either. Don't get me wrong, I like that game advancement has started to slow - how else to explain my 10/2006 PC still runs all games perfectly at max settings in 3/2010? But that doesn't mean it has to stop, and Half Life 2 has stopped since it came out. There's been no noticeable improvement whatsoever.

Get over yourself already. Source still looks good, and each time they release a new source based game, there is an improvement. The graphics of the original were not "fantastic" or massively cutting edge. There were other games that had notably better graphics. What works for Half-Life is how they use the graphics. Half-Life 2 has some of the most real looking NPCs out there. They don't look plastic, and they don't have to use scripted motion capture to make the movements look real.

And for all we know, they have some nice new surprises in wait for the next releases.

Save the brand new engine for the new game. But using improved versions of the existing engine, it works.

Did you know that Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2 use the same engine? Look at the graphical improvements between them. C&C Renegade, C&C Generals, and C&C 3 all use the same engine. Thats right, the 3d engine they developed for Renegade was the same source base for future releases.

There is nothing wrong with Source. What can be wrong is how they use it. And all evidence points towards a good use of it for Portal 2 and Ep 3. Every single Source release by Valve has improved on the previous release.

Cyrsis looked good, but it had no soul to it.

[adam_grif]

Source still looks good, and each time they release a new source based game, there is an improvement.

The only reason contemporary source engine games still look acceptable is because there has been massive stagnation for the industry. The number of PC games that push current technology can be counted on one hand, and there has yet to be a game dethroning Crysis as the technical marvel that it is. Crysis came out in 2007. The source engine improvements are welcome, but not drastic by any stretch of the imagination.

The graphics of the original were not "fantastic" or massively cutting edge. There were other games that had notably better graphics. What works for Half-Life is how they use the graphics.

HL1 wasn't praised for having the greatest graphics in town (although they were top-tier), it was praised for outstanding gameplay and cutting-edge use of scripted NPC interactions.

Half-Life 2 has some of the most real looking NPCs out there. They don't look plastic, and they don't have to use scripted motion capture to make the movements look real.

Are you telling me that the characters in HL2 are neither scripted nor Mo-capped? I can guarantee you they are scripted, and I'm fairly sure they're mo-capped. Even if they weren't, that just means they were hand-animated, which, if you put enough effort in, results in fucking beatiful animations, i.e. Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell 3 on Unreal Engine 2. It's certainly not an indication of the amazing engine it's running on.

Did you know that Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2 use the same engine? Look at the graphical improvements between them. C&C Renegade, C&C Generals, and C&C 3 all use the same engine. Thats right, the 3d engine they developed for Renegade was the same source base for future releases.

Yeah, and they ripped out the guts and drastically upgraded it between games. Nobody's complaining that they might still be using an engine called "Source", it's more that in the five years between HL2 and L4D2, they've added a couple of nicer lighting effects and some subtle filters.

Cyrsis looked good, but it had no soul to it.

Debatable. The game rocked until the aliens showed up. I agree the art design was a bit lacking, but there's no reason we have to choose between "technically mediocre games with great art design" and "technically impressive games with shit art design". We can have both, if developers are so inclined.

[ray245]

Source still looks good, and each time they release a new source based game, there is an improvement.

The only reason contemporary source engine games still look acceptable is because there has been massive stagnation for the industry. The number of PC games that push current technology can be counted on one hand, and there has yet to be a game dethroning Crysis as the technical marvel that it is. Crysis came out in 2007. The source engine improvements are welcome, but not drastic by any stretch of the imagination.

What's the point of the game having excellent graphics if my computer can't run it at the highest settings?

[Vympel]

Get over yourself already. Source still looks good

It looks "fine". That's about it. I'm not impressed when I play it, and haven't been since around 2005 if I had to put a number to it. Their incremental improvements to the engine, whilst no doubt real - they're not really noticeable in the slightest.

I don't think its unreasonable to hope for a genuinely new gaming experience on a new engine given the inordinate delay, and instead they're going to serve up another warmed over 2004 serving of tepid porridge. Bah.

Cyrsis looked good, but it had no soul to it.

Thats debatable, like adam says. I thought it was great, and it shows what you can do with technology that is now 3 years old, and thats the point. I'm not saying Crysis is a better game.

Heck, look at Far Cry 2, as well. Mediocre game that it is, at least they're trying to do some interesting things. Push the damn envelope a bit is what I'm saying.

What's the point of the game having excellent graphics if my computer can't run it at the highest settings?

So that people with better PCs can?

[Starglider]

Are you telling me that the characters in HL2 are neither scripted nor Mo-capped? I can guarantee you they are scripted, and I'm fairly sure they're mo-capped. Even if they weren't, that just means they were hand-animated, which, if you put enough effort in, results in fucking beatiful animations, i.e. Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell 3 on Unreal Engine 2. It's certainly not an indication of the amazing engine it's running on.

Source is still a conventional FPS engine, in that it flips between bones animation and ragdoll modes. Sometimes the scripting is clever, e.g. repositioning actors to give the player a good view of 'cutscenes' wherever they are in the room, and sometimes it sucks, e.g. actors teleporting to the next mark when they get stuck on minor pathing issues.

The next generation of animation is (unsurprisingly) procedural, which means no arbitrary division between animated and ragdoll modes. GTA4 has a partial implementation, although not on all characters all of the time for performance reasons. I'm still waiting for a game where characters can naturally pick things up off the ground or climb arbitrary piles of rubble without needing pre-aligned scripted animations. The techniques you need to do this are computationally similar to normal inverse kinematics but considerably more demanding (local search and planning is essential for maneuvering through tight spaces or where handholds are limited), and again a new generation of DX12 consoles with lots of cores and usable GP-GPU will make it much easier.

Retrofitting this into engines like Source should be quite straightforward, easier than destructible buildings in fact because it doesn't impact any global data structures.

I agree the art design was a bit lacking, but there's no reason we have to choose between "technically mediocre games with great art design" and "technically impressive games with shit art design". We can have both, if developers are so inclined.

If it was a matter of 'inclination' of course everyone would have stunning technology and art. It's not like anyone deliberately sets out to make a mediocre game. You are aware of the concepts of 'budget', 'schedule', 'limited high-end talent pool', 'development risk', 'total project complexity' yes?

[JointStrikeFighter]

I can think of nothing that source offers that UE3 doesn't to better, not to mention being a dhtload easier to work with.

[Zixinus]

Seriously, what's with Source? Yeah, its old a bit, but so what? They can still make an interesting game out of it. They can do the same with Portal.

As for why they don't abandon it for some other game's highly marketed engine, did people forget that it was built in-house by Valve? It's their engine, if they used someone else's they would have to pay for it. Valve has a fixed budget and why bother using someone else's engine, when they know and can improve their own?

Again, we are talking about another installment about how Gordon Freeman beats the Combine up. Does it really need a much bigger (and more expensive and more processor intensive) engine? Because if they were able to make Ep2 decent, I don't see why they are suddenly crippled by an "engine that is simply isn't enough".

Debatable. The game rocked until the aliens showed up. I agree the art design was a bit lacking, but there's no reason we have to choose between "technically mediocre games with great art design" and "technically impressive games with shit art design". We can have both, if developers are so inclined.

Because the developers can focus on either one or the other. Do you have any idea how much more time it takes to create all the high-polygon stuff that all the hip engines want?

And really, the engine is semi-issue: I am still amazed what Beyond Good and Evil can do. That was with the Prince of Persia engine and it looked great, not because it had a marvelous engine, but because of good art direction.

Having a marvelous engine is nothing by itself: you need to create a large order of assets for it, and that is expensive. That is why there are small army of developers making a single game, rather than a handful of people in a garage.

[ShadowDragon8685]

The thing about Half-Life 2 (Ep 1 and 2,) and Portal is that they are good games.

If you're not ultra-wowed by their decision to not spend all their devcycle and money on hiring the Crysis art guys to make a game which won't even play on today's computers at full power... Then vote with your wallet and don't buy Portal 2/Ep3/The Orange Box^2 or whatever.

But you will.

You will, because what keeps people coming back to Half-Life is Half-Life. That they keep innovating is just the awesome bomb.

Take Episode 1. The graphics were improved, yes, and the graphics were improved later for Ep2 as well. But, what really got me was the acting.

I'm serious. The character interactions in those games are the best, ever. With Alyx (or in Ep2, the Lightning Monk Vortigaunt for a stretch) riding around at your side, it breaks the old FPS dynamic of "one against the world." Most modern FPS games don't get that - sure, you might get some mooks, but they're disposable, and pretty useless. When playing Ep1 and 2, you feel like you have an ally, one you can trust and count on. One you can care about.

That's pretty good in a game where the protagonist is silent. I can't count the number of times I've found myself off-handedly responding to Alyx or the Vort (and to a lesser degree, the more static animated characters, like Kleiner/Eli/Magnusson/Those two guys in the underground battlezone in Ep2.)

VALVe tell stories. Please, do yourselves a favor, go out and watch, back-to-back, Empire Strikes Back and Avatar* (if you can find a theater still showing it; any superduper CGI movie should do, though.)

Which is better? They may have "remastered" ESB, but the only parts that really stand out are when they replaced Alec Guinness with that other bloke and the first bloke they had for Palpatine with the real Emperor. By your definitions, Avatar is clearly better.

Except, it's not. It may be a good story, but it's not ESB.

Half-Life 2 was a good game, but Episode 1 and 2 marked the real beginnings of the greatness of Half-Life: it took us off the G-Man's fucking "you're here, wreck everything and then I take you away again" rails, started to show us the larger world that our world had become, and gave us a reason to fight which was beyond "thirty combine are going to break in that door and kill you if you don't fight back."

I'm not shitting when I say that, even knowing that they were going to have Alyx injured, the first time that damn Hunter stabs her, I was fucking screaming and thrashing my keyboard to try and move, to get out and grab something with the grabbity gun to clonk it upside the head with. I'm no longer screaming, but I still do it every time - it's like watching Luke and Vader cross sabers in ESB. You know that Luke is going to lose his hand and his lightsaber, but you're still glued to the screen, somehow hoping that this time, he'll manage to parry that blow, or kick Vader off the platform.

*You can also get this by going and playing Deus Ex and Mass Effect back to back. They're both science-fiction RPGs that cast the player as someone above the law (at least at first, in Denton's case,) but I think very few people would say that Mass Effect is superior. Sure, Mass Effect is great, not the least of which because of the lesbian alien sex, but it's not Deus Ex.

I think the one flaw in Ep2 was making Alyx a little pushier. In Episode 1, she never, ever got bossy or tried to make the player move on. Sometimes, woman, I just want to sniff the roses corpses and sift through the sand. But it's not that noticable.


Some may not agree, and to you I say: Go buy Crysis. The best parts of HL2 and it's Episodes are the story, that which animates it. The engine has gotten a lot of graphical updates, but you guys just don't notice. Like the commentary says, "if we're doing our jobs, you don't notice it - it just looks good," when he's talking about how they revamped Alyx's model to be more fluid, to give her belt heft and movement like it's actually riding on a woman's shapely hips instead of having been epoxy-glued around her waist, to make her jacket subtly move like it's being worn by someone instead of being literally their skin. They are doing graphisc updates, but there's simply not a lot that can be done to crank the wow factor up anymore...

Unless you, you know, actually care to look. I'll explain how.

Step 1: Ensure your system can play Ep2 with the settings cranked.
Step 2: Start a game of Half-Life 2, Episode Bloody None, with the settings cranked, and go on a short tour of City 17.
Step 3: Start a game of Half-Life 2, Episode 1, with the setting cranked, and go on a short tour of City 17.
Step 4: Start a game of Half-Life 2, Episode 2,, with the settings cranked, and go on a short tour of the surrounding countryside.

See the difference? If you don't, your attention to detail and actual appreciation for good art has been lost in wanking the resoloution of the texture of the rocks you're trodding upon. A rock doesn't need all that much texture detail. The stuff you'll be looking at all the time needs that much texture detail; stuff like your weapons, stuff like Alyx and your Vortigaunt allies, stuff like the shit you're going to be shooting at and being shot by.

But even then, you don't simply need to wank the texture, you need full-spectrum art direction. Like, as was said, the modifications made to Alyx's model that make her look like a person in motion, instead of a static platform. Could there be improvements, oh yes.

Frankly, I'd love to see a huge amount of Ep3's art direction focused on improving the player buddy; her chest should heave when she's breathing hard, you should see her breath when it's freezing out (which it will be) in time with her chest's falling. You should see her arms shift, her body relaxing like she's tired from all the constant running, her shooting posture not be laser-straight in line with her eyes. They should make every pouch on her belt, her hip holster, all of them physically linked to her hips, so that they flop dynamically when she runs. She should get a new wardrobe when it's cold; either put Alyx in an HEV suit, or give her some serious cold-weather fighting gear. She should get new weapons - or preferably, the player should be able to choose her weapon, by giving her one from their stock; and her ammo should be tracked with her non-pistol weapons, which would force the player to ammo-share with her, but also let her carry spare ammo if you give her a weapon she's not going to be using; and she could dynamically throw ammo to Gordon when he's running low.

That is the kind of thing that can and (hopefully) will make Episode 3 great. Now, if they'd spent all of that on their graphics budget, well... Those five people who can play Crysis with all the settings cranked to the max might be happy, but as someone with an 8-year-old computer at the razor's edge of it's upgrade cycle, I would feel betrayed. The kind of thing I have suggested will run well on my PC, Crysis? Not a chance. Hell, even Red Faction: Guerilla won't. (Which sucks, since someone gifted it to me for christmas.)


But yeah. Vympel, feel free to keep demanding they spend money on Crysis graphics. Maybe they'll listen and make you and those other four guys happy.

[General Zod]

VALVe tell stories. Please, do yourselves a favor, go out and watch, back-to-back, Empire Strikes Back and Avatar* (if you can find a theater still showing it; any superduper CGI movie should do, though.)

Which is better? They may have "remastered" ESB, but the only parts that really stand out are when they replaced Alec Guinness with that other bloke and the first bloke they had for Palpatine with the real Emperor. By your definitions, Avatar is clearly better.

That's a blatant false dichotomy, good graphics and writing are entirely independent from one another. The idea that you can fairly compare games to the movie industry in that regard is also pretty absurd and reeks of fanboyism.

[ShadowDragon8685]

VALVe tell stories. Please, do yourselves a favor, go out and watch, back-to-back, Empire Strikes Back and Avatar* (if you can find a theater still showing it; any superduper CGI movie should do, though.)

Which is better? They may have "remastered" ESB, but the only parts that really stand out are when they replaced Alec Guinness with that other bloke and the first bloke they had for Palpatine with the real Emperor. By your definitions, Avatar is clearly better.

That's a blatant false dichotomy, good graphics and writing are entirely independent from one another. The idea that you can fairly compare games to the movie industry in that regard is also pretty absurd and reeks of fanboyism.

It's not a false dichotomy unless you postulate a developer studio with infinite money and infinite capacity to hire infinitely talented people in infinite number who have an infinite capacity to cooperate and reach the correct consensus immediately, and an infinite aount of time in which to develop.

Which, frankly, if it were true could rape my dog and I'd still buy their stuff. Hell, I'd tie the bitch down for them.

But that's not true. Developers have a set amount of time and money. They have a limited staff, they have direction issues, they have management, and they have schedules.

Given these factors, over-obcessing on graphics results in you needing twenty hours of dev time to animate one person walking across a room and shoving a cupcake in their mouth - ten seconds of animation, tops. The fact is that sometimes, simpler graphics are faster to work with, don't nessessarily look really worse from the perspective of the person who's watching the NPC walk across the room and eat a cupcake, and it gives you more time and money with which to make things work.

Which is why we have games that, hwen you get over the WOW factor, can be handily defeated in two to three hours having seen all there is to see. And yes, a speed-run of Ep1 or 2 can be very, very fast, but if you take your time to smell the corpses, it can easily take 6 or 8.

Also, I was using the movies as an analogy - you will note I compared two movies in a "graphically crap by today's standards classic" versus "today's most graphically-awesome movie" paradigm. I also gave you a video game analogy to test this with - Deus Ex vs. Mass Effect.

[edit] "Preview" != "Submit".

Play Deus Ex, take the time to smell the roses. That game will give you easily over a full day of uninterrupted play if you poke J.C.'s nose into every corner, take the time to lie, steal and cheat your way through everything, and basically play the whole game. Whereas Mass Effect, discounting elevator time and frequent hang-up crashes requiring me to paranoidally save every time I did anything and basically requiring a restart every hour, lasted what, maybe five, six hours, again, poking Cmdr. Shepard's nose everywhere?

[General Zod]

>snip<

I'm failing to see how any of this ranting is relevant to my point that good writing is entirely independent from having good graphics. I can name a number of games from the last 5 years with both, and quite frankly Valve is shitting money out of their ears, so the idea that they can't afford it is blatantly absurd. But hey, why let facts get in the way of childish fanboy rants?

[Stark]

You're wasting your time; he's a Deus Ex cultist. His religion is based on denying reality.

It's an amusing comparison however because HL2 was a poorly-connected stroll between scripting events through a jungle of bland, but that's 'art'. Modern Warfare is art too I guess.

[ShadowDragon8685]

You're wasting your time; he's a Deus Ex cultist. His religion is based on denying reality.

Deus Ex is a gigantic game offering as many ways of getting through the game as a player can concieve. It is literally possible to complete Deus Ex without J.C. Denton killing a single person, and with only like three absolutely required to die (2 if you exploit a glitch to get someone to open a door that's not supposed to be opened without someone dieing.) Or you can slaughter your way through the game. You can be a guile-filled sneaky spy, or you can walk into a battlefield a juggernaut.

Contrast this with Mass Effect. The only options you get are to be a shining paragon of sweetness and niceness, or be a gigantic douchecock, and to decide which of your allies lives or dies, without even an option to risk it all on an ultra-difficult gambit to save them both. It's not a branching story, it's one story, with only one real ending and a few variables to that ending, whereas Deus Ex gives you three distinct endings, all of them acomplished in different ways, none of them ultra-shiny and sparkling clean.

It's a game with more mind-fucks than the original Matrix movie, and every time you think you've got a handle on things it drops you another level into yet another rancor-pit of chaos, intrigue, and conspiracy, and depending on your choices you may well wind up working directly with the people who tried to kill you earlier.

Deus Ex was a great role-playing shooter, giving you complete freedom to choose how JC develops and what his abilities are; with an incredible story to boot, whereas Mass Effect was just kind of sad. Sure, it was a good story, but it wasn't a great story, nor was it a great game.

It's an amusing comparison however because HL2 was a poorly-connected stroll between scripting events through a jungle of bland, but that's 'art'. Modern Warfare is art too I guess.

Half-Life 2 was a first person shooter, and it made no bones about that. There's no RPG elements, it wasn't intended to have any branching. We all knew this going into it, but it doesn't matter; it doesn't claim to be anything but the sequal to the original Half-Life. It was, I should remind you, the true kick-starter of our current wave of FPSes; it set the bar eight years ago.

The fact that the engine is so capable of being upgraded that we're even having this discussion proves the point that VALVe knew what they were doing technically. The Episodes, on the other hand, take that bog-standard FPS and turn it on it's head; I've already explained why. The story deepened, the plot thickened, and we learn that the guy who, until now, was seemingly as omnipotent as a god has enemies, allies, and nay-sayers, we learn that he is not all-powerful, and your allies can exert a measure of dominance over him.

The Episodes really kicked the Story of Half-Life into high gear, but they also kicked off their own innovations. The graphics have repeatedly improved, which you would see if you'd try the test I just told you to try, and the NPC companion dynamics really blew it out of the park in a way that no game has done before or sense.

[Erik von Nein]

And never mind his point about Empire Strikes Back. The move was made with top-of-the-line special effects, yet he loves the writing. Can't even use examples that don't contradict his point.

[Stark]

Man can I pick em or what? Can anyone read so many lies about Deus Ex without laughing? MORE MINDFUCKS THAT THE MATRIX!

And HL2s story sucked while the technical innovations advertised were almost all scripted. If not for Valve worship it'd be nothing special beyond a game with a remarkably stupid protaganist. It's worth noting it's influence is basically limited to 'lol gravity gun'.

And I hear UE is even older and more heavily modified so by your logic, better. The fact that it's faster, more modern, easier to work with and portable helps.

[ShadowDragon8685]

And never mind his point about Empire Strikes Back. The move was made with top-of-the-line special effects, yet he loves the writing. Can't even use examples that don't contradict his point.

In 1980 they were top-of-the-line SFX. But that doesn't matter, because even though the SFX are dated doesn't mean they're not still enjoyable. It doesn't make anyone sit on the edge of their seat any less when Luke and Vader cross lightsabers because they're not doing the flip-all-over-the-room shit that Anakin and Obi-Wan did in Episode II. The fact that (from RotJ) the Rebel "Fleet" consists of only a dozen models, tops, instead of a gigantic space-filling battle as from the beginning of Episode III doesn't make it any less awesome.

It doesn't contradict my point at all. My point is that all the bitching about the Source Engine not being the Crysis Engine doesn't change the fact that Source (a) still looks goddamned good, and (b) plays great on older systems.

Take Crysis and dial it down to where it can run at even 15 FPS on my system and it will look like shit. It will look worse than Deus Ex. Whereas I can run HL2:Ep2 at near-full or at full (depending on how much water is around) and maintain at least 30 FPS.

Now, which is a larger market share: people who can run HL2:Ep2 on near-full or full, or people who can run Crysis at full? Frankly, wasting your time and energy to please the latter subset does nothing to enhance your sales. If they're a Half-Life fan they'll buy it no matter what, and if they're not but they are the kind of person who likes to masturbate over the technical specs of the graphics engine, then you've gotten a bare handful of sales that won't remotely justify the investiture in building a whole new engine or revamping Source to Crysis levels of graphics.

Man can I pick em or what? Can anyone read so many lies about Deus Ex without laughing? MORE MINDFUCKS THAT THE MATRIX!

Um, yes. Yes, it was. Clearly, you've either never played it, or you've played it so long ago you've forgotten and/or become jaded to the feeling of exploring the world of J.C. Denton and peeling away the layers of conspiracy, finally thinking you're about to bring this shit to an end, only to find out the bad guys weren't who you thought they were at all, and in fact they're now your best and only hope for allies, unless you like confronting the guys powerful enough to dethrone the old world-controlling conspiracy alone.

And HL2s story sucked while the technical innovations advertised were almost all scripted. If not for Valve worship it'd be nothing special beyond a game with a remarkably stupid protaganist. It's worth noting it's influence is basically limited to 'lol gravity gun'.

Half-Life 2's story did not suck. It may not have thrown you that many curves, but frankly I don't need many curve-balls to jump straight into a Hazard Suit and start gunning down the filth and golf-driving headcrabs with my fucking crowbar. And again, do remember that the original HL2 was released in 2002, and had been in development through the Y2K era of rapid advancement. The special features weren't all scripted; yes, other games had implemented vehicles before, but none of them had implemented them as well as HL2. Nobody had a physics manipulation gun before HL2, and it's worth noting that now everyone feels the need to copy it or their schlock will be left feeling very 90s.

And I hear UE is even older and more heavily modified so by your logic, better. The fact that it's faster, more modern, easier to work with and portable helps.

Look, it's very simple. To get graphics which are significantly better than Source can deliver requires jumping up a computational generation. You simply can't run Mass Effect on a single-core Intel Pentium 4. The fact that I struggled through it, saving and reloading every 45 minutes, just means I'm a maschoist. Red Faction: Guerilla simply won't run with anything resembling an acceptable framerate.

VALVe is doing what they're doing for a good reason. They're making money. They're playing the wider market; those with better machines can enjoy cranking HL2:Ep3 up to max and still rocking 300 FPS or whatever they'll get, whereas those of us with older gaming machines who have not been able to upgrade will still throw our disposable cash at them for a game we know we can play and we know we will love.

Crysis, on the other hand, was a titanic flop. Nobody wanted it because even the fucking game reviewer's space-computers couldn't run it with the settings up, and the controversy did not generate a titanic sales rush. Nobody wants to buy a game they can't play any more than they want to buy 21" rims for a car they don't own!

[Stark]

This is gold. No, I remember it just fine; it had obvious 'plot twists' in the way Bad Company 2 has 'plot twists'. It's only step towards complex narrative was level order flexibility, conversation and finding notes (common to most RPGs). It wasn't anywhere near as confusing or MINDFUCKING as you're suggesting. I'm not jaded; you're just a fanboy. It's sad that your idea of 'good story' appears to be your disturbing feeling of having a relationship with a fictional character - your statements of talkign to Alyx really are sad.

I'm not sure how Crysis is relevant to a statement about UE; UE3 is not Crysis. It's also more advanced and arguably more scalable than Source, easier to work with, etc. This is unrelated to Crysis. UE3.5 games look a shitload better than Source games too (frankly, L4D looks like a 2005 game). Does anyone even develop for Source other than Valve or Valve-funded guys? Epic is ALSO making money so I guess we can't argue with their business plan either.

Oh wait, Gears is good because I TALK TO BAIRD. Even better I think I AM BAIRD! EMOTIONAL HIGH MINDFUCK! Best game ever; prove it isn't.

[Starglider]

As for why they don't abandon it for some other game's highly marketed engine, did people forget that it was built in-house by Valve? It's their engine, if they used someone else's they would have to pay for it. Valve has a fixed budget and why bother using someone else's engine, when they know and can improve their own?

Plus all of their existing art assets are built for Source, plus UE3 is probably missing some key character animation tech, plus (the most important factor) their team is all highly experienced at using Source, crap tools and all. UE3 is definitely a more advanced engine, but the switching costs would be huge, way beyond just the licensing sticker price. Even if they were willing to flush money down the toilet for a minor graphics upgrade, it would delay release by a year or more. It clearly doesn't make commercial sense for this set of products.

That's a blatant false dichotomy, good graphics and writing are entirely independent from one another.

You are correct. Programming, art quality, length of game, gameplay tuning, these things all compete for money and man-hours. Writing and conceptual game design do not; they are a tiny fraction of the budget of even RPGs and you can't really make them better by throwing money at them. All you can do is hire the best people you can and hope they deliver. That said, the highly compressed schedules at some studios will cause problems even for the writers and concept designers.

The idea that you can fairly compare games to the movie industry in that regard is also pretty absurd and reeks of fanboyism.

I don't see why not. The games industry has been converging on movie industry budgets, management style and general practices for years. Both industries now employ a few actors, hordes of digital artists and legions of technical and marketing people.

I'm failing to see how any of this ranting is relevant to my point that good writing is entirely independent from having good graphics.

It isn't, but then your point isn't relevant to whether the graphics engine should be replaced. Writing isn't a major expense, although ShadowDragon had a point when he said that Valve sunk real money into character animation and expressions that did compete with pretty scenery. Plus hiring actual talented voice actors, more expensive than random hacks.

quite frankly Valve is shitting money out of their ears, so the idea that they can't afford it is blatantly absurd.

Yeah, you fail Business 101. No matter how much of a cash pile you have, new expenditure is evaluated on a cost/probable return basis. In any case Valve would probably prefer to spend the cash hiring some more mod teams to make full games rather than licensing external engines; it's their model and it works for them.

Whereas Mass Effect, discounting elevator time and frequent hang-up crashes requiring me to paranoidally save every time I did anything and basically requiring a restart every hour, lasted what, maybe five, six hours, again, poking Cmdr. Shepard's nose everywhere?

Only if you completely ignored all the side quests. Doing every side quest takes something like 30 hours of play time.

It's an amusing comparison however because HL2 was a poorly-connected stroll between scripting events through a jungle of bland, but that's 'art'. Modern Warfare is art too I guess.

HL2's run-down East European cityscapes and abandoned industrial outdoor areas were quite novel at the time. Personally I thought the art direction was very strong; doing a convincing seashore was still hard in 2004 (actually it's still not trivial now). Several later games (e.g. STALKER) took the same environments and expanded on them. The Citadel and elements of the city liberation were a bit bland, but you can't expect to make a game that long and not have a few weaker sections. There's a reason why HL2 is still so popular for machinima despite being old and hard to work with; the environments and models are compelling.

[Stark]

ME can be finished to 80% in 8 hours; my first run through hitting everthing took 23. Still a fuckload longer than walking through HL2.

And my point wasn't art direction; it was his argument that HL2 is a spiritual experience due to the amazing drama. The seashore/cliff road section WAS the only part of the game that wasn't bland as fuck, but that doesn't make HL2 interesting.

But machinima? Honestly? They still make Halo machinima. Turns out everyone involved is a giant fanboy?