Half-Life 2 (PC)

[Montaver]

Framerate in FPS games is the most important factor. Maybe i'm too fussy, but on a PC, anything less than 60 looks totally decrepid. My PC isnt amazing (Xp 1.8, Radeon 9500pro), but i'm guessing it could probably run HL2 at a decent graphical level, however in order to gain a proper framerate, detail (in my opinion!) must always be sacreficed.

[Montaver]

Oh and as Fire put it:
<Fire-> and a good monitor, good sound and a comfy seat
<Fire-> and good eyesight

then you will have ultimate experience.

[Garibaldi Biscuit]

I think it was more the broad generalisation that there will be no point in playing Half-Life 2 unless you can have 'maximum everything' that sparked off the disagreements Stu, and which in turn led to accusations of valuing P.C specs above all else.

But you are right, let's not let this descend into another battle of semantics as it is starting to go that way, both parties have a valid point to make but such validity rapidly becomes lost when both start seeking a definite 'victory' over the other.

Let's keep our eyes on the prize, as it were.

[Montaver]

Get on irc gary stop hiding, I have made my 3 posts for the month!

[nips]

Anyway, enough about hardware wars. How about discussing how awesome HL2 will be?

Yeah, as others concur, let's talk about the game.

Do we have any information on what will happen in the game? I mean, if someone wants to post a low down, as what will happen would be cool. I know we're in a European City, but do we have any more information on the game story?

What do you people think of the enemies? The huge Strider type creatures look a bit weird... I don't know whether aesthitically I like them, they are a bit too 'War of The Worlds'. I've not been able to scope many enemies that look like the originals, but I haven't been looking hard. What have you seen? Anything that looks like it may be nasty? Have you been planning posible attack patterns?

With the huge striders, I'm gonna run straight underneath them and shoot from below, I think that they'd be weak there... As long as they don't sit on me. Otherwise, I'll try and take out a leg and see if it will topple over - Possibly using the grav gun thing to launch a heavy object.

Do we know if there will be any good opportunites to repeatedly blow the crap out of Scientists... What about Quick Saves... will there be repeated saving after each jump, or is there a different save method?

To be frank, I don't really mind either way. Quick save is clearly flawed becuase people will save after every jump etc, but, if you don't have quick save, you can't line up your cross hair between the eyes of a scienist and kill him and reload repeatedly...

[Garibaldi Biscuit]

Quick-saving is a tricky one, I'll be the first to admit I used to save every ten seconds when playing the original, so when you died it was a mere inconvenience and not a 'argh! No!' moment.

This is no doubt why games such as Maximo came as a shock to me, I was too used to having it easy, thankfully that game pummeled a bit of sense into me and I know try to limit myself to a certain number of saves per level. I loved Aliens VS Predator for denying you the option to save throughout a level, it racheted the tension up to breaking point, although naturally it was also a sore point with many until they 'corrected' it using a patch.

It was a bad habit I just fell into, they provided it so I used it, any other quick savers here? And, most importantly, do you consider it to be a bad thing?

[Fire]

No suprise that valve are being really tight lipped about the story, they've been developing it in secret for so long I don't think they'll give in at the last minute and reveal any major plot info, understandably they want half-life fans to discover it all first hand from their source powered viewpoint and various realistically animated faces. Are you fighting with the masked combine solider guys at your side to take down the aliens or what? I've no idea

Supposedly a lot of the original's monsters will be making a return including the legendary headcrab, I've a feeling most of your time will be spent dispatching these and various zombie types. The striders invading seems like a big one off moment in the story to me, reckon they'll be a lot of them in all locations? They seem to take a real pounding from rifle fire in the video so I think it'd be best to try and escape from one alive rather than attempting to kill or disable it, unless there are any nearby gratings on the road of course.

I really hope there is no quicksave option, I'm pretty confident there won't be. You always see developers saying in interviews that they will being doing their best to try and avoid the stop-start quicksave mechanic in their single player game.

HL1 had a perfectly good autosave feature at certain checkpoints (20-30 mins apart? I reckon that'd be fair). I'd Like it to be like that. I was playing HL: Blue Shift this afternoon and as you say, couldn't resist trying my luck and seeing how much I could get away with by shooting friendlies etc. Knowing you can quicksave whenever you want and pissing around cheapens the experience to me, it's a shame when the developers are trying to immerse you in an epic story - good for messing around in an older game you're familiar with but I think it kinda ruins the atmosphere of playing an big adventure for the first time and reminds you that you're really just playing with an interactive toy and not a real 'story' where your actions affect your progress, I really hope HL2 doesnt have quicksave.

[Vaipon]

I don't want quick saves either. It takes any sense of danger out of the game, and really demands nothing of the player in the way of skill development. You just repeat a section until you "get lucky", and there is no excitement when your health is low. When I am running low on health, I will try to claw my way through regardless and try to make the best of a bad situation. The sense of accomplishment if you survive a situation under these conditions is massive. The quicksave option in games like this are so over-used by people that many don't even wait for death before resorting to it, and a mere low health situation will be reason enough to reach for the F9 key. This whole idea was born back in the days of Doom when the FPS genre was still relatively new and people had trouble adapting from 2d to 3d. We don't need it anymore, it's a relic of the old-school PC game design that has no place in today's titles, especially as there are so many alternative save devices which can be easily implemented instead.

Get rid of quick-saves, or at least severely limit their use in some way.

[Spatial]

It was confirmed somewhere that Quick Saves are indeed back

Personally I'm not totally against them, its up to the player to have the strength of will to not over use them.

The number of times quick saving has backfired on me has taught me a valuble lesson and to use it sparingly.

Its really frustrating to quick save, only to find that I get repeatedly pummled cos of low energy / ammo and have to start again from the beggining of the level to survive.

Valve are keeping tight lipped on the story ( thankfully, because that was one of things that made the first one so cool - the whole whats going to happen next factor ) but its been written once again by Marc Laidlaw who wrote the first one, so it should be of the same high standard

The very little plot they have released is that the story picks up in City 17 (in Eastern Europe somewhere) and its rumoured to be set 15 years after the original game. It doesn't explain why Gordan's been missing all this time but that is apparently explained during the course of the game

Obviously the game follows the path at the ending in the first one where you opted to work with the G-man, so no doubt he'll have you running around up to all sorts of evil stuff

Apparently the game is set to be a trilogy, and if we have to wait another five years for it, I can only dream how technologically advanced that ones going to look !!

IMO the whole War of the Worlds thing is really great ( but then I'm a fan of the Jeff Wayne Musical )

I don't think the tactic of running under the Stiders will work as in one of the E3 demos it spears a civilian with its leg as its going along. I get the feeling you may not want to get too close to them and have to take them out with the gravity gun

[choddo]

Please don't assume my information is out of date, because it isn't.

Apologies, I forgot you clocked you processor so high. Maybe at 2.4 it's geting close but you don't need a freezer hooked up to your P4 to keep it running like that . But anyway, the differences between the XP and P4 go way beyond HT and you can certainly optimise code for different processor pipeline architectures. You can also have branching code that will take either CPU into consideration, you don't need 2 EXEs. Just pointing out that it's entirely feasible that it will perform differently to any existing benchmark.

As to my P3 500 comment; earlier you said "My CPU is as quick as a top end P4" then you said something to the effect of, "I'm not willy waving, for all you know I could be using a P3 500". Thereby contradicting yourself

[choddo]

Obviously the game follows the path at the ending in the first one where you opted to work with the G-man, so no doubt he'll have you running around up to all sorts of evil stuff

Bah, thanks for the spoiler warning ok ok if I didn't finish the first one in 5 years, I probably don't deserve any consideration

[Super Stu]

Thereby contradicting yourself

Except that every man and his dog has such a PC. Like I said earlier, there's no such thing as PC willy waving.

[JibberX]

Looking forward to HL2, hopefully should have a decen story, the last FPS I played with remotely equal lvl design etc would mysteriously have to be ST EliteForce 1, and then obviously HL1.

As long as it has a good compelling narrative, and decent progressive level design, then I will be happy, I've played HL1 from the lowest specs upwards, didn't affect the enjoyment of the game one bit. The folks at valve, can program, thats for sure.

[Manta Ray vs Guitar]

Whenever a FPS is discussed people always bring up things that are stupid and crap. Things like hardware specs, physics, AI and other FPSers (because you have to compare them - it's a rule). Sometimes you get people arguing about bumpmapping, lighting and which of the different games' identical weapon sets has the most detailed modelling. Maybe you'll have some guy getting excited that you can use two weapons at once, or that the flames on one game's flamethrower are more flamey than another. Maybe one clever guy says he's sick of flamethowers because, I guess, they're a relatively recent cliche.

My question is this: is it because everybody is dumb and deserves to die?

Serious question.

[npg]

Christ, you've just reminded me that I'm going to have to spend $500 at the end of this month for Half Life2.

Yup, the time has finally arrived for me to upgrade my graphics card.