Marc Laidlaw reveals Half-Life 2 Episode 3's story synopsis
- Thread starter dex3108
- Start date
Mike Double U
Banned
That last paragraph man...
And the Vortigaunts come in and save Gordon at the end? I would have loved to play through this years ago.
I can't believe that it's over. I mean deep down I think we all had the sliver of hope that Valve would drop a hint or something that Half Life wasn't truly dead. I feel closure after reading that however, so I feel like the casket is finally buried.
And it's probably for the better, right? We wouldn't want a half cooked Half Life. I mean how many creators of the original games are still there? What percentage of them have moved on? Valve is making a card game now for fucks sake, they don't care about narrative anymore.
Just reading this makes me want to go back and replay the series because it's been way too long... Maybe one day down the road we can get a fan made sequel or spinoff or spirtual successor or something. But nothing will replace what our dreams were made up of.
Goodbye Half Life.
Lmfaooo. Dead.
And the Vortigaunts come in and save Gordon at the end? I would have loved to play through this years ago.
I can't believe that it's over. I mean deep down I think we all had the sliver of hope that Valve would drop a hint or something that Half Life wasn't truly dead. I feel closure after reading that however, so I feel like the casket is finally buried.
And it's probably for the better, right? We wouldn't want a half cooked Half Life. I mean how many creators of the original games are still there? What percentage of them have moved on? Valve is making a card game now for fucks sake, they don't care about narrative anymore.
Just reading this makes me want to go back and replay the series because it's been way too long... Maybe one day down the road we can get a fan made sequel or spinoff or spirtual successor or something. But nothing will replace what our dreams were made up of.
Goodbye Half Life.
Lmfaooo. Dead.
It's freaking ridiculous. Steam looks HORRIBLE in 4k, pure amateur hour. Yet how much revenue do they keep bringing in without overhauling their pitiful UI?
Nah, this is MUCH better than Ep2's cliffhanger.
This wasn't intended to be 'after all that time' though. This is presumably the plot they've sat a fucking decade on.Yeah, after all that time, another cliffhanger with no new revelations on GMan and a futile plan
Better knowing all this than nothing though. Laidlaw is a saint for this.
Type_Raver
Member
I want to read it, but I dont.
#torn
#torn
Correct. When something is marketed as episodic and only single player, the consumer had every right to be upset for what is an incomplete product.
This isn't Mass Effect 3 ending where the ending was or was not garbage, it was an ending and a complete game. I certainly would never have bought episode 1 or 2 if there was no plans for a 3.
As such it's been impossible for me to return to Half Life games because the story is incomplete.
Hesemonni
Banned
This post deserves more attention.
WHY GOD, WHY??? IT SOUNDS SO PERFECT
Oh, right. Hats.
Well at least now we have a foundation like the Black Mesa team to pick up from.
Was that last bit a detailing of Valve?
hbkajshdvfbkjhvgkahsgdfka
Member
I was able to picture that perfectly in my head. With the Half-Life 2 side stepping animations, hand gestures and all.
Rickenslacker
Banned
Ding ding ding. It's not "demanding they make games I want" it's wanting them to finish what they started.
Hats (and guns) are actually the issue.
I once sold a Sam & Max hat for £52 and gun for £15. Valve makes (I think) 10-15% of every trade. They made that money for free... I helped kill Half Life.
Oh, I've got another gun worth £15, I should trade that while it's still worth something, oh god wait.
Frozenprince
Banned
It's barely functional, the download queue flat out does not work correctly half the time, the most basic functionality of a digital storefront and it DOESN'T WORK.
Exactly. The reason why Valve stopped making single player games in favour of their multiplayer games is because the market basically told them to.
People play Valve's multiplayer games (especially Dota2 and CSGO) in far greater numbers, for a much, much longer time than they ever played any of their single player games. Those were dead after a month.
Valve have not hidden how market driven they are, from long before they stopped making single player games. Most game companies would love to be able to focus on multiplayer games - but it's too much of a risk, most can't make multiplayer games that last and sustain a significant player base, but Valve can, so they are.
They're businesses and being one of the few companies to have not one, but multiple successful multiplayer games is a huge competitive advantage that they'd have been stupid to ignore.
The Half Life and Portal series are two of my absolute favourites, I am very sad we're unlikely to see any significant new entry in these series (we may see some experiments here and there), I just can't ever seem to get as angry as other people about it.
The anger mostly feels irrational and without perspective, though I do think the stringing along by Gabe about Half Life 3 has been cruel - instead of "we're not talking about that", he should have said long, long ago that they're not making it. We all knew they weren't making it about 6 or so years ago, but he left that glimmer of hope by never telling us that it wasn't currently happening.
Sax Russel
Banned
Damn =/
Go watch Robin Walker talk about communication.
They honestly believe that if they have to communicate they are doing something wrong as consumers only seek out info when things are broken.
I don't understand what that post means.
JB2448
Member
Here's a link to the tweet he posted that links to his post if you wish to thank him by replying to it: https://twitter.com/marc_laidlaw/status/900902074954661888
You should carefully step outside your GAF bubble and see that there are much less kind things being said all over the place. The people in this thread are being neighborly by comparison.
benicillin
Banned
Wow. I'm really sad all of a sudden.
Unknown Soldier
Member
It's a storefront though. It doesn't have to look pretty. You put money in, and games download and you launch them. Ultimately Steam became the de-facto PC gaming platform, the Playstation Network of PC gaming, but it's really just a storefront and also server listings for Valve's own games.
The storefront has made Gaben worth an estimated $4.1 billion though, so that's one hell of a storefront. I bet Jeff Bezos wonders why he had to bust his ass so hard to become a billionaire from Amazon and all Gaben did was make a storefront for downloading and installing PC games and he's a billionaire too.
What a brilliant story, that would have worked so well in a game. I didn't get what you did though, about Earth being the aggressors - I thought it was more along the lines of The Terminator, where they cut off the Combine invasion before it happens, but failed to do so due to the sheer size of the Combine force. The fact that they were preparing an attack already implied to me that this was a futile effort to stop it, rather than one that triggered the attack in the first place.
Also, what the hell is "schoolmarm (no male equivalent)"? Do they mean "schoolmaster"?
This is a pretty good summary of why Valve blows right now. Obviously they're making money hand over fist because they got lucky / smart with being the first major digital platform on PC.
But there is no vision or follow through. Every year or so it's just them throwing some darts at the board. Their ideas are always scattershot and rarely ever seen through to any kind of logical conclusion or evolution. I mean, even the Steam platform itself is a mess of ideas they've just thrown out there and then never iterated on in any meaningful way - stuff like Steam Curators, for instance.
I mean they can do whatever they want, but it's not unreasonable of fans to be upset at Valve's unfocused and uncommunicative way of doing just about everything now. Far be it for me to speculate on their corporate culture but from the outside it just seems like their much-talked-about management style basically leads to tons of early enthusiasm and a lack of follow through.
Frozenprince
Banned
I would last 2 hours, at best.
TemplaerDude
Member
Man, this is not really how I expected this to go, I dunno if it's over but wow, this is like a weird punch to the gut. I'm glad he posted this.
truestatic
Member
I won't justify people making fat jokes, but you can't justify that sweeping accusation either. No one expected the second coming. I certainly didn't. I would have liked to have played this game, as written by Marc Laidlaw. They didn't make the game cuz they felt like there were more profitable things they could be doing. I accept that. But saying that "They could never have lived up to fan expectations so its better they never tried" is such lofty corporate ball washing garbage. Valve was very capable and could have made a great game, had they desired to do so. They decided to do other things. It is no more exceptional than that. Pleasing their fans was not a no win scenario, don't make it out to be.
civilstrife
Member
In all fairness, it would be pretty frustrating to hear:
-"We're making Episode 3"
-"Never mind, it's not working out"
-"Ok we have a new idea"
-"Oh, half the team got bored and moved their desks away"
-"But this one guy has a solid plan"
-"Oh, he left the company for Blizzard"
-"Nobody is working on Half-Life."
-"20 people are working on Half-Life!"
-"5 people are working on Half-Life"
-"Nobody is working on Half-Life"
Frustrating because it would put in stark relief the inadequacy of Valve's corporate structure.
Yeah i dont understand how this crap gets past any QA, if any exists.
I have to manually unpause downloads sometimes so that they work.
Frozenprince
Banned
It's fine if the store was barebones and they just sat on it and said nothing.
But Valve has been promising and teasing and testing internally UI overhauls to the store for YEARS now, and not one of note has even made it into public closed alpha testing.
If you're going to promise something and say it's on the way and say you're working on it then never deliver then that's a huge problem. Their monopoly, again, is what shields them from any level of consequence for it, which is a shame and deeply anti-consumer.
How could I forget about TF2? I know Valve has.
It's completely ridiculous that something like that takes them ages. They act like their focus is on Steam but pull this shit.
To be fair they released ONE major overhaul but that was ages ago. Since then all I can think of off the top of my head is pretty much removing greenlight.
They got rid of the fun sale games for a fucking card system used to buy profile backgrounds and emojis, and have ignored pleas for something as basic as letting users control the naming of games in their library (I can't give nicknames to games? Seriously? Why the fuck can't I rename games that aren't ordered properly?)
thats true, but it doesn't make it any less depressing to think about. We need to stop buying hats and shit from them so Gaben can stop fucking around and buying random ass knives and get his people to work on stuff that matters
Sir Vilhelm
Member
Sad. Remember how awesome it was to play the first game back in the day. I remember when they announced that they would release half life 2 in episodes so they should release it quicker lol.
brickarts295
Member
Did someone save a copy, it seems Valve ninjas have taken down the site XD.
Page one of the thread there's a quoted post with the entire text.
Yeah. It's on the first page, post 5.
Yes.
Or, at the very least - it was dead when Marc Laidlaw left back in January 2016.
The first page of this very thread has a translated version of the text.
Frozenprince
Banned
Your NDA has no power here, Gaben.
Hasphat'sAnts
Member
1.) It would cost "Top Dollar"
2.) There'd be no guarantee that the game would be good.
SoundPulse
Banned
To be fair to the TF2 team, they have like twelve or fifteen people, with something like three of those people being actual programmers. Which is why they're working on a super mega patch instead of having those three patches out in a reasonable timeframe from when they were announced.
Bless them for trying to keep the lights on, at least.
OverdriveOtaku
Member
It's been copied and pasted here, on reddit, and on various other places including Steam Community pages for the Half-Life games. I'm sure it's never gonna disappear. Site is likely down because of traffic overload.
Yes, very
truestatic
Member
I mean... are you sure about that? I assume that Gabe could ask EvilLore to take it down.
It just wouldn't matter much. It's out now. Whether or not it's here, it's gonna be out there, in about a million places.
poppedcollar69
Member
