Retired Half-Life lead writer has no interest in going back to conclude the story

Reading the interview, Laidlaw sounds pissed as fuck.
Being a writer for your entire life, wanting to continue with video game writing sprawling stories through interesting settings, and then Valve throws you on DOTA duty where you write a few situational lines for characters.
I see why he quit.

these epicftw Holla Forums memes are just too much for me

Why put in work when you can just let CS:GO and DotA effortlessly rake in cash? It boggles my mind they thought the Steam OS or Steambox would take off with absolutely no incentive to use either.

Bullshit. DNF was a garbage fire, there wouldn't have been a problem if it was at least a decent game. It had nothing good going for it.

Go figure why all the creative types are leaving Valve. Sitting still from 9 to 5 will make anyone miserable, no matter how good the pay is.

DNF was fucking garbage from its core.

HL started the cinematic story bullshit.
I always hated it with a passion.

Half-Life was/is an extremely overrated meme game anyway.

it's still 99% gameplay, are you retarded?

No you didn't you fucking faggot. You probably hated when you realized Cinematic story was a thing years later only to follow the hate bandwaggon meme.

I think he means those to be two separate statements.
DNF syndrome refers to a game that's been through complete development hell and has been scrapped multiple times. He then says that despite this, even if it was good it wouldn't matter.

Half Life 1 was revolutionary for it's time, but did not age well.
Half Life 2 is a tech demo for source first, video game second, and it shows, gunplay is weak, levels are designed around showing off the engine rather than fun, pacing is atrocious with the driving segments being the worst offenders, enemy variety is non existent and the story is almost non existent.
It's an overrated meme game.

Nobody was talking about hating HL before you brought it up.

Don't worry anons, less than 2 months left.

>Everyone who disgrees with me is a goon summerfag
I'd be willing to bet I've been shitposting on anonymous imageboards longer than you, m8

It is 100% understandable to dislike the games, but would you please try to articulate your points instead of using vague and ultimately meaningless terms? What the hell is a "meme game"?

It's true that you could always control freeman but there where way to many sequences where you had to listen to boring suit or where confined to some tiny space and all you could do was watching shit happen.

Did you intentionally skip 99% of my post you are replying to?

Not him, but using a sentence to describe each game isn't exactly "articulating your points" either.

Yes I did.
I played it when it was new and I hated it.
I liked Doom and Quake but HL was the most boring FPS ever and it infected the FPS genre, suddenly every new FPS wanted to be like HL.

Wow, what a nice source. I totally believe this story, especially when nobody else on the internet is reporting on it! :^)

What the actual fuck do you expect him to do? Write a lengthy, in-depth essay/paper on the failings of the two games in order to convince some shitposters on Holla Forums?
If someone actually took the time to do that, a lot of anons would just go "TL;DR LOL" and move on to spew memes.

Sorry your ADD doesn't let you listen for a few minutes. Some people enjoy learning about what's going on in the world around them

You can do that with skippable cutscenes you know?

Half Life ain't no goddamn RPG.

Half-Life is WOKE

yeah they should've had skippable combat as well

Like DMC3, you know?

That game has skippable cutscenes.

so you're saying it shouldn't have skippable combat?

I'm saying it should have skippable cutscenes.

Every darn games, RPG included.

Sure but slowing the game to a grinding halt with no way to skip it is possibly the worst way of doing this.
I like a good story but not if it interferes with the gameplay so much.

There was no need to continue the story beyond the first Half Life. Its two possible outcomes were the only logical outcomes and although it seemed open-ended it really wrapped up everything perfectly. Valve really had no idea where to go from there, which is why Half Life 2's story was a clusterfuck set in a future dystopia for no reason. Half Life 3 would have only been a worse clusterfuck.

I'm glad they stopped making games.

I don't know how you can fail to understand why things in hl2 are the way they are, but congratulations, I never knew PC gamers were this fucking dumb

Gameplay is not the most important thing in videogames, stop putting it on a pedestal. Games which focus on a gameplay are shallow as fuck just look at overmeme or mobas.

kill yourself

Explain how it's not contrived as fuck

Enlighten us.
Tell us the story of HL2.

suck on a thousand cocks you colossal faggot

Gameplaycuck triggered. Fuck off back to playing tetris

Because Valve had no idea where to take the story so they pulled something completely random and contrived out of their asses.

nihilanth is the combine controller of the xen borderworld, when he's dead the combine take over the borderworld invasion of earth and after a 7 hour war humanity collectively surrenders to combine forces

really don't know how you could miss something this fucking obvious, it happens in the first hour of hl2 you stupid fucks.

no shit, none of it was planned, but they reasoned pretty much everything presented decently enough. It's actually hard to miss these details unless you're a steam baby.

Congratulations, your 10/10 game story can be summarized in one entire sentence.

Oh i forgot, if you want to know the actual HL2 story you have to hunt down developer interviews, podcasts and private conversations saved God knows where as opposed to it being in the game.

He is kind of right tho. I understand perfectly what happens in HL2, but it all sounds like a sad excuse. The game is a victim of "Let's use this game to test our brand new engine". Source could do realistic open areas, so they made the game mostly realistic open areas, it could do contraptions, so they set an entire chapter for that, it could do vehicles, so they put TWO sections of that, etc. The entire game feels like "Look at this, isn't this cool??", this is why people feel off about it. HL1 suffers from the same thing on a lesser level, but they managed to make it more cohesive as a whole, with much less dialogue.
Also, have you seen HL2 raising the bar? The original premise looked much better, and more in line of what you see in the original HL, HL2 setting is bland as fuck.

Nice argument there imbecile. As expected from a retard whos brain is bothered even by the simplest stories told by vidya.

I'm glad, because anyone who still wants another half life deserves to suffer

old, stale meme, sage

HALF LIFE 3 NEVER EVER

VALVE FAGS ETERNALLY BTFO

wew

That ID

confirmed for not being able to read
it's pretty obvious at this point that you are just trying to start shit

you can find out everything I did by playing the games, but you're too afraid to play anything it seems

no shit, it's an excuse. every valve game is pretty much we have an idea to explore a space in game design, game play, level design, story telling. they've said this at every opportunity for pretty much every single game they've worked on.

>caring about the character of gordon freeman
Holla Forums you're supposed to be smarter than this, at least have knowledge of basic shit about these games before you talk about them

You are incorrect

not long now

What the fuck? The entire reason they changed the entire thing was because, specifically, it was too bland and forgettable. 'Grass is greener', fuck off kiddo.

Look at these pictures. Are you telling me it's not the most generic garbage you've ever seen? If so, you're a lying sack of shit or underage.

Lmao, what the fuck are you even on about? The Nihilanth was running from the Combine, he was the one thing stopping them from invading. Once he's eliminated, the Combine move in and rape Earth up the ass. You don't even know what you're talking about, yet you advocate for it being so great.

wrong, what's with you dumb faggots trying to guess my tastes? It's just obvious shit you dumb niggers are missing and making bad criticisms of the game for

I don't care about hl, no one with a brain has cared about hl in the past 6 years. I don't think it's particularly great, but I'm not going to lie about it like you dumb fucks.

Half Life fucked the FPS genre with linear level design and a focus on story over good gameplay. Half Life fans are insufferable, obnoxious as hell, feverently denying HL has any flaws at all, declaring any and all criticism is just a meme and that it is the single greatest contribution to gaming that has ever existed and ever will exist. It's so satsifying to me seeing them finally suffer after all these years, never getting a proper conclusion to their favorite shit ass cancer game. Halo getting raped hard by 343 and seeing a resurgence in classic style FPS gameplay has me quite smug as well.

The point is that HL1 is much better a a whole, even if it's an excuse to showcase goldscr. HL2 is bland no matter where you look, it almost doesn't feel like a sequel but a complete different game. The story had to be accommodated for that, and it's terrible. It makes sense, but it's terrible.

Well it's not polished at all, but it feels closer to HL1, and that's what matters. Even then it was an example, I don't necessarily want it to be like that, the point is that HL2 feels off in the setting. I wanted to shoot aliens while running in tight exploding corridors and all I got was fighting the same dumb generic combine in a gray city for an eternity. Plus some terrible mechanics added in between.

It was HL2 that started the linear bullshit, the first game was more inspired by Quake's level design. Sorry about the first image, it was the best I could find. It seems like nobody has mapped out HL1.

it is, although it has some notable flaws like how some weapons are absolute shit and large portions of the game are centered around an unfun gimmick

it's not, the engine was never really marketed and was only licensed out a handful of times. if this was the case, valve failed. the point was to make money and make a good video game.

because all ties to the first are just shoe-horned in but they work, if you were desperate for a sequel to hl1's story I have to wonder about your own tastes.

it's actually better than the first half-life's story, but some of the techniques used are fucking terrible.

Only Amerifags like HL2 Beta because it's set in another generic western city.

He wasn't. He was just a puppet like Breen but in Xen instead of Earth. Even Advisers aren't the real Combines. No one know what Universal Union really is. Some Cthulhu shit, I guess.

you're just jelly cuz you'll nevr ave' tripz like him SAD!

You think most of the YouTubers even know what Half-Life is?

not real criticism, linear games are better than non-linear ones. hl1 is also linear and there's a handful of moments where you can choose your own path.

How you couldn't find this image by searching "map of hl1" is beyond me, it's older than the fanboy shit you posted in your first image and has definitely been posted more.

Either way, neither image proves anything.

The only positive of the beta was more aliens (from HL1), yes, and a larger arsenal even though the majority of weapons were basically duplicates, it felt closer to HL1 in that regard.

The city wasn't gray, it's funny because the final game is much more colourful than the beta which was just constant brown/tan/red garbage. The HL2 beta was much more bland than the final product, thank the lord.

Faggot, even Marc confirmed that the Nihilanth was running from the Combine. I don't even know where you faggots pull shit from your ass like this, but you're wrong.

valvetime.net/threads/marc-laidlaw-vault.114535/

It pisses me off how reviewers were going on about how this shit was revolutionary. It was nothing but a huge step back. Yeah you could move around, but you couldn't do anything meaningful, it was completely pointless, it also took away the ability of the developers to direct the scene with camera angles, close ups, etc. I don't understand why they couldn't have at least given us a hotkey to skip the story sections like you could with a regular cutscene. The whole thing was much worse, being able to move around was just a stupid worthless gimmick.

western innovations in game design = bad design tbqh

...

Wrong on both counts. When everybody rushed to copy Half Life they only really copied its drab, mundane graphical style and "realistic" setting. They also tried to wildly outdo its minimal storyline by creating fucking intrusive storylines but that it isn't really HL's fault. It sure did result in a lot of cancer though

Half Life's story did conclude though.

Half Life 2 is an abortion that should be ignored by any sane person.

HL1 hardly has a story, what matters to me more is the setting. I don't like HL2's setting at all. HL1 felt closer to horror games (Not saying it's scary ,but it could be), since you are trapped in a base full of unknown shit. The only chapter like that in HL2 is Ravenholm, which is coincidently the only part that looks REALLY different in the game, it's very well executed, but it's only one chapter of the game.

It's mostly gray user. Look at pic related, this is a canal, it's an opportunity to have multiple colors in it but instead absolutely EVERYTHING is gray, even the fucking ENEMIES that you cannot see in the pic. Literally the most colorful thing in this pic is the brownish explosive barrel behind the boxes. Note, I'm not saying the game should be colorful as in vivid, but HL1 had distinct zones that looked very different one from another. There are gray parts, but there are also other zones in blue, yellowish, orange, brown, red, green, etc, it has a lot of different textures, and also more varied lighting.
Hell, look in this very thread at this picture you are only looking at the fucking floor with a lot of overlapped shit, and it's still more varied.

No, all Im trying to say is that good gameplay doesnt necessarily means a good videogame and other parts are just as important.

Checked.

Nice dubs.

DNF wasn't completely terrible, but it wasn't amazing either.

The golden era of PC gaming died so long ago now that Valve clearly has no interest in making games. What a fucking world. Remember when TF2 was supposed to be realistic and machine gun teams had a loader and a gunner?

yeah it had one good level, everything else was awful

Still more fun than cowadooty though.

fucking writer should just write a book to close the story

if you said this years ago i would have called you a nonce and also a faggot but then i played games like mgs4 and 5 where the core mechanics were strong but nothing in the game complimented them

There's nothing wrong with a game being linear.

But we can all agree that EP 1 was miles better than EP 2, right?

Lmao no. Shit artstyle, hunters are better than Zombines, and you had the ugly mixed whore with you for basically the entire thing unlike EP2 where she's out for a bit. I hated the Citadel part, the dark part where you were forced to use the flashlight was annoying too.

Lmao, Valvedrones actually thought there was something more to that shitty story, they just made shit up as they went

Yeah, because I definitely disclosed my opinion on the game, I didn't shat on you because you said a buzz word.

this thread reeks of summerposters trying to fit in

Some of us play games more than twice, dipshit.
Being forced to listen to any narrative over and over just because you want to get to the gameplay turns it into shit, no matter how good the story.

Oh.
Oh you were just bait, aight man.

Citation please? I believe it, sure, but still.

This.