Play Half-Life 2 for Half-Life 3

[CardinalPiggles]

Yeah why not, it can't hurt.

I'll see if I can get all the Lamdas without checking guides this time around.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

I'll do this, as an excuse to try to get those last few achievements, but frankly I'd rather have some word on whether they're ever planning to fix Half-Life 2 itself after the 2010 "update" broke a bunch of stuff. That's something they have no excuse to be secretive about, nor any real excuse to not do.

 

[mateushac]

Whoa! I just reinstalled all the games (from HL2 to ep2 passing through portal 1 and 2) for a replay
I guess i'm gonna have no excuse not to help

 

[Metalrocks]

just started to play it again last night. sure was fun. has been years since i have touched it. good old HL2. feels good to play it again.

 

[Thumper17]

There was/is a petition currently at 1,605 signatures on the official site, which I gladly signed. Thats got nothing, hard to believe this will do anything.

If we dont get a sniff at this E3, then I give up.

 

[MaxwellEdison]

This will not work. Way to go planners. You only planned the protest on the same weekend as the largest sporting event in America. The Superbowl. If Gabe even notices this, he's going to feel bad, but he still won't change the way information is handled by them. Nothing to see here folks. Keep it moving.

Um...Sorry, but how does the Superbowl in any way change this?
I have a hard time believing Valve stops getting information from Steam the second a football game starts.

 

[MaxwellEdison]

I'd like to play HL2 again, so I'll join in, but seriously, this "demand" by the fans is ridiculous IMO. Yes, it's a big cliff hanger of a game we love. But the last thing you want to do with Valve is push them. Even people unfamiliar with certain TF2 updates should be familiar with the L4D2 resonance.

I really want them to do something big and influential with their next HL installment, so as long as they can deliver that, they can have all the time in the world as far as I care.

Not sure if you read the actual post, but in case you didn't. It's a request for a statement on the status of the game, and it's mentioned specifically that this *isn't* a push to produce it faster.

 

[TheGroovyMule]

Where else can you see 40,000+ people in denial all in one place?

In all seriousness, while I have very much enjoyed the Half Life series, I don't get this 'Call for Communication' group. Communicate about what? A game they're not working on? I'm pretty sure they're not working on a sequel to Ricohet either, should we get up in arms about the lack of information on that non-existing entity?

The Half Life communities ability to try to force information, and make a hint out of anything is starting to smell of desperation at this point. There are dozens of excellent games out there, no point stressing over one that may or may not be coming.

 

[dobahci]

Yeah, I remember the wait between Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2 and I know that the guys at Valve are perfectionists and that's why their games are so good.

The wait between HL1 and HL2 was a wait for a full-length game with a completely overhauled engine, and a physics engine that allowed you to manipulate objects in the game world and use them in puzzles on a scale that had never been seen before in gaming up to that point.

See, the development time for HL2 wasn't just for bringing out an amazing game with a 20 hour playtime, it was also the beginning of the source engine and true beginning of steam. During the wait, valve released trailers, screenshots, gameplay demo vids. They released news of what the next half-life was going to be and how it was going to change the face of gaming. The wait for HL2 was about 6 years. The wait for Episode Three has been about 4 years, so far.

Consider also the case of Blizzard, which had a 12 year break between SC1 and SC2 during which they developed tons of other great games. A lot of that time was spent keeping things secret and not even confirming whether SC2 was in development at all (rather than, say, dealing out false promises to an active fanbase). But in the lead-up to SC2's release, info was given out, trailers, gameplay demo vids, etc etc.

Basically, the pattern of behavior of Valve with respect to Episode Three isn't one of perfectionism, it's one of procrastination. It's an unemployed apartment dweller trying desperately to avoid running into his landlady on the stairs and occasionally feeding her lies that he'll get the payment to her "next week, I promise".

 

[natster43]

Well I won't be participating in this for reasons. But good luck to all you people, hope it works out and you get a response from Valve.

 

[Leon's Hell]

Strangely enough I'm playing through all of the Half-Life games at the moment. I've played through: Source, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, 2, and Episode One, and I'm about ten minutes through Episode Two. So I jumped the gun.

 

[QUINTIX]

The big fallacy here is that working on Portal/L4D sequels and and working on Half Life where mutually exclusive. THEY WHERE NOT. I can just about guarentee that the amount of labor going into half life has not gone down at all. Valve is a big studio, and they have only gotten bigger.

 

[Vigormortis]

The worst thing is when they ask "AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO DID NOT LIKE HALF LIFE 2?". I understand it's meant to be rhetorical and they're fully aware that, statistically, they won't be, but it's just so irritating that they seem to be so brazenly unaware of the fact that the same identical thread has been appearing on the same goddamn forum for so long. That said, at least it actually encourages the tiniest bit of (repetitive) discussion. I do favour that over the flipping mass of Tali fan-wank threads that came up after Mass Effect 2 was released, or the same almost ctrl+v'd "I hate Call of Duty" threads that come up around the same time each year. Thankfully, those were very nearly fully suppressed by Skyrim this time around.

Actually, the worst thing is, when I first joined this forum it was just a lot of gamers coming together to talk about their love of the medium. Now. It's almost nothing but people touting their hate of anyone or anything not to their liking. You used to see a lot of "I love because _______. What's your favorite?" type threads. Now it's almost all "I hate . Why does anyone like that shit?"

At the risk of facing moderator wrath, I honestly have to say I've noticed this forum really devolve from what it once was those years ago when I first found it. It really saddens me.

I think the biggest step backwards came during the "March Mayhem - Zynga" fiasco some time back. I don't think the forum ever really recovered from it. Things got really out of hand.

 

[MurderousToaster]

The worst thing is when they ask "AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO DID NOT LIKE HALF LIFE 2?". I understand it's meant to be rhetorical and they're fully aware that, statistically, they won't be, but it's just so irritating that they seem to be so brazenly unaware of the fact that the same identical thread has been appearing on the same goddamn forum for so long. That said, at least it actually encourages the tiniest bit of (repetitive) discussion. I do favour that over the flipping mass of Tali fan-wank threads that came up after Mass Effect 2 was released, or the same almost ctrl+v'd "I hate Call of Duty" threads that come up around the same time each year. Thankfully, those were very nearly fully suppressed by Skyrim this time around.

Actually, the worst thing is, when I first joined this forum it was just a lot of gamers coming together to talk about their love of the medium. Now. It's almost nothing but people touting their hate of anyone or anything not to their liking. You used to see a lot of "I love because _______. What's your favorite?" type threads. Now it's almost all "I hate . Why does anyone like that shit?"

At the risk of facing moderator wrath, I honestly have to say I've noticed this forum really devolve from what it once was those years ago when I first found it. It really saddens me.

I think the biggest step backwards came during the "March Mayhem - Zynga" fiasco some time back. I don't think the forum ever really recovered from it. Things got really out of hand.

I have to admit, yeah, there's a lot more hate going around these days. That said, it is probably also in correlation to the increase in the amount of "hipsters" on the forum, without meaning to cause any undue hate. People have really gone down the road of despising things for totally arbitrary reasons, such as popularity. I do somewhat miss what the Escapist was like when it was more friendly, and there's a little part of my brain that says that it's due to an increase in size. As great as it is that the Escapist has grown since I started coming on here in 2008, it's also very annoying that the rise of the population on the forums have had such an adverse effect on the quality of discussion. People just seem altogether less willing to engage in proper discussion these days, instead seeming to just throw opinions at one another and hope that they're eventually able to shout the other guy down. That didn't really happen when the forums were less populated, because of the fact that people were more identifiable, and there was a considerably larger chance of people seeing you after you posted something rude and thinking "Oh, that guy again".

I used to have a lot of fun actually reading through entire threads, but these days there's just nowhere near the same level of discussion. It's a shame, really, because I know that the people on the forums are all intelligent enough to properly engage in debates and discussions. It's somewhat of a rarity that you see an extended conversation between two people that isn't either angry or in some way argumentative. It could also be that just because of the pure amount of posts, people are unwilling to type large amounts in case it just flat-out goes unnoticed. Oh well, rose-tinted glasses and all that.

 

[Arcane Azmadi]

I WOULD do this, except that I have literally HUNDREDS of unbeaten games to play (LITERALLY hundreds) and have squeezed Half-Life 2 dry. I have got every achievement from all 3 installments, even Lambda Locator, The One Free Bullet and Little Rocket Man (and my god were those last two annoying). I just can't justify the time when I have so many other games to play and so little I can actually do in the games. I love them and would happily play them again, but my time is limited and I have a list of games to beat a mile long.

 

[Vigormortis]

I have to admit, yeah, there's a lot more hate going around these days. That said, it is probably also in correlation to the increase in the amount of "hipsters" on the forum, without meaning to cause any undue hate. People have really gone down the road of despising things for totally arbitrary reasons, such as popularity. I do somewhat miss what the Escapist was like when it was more friendly, and there's a little part of my brain that says that it's due to an increase in size. As great as it is that the Escapist has grown since I started coming on here in 2008, it's also very annoying that the rise of the population on the forums have had such an adverse effect on the quality of discussion. People just seem altogether less willing to engage in proper discussion these days, instead seeming to just throw opinions at one another and hope that they're eventually able to shout the other guy down. That didn't really happen when the forums were less populated, because of the fact that people were more identifiable, and there was a considerably larger chance of people seeing you after you posted something rude and thinking "Oh, that guy again".

I used to have a lot of fun actually reading through entire threads, but these days there's just nowhere near the same level of discussion. It's a shame, really, because I know that the people on the forums are all intelligent enough to properly engage in debates and discussions. It's somewhat of a rarity that you see an extended conversation between two people that isn't either angry or in some way argumentative. It could also be that just because of the pure amount of posts, people are unwilling to type large amounts in case it just flat-out goes unnoticed. Oh well, rose-tinted glasses and all that.

It's literally like you took the thoughts out of my head. I used to love reading through threads too. I actually looked forward to seeing that someone had quoted me as it would often lead to a decent discussion or debate.

But now. It's a chore to read through one page and I dread ever seeing a little, yellow number up by my name.

I'm thinking we just pretend that the people who seek confrontation don't exist. We ignore their posts. Their messages. All of it. Maybe then we can have decent, non-insulting, non-aggravating, non-aggressive discussions. I don't know.