gaming

blizzard’s-pulling-of-warcraft-i-&-ii-tests-gog’s-new-preservation-program

Blizzard’s pulling of Warcraft I & II tests GOG’s new Preservation Program

Blizzard, DRM, DRM-free, game preservation, gaming, gog, video game preservation, Warcraft, warcraft 3, warcraft 3 reforged, warcraft II, Warcraft III / /

GOG’s version goes a bit beyond the classic versions that were on sale on Blizzard.net. Beyond the broad promise that “this is the best version of this game you can buy on any PC platform,” GOG has made specific tweaks to the networking code for Warcraft I and fixed up the DirectX wrapper for Warcraft II to improve its scaling on modern monitor resolutions.

It’s quite a novel commitment, keeping non-revenue-generating games playable for buyers, even after a publisher no longer makes them available for sale. The Warcraft titles certainly won’t be the only games for which publisher enthusiasm lags behind GOG and its classic gamers.

As noted at the Preservation Program’s launch, for some titles, GOG does not have the rights to modify a game’s build, and only its original developers can do so. So if GOG can’t make it work in, say, DOSBox, extraordinary efforts may be required.

A screenshot from Blizzard's Warcraft II: Remastered release, showing brick keeps, archers, footsoldiers, dragons around a roost, and knights on horseback units.

Warcraft II: Remastered lets you switch back and forth between classic and remastered graphics and promises to offer better support for widescreen monitors and more units selected at once.

Credit: Blizzard

Warcraft II: Remastered lets you switch back and forth between classic and remastered graphics and promises to offer better support for widescreen monitors and more units selected at once. Credit: Blizzard

Beyond being tied to Blizzard’s Battle.net service in perpetuity, there are other reasons Warcraft fans might want to hold onto the originals. Blizzard’s 2020 release of Warcraft III Reforged was widely panned as uneven, unfinished, and in some ways unfair, as it, too, removed the original Warcraft III from stores. Reforged was still in rough shape a year later, leading Ars’ list of 2020’s most disappointing games. A 2.0 update promised a total reboot, but fans remain torn on the new art styles and are somewhat wary.

Then again, you can now select more units in the first two Warcraft games’ remasters, and you get “numerous visual updates for the UI.”

Blizzard’s pulling of Warcraft I & II tests GOG’s new Preservation Program Read More »

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The Atari 7800+ is a no-frills glimpse into a forgotten gaming era

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Awkward controls and a lack of features make a device for Atari completists only.

Shiny and chrome? In this economy? Credit: Kyle Orland

Like a lot of children of the ’80s, my early gaming nostalgia has a huge hole where the Atari 7800 might have lived. While practically everyone I knew had an NES during my childhood—and a few uncles and friends’ older siblings even had an Atari 2600 gathering dust in their dens—I was only vaguely aware of the 7800, Atari’s backward compatible, late ’80s attempt to maintain relevance in the quickly changing console market.

Absent that kind of nostalgia, the Atari 7800+ comes across as a real oddity. Fiddling with the system’s extremely cumbersome controllers and pixelated, arcade-port-heavy software library from a modern perspective is like peering into a fallen alternate universe, one where Nintendo wasn’t able to swoop in and revive a flailing Western home video game industry with the NES.

Even for those with fond memories of Atari 7800-filled childhoods, I’m not sure that this bare-bones package justifies its $130 price. There are many more full-featured ways to get your retro gaming fix, even for those still invested in the tail end of Atari’s dead-end branch of the gaming console’s evolutionary tree.

7800HD

Much like last year’s Atari 2600+, the 7800+ shell is a slightly slimmed-down version of Atari’s nostalgic hardware design. This time, Atari took design inspiration from the rainbow-adorned European version of the 7800 console (which released a year later), rather than the bulkier, less colorful US release.

A reverse angle showing how 7800 cartridges stick out with the art facing away from the front. Kyle Orland

The 7800+ plays any of the 58 officially licensed Atari 7800 cartridges released decades ago, as well as the dozens of homebrew cartridges released by coders in more recent years (some of which are now being sold for $30 each by the modern Atari corporation itself; more on those later). The data on those cartridges is run via the open source ProSystem emulator, which seems more than up to the job of re-creating the relatively ancient 7800 tech without any apparent slowdown, input lag, or graphical inconsistencies. The 15 to 30 seconds of loading time when you first plug in a new cartridge is more than a bit annoying, though.

The HDMI output from the 7800+ is the updated console’s main selling point, if anything is. The sharp, upscaled images work best on games with lots of horizontal and/or vertical lines and bright, single-colored sprites. But blowing up decades-old low-resolution graphics can also hurt the visual appeal of games designed to take advantage of the smoother edges and blended color gradients inherent to older cathode ray tube TVs.

Atari’s new console doesn’t offer the kind of scanline emulation or graphical filters that can help recreate that CRT glow in countless other emulation solutions (though a hardware switch does let you extend the standard 4:3 graphics to a sickeningly stretched-out 16:9). That means many of the sprites in games like Food Fight and Fatal Run end up looking like blocky riots of color when blown up to HD resolutions on the 7800+.

Beyond graphics, the 7800+ also doesn’t offer any modern emulation conveniences like save states, fast-forward and rewind, slow-mo, controller customization, or high-score tracking across sessions. Authenticity seems to have taken precedence over modern conveniences here.

Much like the original Atari 7800, the 7800+ is also backward-compatible with older Atari 2600 cartridges and controllers (re-created through the able Stella emulator). That’s a nice touch but also a little galling for anyone who already invested money in last year’s Atari 2600+, which the company is still selling for roughly the same price as the 7800+. Aside from the nostalgic styling of the box itself, we can’t see any reason why the less-capable 2600+ still needs to exist at all at this point.

A mess of a controller

In the US, the original Atari 7800 came with an oddly designed “ProLine” joystick featuring two buttons on either side of the base, designed to be hit with the thumb and index finger of your off hand. For the 7800+, Atari instead went with a controller modeled after the CX78 joypad released with the European version of the console.

This pad represents an odd inflection point in video game history, with a hard plastic thumbstick sticking out above a standard eight-way D-pad. Years before analog thumbsticks would become a console standard, this thumbstick feels incredibly fiddly for the console’s completely digital directional inputs. In a game like Asteroid Deluxe, for instance, I found turning to the right or left frequently led to thrusting forward with an accidental “up” push as well.

The CX78 pad was also the first packaged Atari controller with two face buttons, a la the familiar NES controller. Unfortunately, those buttons are spaced just far enough apart to make it extremely awkward to hit both at once using a single thumb, which is practically required in newer titles like Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest. The whole thing seems designed for placing the controller in front of you and hitting the buttons with two separate fingers, which I found less than convenient.

The Atari 7800+ does feature two standard Atari console plugs in the front, making it compatible with pretty much all classic and revamped Atari controllers (and, oddly enough, Sega Genesis pads). Be wary, though; if a 7800 game requires two buttons, a lot of single-button Atari control options will prove insufficient.

The CX78+’s included wireless receivers (which plug into those controller ports) mean you don’t have to run any long cables from the system to your couch while playing the Atari 7800+. But a few important controls like pause and reset are stuck on the console itself—just as they were on the original Atari 7800—meaning you’ll probably want to have the system nearby anyway. It would have been nice to have additional buttons for these options on the controller itself, even if that would have diminished the authenticity of the controllers.

There are better versions of these games

The VIP package Atari sent me, along with a selection of cartridges. Credit: Kyle Orland

Since I’ve never owned an Atari 7800 cartridge, Atari sent me eight titles from its current line of retro cartridges to test alongside the updated hardware. This included a mix of original titles released in the ’80s and “homebrew elevation” cartridges that the company says are now “getting a well-deserved official Atari release.”

The titles I had to test were definitely a step up from the few dozen Atari 2600 games that I’ve accumulated and grown to tolerate over the years. A game like Asteroids Deluxe on the 7800 doesn’t quite match the vector graphics of the arcade original, but it comes a lot closer than the odd, colorful blobs of Asteroids on the 2600. The same goes for Frenzy on the 7800, which is a big step up from Berzerk on the 2600.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel that these arcade ports are better experienced these days on one of the many MAME-based or FPGA-based emulation boxes that can do justice to the original quarter munchers. And the more original titles I’ve sampled mostly ended up feeling like pale shadows of the NES games I knew and loved.

The new Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest (which is included with the 7800+ package) comes across as an oversimplified knock-off of Adventure Island, for instance. And the rough vehicular combat of Fatal Run is much less engaging than the NES port of Atari’s own similar but superior Roadblasters arcade cabinet. The one exception to this rule that I found was Ninja Golf, a wacky, original mix of decent golfing and engaging run-and-punch combat.

Of course, I’m not really the target audience here. The ideal Atari 7800+ buyer is someone who still has nostalgic memories of the Atari 7800 games they played as a child and has held onto at least a few of them (and/or bought more modern homebrew cartridges) in the intervening decades.

If those retro gamers want an authentic but no-frills box that will upscale those cartridges for an HDTV, the Atari 7800+ will do the job and look cute on your mantel while it does. But any number of emulation solutions will probably do the job just as well and with more features to boot.

Photo of Kyle Orland

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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Sony is reportedly working on a PS5 portable

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Bloomberg reports that Sony is “in the early stages” of work on a fully portable console that can play PlayStation 5 software. The device is still “likely years away from launch,” according to “people familiar with its development” that spoke to Bloomberg anonymously.

The report comes less than a year after the launch of the PlayStation Portal, a Sony portable device designed to stream PS5 games running on a console on the same local network. Recently, Sony updated the Portal firmware to let PlayStation Plus subscribers also stream PS5 games from Sony’s centralized servers at up to 1080p and 60 fps.

Sony’s reported PS5 portable plans also come after months of rumors that Microsoft has also been working on a new Xbox console with a portable form factor. In June, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer added fuel to those rumors by directly saying, “I think we should have a handheld, too… I like my ROG Ally, my Lenovo Legion Go, my Steam Deck… I think being able to play games locally is really important.”

Nintendo’s follow-up to the Switch, which will be formally announced in the next few months, is also widely expected to mimic the hybrid portable/console design of Nintendo’s last console.

Sony first dipped its toes in the portable gaming arena with 2005’s PlayStation Portable, which is still the only major handheld console to make use of optical discs (in Sony’s own proprietary UMD format). Sony followed that up with 2012’s PlayStation Vita, a well-loved console that brought a full analog stick and a larger high-resolution screen to the portable console space. But both efforts struggled to find much market success compared to the sales juggernauts of Nintendo’s cheaper Nintendo DS and 3DS hardware lines.

Sony is reportedly working on a PS5 portable Read More »

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Obsidian’s Avowed is the cure for “Souls-like” action-RPG fatigue

gaming / /

The early dialogue trees offer plenty of opportunities to explore the political lore and historical backstory of the world. You can also stumble on some interesting side stories, including one where you end up playing impromptu relationship counselor to a troubled human who has fallen into a forbidden relationship with one of the beasts bedeviling the town.

After taming a few of the more fearsome infected beasts troubling Paradis, you discover a mystical stone that lets you actually talk to the sentient fungus that’s causing all of this trouble; it describes itself as “mycelia twining through the loam, taking and giving in equal measure.” That first conversation with the reluctant infection itself is full of the kind of heavy-handed mysticism and flowery language that quickly had me tuning out of the story. I’m hopeful that the full game will stay more focused on the more interesting human interactions instead.

Daggers, bows, and spells

If you’re used to games like Dark Souls or Elden Ring, you’ll find the first-person melee-based combat in Avowed to be downright zippy. You start with a simple dagger that’s great for multiple quick thrusts or for a slower, charged attack that lets you lunge in from a few paces out. Getting in close with the dagger can open you up to dangerous counterattacks, though, which are best avoided with a quick sideways or backward dodge. The window for those dodges can be pretty tight, though, and a few stray attacks is enough to leave you struggling to survive with a limited “second wind” recovery.

Pretty quickly, you’ll stumble on a bow and a seemingly unlimited supply of arrows, which can be fired quickly or charged for a more powerful volley. This is the safest way to attack most early grunt enemies, as you can keep your distance from foes that can’t do much from afar but throw rocks. But the safer option is also the duller one, as lobbing arrow after arrow from a relatively safe distance quickly starts to feel a bit tedious.

Obsidian’s Avowed is the cure for “Souls-like” action-RPG fatigue Read More »

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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 arrives with a “full digital twin” of Earth

flight sim, flight simulator, gaming, microsoft, Microsoft flight simulator / /

You’re getting pretty close to the ground there, chief. But the good news is, you’re generating terrain for other players.

Credit: Microsoft

You’re getting pretty close to the ground there, chief. But the good news is, you’re generating terrain for other players. Credit: Microsoft

AI learning was used for 2024‘s world mapping. It allowed for a (possibly hyperbolic) “4,000 times more” detail in textures and terrain meshes, Wloch told TechRadar. Players will see this mainly when they’re closer to ground, with the terrain generating detail on demand. Machine learning is run against tens of thousands of tiles of Earth terrains, and it does picture analysis to generate, say, wet gravel or nighttime grasslands during winter. Data generated from a player is streamed into other pilots’ games, Neumann told Rock Paper Shotgun.

Hot air balloons across a night sky.

Throw a little engine on that balloon and you’ve got yourself a Flydoo, a word I learned today.

Credit: Microsoft

Throw a little engine on that balloon and you’ve got yourself a Flydoo, a word I learned today. Credit: Microsoft

You can fly a balloon and a “Flydoo,” the latter of which is a balloon with a tiny engine. Aircraft and airports you customized or purchased are carried over from 2020 into 2024. EuroGamer has a list of every aircraft in the game, which includes a Joby VTOL air taxi.

Father figure pointing out an approaching helicopter to his child on a mountain ridge.

When will hikers learn to stick to the trails in Zoar Valley?

Credit: Microsoft

When will hikers learn to stick to the trails in Zoar Valley? Credit: Microsoft

A new Career Mode, with 26 different paths, adds some structure to the pre-existing challenges and rewards. You can start out as a rookie and work through up to 54 training courses. You then decide exactly what kind of ace you want to be. You can be a regional airline pilot, a global specialist in VIP helicopter rides, a cropduster, a firefighter, or some other kind. You can own a fleet and expand your business or stick to being a jockey for hire.

There are many animals with realistic behavior, ported in from Planet Zoo. Neumann previously worked at Frontier, the company behind Planet Zoo (and Elite: Dangerous). Wanting some of that old “animals doing things” energy, Neumann said he called Frontier’s CEO and said, “Can I have your animals?” Neumann told Sports Illustrated. So now sheep head inside when it’s raining, birds migrate, and elephants will finally be impressed with your low-level flybys—maybe.

Flight Simulator 2020 will continue to get support, according to a FAQ on the developer’s site. It’s a valid question of what “support” will look like after 2024 is released and if it matches up with the initial promise of “10 years of support.”

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 arrives with a “full digital twin” of Earth Read More »

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Valve developers discuss why Half Life 2: Episode 3 was abandoned

gaming, half life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 3 / /

Despite the new weapons and mechanics that were already in the works for Episode 3, many developers quoted in the documentary cite a kind of fatigue that had set in after so much time and effort focused on a single franchise. “A lot of us had been doing Half-Life for eight-plus years” designer and composer Kelly Bailey noted.

That lengthy focus on a single franchise helps explain why some Valve developers were eager to work on anything else by that time in their careers. “I think everybody that worked on Half-Life misses working on that thing,” Engineer Scott Dalton said. “But it’s also hard not to be like, ‘Man, I’ve kind of seen every way that you can fight an Antlion,’ or whatever. And so you wanna get some space away from it until you can come back to it with fresh eyes.”

After the first two Half-Life 2 episodes were received less well than the base game itself, many developers cited in the documentary also said they felt pressure to go “much bigger” for Episode 3. Living up to that pressure, and doing justice to the fan expectations for the conclusion of the three-episode saga, proved to be too much for the team.

“You can’t get lazy and say, ‘Oh, we’re moving the story forward,’ Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said of the pressure. “That’s copping out of your obligation to gamers, right? Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it. But sort of saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next… you know, we could’ve shipped it, like, it wouldn’t have been that hard.

“You know, the failure was—my personal failure was being stumped,” Newell continued. “Like, I couldn’t figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.”

Valve developers discuss why Half Life 2: Episode 3 was abandoned Read More »

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These are the lasting things that Half-Life 2 gave us, besides headcrabs and crowbars

gabe newell, gaming, half life 2, Half-Life 3, marc laidlaw, portal, portal 2, source code leak, Source Engine, steam, Team Fortress 2, valve / /

Beyond the game itself (which rocks), Half-Life 2 had a big impact on PC gaming.

This article is part of our 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 series. Credit: Aurich Lawson

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

“Well, I just hate the idea that our games might waste people’s time. Why spend four years of your life building something that isn’t innovative and is basically pointless?”

Valve software founder Gabe Newell is quoted by Geoff Keighley—yes, the Game Awards guy, back then a GameSpot writer—as saying this in June 1999, six months after the original Half-Life launched. Newell gave his team no real budget or deadline, only the assignment to “follow up the best PC game of all time” and redefine the genre.

When Half-Life 2 arrived in November 2004, the Collector’s Edition contained about 2.6GB of files. The game, however, contained so many things that would seem brand new in gaming, or just brave, that it’s hard to even list them.

Except I’m going to try that right here. Some will be hard to pin definitively in time to Half-Life 2 (HL2). But like many great games, HL2 refined existing ideas, borrowed others, and had a few of its own to show off.

Note that some aspects of the game itself, its status as Steam’s big push title, and what it’s like to play it today, are covered by other writers during Ars’ multi-day celebration of the game’s 20th anniversary. That includes the Gravity Gun.

How many film and gaming careers were launched by people learning how to make the Scout do something goofy?

Credit: Valve

How many film and gaming careers were launched by people learning how to make the Scout do something goofy? Credit: Valve

The Source Engine

It’s hard to imagine another game developer building an engine with such a forward-thinking mission as Source. Rather than just build the thing that runs their next game, Valve crafted Source to be modular, such that its core could be continually improved (and shipped out over Steam), and newer technologies could be optionally ported into games both new and old, while not breaking any older titles working perfectly fine.

Source started development during the late stages of the original Half-Life, but its impact goes far beyond the series. Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Portal 1/2, and Left 4 Dead, from Valve alone, take up multiple slots on lists of the all-time best games. The Stanley Parable, Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, and a whole lot of other games used Source, too. Countless future game developers, level designers, and mod makers cut their teeth on the very open and freely available Source code tools.

And then, of course, where would we be as a society were it not for Source Filmmaker and Garry’s Mod, without which we would never have Save as .dmx and Skibidi Toilet.

Half-Life: Alyx is a technical marvel of the VR age, but it’s pulled along by the emotional bonds of Alyx and Russell, and the quest to save Eli Vance.

Credit: Valve

Half-Life: Alyx is a technical marvel of the VR age, but it’s pulled along by the emotional bonds of Alyx and Russell, and the quest to save Eli Vance. Credit: Valve

A shooter with family dynamics

Novelist Marc Laidlaw has made it clear, multiple times, that he did not truly create the Half-Life story when he joined Valve; it was “all there when I got there, in embryo,” he told Rock Paper Shotgun. Laidlaw helped the developers tell their story through level design and wrote short, funny, unnerving dialogue.

For Half-Life 2, Laidlaw and the devs were tasked with creating some honest-to-goodness characters, something you didn’t get very often in first-person shooters (they were all dead in 1994’s System Shock). So in walked that father/daughter team of Eli and Alyx Vance, and the extended Black Mesa family, including folks like Dr. Kleiner.

These real and makeshift family members gave the mute protagonist Gordon Freeman stakes in wanting to fix the future. And Laidlaw’s “basic dramatic unit” set a precedent for lots of shooty-yet-soft-hearted games down the road: Mass Effect, The Last of Us, Gears of War, Red Dead Redemption, and far more.

Remember when a Boston-area medical manufacturing firm, run by a Half-Life fan, got everyone thinking a sequel was coming? Fun times. Credit: Black Mesa

Intense speculation about what Valve is actually doing

Another unique thing Laidlaw helped develop in PC gaming: intense grief and longing for a sequel that both does and does not exist, channeled through endless speculation about Valve’s processes and general radio silence.

Half-Life 2 got “Episodes” but never a true numbered Half-Life 3 sequel. The likelihood of 3 took a hit when Laidlaw unexpectedly announced his retirement in January 2016. Then it got even less likely, or maybe just sad, when Laidlaw posted a barely disguised “snapshot of a dream” of “Epistle 3” to his blog (since deleted and later transposed on Pastebin).

Laidlaw has expressed regret about this move. Fans have expressed regret that Half-Life 3 somehow seems even less likely, having seen Valve’s premiere writer post such a seemingly despondent bit of primary source fan fiction.

“Fans of popular game eager for sequel” isn’t itself a unique thing, but it is for Half-Life 3’s quantum existence. Valve published its new employee handbook from around 2012 on the web, and in it, you can read about the company’s boldly flat structure. To summarize greatly: Projects only get started if someone can get enough fellow employees to wheel their desks over and work on it with them. The company doesn’t take canceled or stalled games to heart; in its handbook, it’s almost celebrated that it killed Prospero as one of its first major decisions.

So the fact that Half-Life 3 exists only as something that hasn’t been formally canceled is uniquely frustrating. HL2’s last (chronological) chapter left off on a global-scale cliffhanger, and the only reason a sequel doesn’t exist is because too many other things are more appealing than developing a new first-person shooter. If you worked at Valve, you tell yourself, maybe you could change this! Maybe.

What, you’re telling me now it’s illegal to break in, take source code, and then ask for a job? This is a police state!

Credit: Valve

What, you’re telling me now it’s illegal to break in, take source code, and then ask for a job? This is a police state! Credit: Valve

Source code leak drama

The Wikipedia pages “List of commercial video games with available source code” and its cousin “Later released source code” show that, up until 2003, most of the notable games whose source code became publicly available were either altruistic efforts at preservation or, for some reason, accidental inclusions of source code on demos or in dummy files on the game disc.

And then, in late 2003, Valve and Half-Life superfan Axel Gembe hacked into Valve’s servers, grabbed the Half-Life 2 source code that existed at the time and posted it to the web. It not only showed off parts of the game Valve wanted to keep under wraps, but it showed just how far behind the game’s development was relative to the release date that had blown by weeks earlier. Valve’s response was typically atypical: they acknowledged the source code as real, asked their biggest fans for help, and then released the game a year later, to critical and commercial success.

The leak further ensconced Valve as a different kind of company, one with a particularly dedicated fanbase. It also seems to have taught companies a lesson about hardening their servers and development environments. Early builds of games still leak—witness Space Marine 2 this past July—but full source code leaks, coming from network intrusions, are something you don’t see quite so often.

Pre-loading a game before release

It would be hard to go back in time and tell our pre-broadband selves about pre-loading. You download entire games, over the Internet, and then they’re ready to play one second after the release time—no store lines, no drive back home, no stuffed servers or crashed discs. It seems like a remarkable bit of trust, though it’s really just a way to lessen server load on release day.

It’s hard to pin down which game first offered pre-loading in the modern sense, but HL2, being a major launch title for Valve’s Steam service and a title with heavy demand, definitely popularized the concept.

Always-online for single-player games

Here’s one way that Half-Life 2 moved the industry forward that some folks might want to move back.

Technically, you can play HL2 without an Internet connection, and maybe for long periods of time. But for most people, playing HL2 without a persistent net connection involves activating the game on Steam, letting it fully update, and then turning on Steam’s “Offline Mode” to play it. There’s no time limit, but you need to keep Steam active while playing.

It’s not so much the particular connection demands of HL2 that make it notable, but the pathway that it, and Steam, created on which other companies moved ahead, treating gaming as something that, by default, happens with at least a connection, and preferably a persistent one.

It’s Game of the Year. Which year? Most of them, really (until Disco Elysium shows up).

Credit: Valve

It’s Game of the Year. Which year? Most of them, really (until Disco Elysium shows up). Credit: Valve

A place on “All-time” video game rankings forever

Half-Life 2 introduced many ground-breaking things at once—deep facial animations and expressions, an accessible physics engine, a compelling global-scale but family-minded story—while also being tremendously enjoyable game to play through. This has made it hard for anyone to suggest another game to go above it on any “All-time greatest games” list, especially those with a PC focus.

Not that they don’t try. PC Gamer has HL2 at 7 out of 100, mostly because it has lost an understandable amount of “Hotness” in 20 years. IGN has it at No. 9 (while its descendant Portal 2 takes third place). Metacritic, however fallible, slots it in universal second place for PC games.

So give Half-Life 2 even more credit for fostering innovation in the “arbitrary ranked list of games” genre. Rock Paper Shotgun’s top 100 is cited as the best “to play on PC today,” as they have “paid no mind to what was important or influential.” And yet, Half-Life 2, as a game you can play in 2024, is still on that list. It’s really something, that game.

Photo of Kevin Purdy

Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch.

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I played Half-Life 2 for the first time this year—here’s how it went

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Wake up and smell the ashes, Ms. Washenko.

This article is part of our 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 series. Credit: Aurich Lawson

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

The time has finally come to close one of the most notable gaps in my gaming history. Despite more than a decade of writing about video games and even more years enjoying them, I never got around to playing Half-Life 2.

Not only have I not played it, but I’ve managed to keep myself in the dark about pretty much everything to do with it. I always assumed that one day I would get around to playing this classic, and I wanted the experience to be as close as possible to it would have been back in 2004. So my only knowledge about Half-Life 2 before starting this project was 1) the game is set in the same universe as Portal, a game I love, 2) the protagonist is named Gordon Freeman, and he looks uncannily like a silent, spectacled young Hugh Laurie, and 3) there’s something called the Gravity Gun.

That’s it. I didn’t even know exactly what the Gravity Gun did, only that it existed.

So, the time has come for me to learn what the fuss is all about. I’ve cataloged my off-the-cuff reactions as well as my more analytical thoughts about Half-Life 2, both as a standalone project and as a catalyst for setting new standards in design. But if you’re looking for the TL;DR of whether I think the game holds up, my answer is: it depends.

Beginning a classic with a clunk

A red letter day indeed! Time to experience this iconic piece of video game history. I spend most of the intro sequence in the train station soaking in the atmosphere of the dystopian City 17. A few minutes in, though, I think I’m supposed to sneak past a guard. Because I’m a fugitive trying to escape this freaky Big Brother building, and I swear Barney told me to avoid detection. Instead, the guard immediately sees me and whomps me on the head for not putting a bottle into the trash. Not an auspicious beginning.

I make it to Dr. Kleiner’s lab for a little bit of story exposition. I like this rag-tag group of geniuses and the whole vibe of a secret scientific rebellion. I also appreciate that it’s not a static cutscene, so I can poke around the lab while I listen or observe the characters interacting.

After a failed teleport and getting a crowbar from Barney, I then spend a long time getting shot and dying in a train yard. Like, an embarrassingly long time. Perhaps I was assuming at this early stage that Half-Life 2 would be like Portal with real guns, because I figured this area had to be a puzzle. I’m not sure how I missed the one portion of the environment that I could slip through, but I convinced myself that I was supposed to leap across the tops of the train cars, Frogger style. And Gordon might have many skills, but his jumping leaves something to be desired.

Finally, I realize that there’s a gap in the cars, and I move along. This canal setting is striking, but I keep being unsure which areas of the map I can access. I’ve heard that the level design is one of the most lauded parts of Half-Life 2, but this is proving to be a genuine struggle with the game.

When I played Portal, I sometimes was unsure how to progress, but because that game is presented in the austere confines of a science experiment, I felt like I was supposed to be challenged. In Half-Life 2, though, where there are higher stakes and I’m running for my life, getting stuck just makes me feel dumb and annoyed. And I’m doubly annoyed because this escape sequence would probably feel amazing if I didn’t keep getting lost. Again, not the thrilling start I was hoping for.

Killing a barnacle by feeding it an explosive barrel is a definite high point. I may have cackled. This is the sort of clever environmental interaction I expected to see from the minds that later made Portal.

Headcrabs, on the other hand, are just obnoxious. My dinky little pea shooter pistol doesn’t feel like great protection. What’s a rogue physicist gotta do to get a shotgun?

From airboats to zombies

After a break, I return armed with a renewed determination to grok this game and, more importantly, with an airboat. For 90 percent of the Water Hazard chapter, I am feeling like a badass. I’m cruising in my watery ride, flying over ramps, and watching a silo collapse overhead. Especially in those rare moments when the 2000s electro jams punctuate my fights, I feel like a true action hero.

A helicopter hovers over an airboat in Half-Life 2

The airboat sequence was divisive in 2004, but this writer enjoyed it. Credit: Anna Washenko

Next I reach the Black Mesa East chapter, which is a perfect interlude. The game’s approach to world-building is probably the area where my feelings align most closely with those of Half-Life 2 veterans. It is spectacular. Heading down into the lab may be the best elevator ride I’ve taken in a game. Judith is talking science, and outside the shaft, I see humans and vortigaunts conducting fascinating experiments. Small vignettes like those are a perfect way to introduce more information about the rebellion. They give subtle context to a game that doesn’t do much to explain itself and doesn’t need to.

Also, Dog is the best boy. Seriously, I’ve seen modern games where the animations didn’t have as much personality as when Alyx treats her robot protector like an actual dog, and he shakes in delight. My only sadness is that Dog doesn’t accompany me to Ravenholm.

Dog and Alyx standing together at Black Mesa East

Dog is, in fact, the best boy. Credit: Valve

I do wish Dog had come with me to Ravenholm. I learned after the fact that this chapter is one of the most iconic and beloved, but I had the opposite reaction. Survival horror is not my jam. These whirling death traps are sweet, but I hate jump scares, and I don’t love any of my weapons for the encounters.

That brings me to something I don’t want to say, but in the spirit of journalistic honesty, I must: I don’t adore the Gravity Gun. Obviously it was the game’s signature creation here and probably what most of you recall most fondly, but I did not fully grasp its potential immediately. Based on the tutorial in Black Mesa East, I assumed it would mostly be a component to puzzle-solving and traversal rather than a key part of combat. I only started using it as a weapon in Ravenholm because I ran out of ammo for everything else.

It’s not that I don’t get the appeal. Slicing zombies up with a saw blade or bashing them with paint cans is satisfying—no complaints there. But I found the tool inconsistent, which discouraged me from experimenting as much as the developers may have hoped. I’m pretty sure I do as much damage to myself as to enemies trying to lob exploding barrels. I want to be able to fling corpses around and can’t (for reasons that became apparent later, but in the moment felt limiting). Later chapters reinforced my uncertainty, when I couldn’t pull a car to me, yet a push blast had enough power to overturn the vehicle.

And once again, I had a rough time with navigation. Maybe I was missing what other people would have seen as obvious cues, the way I’m attuned to finding climbing paths marked by color in modern games—controversial as that yellow marking convention may be, its absence is noted when you’re struggling to read the environment with a visual language for the game that emphasizes realism over readability. Or maybe I’ve gotten over-reliant on the tools of the sprawling RPGs I favor these days, where you have a mini-map and quest markers to help you manage all the threads. But for an agonizingly long time, I stared at an electrified fence and wires that seemed to lead to nowhere before realizing that I was supposed to enter the building where Father Grigori first appeared on the balcony. A giant bonfire of corpses out front seemed like a clear ‘do not enter’ sign, so it didn’t occur to me that I could go inside. Alas.

Speaking of which, Father Grigori is the best part of the section. He’s a total bro, giving me a shotgun at long last. I feel kind of bad when I just abandon him to his murderous flock at the end of the chapter. I hope he survives?

Familiarity and finding my footing

The new weapons are coming fast and furious now. I’m impressed at how good the combat feel is. I like the pulse rifle a lot, and that has become my go-to for most long-distance enemies. I wish I could aim down sights, but at least this feels impactful at range. Although I don’t usually favor the slow cadence of a revolver in other games, I also enjoy the magnum. The SMG serves well as a workhorse, while the rocket launcher and crossbow are satisfying tools when the right situation arises.

But my favorite weapon, far more than the Gravity Gun, is the shotgun. Especially at point-blank range and into a fast zombie’s head. Chef’s kiss. Maybe it’s my love of Doom (2016) peeking through, but any time I can go charging into a crowd with my shotgun, I’m a happy camper.

While the worldbuilding in Half-Life 2 is stellar, I don’t think the writing matches that high. Just about every brief encounter with allies starts with someone breathlessly gasping, “Gordon? Gordon Freeman?” It’s the sort of repetition that would make for an effective and dangerous drinking game.

I was surprised when I entered another vehicle section. I liked the airboat, even though the chapter ran a touch long, but this dune buggy feels a lot jankier. At least it starts with a gun attached.

I love the idea of this magnet crane puzzle. I wish it didn’t control like something from Octodad, but I do get my buggy up out of the sand.

A metal sheet is placed on the sand by the gravity gun

The “floor is lava” sequence involves placing objects with the Gravity Gun to avoid disturbing an army of angry antlions by stepping on the sand. Credit: Anna Washenko

Things start turning around for me once I reach the sandy version of ‘the floor is lava.’ That’s a cute idea. Although I keep wanting to rotate objects and have a more controlled placement with the Gravity Gun like I could when I did these kinds of tasks with the Ultrahand ability during The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I understand that Half-Life 2 crawled so TotK could run, but that knowledge doesn’t mean I have a better time using the mechanic. Toward the end of the sequence, I got bored by the slow pace of creating a bridge and just barrelled ahead, willing to face a firefight just to move things along.

At this point, however, things take a decided turn for the better when I get my other favorite weapon of the game: My own antlion army! Commanding them is so fabulously ridiculous. The scene where hordes of antlions leap over high walls to attack gunmen on the towers leading into Nova Prospekt may be my favorite moment so far in the entire game. If this is how all of you felt flinging radiators around with the Gravity Gun back in the day, then I get why you love it so. I’m sure I won’t be able to keep this glorious power indefinitely, but I would happily finish the rest of the story with just antlions and a shotgun if they’d let me.

The Nova Prospekt area is the first time I really see a clear line connecting Half-Life 2 to Portal. None of the puzzles or characters thus far gave me Portal vibes, but I definitely get them here, especially once turrets come into play. By this point, I’m finally navigating the space with some confidence. That might be the result of logging enough hours or maybe it was just the sense that GLaDOS could start talking to me at any moment. Whatever the reason, I think I’m finding my groove at last.

A dialogue subtitle instructs a shotgun-wielding Gordon to start setting up turrets in an alien prison

Nova Prospekt is one of the first areas Valve made when it developed Half-Life 2, so it’s not surprising it bears a lot of similarity to environments and vibes in both the original Half-Life and in Portal. Credit: Anna Washenko

Somehow I am not surprised by Judith’s sudden but inevitable betrayal in this chapter. Alyx not getting along with her in the Black Mesa East chapter felt pretty telling. But then she’s just going to let Judith enter teleport coordinates unsupervised? Alyx, you’re supposed to be smart!

What do you know—now Judith has re-kidnapped Eli. Color me shocked.

Onward and upward to the end

It’s nice having human minions. They’re no antlions, but I like how the world has shifted to a real uprising. It reminds me of the big charge at the end of Mass Effect 3, running and gunning through a bombed-out city with bug-like baddies overhead.

Snipers are not a welcome addition to the enemy roster. Not sure why Barney’s whining so much. You could throw some grenades, too, my dude.

Barney tags along with my minions as we reach the Overwatch Nexus. Destroying floor turrets is probably the first time I’ve struggled with combat. These are the least precise grenades of all time. Once we make it through the interior sequence, it’s time to face down the striders. I can’t imagine how you’d play this section bringing down the swarm of them on a harder difficulty. My health takes a beating as I run around the wreckage desperately looking for ammo reloads and medkits. In theory, this is probably a great setpiece, but I’m just stressed out. Things go a little better once the combat is paired with traversal, and the final showdown on the roof does feel like a gratifying close to a boss fight.

On to the Citadel. Why on earth would I get into one of these pods? That’s a terrible idea. But apparently that’s what I’m going to do. I hope I’m not supposed to be navigating this pod in any way, because I’m just taking in the vibes. It’s another transit moment with glimpses into what the enemies have been getting up to while the rebellion rages outside. It’s eerie; I like it.

A strider looms over the player as the player switches weapons

Battling the striders as the game moves toward its finale. Credit: Anna Washenko

The Gravity Gun is the core of Half-Life 2, so it makes sense that a supercharged version is all I have for the final push. I appreciate that I can use it to fling bodies, but my reaction is a little muted since this was an idea I’d had from the start. But I do find the new angle of sucking up energy orbs to be pretty rad.

I arrive in Dr. Breen’s office, and it looks grim for our heroes. Judith redeeming herself surprises me more than her betrayal, which is nice. When he runs off, I’m mentally preparing myself as I chase him for a final boss showdown. Surely, something extra bonkers with the Gravity Gun awaits me. I climb the teleportation tower, I pelt Breen’s device with energy orbs, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, and…

Huh?

Context is everything

In the moment, I was torn between feeling that the opaque ending was genius and that it was an absolute cop-out. It was certainly not how I expected the game to end.

But on reflection, that wound up being a fitting final thought as the credits rolled, because I think ‘expectations’ were at the heart of my conflicted reactions to finally playing Half-Life 2. I’ve rarely felt so much pressure to have a particular response. I wanted to love this game. I wanted to share the awe that so many players feel for it. I wanted to have an epic experience that matched the epic legacy Half-Life 2 has in gaming history.

I didn’t.

Instead, I had whiplash, swinging between moments of delight and stretches of being stymied or even downright pissed off. I was tense, often dreading rather than eagerly awaiting each next twist. Aside from a handful of high points, I’m not sure I’d say playing Half-Life 2 was fun.

As I mentioned at the start, the big question I felt I had to answer was whether Half-Life 2 felt relevant today or whether it only holds up under the rosy glow of nostalgia. And my answer is, “It depends.” As an enigmatic person once said, “The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.” It’s all in the context.

Moments that were jaw-dropping in 2004 have less impact for someone like me who’s played the many titles that copied, standardized, and perfected Half-Life 2‘s revelations. Intellectually, I understand that the Gravity Gun was a literal game-changer and that a physics engine deployed at this scale was unheard of. But funnily enough, a modern player is even less likely to see those innovations as so, well, innovative when a game has as much polish as Half-Life 2 does. Half-Life 2 has almost no rough edges in the execution. Everything works the way it was intended.

Since that polish means the new ideas don’t feel like experiments, and since I’ve seen them in other games in the intervening years, they don’t register as notable.

Just as you don’t need to be a fan of Aristotle’s Poetics to appreciate drama, you don’t need to love Half-Life 2 to appreciate its legacy. As a fun game to play, whether it holds up will come down to you and your context. However, as a showcase of the technology of the time and a masterclass in world-building, yes, Half-Life 2 holds up today.

I played Half-Life 2 for the first time this year—here’s how it went Read More »

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Half-Life 2 pushed Steam on the gaming masses… and the masses pushed back

gaming, half life 2, steam, valve / /

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day leading up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

When millions of eager gamers first installed Half-Life 2 20 years ago, many, if not most, of them found they needed to install another piece of software alongside it. Few at the time could imagine that piece of companion software–with the pithy name Steam–would eventually become the key distribution point and social networking center for the entire PC gaming ecosystem, making the idea of physical PC games an anachronism in the process.

While Half-Life 2 wasn’t the first Valve game released on Steam, it was the first high-profile title to require the platform, even for players installing the game from physical retail discs. That requirement gave Valve access to millions of gamers with new Steam accounts and helped the company bypass traditional retail publishers of the day by directly marketing and selling its games (and, eventually, games from other developers). But 2004-era Steam also faced a vociferous backlash from players who saw the software as a piece of nuisance DRM (digital rights management) that did little to justify its existence at the time.

Free (from Vivendi) at last

Years before Half-Life 2’s release, Valve revealed Steam to the world at the 2002 Game Developers Conference, announcing “a broadband business platform for direct software delivery and content management” in a press release. Valve’s vision for a new suite of developer tools for content publishing, billing, version control, and anti-piracy was all present and stressed in that initial announcement.

Perhaps the largest goal for Steam, though, was removing the middlemen of retail game distribution and giving more direct control to game developers, including Valve. “By eliminating the overhead of physical goods distribution, developers will be able to leverage the efficiency of broadband to improve customer service and increase operating margins,” Valve wrote in its 2002 announcement.

Valve’s Gabe Newell on stage unveiling Steam at GDC 2002. Credit: 4Gamer

On stage at GDC, Valve founder Gabe Newell took things even further, positioning himself as “a new-age Robin Hood who wanted to take from the greedy publishers what independent game developers deserved: a larger piece of the revenue pie,” as Gamespot’s Final Days of Half-Life 2 feature summed it up. Cutting out the publishers and retailers, Newell said, could be the difference between a developer taking home $7 or $30 on a full-price game (which generally ran $50 at the time).

Half-Life 2 pushed Steam on the gaming masses… and the masses pushed back Read More »

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the choices you make while saving the world

Bioware, Dragon Age, Dragon Age The Veilguard, Dragon Age Veilguard, EA, Features, gaming, RPG / /

“Events are weaving together quickly. The fate of the world shall be decided.”

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is as much about the world, story, and characters as the gameplay. Credit: EA

BioWare’s reputation as a AAA game development studio is built on three pillars: world-building, storytelling, and character development. In-game codices offer textual support for fan theories, replays are kept fresh by systems that encourage experimenting with alternative quest resolutions, and players get so attached to their characters that an entire fan-built ecosystem of player-generated fiction and artwork has sprung up over the years.

After two very publicly disappointing releases with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, BioWare pivoted back to the formula that brought it success, but I’m wrapping up the first third of The Veilguard, and it feels like there’s an ingredient missing from the special sauce. Where are the quests that really let me agonize over the potential repercussions of my choices?

I love Thedas, and I love the ragtag group of friends my hero has to assemble anew in each game, but what really gets me going as a roleplayer are the morally ambiguous questions that make me squirm: the dreadful and delicious BioWare decisions.

Should I listen to the tormented templar and assume every mage I meet is so dangerous that I need to adopt a “strike first, ask questions later” policy, or can I assume at least some magic users are probably not going to murder me on sight? When I find out my best friend’s kleptomania is the reason my city has been under armed occupation for the past 10 years, do I turn her in, or do I swear to defend her to the end?

Questions like these keep me coming back to replay BioWare games over and over. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of the fourth game in the Dragon Age franchise so I can find out what fresh dilemmas I’ll have to wrangle, but at about 70 hours in, they seem to be in short supply.

The allure of interactive media, and the limitations

Before we get into some actual BioWare choices, I think it’s important to acknowledge the realities of the medium. These games are brilliant interactive stories. They reach me like my favorite novels do, but they offer a flexibility not available in printed media (well, outside of the old Choose Your Own Adventure novels, anyway). I’m not just reading about the main character’s decisions; I’m making the main character’s decisions, and that can be some heady stuff.

There’s a limit to how much of the plot can be put into a player’s hands, though. A roleplaying game developer wants to give as much player agency as possible, but that has to happen through the illusion of choice. You must arrive at one specific location for the sake of the plot, but the game can accommodate letting you choose from several open pathways to get there. It’s a railroad—hopefully a well-hidden railroad—but at the end of the day, no matter how great the storytelling is, these are still video games. There’s only so much they can do.

So if you have to maintain an illusion of choice but also want to to invite your players to thoughtfully engage with your decision nodes, what do you do? You reward them for playing along and suspending their disbelief by giving their choices meaningful weight inside your shared fantasy world.

If the win condition of a basic quest is a simple “perform action X at location Y,” you have to spice that up with some complexity or the game gets very old very quickly. That complexity can be programmatic, or it can be narrative. With your game development tools, you can give the player more than one route to navigate to location Y through good map design, or you can make action X easier or harder to accomplish by setting preconditions like puzzles to solve or other nodes that need interaction. With the narrative, you’re not limited to what can be accomplished in your game engine. The question becomes, “How much can I give the player to emotionally react to?”

In a field packed with quality roleplaying game developers, this is where BioWare has historically shined: making me have big feelings about my companions and the world they live in. This is what I crave.

Who is (my) Rook, anyway?

The Veilguard sets up your protagonist, Rook, with a lightly sketched backstory tied to your chosen faction. You pick a first name, you are assigned a last name, and you read a brief summary of an important event in Rook’s recent history. The rest is on you, and you reveal Rook’s essential nature through the dialog wheel and the major plot choices you make. Those plot choices are necessarily mechanically limited in scope and in rewards/consequences, but narratively, there’s a lot of ground you can cover.

One version of the protagonist in Dragon Age The Veilguard, with a dialogue wheel showing options

For the record, I picked “Oof.” That’s just how my Rook rolls. Credit: Marisol Cuervo

During the game’s tutorial, you’re given information about a town that has mysteriously fallen out of communication with the group you’re assisting. You and your companions set out to discover what happened. You investigate the town, find the person responsible, and decide what happens to him next. Mechanically, it’s pretty straightforward.

The real action is happening inside your head. As Rook, I’ve just walked through a real horror show in this small village, put together some really disturbing clues about what’s happening, and I’m now staring down the person responsible while he’s trapped inside an uncomfortably slimy-looking cyst of material the game calls the Blight. Here is the choice: What does my Rook decide to do with him, and what does that choice say about her character? I can’t answer that question without looking through the lens of my personal morality, even if I intend for Rook to act counter to my own nature.

My first emotional, knee-jerk reaction is to say screw this guy. Leave him to the consequences of his own making. He’s given me an offensively venal justification for how he got here, so let him sit there and stare at his material reward for all the good it will do him while he’s being swallowed by the Blight.

The alternative is saving him. You get to give him a scathing lecture, but he goes free, and it’s because you made that choice. You walked through the center of what used to be a vibrant settlement and saw this guy, you know he’s the one who allowed this mess to happen, and you stayed true to your moral center anyway. Don’t you feel good? Look at you, big hero! All those other people will die from the Blight, but you held the line and said, “Well, not this one.”

A dialogue wheel gives the player a decisive choice

Being vindictive might feel good, but I feel leaving him is a profoundly evil choice. Credit: Marisol Cuervo

There’s no objectively right answer about what to do with the mayor, and I’m here for it. Leaving him or saving him: Neither option is without ethical hazards. I can use this medium to dig deep into who I am and how I see myself before building up my idea of who my Rook is going to be.

Make your decision, and Rook lives with the consequences. Some are significant, and some… not so much.

Your choices are world-changing—but also can’t be

Longtime BioWare fans have historically been given the luxury of having their choices—large and small—acknowledged by the next game in the franchise. In past games, this happened largely through small dialog mentions or NPC reappearances, but as satisfying as this is for me as a player, it creates a big problem for BioWare.

Here’s an example: depending on the actions of the player, ginger-haired bard and possible romantic companion Leliana can be missed entirely as a recruitable companion in Dragon Age: Origins, the first game in the franchise. If she is recruited, she can potentially die in a later quest. It’s not guaranteed that she survives the first game. That’s a bit of a problem in Dragon Age II, where Leliana shows up in one of the downloadable content packs. It’s a bigger problem in the third game, where Leliana is the official spymaster for the titular Inquisition. BioWare calls these NPCs who can exist in a superposition of states “quantum characters.”

A tweet that says BioWare's default stance is to avoid using quantum characters, but an exception was made for Liliana

One of the game’s creative leaders talking about “quantum characters.” Credit: Marisol Cuervo

If you follow this thought to its logical end, you can understand where BioWare is coming from: After a critical mass of quantum characters is reached, the effects are impossible to manage. BioWare sidesteps the Leliana problem entirely in The Veilguard by just not talking about her.

BioWare has staunchly maintained that, as a studio, it does not have a set canon for the history of its games; there’s only the personal canon each player develops as a result of their gameplay. As I’ve been playing, I can tell there’s been a lot of thought put into ensuring none of The Veilguard’s in-game references to areas covered in the previous three games would invalidate a player’s personal canon, and I appreciate that. That’s not an easy needle to thread. I can also see that the same care was put into ensuring that this game’s decisions would not create future quantum characters, and that means the choices we’re given are very carefully constrained to this story and only this story.

But it still feels like we’re missing an opportunity to make these moral decisions on a smaller scale. Dragon Age: Inquisition introduced a collectible and cleverly hidden item for players to track down while they worked on saving the world. Collect enough trinkets and you eventually open up an entirely optional area to explore. Because this is BioWare, though, there was a catch: To find the trinkets, you had to stare through the crystal eyes of a skull sourced from the body of a mage who has been forcibly cut off from the source of all magic in the world. Is your Inquisitor on board with that, even if it comes with a payoff? Personally, I don’t like the idea. My Inquisitor? She thoroughly looted the joint. It’s a small choice, and it doesn’t really impact the long-term state of the world, but I still really enjoyed working through it.

Later in the first act of The Veilguard, Rook finally gets an opportunity to make one of the big, ethically difficult decisions. I’ll avoid spoilers, but I don’t mind sharing that it was a satisfyingly difficult choice to make, and I wasn’t sure I felt good about my decision. I spent a lot of time staring at the screen before clicking on my answer. Yeah, that’s the good stuff right there.

In keeping with the studio’s effort to avoid creating quantum worldstates, The Veilguard treads lightly with the mechanical consequences of this specific choice and the player is asked to take up the narrative repercussions. How hard the consequences hit, or if they miss, comes down to your individual approach to roleplaying games. Are you a player who inhabits the character and lives in the world? Or is it more like you’re riding along, only watching a story unfold? Your answer will greatly influence how connected you feel to the choices BioWare asks you to make.

Is this better or worse?

Much online discussion around The Veilguard has centered on Bioware’s decision to incorporate only three choices from the previous game in the series, Inquisition, rather than using the existing Dragon Age Keep to import an entire worldstate. I’m a little disappointed by this, but I’m also not sure anything in Thedas is significantly changed because my Hero of Ferelden was a softie who convinced the guard in the Ostagar camp to give his lunch to the prisoner who was in the cage for attempted desertion.

At the same time, as I wrap up the first act, I’m missing the mild tension I should be feeling when the dialog wheel comes up, and not just because many of the dialog choices seem to be three flavors of “yes, and…” One of my companions was deeply unhappy with me for a period of time after I made the big first-act decision and sharply rebuffed my attempts at justification, snapping at me that I should go. Previous games allowed companions to leave your party forever if they disagreed enough with your main character; this doesn’t seem to be a mechanic you need to worry about in The Veilguard.

Rook’s friends might be divided on how they view her choice of verbal persuasion versus percussive diplomacy, but none of them had anything to say about it while she was very earnestly attempting to convince a significant NPC they were making a pretty big mistake. One of Rook’s companions later asked about her intentions during that interaction but otherwise had no reaction.

Another dialogue choice in Veilguard

BioWare, are you OK? Why do you keep punching people who don’t agree with you? Credit: Marisol Cuervo

Seventy hours into the game, I’m looking for places where I have to navigate my own ethical landscape before I can choose to have Rook conform to, or flaunt, the social mores of northern Thedas. I’m still helping people, being the hero, and having a lot of fun doing so, but the problems I’m solving aren’t sticky, and they lack the nuance I enjoyed in previous games. I want to really wrestle with the potential consequences before I decide to do something. Maybe this is something I’ll see more of in the second act.

If the banal, puppy-kicking kind of evil has been minimized in favor of larger stakes—something I applaud—it has left a sort of vacuum on the roleplaying spectrum. BioWare has big opinions about how heroes should act and how they should handle interpersonal conflict. I wish I felt more like I was having that struggle rather than being told that’s how Rook is feeling.

I’m hopeful my Rook isn’t just going to just save the world, but that in the next act of the game, I’ll see more opportunities from BioWare to let her do it her way.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the choices you make while saving the world Read More »

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How Valve made Half-Life 2 and set a new standard for future games

first-person shooter, Game Design, game development, gaming, half life 2, steam, Valve Software / /

From physics to greyboxing, Half-Life 2 broke a lot of new ground.

This article is part of our 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 series. Credit: Aurich Lawson

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

There has been some debate about which product was the first modern “triple-A” video game, but ask most people and one answer is sure to at least be a contender: Valve’s Half-Life 2.

For Western PC games, Half-Life 2 set a standard that held strong in developers’ ambitions and in players’ expectations for well over a decade. Despite that, there’s only so much new ground it truly broke in terms of how games are made and designed—it’s just that most games didn’t have the same commitment to scope, scale, and polish all at the same time.

To kick off a week of articles looking back at the influential classic, we’re going to go over the way it was made, and just as importantly, the thought that went into its design—both of which were highly influential.

A story of cabals and Electronics Boutique

Development, design, and production practices in the games industry have always varied widely by studio. But because of the success of Half-Life 2, some of the approaches that Valve took were copied elsewhere in the industry after they were shared in blog posts and conference talks at events like the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC).

The cabals of Valve

Valve is famous for influencing many things in gaming, but it was most influential in its relatively flat and democratic team structure, and that played out even during Half-Life 2’s development in the early 2000s. While many studios are broken up into clear departments big and small for different disciplines (such as art, level design, combat design, narrative design, AI programming, and so on), many parts of Valve’s Half-Life 2 team consisted of a half-dozen multi-disciplinary small groups the company internally called “cabals.”

Each major chapter in Half-Life 2 had its own unique four-to-five-person cabal made up of level designers and programmers. These groups built their levels largely independently while frequently showing their work to other cabals for feedback and cross-pollination of good ideas. They all worked within constraints set in a pre-production phase that laid out elements like the main story beats, some of the weapons, and so on.

A resistance soldier shoots at a Strider in the streets of City 17

Each major chapter, like this battle-in-the-streets one toward the end of the game, was designed by a largely independent cabal. Credit: Valve

Additionally, similarly sized design cabals worked on aspects of the game’s design that crossed multiple levels—often made with representatives from the chapter cabals—for things like weapons.

There was even a “Cabal Cabal” made up of representatives from each of the six chapter teams to critique the work coming from all the teams.

Ruthless playtesting

Many game designers—especially back in the ’80s or ’90s—worked largely in isolation, determining privately what they thought would be fun and then shipping a finished product to an audience to find out if it really was.

By contrast, Valve put a great deal of emphasis on playtesting. To be clear: Valve did not invent playtesting. But it did make that a key part of the design process in a way that is even quite common today.

The Half-Life 2 team would send representatives to public places where potential fans might hang out, like Electronics Boutique stores, and would approach them and say something along the lines of, “Would you like to play Half-Life 2?” (Most said yes!)

A group of game developers sits on couches and takes notes while a PC gamer plays Half-Life 2

A photo from an actual early 2000s playtest of an in-development Half-Life 2, courtesy of a presentation slide from a Valve GDC talk. Credit: Valve

The volunteer playtesters were brought to a room set up like a real player’s living room and told to sit at the computer desk and simply play the game. Behind them, the level’s cabal would sit and watch a feed of the gameplay on a TV. The designers weren’t allowed to talk to the testers; they simply took notes.

Through this process, they learned which designs and ideas worked and which ones simply confused the players. They then made iterative changes, playtested the level again, and repeated that process until they were happy with the outcome.

Today’s developers sometimes take a more sophisticated approach to sourcing players for their playtests, making sure they’re putting their games in front of a wider range of people to make the games more accessible beyond a dedicated enthusiast core. But nonetheless, playtesting across the industry today is at the level it is because of Valve’s refinement of the process.

The alpha wave

For a game as ambitious as Half-Life 2 was, it’s surprising just how polished it was when it hit the market. That iterative mindset was a big part of it, but it extended beyond those consumer playtests.

Valve made sure to allocate a significant amount of time for iteration and refinement on an alpha build, which in this case meant a version of the game that could be played from beginning to end. When speaking to other developers about the process, representatives of Valve said that if you’re working on a game for just a year, you should try to get to the alpha point by the end of eight months so you have four for refinement.

Apparently, this made a big impact on Half-Life 2’s overall quality. It also helped address natural downsides of the cabal structure, like the fact that chapters developed by largely independent teams offered an inconsistent experience in terms of the difficulty curve.

With processes like this, Valve modeled several things that would be standard in triple-A game development for years to come—though not all of them were done by Valve first.

For example, the approach to in-game cutscenes reverberates today. Different cabals focused on designing the levels versus planning out cutscenes in which characters would walk around the room and interact with one another, all while the player could freely explore the environment.

A screenshot of Combine soldiers fighting antlions in Nova Prospekt

Nova Prospekt was one of the first levels completed during Half-Life 2‘s development. Credit: Valve

The team that focused on story performances worked with level designers to block out the walking paths for characters, and the level designers had to use that as a constraint, building the levels around them. That meant that changes to level layouts couldn’t create situations where new character animations would have to be made. That approach is still used by many studios today.

As is what is now called greyboxing, the practice of designing levels without high-effort artwork so that artists can come in and pretty the levels up after the layout is settled, rather than having to constantly go back and forth with designers as those designers “find the fun.” Valve didn’t invent this, but it was a big part of the process, and its in-development levels were filled with the color orange, not just gray.

Finding the DNA of Half-Life 2 in 20 years of games

When Half-Life 2 hit the market via the newly launched Steam digital distribution platform (more on that later this week), it was widely praised. Critics and players at the time loved it, calling it a must-have title and one that defined the PC gaming experience. Several of the things that came out of its development process that players remember most from Half-Life 2 became staples over the past 20 years.

For instance, the game set a new standard for character animations in fully interactive cutscenes, especially with facial animations. Today, far more advanced motion capture is a common practice in triple-A games—to the point that games that don’t do it (like Bethesda Game Studios titles) are widely criticized by players simply for not taking that route, even if motion capture doesn’t necessarily make practical sense for those games’ scope and design.

And Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun, which dramatically built on past games’ physics mechanics, is in many ways a  concept that developers are still playing with and expanding on today. Ultrahand, the flagship player ability in 2023’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, could be seen as a substantial evolution from the Gravity Gun. In addition to offering players the ability to pick and place objects in the world, it gives them the power to attach them to one another to build creative contraptions.

There’s also Half-Life 2’s approach to using environmental lines and art cues to guide the player’s attention through realistic-looking environments. The game was lauded for that at the time, and it was an approach used by many popular games in the years to come. Today, many studios have moved on to much more explicit player cues like the yellow climbing holds in so many recent triple-A titles. As you’ll see in an upcoming article this week written by someone who played Half-Life 2 for the very first time in 2024, Half-Life 2’s approach may have set the stage, but modern players might expect something a little different.

A trainyard in City 17

Environments like this were carefully designed to guide the player’s eye in subtle ways. Today, many triple-A games take a less subtle approach because playtesting with broader audiences shows it’s sometimes necessary. Credit: Valve

One thing about the environment design that Half-Life 2 was praised for hasn’t been replaced these days, though: a commitment to subtle environmental storytelling. World-building and vibes are perhaps Half-Life 2’s greatest achievements. From BioShock to Dishonored to Cyberpunk 2077, this might be the realm where Half-Life 2’s influence is still felt the most today.

A legacy remembered

Looking back 20 years later, Half-Life 2 isn’t necessarily remembered for radical new gameplay concepts. Instead, it’s known for outstanding execution—and developers everywhere are still applying lessons learned by that development team to try to chase its high standard of quality.

Even at the time, critics noted that it wasn’t exactly that there was anything in Half-Life 2 that players had never seen before. Rather, it was the combined force of quality, scope, presentation, and refinement that made an impact.

Of course, Valve and Half-Life 2 are also known for multiple memorable cultural moments, some of the industry’s most infamous controversies, and playing a big part in introducing digital distribution. We’ll explore some of those things as we count down to the “Red Letter Day” this Saturday.

Photo of Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica. He covers Apple, software development, gaming, AI, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

How Valve made Half-Life 2 and set a new standard for future games Read More »

gog’s-preservation-program-is-the-drm-free-store-refocusing-on-the-classics

GOG’s Preservation Program is the DRM-free store refocusing on the classics

game preservation, gaming, gog, Good Old Games, video game preservation / /

The classic PC games market is “in a sorry state,” according to DRM-free and classic-minded storefront GOG. Small games that aren’t currently selling get abandoned, and compatibility issues arise as technology moves forward or as one-off development ideas age like milk.

Classic games are only 20 percent of GOG’s catalog, and the firm hasn’t actually called itself “Good Old Games” in 12 years. And yet, today, GOG announces that it is making “a significant commitment of resources” toward a new GOG Preservation Program. It starts with 100 games for which GOG’s own developers are working to create current and future compatibility, keeping them DRM-free and giving them ongoing tech support, along with granting them a “Good Old Game: Preserved by GOG” stamp.

Selection of games available in GOG's

Credit: GOG

GOG is not shifting its mission of providing a DRM-free alternative to Steam, Epic, and other PC storefronts, at least not entirely. But it is demonstrably excited about a new focus that ties back to its original name, inspired in some part by its work on Alpha Protocol.

“We think we can significantly impact the classics industry by focusing our resources on it and creating superior products,” writes Arthur Dejardin, head of sales and marketing at GOG. “If we wanted to spread the DRM-free gospel by focusing on getting new AAA games on GOG instead, we would make little progress with the same amount of effort and money (we’ve been trying various versions of that for the last 5 years).”

GOG Preservation Program’s launch video.

Getting knights, demons, and zombies up to snuff

What kind of games? Scanning the list of Good Old Games, most of them are, by all accounts, both good and old. Personally, I’m glad to see the Jagged Alliance games, System Shock 2, Warcraft I & II, Dungeon Keeper Gold and Theme Park, SimCity 3000 Unlimited, and the Wing Commander series (particularly, personally, Privateer). Most of them are, understandably, Windows-only, though Mac support extends to 34 titles so far, and Linux may pick up many more through Proton compatibility beyond the 19 native titles to date.

GOG’s Preservation Program is the DRM-free store refocusing on the classics Read More »