How's it going?:)
Pretty good. Thanks for asking.
Standard question first - what's your name, age, role and favourite game that
isn't one of your own?
Gabe Newell, 40, managing director, Mario 64.
There must be a lot of pressure on, because everyone's *really* looking forward
to HL2 - are you getting the games equivalent of second album panics?
Yep. We've received a great deal of support from the press, from retailers, from
fans, and from the online community in the years since the original Half-Life
shipped. Now it's up to us to pay them all back, and, yes, we are terrified that
we won't deliver.
Is the levitation gun (if you could give us the real name, we'd sound way better!)
used to levitate / fire things about in the tech demo trailers going to be in
the game?
Yes. If you have a system in your game - shaders, particles, physics, whatever,
and you want to have it be about gameplay and not just presentation, then you
are probably going to give the player some straight-forward method of having an
input into that system. You could restrict the player to having indirect or "realistic"
methods of input a la Trespasser, but that proved to be such a disaster that none
of us tinkering with physics ever want to bring up Trespasser. Especially not
in an interview - nope. You'd have to be a total gnork to say "Trespasser"
in an interview where you want people to believe physics could be fun.
Can you / are you willing to comment on Doom III?
Sure - I think the thought police are over at Monolith this week. I think Doom
3 looks great. I'll buy it.
What's the official minimum spec machine for it, supported operating systems
etc?
Windows 98 and later, Pentium-III 800, with a DX-6 level graphics accelerator.
How would you describe the game to someone who's not a hardcore FPS fan, why
is it going to rock their world and have them running to upgrade their office
PC to play it?
We've shown Half-Life 2 to a number of very casual or "so casual they don't"
gamers. The characters and the world interactivity seems to be the key for them.
Usually they tell us "it looks just like a movie, except I'll be in it",
and we grit our teeth and say "Interactive Movie" is a Really Bad Thing,
and they are not to say it again, or we'll take away their Half-Life 2 hat.
It seems like guns alone won't be enough - what else can you use to survive?
I was showing some people down in Hollywood the game last week, and was going
through zombie town, showing how I could "Rambo" my way through with
guns a-blazin, or I could "MacGyver" my way through by paying attention
to the world and being clever (it's easier to be clever when you helped design
the level, of course). We're trying pretty hard to reward people for thinking
about what's in front of them and the tools the world gives them that could be
useful.
There seems to be a sense of a free world, in which you figure your own way
out to deal with stuff - or are there pre-set triggers (such as the pipe swinging
and knocking everyone out)?
The physics gives you a lot of freedom to approach things your own way, but we
also try to insert more discretely authored experiences to give people a sense
of "that was cool" without having them feel too much "that was
really contrived."
What's your favourite new feature?
The character technology.
Are we correct to assume it'll have WON authentication or something like it
in place to tw** the nasty people with?
It will use the Steam authentication and anti-cheat technology.
Does Half Life 2 have its own anti-cheat code at the heart of the game?
It will use an updated version of what's out there on Steam.
Will it be a exclusive to any one server provider or will All Seeing Eye work
with it?
We think of third party server browsers as being MODs. We love MODs, not least
because our customers love MODs.
Did the success of Half-Life take you by surprise, and how has it influenced
the design of HL2? For example, will you be keeping support for the large modding
community?
Yes, we were quite surprised. We've tried to learn from the original so we have
made the new engine much more flexible and approachable for MOD authors (e.g.
MOD authors will find it a lot easier to add network entities, they will have
explicit control over all of the rendering on a per-poly basis if they want to).
It's challenging, because now there is a great deal of more functionality, and
the art bar is a lot higher, so the MOD teams will have their work cut out for
them.
When will the HL2 SDK (Software Development Kit - so happy MODDers can get going tinkering with it) be released?
Hopefully we will start releasing pieces of it to a broader group of developers
starting in August. Some developers already have the engine, such as Troika.
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Stuff like Halo 2 on Xbox looks great, and we already know it's going to kick ass once we play it, but viewing footage of the game didn't cause us to whoop like US games journos at a WWE mud-wrestling jamboree. Half-Life 2 though. Wow.
Watching the short videos that have so far been released onto the web had us gasping, laughing, rewinding, and in some cases, dropping dead from shock. This is truly amazing stuff - light years ahead of any other game on the release schedule of any other system.
Read more in Jonny Austin's BIG Preview...
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