Highlighting HL2 Episode One's Commentary Track 44
Via GameSetWatch, an article on Waxy.org highlighting the great audio commentary for Half-Life 2: Episode One. The article includes a few excerpts from the experience, via flash movies. From the article: "Most of the game's 115 nodes are audio only, pointing out interesting tidbits about the scene you're currently in, such as the visual design, character dialogue, or gameplay. Some of the best examples discuss the iterations a stage or puzzle went through, why original versions didn't live up to expectations, and how they reached their final design. It's a fascinating glimpse into the minds of the developers, very much like sitting next to them as you play through at your own pace. But a few commentary nodes do much more, taking over the player's view to show them something hidden or entirely new. I've captured video from some of my favorites." Completely worth it to play through a second time to experience.
It needed it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Do you have to install this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Developers sure didn't care to remove development, testing and obsolete files.
There's LOTS of quite lengthy sequences including at least two versions of every single sentence said by most major characters, including something that was scrapped from the game (secret shrine with Breen's busts collection anyone?), plethora of random sentences to be said by your squad (you get a squad of 1 or 2 for a really short piece of the game), and lots of other sounds you're never going to hear.
I really wonder if the situation is similar with the rest of the game data. Seems likely.
Re:Unpleasant truth. (Score:1, Insightful)
It also revealed a few odd quirks about the developers.
For instance, the developers in the commentary talk about a vista being a reward, but they never talk about a fun action sequence as a reward. This seems wrongheaded - a player is unlikely to make a save so they can go and look at a vista again; they might well make a save so they can go back and replay fighting off horde of zombies in the dark using only exploding gas cannisters. The vista is not a reward, the action piece is the reward. The vista is just a short break in which the player is probably thinking more about "how cool am I" than looking at the view.
Episode One also spoke reams about the demographic of their playtesters - whereas in HL2 Alyx was mildly interesting as a dramatic character, in Episode One she spent half her time overtly fawning over the player as a teenage-fantasy girl.
As for the "zombie lift" -- playing to genre conventions is usually seen as a good thing in movies and games because it works as very simple foreshadowing to build tension. You see the too-inviting-looking lift; you know what's coming.
Re:Unpleasant truth. (Score:3, Insightful)
When you write a book or a story, you may lay out the plot schedule on paper, plan every piece of action and interaction, apply plot devices at strategical points, then wear it nicely in words and you most likely get a horrible, boring, unreadable pulp. Or you write as you feel the action would progress, try to feel what the characters would feel at different points, make smart decisions for both sides of the conflict, set up traps then let the characters foresee and avoid them instead of pushing them into them, and you get some great reading.
The golden rule of GOOD books is: Know the genre conventions, then BREAK them in original and interesting manner. Same is true about good games: make the player used to certain idea then turn everything upside down. If you just follow the old tools of the trade, the result is boring.
Re:Unpleasant truth. (Score:4, Insightful)
For a short run-down: Dialog needs to be very, very short in games. It needs to be visual. You need to define characters in ways that don't conflict with player initiated actions. You need to integrate real gameplay sequences (which would normally be terrible writing). You need to establish and stick to a palette of expressive animations. You need to write your plot for all of the possible ways that the player can traverse through that plot, and ensure that conflicting information and worldstate is never achieved. It needs to be paced for 20 - 40 hours. It needs to be technically possible to implement on a budget, which means paradoxically that flying through space is OK but fabric falling to the floor is not. It needs to be modular enough that when you cut two sections for time from the final game, the plot still makes sense. And it needs to "feel" right when you've moved your sequence from ten lines on a page to eight months later when you have a character running and jumping and dying.
A friend of mine just finished a project which had hired a big-name and well skilled author to write scripts for his game, and the results were functionally unusable. He just didn't get the structure of gaming, the non-linearity of it, and the types of things which can be effectively communicated or done in the digital realm.
Game writers need to have strong backgrounds in game design, and more than a little programming, art knowledge, and production. Oh, and they have to be amazing writers. That's a pretty rare overlap of skills. They had to dump him, hire a lesser known hollywood writer, dump him, then hire a game designer with a writing background to finish up.
Most gaming companies that I've seen "get" that they need writers. They just have a terrible time finding the right ones.