"Listening to the dev commentary makes me respect HL2 even more. All the big aspects like physics and facial animations had to be developed for years with no certainty they would work in the end. It's the polar opposite of cash-grab." - NO! actually, HL2 sucks, Playtesters suck and are the cancer that is killing Valve, and you are a nostalgiastragging ValveBIPOC shill!

We already had this argument here.

https://rdrama.net/h/vidya/post/318182/my-personal-failure-was-being-stumped/7349474#context

For those who don't have time to read, we collective agreed that HL2 was a shit game and a cash grab, and anyone who simps for valve is a cheeto-dusted artistic manchild unable to grow up, desperately clinging to their childhood lack of responsibilities and diaper fetishism through nostalgia-laden commodity worship.

Not really, most of the big changes are pretty solid and it's just people thinking wistfully about what ifs. None of the playtest changes we know about come close to Arkane gutting one of their best levels because of playtesters

The Costume Party level in Dishonored was supposed to be a full on murder mystery but play testers never realized that they could leave the first floor so Arkane put in an NPC that basically told you the answer to the mystery as soon as you got to the party.

Arkane are so bad with this. They always sand down their edges to appeal to normies. DH1 was great, but they changed the atmosphere because grimdark isnt feminist. Then they hired a bunch of s to do DH2's level design and changed everything from small but dense murder sandboxes to neurodivergent, long open world levels with a bunch of places to go but nothing interesting in them

HL2 was genuinely a technological leap that hasn't been matched since. Watching people react to the 2003 demo in the documentary and looking at how people react now to any game announcement the difference couldn't be more stark. We will never have another game like this, not from Valve or any other company.

If you disagree you may be a Valve playtester, go back to your antlion tunnel

Ravenholm and Highway 17 still remain some of the best video game atmospheres.

Worst is still portal 2 the puzzle game where anytime someone got lost for more then a fee minutes valve made the puzzle even more obvious. So yoy have a game where if you have any pattern recognition you can nearly instantly see the answer to every puzzle since the puzzles only include stuff you need.

HL2 sucks

Hl2 was good but hl1 was way more ahead of its time. Both haven't aged super well.

>Valve seems to really prioritizes technical advancement and user experience in their games. The mentality of the developers in a lot of the HL2 commentary tracks is "If something is giving players trouble then that's our fault for making the game poorly," as if they're designing a new UI for Photoshop.

Interesting that Carmack seemed to have the same approach.

Snapshots:

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/695175027:

• archived.moe

• ghostarchive.org

• archive.org

• archive.ph (click to archive)