Half-Life 2: Episode One

• Platform: PC
• Published by: Valve Software
• Developed by: Valve Software
• Release Date: Jun 1, 2006
• Genre: Action
• Multiplayer: Yes
• Online: Yes

Valve on Episode One Continued..

When it comes to pacing, there's also a less obvious benefit simply in the shorter length of an episode. As great as Half-Life 2 is, Valve's design process sometimes shone through a bit too much. Though the game is not divided into discrete levels as most first person shooters are, the game sometimes felt segmented regardless. There were many different types of gameplay, but those segments were perhaps more clearly defined than would have been ideal. When the game is only several hours long but still has a good variety of gameplay situations and attention to detail, as any Valve release does, everything becomes denser and more tightly constructed. Plus, any situations that still don't work are more likely to be corrected without having to wait half a decade. Walker gave one example of how this impacted Episode One. "People really enjoyed the super gravity gun in Half-Life 2," he said, "so we gave it to them almost at the start in Episode One." To go along with that, Valve increased the overall scale and depth of interaction with the game world.

Speaking of Valve's development process, I was curious as to who actually does what on these games. It turns out nobody was really able to answer my question, or at least nobody wanted to. "Our business cards say all kinds of things," laughed Newell, who himself wears many hats at the company. Obviously, certain people do certain things--there are animators and writers and artists and so on--but everybody working on a given project has a high level of input into the decisions made on that project. This is evidenced by the way Valve does credit sequences: all of the team members are listed alphabetically without any titles. Initially, I tried to find out who acted as "lead designer" on Episode One. When pressed, a reluctant answer was given that Robin Walker is the "project lead," but he was quick to insist that the informal title relates more to general team management than creative control. This too drew a few knowing laughs. "If anyone tried to say, 'I have a vision,' they'd get mocked out of a meeting," explained Newell. "You bring in one wrong person to a team, and it would go off-kilter real fast. Our ability to do what we do is dependent on that dynamic."

Another benefit of working with that method, Walker explained, is that since any proposed additions are considered and discussed as a team, it can prevent feature bloat. "It's really easy to add features to your game that actually hurt the core experience," he said. As an example, he described a minor "feature" from the development of Half-Life 2. At one point, players could do a small amount of damage to zombies using just the gravity gun, causing a visible physical reaction from the zombie. When players discovered this ability, developers noticed that they frequently ignored other, better, methods to take out the zombies, such as the ability to use the gravity gun to launch a circular sawblade at the enemies. The damage and visual feedback was nice touch, but it actually detracted from the game at the time by slowing down players and weakening the pacing with an inefficient combat method.

Tech benefits

Valve doesn't just make games, the company also maintains and licenses its Source engine, used for all internal projects as well as numerous games from other developers. Working episodically, Valve can not only update the engine on a frequent basis, but can also ensure that all of the significant improvements have actually been demonstrated in a shipped product. This is helpful to licensees because it provides an immediate showcase for new features. For Episode One, the second major version of Valve's facial animation system was released. High dynamic range rendering (HDR), first showcased in Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast and Day of Defeat: Source, was improved and put to great effect in Episode One. The engine has also been optimized a great deal. Walker said that Valve learned some optimization tricks through the process of porting Half-Life 2 to Xbox, and many of those techniques have been applied to the Source engine on PC. "We pushed forward with graphics," he explained, "but the low end requirements got even lower due to optimizations."

One interesting example is that Valve noticed, quite frequently, stability problems were greatly reduced when users defragmented their hard drives. Taking that into account, Steam now automatically defragments the game cache, which has the same effect.

Risk management

One important benefit of episodic development Gabe Newell mentioned is risk management. As development costs, both on the PC and on consoles, continue to increase, simply developing a video game at all is a substantial risk, so most publishers try to find external factors such as licenses to minimize that risk. "When making a PlayStation 3 game, you've already expended all your risk," said Newell. With smaller scale episodic game, developers are putting less on the line with each release, so there is more room to try new concepts and approaches. In regards to consoles, Valve has announced it will be supporting Xbox 360 in some form, but Newell had some positive remarks about Nintendo's approach as well. "I understand why [Nintendo is] doing these things," he said. "I think they'll see more success than just making PS2 games with four times the budget and a movie license and a big day to date tie-in release."

To wrap things up

So then, it's probably just as well that everybody is looking to Valve to gauge the success of episodic gaming. After all, Valve seems to have the most answers when it comes to the subject. Early reports indicate that Episode One is doing nicely in retail, not just online; Valve announced today that the retail version of Half-Life 2: Episode One debuted at #1 on the European retail PC sales charts upon its release. While there are still only very few developers working on these kinds of projects, momentum is undoubtedly growing. Both Ritual and Telltale Games have expressed interest in bringing their episodic projects to consoles, which are starting to see digital distribution for the first time. Personally, I'm looking forward to actually finishing more games.

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