Topic: On "Valve Time" and not anticipating HL3

[MukiDA]

Warning: I write walls of text. If you're thinking "tl;dr" at a glance, go with your gut.

Right off the bat, I'll make my point clear. Whenever Valve decides to continuation to the Half Life franchise, I'll be picking it up day 1. I don't care if it takes me a week for Steam's servers to steady out from the load it causes.

That said, I'm in no hurry. At the end of the day, I don't really care much about Half Life's story. When you build a story with cliffhangers that have no forseeable conclusion (Resident Evil movies, EVERY Half Life game to date), you're probably not telling a very good story, and more than likely piecing it together per iteration (see every season of Heroes and Dexter past the first).

Only the story is not really what gets me into that series, anymore than the story being what got me into Prometheus. Half-Life is really a series of amazing moments and sequences, long before it became a standard for FPSs, and, in all honesty, it still does this the best out of most titles. The cinemas never cut to a different perspective and the game RARELY takes control away from the player (even when amazing things are happening). Never mind that the game's biggest events require active and skilled participation from the player, as opposed to the "Theme Park Attraction" approach most modern titles take to this kind of immersion.

Basically, I'll be glad to plunker down and enjoy 6-8 hours of whatever Valve releases in the next few years. Which segways quite nicely into...

Valve Time

So much like this site's titularly loved games producer, Valve has a tendency to release software on the "When it's done" schedule. Franchises disappear for ages, and screenshots have very little value for completion estimates until a street date is on our laps. Even that doesn't always mean a whole lot. And the final single-player games tend to be short (both Portal games, for instance)

I think what most people don't realize about Valve Time, however, and what didn't really click for me until the release and subsequent critical backlash of Quantum Conundrum, is just how much of that results in what we DON'T get to play in their eventual releases. A GREAT deal of every dev cycle for Valve is research, into both how they can extend their engine (hell, look at DOTA 2 and all the Mac/Linux work) and what works best over the course of their games. The chunk we never see is what they find DOESN'T work in their titles, because at best, we get snippets of that in the dev commentary.

Who knows how many OTHER ideas Valve worked on for weeks or months that, as work wrapped up on that segment of a game, turned out to NOT BE FUN. Who knows how many programmer days (e.g. 24 hour periods, not work days) funneled into a gameplay or graphics concept that modern hardware at the time wasn't ready for, and was scrapped (or pushed into future consideration).

Next time you get a chance, if you own a DVD or Blu-Ray copy of Serenity, take a look at the deleted scenes. Most of them are minutes of extra dialogue in various parts of the movie that contributed NOTHING to the plot and actually felt a little "rambly". Half of that movie's brilliance (imho) was what never left the cutting room floor, something that is RARE in video games. "Insert Credit" had a feature on this problem some time ago, and how the rather excessive cost of game development (and this was written before the current console generation started) leads to a distinct lack of editing in games, for both story and level elements.

Basically, look at it this way: Among other things, Valve Time keeps "Scrappy Levels" down to a minimum.

[Glad0s]

Good point, but the conciseness vs. "rambly" debate is rather different in films and tv shows than games. Take Kubrick's films, for example. If you cut out anything "rambly" from 2001, you're left with about an hour of footage and virtually no majestic feel. It's the epic-ness, the SPRAWL that makes it so incredible. Also, if you were to cut out the long shots from A Clockwork Orange, it would severely damage the lasting intensity that the film has, The same goes with albums -- Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde", The Clash's "London Calling", The Rolling Stones' "Exile On Main St.", all of these albums have what many consider "filler", but in my opinion, the filler actually adds to the whole, as it gives the album an epic scope. The main difference between those mediums and games is one thing -- length. Albums are about an hour, usually, and movies are about two. The average game is....eh....anywhere from 7-12 hours or so. Thus, filler and rambling are more annoying and problematic when the experience itself is as long as it already is. But, speaking of Valve, some games may be a bit TOO short. I'm speaking mainly of Portal (see my username, there?) here. I think a few extra test chambers would have been fantastic. Valve, however, fixed that problem with the sequel. That game was the perfect length, in my opinion. But what about a short game with a less-novel premise. Limbo, perhaps? Does something like that game need to be longer? I really don't know.



I could go on forever, rambling with this pointlessness. Regardless, it's a very fun debate. The RFN guys should do a discussion on this...