Half Life thread - Discussions about Valve's FPS magnum opus(es) and any related content (spin offs, expansions and etc)

HL 3...is it still happening?

  • No and anyone that still thinks that it will is delusional

    Votes: 240 47.5%
  • Yes, they just need a few more years to perfect it so it can another game changer in the industry

    Votes: 136 26.9%
  • Shouldnt it be called "Two Lives and a half" instead?

    Votes: 82 16.2%
  • Half life is overrated, you neckbeard homos

    Votes: 47 9.3%

  • Total voters
    505
Was interested in the Black Mesa remake, but like much of Half-Life's history, it simply took too long for me. I have a massive backlog of games now where there previously weren't many, and Black Mesa is not a priority at this moment.
I would have put Black Mesa up there with Episode 2 or the original if not for Xen being overly long.

If only Xen was 40% shorter and the gonarch boss fight less janky (I played it pretty soon after Xen released, so I don't know if this has seen some improvements), I would have preferred it over the original by a good distance.

All things said, it does play quite nicely up until Interloper starts dragging on forever.

Better for it to stay dead at this point. In my opinion, the suitable window for a sequel fizzled out over 10 years ago, and whatever they could make now would just be an ill-fitting capstone.
They do still care about the series, considering what they did for the 25th anniversary (Man was it fun to play HLDM with real players and more than 2 active servers). But if they never made another mainline entry, I wouldn't really feel bad at this point. It's been 17 years (!) after Episode 2.
 
Last edited:
Better for it to stay dead at this point. In my opinion, the suitable window for a sequel fizzled out over 10 years ago, and whatever they could make now would just be an ill-fitting capstone.
I feel the same about this and kingdom hearts. Of course kh3 actually came out 15 years late but in that time disney has changed.

Similarly Valve no longer represents innovation instead they exist to monetize every aspect of gaming as an infrastructure. While everyone blames horse armor for the microtransaction slippery slope its really hats that showed how bad it can be. VR as a trend seems to be dying it was already very niche and there seems to be no new games being made for it anymore. Their emotes, stickers, profile customizations, etc. are worthless when everyone uses discord.

Valve's whole "no leaders" structure is an experiment that should've been deemed a failure long ago but persists purely because of how much money they make from their game store. None of that money is due to their awkward business policies and all its served to do is make sure that nothing ever gets done.
 
Similarly Valve no longer represents innovation instead they exist to monetize every aspect of gaming as an infrastructure. While everyone blames horse armor for the microtransaction slippery slope its really hats that showed how bad it can be.
Every single company has monetized every aspect of gaming. Selling cosmetics. Season passes and timed or limited content. Selling increased experience and better loot drops. Selling frame data. Selling a second soundtrack made up of previous music from earlier games. Online modes that are subscription only. On disc and day one DLC that was withheld just to make more money. Activation codes with new copies to hurt used game sales. Charging money to move accounts to different servers or realms. Shutting down old servers and forcing you to purchase accounts on the new server. The list is endless.

Not to mention things like preventing backwards compatible controllers just to make everyone have to repurchase their entire hardware collection yet again. Like planned obsolescence with cell phones. Or Microsoft just dumping new inferior versions of Windows every few years. Valve currently dropped all support for Win7 and in a few years will likely prevent access to Steam with Win10.
VR as a trend seems to be dying it was already very niche and there seems to be no new games being made for it anymore.
It will always be very niche. It is not the place to make sequels to already existing IPs like Half Life.
Valve's whole "no leaders" structure is an experiment that should've been deemed a failure long ago but persists purely because of how much money they make from their game store. None of that money is due to their awkward business policies and all its served to do is make sure that nothing ever gets done.
Valve is a massively predatory company like Apple or Google or Microsoft. And just like those companies they have gargantuan public relation teams in house to control their image on social media. And release just enough content and good news each year to allow their sycophants to ignore their evil and sick behaviors. Make a Half Life VR game and ignore the ultra predatory gambling and loot chests marketed to children and addicts.
 
In case you didn't know, or didn't want to remember that this mod exists, Crack Life had a 10th anniversary update released.
I've decided to cause mental torment for myself and played through it with godmode and it's more of the same thing, but now it has references to current day bullshit, such as hazmat suit scientists trying to forcefully vaccinate you, zoomer tiktok brainrot scientists taking cringe photos of you, and other new fun additions.

If that wasn't enough, a Campaign update is in the works, so expect even more retardation in the future.
Now if you excuse me, I'll go back to listening to these soothing sounds.
 
In case you didn't know, or didn't want to remember that this mod exists, Crack Life had a 10th anniversary update released.
I've decided to cause mental torment for myself and played through it with godmode and it's more of the same thing, but now it has references to current day bullshit, such as hazmat suit scientists trying to forcefully vaccinate you, zoomer tiktok brainrot scientists taking cringe photos of you, and other new fun additions.

If that wasn't enough, a Campaign update is in the works, so expect even more retardation in the future.
Now if you excuse me, I'll go back to listening to these soothing sounds.
View attachment 5813227
That's pretty cool. Crack-Life kicks ass and I really enjoyed the campaign they released afterwards.

Fun fact: I actually first played through Half-Life with it installed.
It was actually a lot harder in spots because the nazis shot lightning instantly without windup.
You also can't beat killing The Nihilanth to the distorted tune of Justin Bieber.
 
No Half Life 3 would be better at this point. In my opinion, Half Life 3: Unannounced might as well be the official sequel:
Fucking lame, thought it would be a project like black mesa to make HL3 using alyx's assets and the leaked script.

Could be done.
 
Valve is a massively predatory company like Apple or Google or Microsoft. And just like those companies they have gargantuan public relation teams in house to control their image on social media. And release just enough content and good news each year to allow their sycophants to ignore their evil and sick behaviors. Make a Half Life VR game and ignore the ultra predatory gambling and loot chests marketed to children and addicts.
Valve is nothing compared to Apple/Google/Microsoft. Their total equity is less what those corporations make in a year, because they're a private company so they're not chasing profits for the sake of profits, which is why they have what you would call a monopoly. Because their rivals, such as EA, Ubisoft, Epic Games and CD Projekt are public companies, their decisions are dictated by the investors, and it leads to them shooting themselves in the foot to appease their overlords instead of their clients. Valve has no such obligations, which is why Steam remains this titan with a "monopoly", because the competition is retarded.

And uhh, games marketed to children? Team Fortress 2 had to be censored in Germany and I can attest from experience that my mom hated me playing it when I was a kid, and I had to mod out the blood, gore and death screams so she would let me play it. It was very much a game out of my age class but the age guidelines are just that, guidelines, and I downloaded it for free from the web. None of Valve's games are targeted to kids, and if by "addicts" you mean gambling addicts then they get drawn to anything that has random chances. Just look at BossmanJack, he got hooked on OSRS PvP because it was all random chances. Are you going to say that OSRS PvP was marketing to addicts?

Valve currently dropped all support for Win7 and in a few years will likely prevent access to Steam with Win10.
For the last fucking time, that's on Google for dropping support for Win 7, 8 and 8.1 in Chromium. You want to complain, complain about Valve basing the only way to access their games on a 3rd party web browser instead of whipping up something independent.

Look, I get it, you want to be mad at every corporation under the sun, but not a single company under the sun would bend over backwards to be super duper friendly and pro-consumer just to appease complainers like you because that's not what makes money and that's not what keeps a company afloat. And by comparison Valve is the least evil and least predatory corporation out of all the ones you've mentioned and out of all the ones you've mentioned.

Microsoft forces LGBT politics into Minecraft, and the console/mobile versions of it have a marketplace that's designed to rip off parents with kids that just tap the big glowy "buy" button. I have never seen Valve do anything on that level of predatory. Maybe instead of complaining about Valve not being 100% perfect, because not a single company in the history ever was nor ever will, focus for once on what they're doing right compared to the rest, and appreciate that Valve isn't like EA or Ubisoft. But maybe you'd like that because you'd have so much to complain then, and I don't think you even play video games if you're so focused on pointing out Valve's flaws you're exaggerating shit.
 
DRM, loot boxes and gambling, casino games, awful community with tons of censorship, siding with developers to stop honest reviews by citing 'review bombing', taking a huge cut from developers for essentially just owning a giant marketplace, pushing shovelware to the point where probably 90% of games on Steam are not even on the level of old 90s flash browser games.
 
DRM, loot boxes and gambling, casino games, awful community with tons of censorship, siding with developers to stop honest reviews by citing 'review bombing', taking a huge cut from developers for essentially just owning a giant marketplace, pushing shovelware to the point where probably 90% of games on Steam are not even on the level of old 90s flash browser games.
Just don't buy those kinds of games then.
 
If only Xen was 40% shorter

100% agree, though I might up it to 60%. This really was the absolute worst part of Black Mesa, and I'm surprised BM gets as much adulation as it does because the Xen portion of the game very nearly sours the entire mod, for me at least. It's like they said "The Xen section in the original Half Life was not as well recieved as the rest of the game by a not-insubstantial portion of players. Let's outdo valve in that respect and make our Xen section ten times worse! YAAYYY!!"

Xen started out pretty nifty (and occasionally shows burts of further niftiness) however it rapidly becomes just insidiously repetitive and/or tedious in almost all other parts. And I think to myself - they cut out, or really, decided to not remake an entire chapter as well as significant parts of other chapters set in Black Mesa (you know, the actual fucking namesake of the mod) to cram in overly long, comically repetitive sections of Xen, so much so that it makes up probably 60+% of the overall gametime - what in the christing fuck is wrong with you developers? Just awful.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: tofudelivery
It's like they said "The Xen section in the original Half Life was not as well recieved as the rest of the game by a not-insubstantial portion of players. Let's outdo valve in that respect and make our Xen section ten times worse! YAAYYY!!"
BM's Xen was propably best summarized by Yahtzee:
"Half-Life was a handsome, intelligent, and smartly-dressed man who was inexplicably wearing one bright green Wellington boot; I don't think the solution was to put on the other Wellington boot."
I actually didn't finish the full release of BM because of it, so it's going to stay at the "Hiden Hat" achievement forever, especially since every time I try and reinstall half the textures are missing. Platforming in first person was, is and always will be cancer. Also whoever designed the modern Gonarch encounter should be fucking killed with a bazookoid.
 
DRM, loot boxes and gambling, casino games, awful community with tons of censorship, siding with developers to stop honest reviews by citing 'review bombing', taking a huge cut from developers for essentially just owning a giant marketplace, pushing shovelware to the point where probably 90% of games on Steam are not even on the level of old 90s flash browser games.
Just about everything that you've said here applies to the rest of the storefronts but you seem to be oddly hellbent on hating on the one that's the least shit of them all.

Honestly you sound like someone who listened to Tim Swiney's spiel about how bad Steam is, and joining his crusade against Steam without realizing that the only reason Epic is going against Steam is so that Epic can have the monopoly.

DRM? Epic Games Store has as much DRM as Steam.
Loot boxes, gambling, casino games, awful community with tons of censorship? You mean like Fortnite?
Stopping reviews? All they do is hide them and make a note that they're hidden. If a game is actually shit it does have shit reviews, the review bombing exclusion can only do so much for shit developers.
Huge cut? You mean the 30% cut that Swiney keeps yapping about to encourage people to sign a 1 year exclusivity deal on his lackluster storefront?
Pushing shovelware? Just like Epic is doing right now?

Again, why are you so hellbent on Steam? Show me on the doll where GabeN touched you.
 
Just about everything that you've said here applies to the rest of the storefronts.
And? So it's okay that Steam and Valve do it? What kind of faggoty corporate worshiping attitude is that? Epic is a garbage storefront and almost completely useless. Microsoft, Apple, SONY, all push degenerate trash and gambling games and have basically ruined gaming. Valve is just as complicit. None of these companies are improving gaming anymore nor do they care about consumers.

You sound like a teenager caught in the console brand wars arguing over Xbox versus Playstation when they both are utter shit currently. "Dude it's okay when my favorite brand does it".
Show me on the doll where GabeN touched you.
Show me on the doll which part of GabeN you want to put in your mouth. Because you seem to be a big fan of his.
 
Back