'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'
'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'
Half-Life 3: Episode 3 never happened because Newell "couldn't figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward."
!['My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f5a8afbd-e89d-477b-a214-be02d87713cc.png?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
!['My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/027233a6-034a-491c-9df9-28c094f6a863.png?format=webp&thumbnail=196)
!['My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3279222d-a689-462f-88ff-f4eff4308c88.png?format=webp&thumbnail=196)
So they can count to three.
Meh. They might have not wanted to make Ep3, but the fans sure did.
I understand Valve works or used to work very differently, people collaborating without a strong top-down steering for management. Yet whatever explanation they have, we were punched in the gut at the end of Ep2, then left waiting, holding our breath. It’s just a piece of media, but it was an important part of my teenage years, and I could never experience the end of the story (outside of reading it in a blog) I waited so much for.
This made me really resent Valve, and soured my experience/memories with the series, I haven’t touched HL or other Valve game for 10+ years, and I don’t think I will in the future.
I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.
Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2's cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck's sake, Gabe.
Instead we got Half Life: Alyx
Only if you're rich enough to afford VR setup. Fuck me for being born in a third world country, right Gabe?
This. I didn't (and still don't) need groundbreaking gameplay for Episode 3. I just wanted an ending to the plot.
I have so many thoughts about this.
I would've wanted a conclusion just to shut up all of the dead-horse beating to dust memelords that for years have been wagoning their tiresome HL3 jokes.
But, it's like, how many games have we waited so long to be released whether it's to continue the story or end it and the reception being more of "...wait that's it?!" than "I'm satisified."
Gamers are the hardest people to appease, so I get the sentiment that Gabe not only felt stumped but written himself into a corner with HL3. Whatever hype at all that has been built, is insurmountably high that whatever Valve pitches out, it's going to be mixed. It'll have a higher chance of being what happened to Duke Nukem Forever in context, than it being what Baldur's Gate 3 became 23 years later after Baldur's Gate II. It's a very narrow window to hit that sweet spot.
I wonder if at some point we'll get a good HL3 from a different studio that have passion to make it's worth.
So just leaving the series dead on a cliffhanger is somehow not a copp out to gamers??
We’ve been waiting for so long that games don’t even remember Half-Life. It’s all “silksong copium” memes now lol
I think HL3's meme status is the only reason a lot of gamers today do know it. If it had come out, it would've been forgotten.
Just like duke nukem forever was. Had to think hard to remember the name.
I honestly don't even see it memed anymore.
Clearly this just means that Silksong IS Half-life 3.
Shame Ubisoft doesn't feel this obligation to gamers. If they did, we'd probably only have 4 assassin's Creed games
Is assassin’s creed any good? Once a game becomes a franchise with a bajillion releases I just tune it out. Feel the same way about marvel movies. Maybe they’re good, maybe they’re bad, but I’m more annoyed that they’re trying to shove it down my throat, so I tune out.
I've played pretty much all but the most recent. They have their ups and downs. The first was almost like a proof of concept. Kinda boring, but the story sets up the sequels. There was a good overall story arc in the Desmond/Ezio trilogy (Assassin's Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations) that hasn't been duplicated since.
AC3 was a bit of a breath of fresh air, being part of the American revolution, but it wasn't for everyone. The story was being deviated from earlier games too much. AC4 is, for me, still the best single-player pirate game out there. It continues with Rogue. Both of those games I highly enjoyed.
Unity (Paris during French Revolution) and Syndicate (Victorian London) both have fantastic maps and character design, but gameplay and story just wasn't as interesting to me. The series was feeling stale.
To Ubisoft's credit, they knew that too and entirely revamped the gameplay and menu system starting with Origins (Ancient Egypt), then Odyssey (Ancient Greece), and Valhalla (Vikings during 9th Century). Valhalla was really fun. I love how they change certain villages up throughout the year... adding festivals/challenges depending on when you play. The maps were just getting too huge and overwhelming at this point.
I play the games now mainly for exploration. Gameplay and story are secondary as they aren't as interesting anymore. They really put a lot of detail into their surroundings and do their research on history, whether real or fantastical. It's escapism to another land in another time.
Ubisoft is not Rockstar. The story is no longer the reason to play these games. They are forgettable. The Desmond/Ezio storyline of the earlier games are no more. However, we don't have to wait several years to play a sequel.
Valhalla was the only one that I paid full price for since it was 2020 and we were still basically trapped in our homes, but definitely got my money's worth. They seemed to take more time making Mirage so I'll check that out eventually. They are remastering some of their old games so I'd play those over the dated originals.
The Far Cry series has a similar feeling for me, but with a first person perspective. New lands to explore, new stories and characters, but some are better than others.
Obviously subjective, but I was a very big fan of the series for the first several entries, kinda began losing interest around Unity (although in hindsight, Unity is probably one of the best ones in a few ways, but at release it was a very buggy mess).
I am not personally a fan of the way they have ignored the modern day story line after around 3, as I am one of the few on the planet that actually found that part of the narrative compelling and the part I was really playing for.
I don't like they gameplay changes since Origins, and it has increasingly become more of an action game over time and less of a dope assassin game.
AssCreed4 is the best game of the series. Black Flag's combat was great and the ship combat keeps me coming back to the game years on.
The first one was meh, the second one was good. Haven't played most of the others but people seem to enjoy them.
At this point I am just expecting Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Part 2
Manchester United: 3
Then Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Part 2; Chapter 2
Valve is asymptotically approaching episode three. Always getting closer, but never quite reaching it.
Zero punctuation on the orange box. https://youtu.be/_dlEm_2ke8k?si=bsTqae8W64qKny93
We ought to improve as humanity so we can deserve Gabe.
“I was just stumped,” Newell said, sipping a drink on one of his many yachts. “Maybe I’ll get unstumped with my next yacht purchase.”
Overhearing the conversation, George RR Martin, sitting on a pile of money, quipped, “Yes, and I am thiiiis close to finishing the next book.”
How greedy of the man, to checks notes admit to not wanting to make a cash grab and instead leaving the series unfinished because they didn’t think they could do it justice.
Leaving it to rot for 15 years was far more unjust than a slightly less "revolutionary" game. And the concepts they show in the new doc are cool as hell! I would have loved to shoot at blobmonster! They just decided singleplayer FPS games weren't as profitable, and that's fine, I guess. They're a company, they want to make money. But pretending they were somehow doing us a favor by leaving the cliffhanger for so long is utter nonsense. Especially since they wound up simply retconning it so the whole wait was pointless anyway!
Edit: y'all they literally said in the doc that if they'd kept working on it for 1-2 more years they would have been able to complete it, but they were more interested in multiplayer games and went to go work on that. But if you really want to drink the self-aggrandizing bs that Newell spouts, go right ahead