Half-Life 2: Aftermath
The news most of us have been waiting for has finally been confirmed: Valve is readying the first expansion pack for the unanimously acclaimed Half-Life 2. Provisionally titled 'Aftermath', the new adventures of Gordon Freeman and his able sidekick Alyx is tentatively scheduled for a 'summer' release only via Steam, according to PC Gamer UK, which has - incredibly - scooped the world with its cover feature on the hotly anticipated game in its May issue, out today.
Valve in "good at making Half Life games" - shock!
Grabbing a quick chat with Valve designer Robin Walker and writer Marc Laidlaw, the ten page PC Gamer feature doesn't reveal much in the way of concrete information about Aftermath, but instead, the ever-slippery chaps at Valve talk around the subject of the game, choosing to focus more on their motivations for choosing to make new Half-Life 2 content all by themselves rather than, say, farm out the job to Gearbox as it did during the Half-Life era.
Walker admits in the PC Gamer interview: "Right now, we're really, really good at making Half Life 2. We think our customers want a lot more of Half Life 2. That's what we're going to give them. But we'd just got comfortable with all our tools and what we could do. That's normally the point in which we'd go off and make new tools - we didn't want to do that."
The focus for Aftermath appears to break with the Half-Life tradition of presenting the storyline from the viewpoint of other key characters in the game, with the mooted Alyx-based episode apparently not happening as many of us imagined it might. Instead, it would appear that as a compromise, Alyx figures as a much more active partner of Gordon Freeman's adventures.
As Walker asserts in the PCG interview, the rationale is for the player to get a much greater sense of attachment to Alyx, after doing so much to introduce her in Half-Life 2: "It's kind of ironic that despite so much of the theme of Half Life 2 being about other characters and other people, you spent most of the game alone."
Get up close and personal with Alyx
"We really want Alyx to grow as a character," he insists in the Gamer piece. "There was the promise of that in the first game, but we spent so much of our time introducing her as a character, we didn't really get a chance to spend time with her for an entire section. She would flit in and out. Since she's with you quite a lot, we're working on ways to make her a lot more interesting to be around, a lot more interesting to interact with." Ahem. A burgeoning romance perhaps?
As for where Aftermath is set, and the timeline, it's very much a logical continuation from where Half-Life 2 left off, as Laidlaw goes on to explain in the PC Gamer feature: "[Aftermath] deals with the events and issues set in motion during Half-Life 2. You've done critical damage to the Citadel. The whole place is going to go up, taking out City 17 and what's in its immediate radius. You and Alyx are leading the flight from the city getting up close and personal with some of the creatures and sights from the end of the game." Interestingly, apart from a few ambiguous illustrative captions, the PCG piece at no stage makes it 100 per cent explicit that Alyx's sidekick will be Gordon. However, writer Tim Edwards has subsequently clarified that you do play as Gordon in Aftermath.
Unlike in Half-Life 2, creatures that were barred from the confines of City 17 have now found a new home unfettered by the barriers that kept them at bay previously. "We have a philosophy that we try to re-use and provide interesting twists to our core concepts," says Walker in the same PC Gamer feature. "Like the Antlions started the game as your enemy, and then became your friends later on. In Aftermath, City 17 was 'one thing' and now it's this 'other thing'," he continues, refusing doggedly to elaborate despite probing from PC Gamer UK writer Tim Edwards, the man who unearthed this stunning exclusive ahead of the world's press.
Letting off Steam
One very big question mark over the fate of Aftermath is how much the game will cost over Steam and whether the game will be also be released in boxed form through long-term publisher Sierra/Vivendi-Universal Games at any stage in the future; if the PC Gamer piece is to believed, no boxed version is planned - although how VU Games feels about missing out on this expansion pack would be very interesting indeed.
Walker states in the piece: "The reason we're able to do this, and why it's so exciting is because of Steam. If we were doing this without Steam we'd have to put it in a box, we'd have to start figuring out shelf space over a year beforehand. You'd see it six years from now."
Six years? An exaggeration for comic effect, maybe, but we don't recall Blue Shift or Opposing Force taking "six years" to emerge after Half-Life. The Steam online content delivery system admittedly speeds up the process by cutting out the middle men, gets piped straight to the end user and generates a huge amount of cash for the game creators, but producing a boxed version shouldn't hold up the delivery of new content to a significant degree.
"We're enthusiastic, we want to make games. We're people who love to create, but we don't have the thrill of smaller projects," admits Walker in the PC Gamer exclusive. "We can't just throw something out there and see how the customers enjoy it. As soon as Half-Life 2 came out, the mod community created all these combinations of monster battles that we hadn't gotten around to. We never did the Xen Controller versus the Tentacle. This time we want to be the ones to have that fun." Walker also admits later in Gamer's feature that he's "desperate" to work on a mod based on Lemarr, the little headcrab.
Even less specifically, Walker goes on to talk in general terms about Valve's concept of "design economy". "Simply: how economically do we use each game element?" he asks in the PC Gamer piece. "How well is an object in the game connected to all the others? The heart of the game design is making those connections, and making them more interesting. By the end of Half-Life 2 we could see them very well and understood how they work. The better you understand those connections, the better you are at processing new gameplay. Can I sit today with five other people, and create a new level using the elements we already have?" We don't doubt it.
More questions than answers
And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we leave you with many questions rattling around your fevered minds about the next episode in the Half-Life series. What new weapons and monsters will there be? How long will it be? When will it really be coming out? Will players still have to go through the same authentication nightmare just to play it? Doubtlessly, as ever, Valve will leave as many questions as possible unanswered in the lead up to its 'summer' release, but with all this in mind we look forward to congregating in an ATI booth at E3 to catch a glimpse of the first footage from the game...
If you played Half-Life 2, last year's blockbuster first-person shooter, then you know that the game ended in a cliff-hanger that left more questions than answers. The good news is that Valve is in the final stages of prepping Half-Life 2: Aftermath, the first expansion for Half-Life 2, due out later this year. Valve likes to describe Aftermath as a new "episode" for the franchise, and we know that it picks up immediately after the events of the main game. However, further details are few and far between, thanks to Valve's tight-lipped nature. That didn't deter us from throwing some questions at designer/programmer Robin Walker, and he helped fill in the bigger picture. For those of you who wish to remain totally in the dark about Aftermath, we should warn you that there are some minor spoilers below.
Alyx is back, and she's taking dead aim at the Combine once again.
GameSpot: We know that Aftermath takes place immediately after the events in Half-Life 2, and we know that Alyx plays a big role in it. What else can you tell us about the expansion in terms of plot and setting?
Robin Walker: We don't want to spoil any surprises by getting into specifics. But to answer this in general terms, the entirety of the episode is set in City 17, and the driving force is the fact that, thanks to Gordon's actions at the end of Half-Life 2, the Citadel is about to give up the ghost in such a way that anyone left in the city will be killed.
GS: Some might be surprised to see that Alyx will return in Aftermath after the events in Half-Life 2, so can we also expect to see more of everyone's favorite Dog? How about any of the other major characters?
RW: Many of the Half-Life 2 characters will be returning in some form or another, including Dog. In some cases, such as Alyx, those characters have learned new things that have interesting gameplay repercussions.
GS: After the cryptic ending of Half-Life 2, we have to ask: Will we learn more about Gordon Freeman in Aftermath? The Combine? The G-Man? Can you promise that at least one big secret will be revealed?
RW: We will be doing what we usually do in these games, which is answering some old questions while raising new ones. Dr. Kleiner will be on hand with some informed opinions, as well as a bit of speculation.
Other mysteries will be introduced for the purpose of gradual revelation. We believe that theorizing about the meaning behind the clues in the Half-Life 2 universe, and the motivations of the characters within it, is one of the fun things about being a Half-Life 2 fan.
GS: In terms of length and number of levels, roughly how large is Aftermath compared to Half-Life 2?
RW: Half-Life 2: Aftermath is a new episode in the Half-Life story, so it's intentionally shorter than Half-Life 2. We're still finalizing the exact length, as this is the first time we've released a new episode for one of our games.
The pitched street battles of Half-Life 2 also return in Aftermath.
GS: We learned at E3 during the demo of Lost Coast that Aftermath will include high-dynamic range lighting, which should help the game realistically model the way the human eye reacts to light. But do you envision a lot more fun with the gravity gun and physics, and are there plans to introduce any new weapons, or any new items, options, or features that will make Aftermath's gameplay as distinctive as the gravity gun made Half-Life 2's gameplay?
RW: Aftermath adds a variety of new ways in which the player interacts with the Half-Life 2 world. Alyx, and other allies, learn new abilities to help you. Your enemies, both old and new, haven't been resting either.
GS: Will the original voice actors from Half-Life 2 reprise their roles in Aftermath?
RW: Yes, where Aftermath features characters from Half-Life 2, the original voice actors returned to play those roles.
GS: We know that Valve has a history of working with outside contractors to provide expansion-pack content for its previous work. Why the decision to make Aftermath in-house at Valve? Will keeping work on new Valve projects become the company's new standard operating procedure, or would Valve consider working with outside studios again in the future?
RW: Building a game like Half-life 2 involves building a lot of tools and technology. As we build them, we learn how to use them. By the end of the development, we know the tools much better than we did at the start, and as a result, we can build much cooler content. After Half-Life finished, we moved on to Half-life 2 immediately, which meant taking on a lot of new problems. This meant we didn't get to build that new Half-Life content we'd just learned to build, and we gave the fun of building it to other companies.
With Half-life 2 we decided to build that extra content ourselves. Right now, we're better than we've ever been at building Half-Life 2-type content, and we'd like to have the fun of doing it for a while.
GS: Half-Life 2 was a universally acclaimed game, but was there anything in the game that you wished you had more time to work on that you're setting out to fix or add to in Aftermath?
RW: The biggest regret we had about Half-Life 2 was that you didn't spend enough time with the major characters. Players spent small sections of the game with allies, and interactions with them were fairly constrained. As a result, this is the first challenge we set out to tackle in Aftermath.
GS: Are you planning to do anything special with the multiplayer gameplay? Any plans to expand on the existing Half-Life 2 deathmatch or add new multiplayer modes? Considering that Counter-Strike: Source, the upgraded version of the popular multiplayer game, came bundled with Half-Life 2, could we expect to see, oh, maybe, Team Fortress 2 coincide with the release of Aftermath?
It simply would not be a Half-Life game without zombies and headcrabs.
RW: Aftermath is focusing on single-player. However, it's likely that some of the new pieces created for Aftermath will appear in deathmatch.
GS: So let us guess that Aftermath will be done when it's done? But any hints as to when that will happen?
RW: Should be done in a few months and available for everyone to play well before the end of this year.
GS: Wow. Thanks, Robin.
The news most of us have been waiting for has finally been confirmed: Valve is readying the first expansion pack for the unanimously acclaimed Half-Life 2. Provisionally titled 'Aftermath', the new adventures of Gordon Freeman and his able sidekick Alyx is tentatively scheduled for a 'summer' release only via Steam, according to PC Gamer UK, which has - incredibly - scooped the world with its cover feature on the hotly anticipated game in its May issue, out today.
Valve in "good at making Half Life games" - shock!
Grabbing a quick chat with Valve designer Robin Walker and writer Marc Laidlaw, the ten page PC Gamer feature doesn't reveal much in the way of concrete information about Aftermath, but instead, the ever-slippery chaps at Valve talk around the subject of the game, choosing to focus more on their motivations for choosing to make new Half-Life 2 content all by themselves rather than, say, farm out the job to Gearbox as it did during the Half-Life era.
Walker admits in the PC Gamer interview: "Right now, we're really, really good at making Half Life 2. We think our customers want a lot more of Half Life 2. That's what we're going to give them. But we'd just got comfortable with all our tools and what we could do. That's normally the point in which we'd go off and make new tools - we didn't want to do that."
The focus for Aftermath appears to break with the Half-Life tradition of presenting the storyline from the viewpoint of other key characters in the game, with the mooted Alyx-based episode apparently not happening as many of us imagined it might. Instead, it would appear that as a compromise, Alyx figures as a much more active partner of Gordon Freeman's adventures.
As Walker asserts in the PCG interview, the rationale is for the player to get a much greater sense of attachment to Alyx, after doing so much to introduce her in Half-Life 2: "It's kind of ironic that despite so much of the theme of Half Life 2 being about other characters and other people, you spent most of the game alone."
Get up close and personal with Alyx
"We really want Alyx to grow as a character," he insists in the Gamer piece. "There was the promise of that in the first game, but we spent so much of our time introducing her as a character, we didn't really get a chance to spend time with her for an entire section. She would flit in and out. Since she's with you quite a lot, we're working on ways to make her a lot more interesting to be around, a lot more interesting to interact with." Ahem. A burgeoning romance perhaps?
As for where Aftermath is set, and the timeline, it's very much a logical continuation from where Half-Life 2 left off, as Laidlaw goes on to explain in the PC Gamer feature: "[Aftermath] deals with the events and issues set in motion during Half-Life 2. You've done critical damage to the Citadel. The whole place is going to go up, taking out City 17 and what's in its immediate radius. You and Alyx are leading the flight from the city getting up close and personal with some of the creatures and sights from the end of the game." Interestingly, apart from a few ambiguous illustrative captions, the PCG piece at no stage makes it 100 per cent explicit that Alyx's sidekick will be Gordon. However, writer Tim Edwards has subsequently clarified that you do play as Gordon in Aftermath.
Unlike in Half-Life 2, creatures that were barred from the confines of City 17 have now found a new home unfettered by the barriers that kept them at bay previously. "We have a philosophy that we try to re-use and provide interesting twists to our core concepts," says Walker in the same PC Gamer feature. "Like the Antlions started the game as your enemy, and then became your friends later on. In Aftermath, City 17 was 'one thing' and now it's this 'other thing'," he continues, refusing doggedly to elaborate despite probing from PC Gamer UK writer Tim Edwards, the man who unearthed this stunning exclusive ahead of the world's press.
Letting off Steam
One very big question mark over the fate of Aftermath is how much the game will cost over Steam and whether the game will be also be released in boxed form through long-term publisher Sierra/Vivendi-Universal Games at any stage in the future; if the PC Gamer piece is to believed, no boxed version is planned - although how VU Games feels about missing out on this expansion pack would be very interesting indeed.
Walker states in the piece: "The reason we're able to do this, and why it's so exciting is because of Steam. If we were doing this without Steam we'd have to put it in a box, we'd have to start figuring out shelf space over a year beforehand. You'd see it six years from now."
Six years? An exaggeration for comic effect, maybe, but we don't recall Blue Shift or Opposing Force taking "six years" to emerge after Half-Life. The Steam online content delivery system admittedly speeds up the process by cutting out the middle men, gets piped straight to the end user and generates a huge amount of cash for the game creators, but producing a boxed version shouldn't hold up the delivery of new content to a significant degree.
"We're enthusiastic, we want to make games. We're people who love to create, but we don't have the thrill of smaller projects," admits Walker in the PC Gamer exclusive. "We can't just throw something out there and see how the customers enjoy it. As soon as Half-Life 2 came out, the mod community created all these combinations of monster battles that we hadn't gotten around to. We never did the Xen Controller versus the Tentacle. This time we want to be the ones to have that fun." Walker also admits later in Gamer's feature that he's "desperate" to work on a mod based on Lemarr, the little headcrab.
Even less specifically, Walker goes on to talk in general terms about Valve's concept of "design economy". "Simply: how economically do we use each game element?" he asks in the PC Gamer piece. "How well is an object in the game connected to all the others? The heart of the game design is making those connections, and making them more interesting. By the end of Half-Life 2 we could see them very well and understood how they work. The better you understand those connections, the better you are at processing new gameplay. Can I sit today with five other people, and create a new level using the elements we already have?" We don't doubt it.
More questions than answers
And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we leave you with many questions rattling around your fevered minds about the next episode in the Half-Life series. What new weapons and monsters will there be? How long will it be? When will it really be coming out? Will players still have to go through the same authentication nightmare just to play it? Doubtlessly, as ever, Valve will leave as many questions as possible unanswered in the lead up to its 'summer' release, but with all this in mind we look forward to congregating in an ATI booth at E3 to catch a glimpse of the first footage from the game...
If you played Half-Life 2, last year's blockbuster first-person shooter, then you know that the game ended in a cliff-hanger that left more questions than answers. The good news is that Valve is in the final stages of prepping Half-Life 2: Aftermath, the first expansion for Half-Life 2, due out later this year. Valve likes to describe Aftermath as a new "episode" for the franchise, and we know that it picks up immediately after the events of the main game. However, further details are few and far between, thanks to Valve's tight-lipped nature. That didn't deter us from throwing some questions at designer/programmer Robin Walker, and he helped fill in the bigger picture. For those of you who wish to remain totally in the dark about Aftermath, we should warn you that there are some minor spoilers below.
Alyx is back, and she's taking dead aim at the Combine once again.
GameSpot: We know that Aftermath takes place immediately after the events in Half-Life 2, and we know that Alyx plays a big role in it. What else can you tell us about the expansion in terms of plot and setting?
Robin Walker: We don't want to spoil any surprises by getting into specifics. But to answer this in general terms, the entirety of the episode is set in City 17, and the driving force is the fact that, thanks to Gordon's actions at the end of Half-Life 2, the Citadel is about to give up the ghost in such a way that anyone left in the city will be killed.
GS: Some might be surprised to see that Alyx will return in Aftermath after the events in Half-Life 2, so can we also expect to see more of everyone's favorite Dog? How about any of the other major characters?
RW: Many of the Half-Life 2 characters will be returning in some form or another, including Dog. In some cases, such as Alyx, those characters have learned new things that have interesting gameplay repercussions.
GS: After the cryptic ending of Half-Life 2, we have to ask: Will we learn more about Gordon Freeman in Aftermath? The Combine? The G-Man? Can you promise that at least one big secret will be revealed?
RW: We will be doing what we usually do in these games, which is answering some old questions while raising new ones. Dr. Kleiner will be on hand with some informed opinions, as well as a bit of speculation.
Other mysteries will be introduced for the purpose of gradual revelation. We believe that theorizing about the meaning behind the clues in the Half-Life 2 universe, and the motivations of the characters within it, is one of the fun things about being a Half-Life 2 fan.
GS: In terms of length and number of levels, roughly how large is Aftermath compared to Half-Life 2?
RW: Half-Life 2: Aftermath is a new episode in the Half-Life story, so it's intentionally shorter than Half-Life 2. We're still finalizing the exact length, as this is the first time we've released a new episode for one of our games.
The pitched street battles of Half-Life 2 also return in Aftermath.
GS: We learned at E3 during the demo of Lost Coast that Aftermath will include high-dynamic range lighting, which should help the game realistically model the way the human eye reacts to light. But do you envision a lot more fun with the gravity gun and physics, and are there plans to introduce any new weapons, or any new items, options, or features that will make Aftermath's gameplay as distinctive as the gravity gun made Half-Life 2's gameplay?
RW: Aftermath adds a variety of new ways in which the player interacts with the Half-Life 2 world. Alyx, and other allies, learn new abilities to help you. Your enemies, both old and new, haven't been resting either.
GS: Will the original voice actors from Half-Life 2 reprise their roles in Aftermath?
RW: Yes, where Aftermath features characters from Half-Life 2, the original voice actors returned to play those roles.
GS: We know that Valve has a history of working with outside contractors to provide expansion-pack content for its previous work. Why the decision to make Aftermath in-house at Valve? Will keeping work on new Valve projects become the company's new standard operating procedure, or would Valve consider working with outside studios again in the future?
RW: Building a game like Half-life 2 involves building a lot of tools and technology. As we build them, we learn how to use them. By the end of the development, we know the tools much better than we did at the start, and as a result, we can build much cooler content. After Half-Life finished, we moved on to Half-life 2 immediately, which meant taking on a lot of new problems. This meant we didn't get to build that new Half-Life content we'd just learned to build, and we gave the fun of building it to other companies.
With Half-life 2 we decided to build that extra content ourselves. Right now, we're better than we've ever been at building Half-Life 2-type content, and we'd like to have the fun of doing it for a while.
GS: Half-Life 2 was a universally acclaimed game, but was there anything in the game that you wished you had more time to work on that you're setting out to fix or add to in Aftermath?
RW: The biggest regret we had about Half-Life 2 was that you didn't spend enough time with the major characters. Players spent small sections of the game with allies, and interactions with them were fairly constrained. As a result, this is the first challenge we set out to tackle in Aftermath.
GS: Are you planning to do anything special with the multiplayer gameplay? Any plans to expand on the existing Half-Life 2 deathmatch or add new multiplayer modes? Considering that Counter-Strike: Source, the upgraded version of the popular multiplayer game, came bundled with Half-Life 2, could we expect to see, oh, maybe, Team Fortress 2 coincide with the release of Aftermath?
It simply would not be a Half-Life game without zombies and headcrabs.
RW: Aftermath is focusing on single-player. However, it's likely that some of the new pieces created for Aftermath will appear in deathmatch.
GS: So let us guess that Aftermath will be done when it's done? But any hints as to when that will happen?
RW: Should be done in a few months and available for everyone to play well before the end of this year.
GS: Wow. Thanks, Robin.
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