Looking Back... Half-Life 2

Valve Software's Half-Life 2, for 99.9 percent of those who played it, proved a phenomenal first-person shooter experience and the best title to grace the genre since FPS granddaddy Castle Wolfenstein first put it on the map. But how exactly was what turned out to be an awesome end product that dropped into the eager clutches of trigger-happy punters put together at the developer's HQ? Valve's marketing director Doug Lombardi and writer/game designer Marc Laidlaw explain...

MAKING A SEQUEL
Lombardi: The first Half-Life was made available in November 1998. Immediately after the game was sent to replication, folks here took a break to recoup from crunch time and spend some time with their families. Once everyone was back from all that, the decision was made to pursue Half-Life 2. It was agreed that Valve would self-fund the project and time would not be a constraint. The only benchmark set for the team was quality: make the greatest game experience you can imagine in the Half-Life universe.

WRITING
Laidlaw: One of the key story elements that hung on technology was the extent to which we believed we'd be able to develop strong, well-rounded characters and put them in dynamic, dramatic scenes. For a long time, the character and animation systems were very rough, and those of us closest to the story had to live with a strong level of trust that the technology would eventually get to the point where we could actually implement the scenes we were sketching out.

Writing for a Half-Life-style game is an ongoing collaborative effort that starts in the earliest phases of project development and doesn't really end until the game is finished. The writing of dialogue ends once all the English language voice-acting has been recorded and the script sent off to localisers; but even then, there are many little decisions regarding how the game unfolds which each affect the way a player perceives the story. However, the writing is no more (or less) important than any other element of the game, which is one obvious way in which it differs from a book, where the writing is everything.

STORY
Lombardi: We had a glimpse of the larger threat when we were working on Half-Life 1. In other words, we knew that once you cleared out the Nihilanth (end-of-game boss), you were going to discover something worse beyond it. We knew that some immense threat had chased the Nihilanth and its creatures out of their own world and into Xen, from which location they were all too glad to seize the opportunity to continue on to Earth with suppression through the citadels. But the exact nature of the threat was left to be solved in Half-Life 2.

THE HALF-LIFE 2 UNIVERSE
Laidlaw: It's a classic science-fiction technique to build your world with details, any one of which could be made into a story or a book in its own right. There's something skimpy and cheap about trying to extract full-scale entertainment from every single little detail, rather than just liberally scattering them about. Some writers will take one idea and spread it very, very thin; others will take that one and five others like it and stuff them ten to a page for hundreds of pages. Guess which kind I prefer? We're trying not to be stingy, but to strike sparks and suggest more stories than can possibly be told. In a game especially, some of our fans love looking for clues that help them piece together a sense of the world, others want to get on with the shooting. We try to satisfy both camps; perhaps this is impossible, but we do try.

CUTTING-ROOM FLOOR
Laidlaw: Levels, creatures, characters and gameplay elements were in flux for a long time. Many ideas arose, became our favourites and then eventually fell by the wayside. The early plans for HL2 called for a story that spanned the globe and covered many days, but this would have meant discontinuities in space, time and Gordon Freeman's consciousness.

So we gradually tightened our focus on City 17 and the immediate area, and condensed the story so that all events could take place within a relatively short time span, without requiring Gordon to sleep, black-out or do any of those other things that usually mask a transition. Every time we tightened up the game, we'd shed a level, a monster or a character. This tended to make the surviving elements stronger and ensured that we made better use of them.

PHYSICS
Lombardi: The physics festered their way into the game through the results of our play testing (which we do for months before any QA testing begins). Ravenholm, the original home of the 'physics part of the game' occurred a bit later in earlier versions, and it was the only place you had the gravity gun. But, as more and more testers told us this was gameplay they enjoyed (and we could start eliminating fears of being compared to bad experiments with physics in games), the closer Ravenholm moved to the start.

Laidlaw: Ravenholm and the gravity gun co-existed in our minds for a long time. The saw blades didn't appear until we'd spent some time in Ravenholm looking for things to throw...

HUMOUR
Laidlaw: We tried not to force it: in the first Half-Life, the humour tended to be situational and fairly bleak, very much a part of the environment. The setting of HL2 was, if anything, even darker. However, instead of trying to cram comedy into it, we waited for opportunities to arise. We also had to be mindful of the fact that obvious gags would tend to jar people out of the game unless it was a seamless part of the experience; and at the same time, prepare for the fact that some people would not share our sense of humour. Even people within Valve disagreed about the comedy value of certain scenes. So, we tried not to overdo it; on the other hand, when it seemed to come naturally, we didn't force ourselves to censor it either.

CHARACTERS
Laidlaw: All the characters have evolved a bit to make the most of the skilful actors who portray them, but none are based on real people. We had a very good casting agency in Los Angeles who took our character descriptions and sent out casting calls. In some cases we had names of actors we thought would be ideal for the parts, although when we started on Half-Life 2 it seemed fairly unlikely that any of them would be interested in working with us. Robert Guillaume was our first choice for Eli from the very first time we talked about casting the part - the casting agency went and asked him directly.

THE CRYING COUPLE
Laidlaw: The germ of that idea came from a couple who appear both in Nintendo's Zelda: Ocarina Of Time and Zelda: Majora's Mask - oblivious to their surroundings and totally absorbed in each other. I wanted to do a darker, City 17 version. It was easy to summarise the idea, but difficult to convince people it was worth the production costs. While all I had to do was write a few lines of dialogue, someone else had to pose and animate them, set them up in the level, make sure they were invulnerable to playtesters... All that added up to quite a lot of work for quite a few people and is indicative of how much thought goes into even the smallest scenes in the game.

ALYX AND DOG
Laidlaw: I sympathise with people who wanted more interaction with Alyx during Half-Life 2. I was happy with where we ended up on this, but I'm also glad now that the expansion pack Aftermath is giving us the opportunity to revisit some of these partially-realised ambitions.

As for Dog, the constraints on him were many and I often found myself arguing against including him in certain scenes because I was afraid we wouldn't be able to do it right. Fortunately, certain animators shouted me down. More importantly, they then went on and did the work to make sure that wherever Dog appeared, it was more than worth the time invested.

THE ENDING
Laidlaw: I'm always surprised to hear that people found the ending sudden, since I thought from the opening scenes of the game we'd made it pretty clear where you were going to end up and who you were going to confront. It was the coolest ending we could dream up that seemed fitting to Gordon Freeman's role in the universe. I don't think a denouement would have added much to the game, and in fact would have closed some options that we're glad (in Aftermath) to have left open.

The above article originally appeared in PC Zone magazine, issue #160. Keep 'em peeled for issue #161, out this week on October 13.

CVG Staff