There’s something bothering me about Guild Wars 2 and it’s a stumbling block many game developers trip over, and one which is undoubtedly a very expensive problem to rectify…
An exciting and wordy discussion has been wandering across several of Tap’s forum threads, notably here, and also in various comments on articles. Fully grokking a conversation being held by the Tap community requires a certain ability to master the art of tangential crossover.
ANYWAY, to quickly sum up: some of our debaters did not like Half Life 2, some did, but for variant reasons; everyone likes STALKER but some wanted different things from it; System Shock 2 is very scary but may not have aged well; and something to do with Neocron, plus some other stuff.
Sometimes, when you create something and don’t get all dicky when other people want to build on your work, nice things happen. Consider Beyond Black Mesa, an 11-minute fan short set in the world of Valve’s Half-Life 2, using characters from it. You see a lot of this stuff from fans, like the Purchase Brothers’ Escape From City-17, and the still-hopefully-in-development Black Mesa Source. The common thread among all of this is that Valve has …
Valve has a history of slurping up talent from the fan/mod community – Adam Foster, creator of MINERVA, now gets his paychecks from Valve. So does the team that created the popular Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients, a game I never really got into. Also scribe Erik Wolpaw. And we’d be remiss not to mention the jewel in their recruitment crown, the DigiPen Institute student team that created Narbacular Drop, a senior project …
Lewis Denby has written an interesting piece for his column over at GameSetWatch about the way in which we engage with games and more specifically the nature of embodying player characters. The article came about after he attended and contributed to a discussion on video game narrative held by Kieron Gillen at GameCamp in London a few weeks ago. Lewis spoke of how he tried to explore ‘context as narrative’ in his two Half-Life 2 …
Intrigued by yesterday’s Rock, Paper, Shotgun writeup of two highly unique mods for Half-Life 2, I scampered over to ModDB to get them for myself. The first, Dear Esther, didn’t work correctly on my computer, so I set it aside until I have time for troubleshooting. The second, Korsakovia, it worked fine. I kinda wish it hadn’t, because despite the fact that 30 minutes with this mod had me gelatinized with fear, I have a …
Few things are more immersive than visiting a fully realized universe. This doesn’t mean we aren’t looking for great story or boffo gameplay. But often as not, the world that keeps us playing, drawn to that altered state that only gaming can provide.
Recently, I asked the question: “Why do some games, like Grand Theft Auto, Halo, Max Payne and others become such winners in the marketplace?” Ever since then I have been trying to unlock the secret to developing and selling winning games. So, the question for today should be pretty obvious. What makes gamers line up at midnight before a release to purchase these games?
Valve Software’s The Orange Box is on sale for $9.99 all weekend, meaning you have approximately fifteen hours left to do what you should have done when it was $50. This purchase gets you Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode 1, Half Life 2: Episode 2, multiple-game-of-the-year-winning-and-critical-darling Portal, plus the relentlessly jolly Team Fortress 2. Remember if you already own any or all of these, you can gift them to fellow Steam subscribers at …
Kotaku described it as “freakin’ amazing,” and that’s a sentiment I must echo regarding this first of (hopefully) many episodic indie movies from the Purchase Brothers, detailing the escape of a ragtag band of survivors from the ruins of City-17 immediately after the events of Half Life 2. Showing remarkable skill with greenscreening and use of Adobe After Effects, these guys managed to direct a really quite compelling action short with what was apparently “no …