Half-life 2: Exclusive Interview, Part One!

[Dr Sadako]

Found this interview at http://www.computerandvideogames.com/

You can only read either half of the inteview then you have to sign up. I have added both halves here.

HALF-LIFE 2: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, PART ONE!

Valve Software's Doug Lombardi chats in-depth about the hottest first-person shooter on the planet

17:14 Unless you've been living under a rock for the past six months or so, then you'll be well aware that Valve Software's Half-Life 2 is hot potatoes. Sequel to the developer's phenomenal first-person shooter Half-Life, the second in the series finds players reprising the role of scientist Gordon Freeman and embarking on a new, action-packed adventure.
An intriguing, engrossing storyline, incredible visuals, quite stunning character facial animation of a like never seen, a cutting-edge physics system and above all the chance to dive back into the world of Half-Life and Gordon Freeman, have got us champing at the bit and then some for what is basically the biggest game in the galaxy.

Some might find it frustrating, but Valve Software is hiding substantial parts of Half-Life 2 under its hat. The developer has yet to speak at any length about multiplayer plans, looks to have revealed all it intends to on the storyline front, and has left us guessing about the intended full weapons line-up - and that's just a small selection of what's being kept secret. But hell, playing the game, we want to be surprised, right?

Still, when we were presented with the opportunity to interview Valve Software's director of marketing Doug Lombardi at ECTS 2003, we went it with the intention of squeezing as much information out as possible.

We even threw caution to the wind and asked about some of the things that turned up on a "questions not to be asked about Half-Life 2" list that appeared in our inbox just prior to the interview. Seriously...

What's the atmosphere like over at Valve Software at the moment? Is there an excited buzz or is it more knuckles to the grindstone?

Lombardi: Well, a little bit of both. You know, we hadn't shown the game, ever, and we didn't even talk about it - we didn't even acknowledge the fact that we were doing it for so long.

But after a while I think that put a certain taxing on the team, and I think bringing it out and showing it to yourself and to everybody else at E3 and now at this show, and seeing people write great things about it and saying, "All the five years worth of labour that you've been putting into this project was worth your time", that sort of energised everybody.

Also, the fact that the end is in sight, that just makes any situation better. When you can see the finish line, you always get that adrenaline rush to charge forward, and I think that's where folks' heads are really at right now.

What are you focusing on in the game then at the moment, in terms of development?

Lombardi: Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting.

So you're at the fine-tuning stage, then?

Lombardi: Yeah. In the prior generation of stuff, level designers were artists, in a sense, and what we've done is de-coupled the two processes and we've gone with the idea of an orange map, where we make a quite simple orange version of the level, and that's strictly for pathing and playtesting right off the bat.

So as soon as the designer says, "Hey, here's the scene in the prison", or whatever it is, and they set it up, then we can start going through it and playtesting and putting the AI in and dropping in things that are fun and make sense to the story and so on.

And then once we've got that locked down, we send it to get an art pass, and then it comes back, and it goes back and forth like that.

So, it's this point, we're at that... we keep iterating and iterating until it's fun to as wider an audience as possible. Then there are the ugly things like localisation and optimising for the lower system specs.

We're looking at DirectX9 a lot. We didn't expect this, but we're going to be one of the first full-blown DirectX9 apps out there, using things like high dynamic range and depth of field and some of the things that are in DirectX9 that a lot of games really haven't taken advantage of yet.

So those are some of the areas that we're looking at right now.

At what point during the development of Half-Life 2 did you think, "Yeah, this is going to be really special", like you did with Half-Life - you got to a point with the original Half-Life where you thought, "Yeah, this is going to be a top game"?

Lombardi: There are so many of those moments where you work on something and you work on something and then something happens and you say "Cool", and hit a checkpoint and you realise you're heading in the right direction.

The day that Ken Birdwell [senior software development engineer at Valve] added the gloss to the eyeballs on the characters... I came into work, and I think he had been there all night, and he grabbed me and said: "Look at this. What do you think?" And then I got someone else and said: "You've got to see Ken's demo today! You've got to see Ken's demo today!" and everybody else around the office started saying that.

And when those moments happen, when everybody around is saying to look at what somebody's done, that's a pretty good indicator. Because we're pretty tough critics on, not only our own stuff, but on everybody else's stuff too.

So when everyone in the office agrees that something somebody is doing is really hitting the mark, that's a good checkpoint for us.

Again, going back to this point that we kept it hush-hush for so long, there was this moment right before journalists came over to get the first look, that we sort of questioned and we had this panic attack.

You know, you're keeping it quiet and building it in a top secret laboratory in rainy Seattle, and you have these checkpoints where you think internally you're hitting it right and the internal grades go up and what not, but then all of a sudden you realise "What if we're all full of ourselves and we've spent the last five years working on complete nonsense and we go to E3 and this thing's a joke?"

So you do have that panic. I think at E3, when the guys came back and said that on the last day of the show, when they opened the doors in the morning, people ran to get in line to see the demo... Clearly by that point we realised we were on to something that was connecting with people.

Were you concerned about how fans would react to the change of setting for the sequel?

Lombardi: I think we knew from peoples' reactions to the first game, and the things that we tried to do in the first game that we were marginally successful at, that we had a pretty good indicator of what was OK to move with and what was not.

Xen wasn't so popular... you didn't see Xen in any of the demos that we were showing at E3 or ETCS today. So we knew where not to go, and that sort of helps you define where you should go.

When people play the game, I think they'll understand more about how things moved from New Mexico to Eastern Europe, and they'll be able to put those pieces together as they play as Gordon and as Gordon finds out what's been happening between that.

I don't think that was really a big point of our worries as much as some of the other choices we made. You know, "Was physics going to be fun?", "Were the characters that Ken put so much labour of love into, were those going to have the same impact on people outside of the company that they had on people inside the company?"

But the location and the setting is one of those things where, if the game's fun, the story makes sense - people sort of take that.

There's been a lot said about the freeform nature of the game, the way the AI reacts to you rather than the way you react to the AI - to what extent have you found you've had to add scripted moments in as well, and how have you found the two working together?

Lombardi: Well, we've sort of moved away from the notion of scripting, in that in Half-Life we put you behind a "locked door" as soon as we wanted something like that to happen, and we were very careful about how we'd author a scene so it didn't feel like you were behind this "locked door". But each time something happened like a character crashing through a wall, it was all canned.

That's cool in 1998, but we've really got to move beyond that. So what we've done is come up with this thing where we're moving away from scripting and moving toward what we're calling contextual AI.

The non-player character knows the environment, they're aware of being able to use things, like if they come across a barrel they know they can whack it at you, and you can blast it back at them and get into a barrel-whacking contest with the AI characters.

Basically, non-player characters are allowed a set of choices and knowledge about where they are in the scene that they are in, so that there are a variety of things that can happen.

When journalists first came over to see the game, there was a really good scene we were showing at the time where Gordon was being chased by a guy in a Mech suit. And the player decided to duck into this room and slammed the door.

Now, that wasn't a critical path for the player. There were multiple ways for the player to get out of that scene. And if you made that choice, then the Mech decided to put the camera in, trap you and bang the door down.

In the old way we would have forced you to go into that room, and the Mech would have knocked the door down every single time. So we're now able to open things up a bit and say: "If the player does this, then you can do that." And it becomes more AI than just a canned scripted sequence.

Is the game entirely like that, or are there elements of scripting in certain points that you've found you had to include in order to forward the storyline?

Lombardi: The critical moments of dialogue that you're going to have to get, and how they are delivered to you may be unique, and the non-player characters need to deliver that information to you in different ways.

So, say for example there's a nugget of information, there's one line that you really need at this point, and Alyx needs to deliver it to you and you're in the scene and you're just being a player with itchy feet who's just not going to sit still.

Instead of going through all the lines that she may be able to say in that scene, she'll realise that you're about to bail and she'll just give you that one line and off you go again.

So again, there's this contextual AI that's going on, it's making decisions about how you are playing the game and how the non-player characters need to help you, deliver information etc.

Check back tomorrow for part two of our exclusive Half-Life 2 interview, where we grill Doug about enemies, vehicles, Gordon's HEV suit, the Half-Life 2 mod scene and much, much more.

By Stuart Bishop