![]() In 2012, Valve launched Steam Greenlight, a program that let developers pitch their games directly to Steam users, and those that got the most support would be granted the privilege of using the Steam platform. More publishers added their games to Steam throughout the ‘00s, and the process was even slower for indie games. Nowadays, Steam is a one-stop shop for PC games, but it took a long time to get there. With the introduction of Rag Doll Kung Fu, a bizarre physics-based fighting game from the future creator of Little Big Planet, Steam began its transformation from simple patch installer to digital distribution juggernaut. Still, Valve kept building its fledgling service, and in 2005, it started offering third-party games for the first time. ![]() The result: one of the most anticipated PC games ever was rendered temporarily unplayable, and it was all Steam’s fault. On top of what we’ve now all grown accustomed to as launch-day chaos, factor in that internet adoption was lower back in 2004 and connections were much, much slower. Anyone who’s ever tried to play a multiplayer game on day one can guess what happened next.Īs thousands of players rushed to unlock Half-Life 2 using this newfangled Steam software, Valve’s servers struggled to keep up. ![]() But when Half-Life 2 launched, it required an internet connection and Steam to authenticate, even if you didn’t buy the game through Steam. Up until 2004, Steam was a totally optional and useful way of keeping games up to date. It didn’t help that Steam kind of sucked in the beginning. And they always tell us how we’re doing.Half-Life 2 proved the potential of Steam - even if its launch was a mess. ![]() crank Half-Life titles out because it helps us make the quarterly numbers…Our judge and jury is always the playtesting. “ Half-Life games are supposed to solve interesting problems. “We were never really that happy with what we came up with,” Casali explains. The second was the fact that Valve simply didn’t think it was wise to release a Half-Life game that they didn’t feel entirely confident in. The first involved the lengthy development of the Source 2 engine and how the number of resources that process required just made the idea of developing a new Half-Life title that much more challenging. “I think at that point we realized, ‘Okay, maybe this episodes thing, it was a good concept, but we’re not executing terribly well as far as getting things out quickly enough’…and then we realized these episodes are turning more into sequels.”įrom there, a couple more complications emerged. “We found ourselves creeping ever forward towards, ‘Well, let’s just keeping putting more and more, and more, and more stuff in this game because we want to make it as good as we can,’” Casali says. When Half-Life 2: Episode Two actually took two years to develop, the team quickly realized that they were suffering from what Casali refers to as scope creep. We think players are going to prefer that from waiting six years and going through however many delays we went through.’”Ĭasali notes that at one point, Valve thought they could release a new Half-Life story every year via the episodic format. Let’s just bite off little chunks and then release more often. We understand the characters, we understand the story, we have most of the mechanics. “That’s why we started doing the episodes where we thought, ‘Well, we have the stable technology now. “After working on Half-Life 2 for six years we decided we didn’t want to go dark for so long,” Casali says with an understanding of the irony of his statement. However, Casali at least offered quite a lot to say on the subject beginning with the problems posed by Valve’s intended episodic format for the series. As we’ve heard in the past regarding one of gaming’s most famous non-existent sequels, the basic answer is “it’s complicated.” In an interview with IGN, veteran Valve level designer Dario Casali spoke about why the company never released Half-Life 3 or Half-Life 2: Episode 3.
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