Rock, Paper, Shotgun

17/04/2011 at 20:50 gwathdring says:

I feel bad for valve for the state of Half Life 2: Episode 3. They were going to try a new business model that really didn’t fit the way they make games so it got ditched. And then they came up with all of these other game concepts that were more interesting and worthwhile in at least the short term and took precedence over the Half-Life series. Suppose for a moment that you were writing a series and suddenly realized that you couldn’t keep it up. Either you thought you could do better and the series wasn’t giving you room to grow and improve, or you felt too drained and tired of the material to crank out another novel–good or bad. With games more so than novels, you’re not just dumping in time either. You’re also dumping in tons and tons of money. I have hunch that the people at Valve likely want some sort of closure on the Half Life front. But even so it is still distinctly possible that for one or more of the reasons above, Half Life 2: Episode 3 just doesn’t fit their creative direction or their business model.

Valve as a company certainly puts a lot of love into each of their games. They have so much fun with the material before and after release, and are quite dedicated to bettering their products. I wouldn’t ask them to stifle that by giving me closure on Episode 3 when they could instead be putting out new, original, fun, well-loved games that excite both the company and the fans. I would like to know what happens next, but it’s more of a passing curiosity. I don’t need more of a linear first-person shooter that everyone has been stealing from (both the good and bad sorts of stealing) for a over a decade and that doesn’t necessarily have anywhere new to go gameplay-wise while still necessarily seeming like an extension of the previous games. There’s enough tradition in Half-Life that making episode 3 could be a fairly restrictive task. Your main character isn’t overly invested in their own story, a certain number of side-characters pretty much have to make an appearance, and there are certain questions that need to be answered satisfactorily unless the series is to continue towards Half-Life 3 (at which point it would make more sense to revolutionize gameplay and do something really cool with the IP).

I can understand avoiding, postponing, or flat out abandoning that sort of a project. Especially as a company that values innovation.

18/04/2011 at 08:03 gwathdring says:

@Deano

I’m not convinced. I’d be disappointed in the Lord of the Rings case, but I wouldn’t be upset at the director in such a general context. There are plenty of unforeseeable occurrences that can kill a game or a movie that have nothing to do with the director slacking off or otherwise behaving unprofessionally. And while there are plenty of stories I’ve had cut short much to my dismay, I’ve never felt I was owed the rest. I understand that some promises, especially creative promises, are extremely difficult to keep. The less legally binding the promise and the less personally addressed to me, the less I’m going to hold someone accountable for it. Valve didn’t pull through on the plan to make a handful of episodes with short development cycles, so I figured they’d screwed up and didn’t expect them to hold up any other part of the promise given that they couldn’t hold up the first part.

I understand the frustration, but I don’t personally share it. Marketing is a toxic, complicated mess. You have to time announcements right and sometimes that timing doesn’t match up with when decisions should be made at a company. This isn’t a good thing, but it’s a reality of the marketing system we have in place for games. The big conference announcement and requisite hype machine is a huge part of video game marketing and it’s easy to see those events coming around when ideas are still flying back and forth. This doesn’t excuse false advertising, but it is one of many reasons we have to expect some genuine errors and missteps in marketing campaigns. As long as the company either delivers something different but compensatory or apologizes for getting fan hopes high and then abandoning a project, I don’t feel it’s fair to expect more.

I’d be enormously frustrated if I was expected to produce something I just didn’t have the energy for or thought would drag down a lot of the creative momentum I’d built up in newer projects by forcing me to step back a few years in at least some aspects of creation. And I’m sure that happens all the time without being wholly avoidable, especially for individuals on a larger team that as a whole wants to work on a project that just isn’t as snappy and clever and interesting as the last one. But it’s always more complicated than “They said they would make it, so where is it?” Be disappointed. Voice your disappointment. But it’s important to keep in mind that being upset at the outcome is often far more reasonable than being angry or upset at the people on the other side of the product. They might be just as frustrated about the situation as you are, but be tied down creatively, financially (not the case here), or for other reasons not visible to the consumers.