Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

Friday, October 28, 2005 » gaming thought

Last night I tried out the freshly-released Half-Life 2 Lost Coast tech demo, despite the software's urgings that my processor wasn't up to it. (What's 0.1GHz, anyway?) While HL2 proper ran nicely in 1280x1024, I had to knock the resolution down a bit in order to get an acceptable framerate this time around. As a result, my enjoyment of the fancy new HDR lighting may have been dampened a bit; the relative blurriness of the lower, non-LCD-native resolution made me uncertain whether I was interpreting some of the bloom and exposure adjustment effects correctly. Nevertheless, the demo did look quite realistic (and shiny!), and lighting inside and around the church was amazing. Then the level ended pretty much right after that, making me wonder when Valve will finish up Half-Life 2: Aftermath.

I was surprised to learn that Valve included a commentary system to go with the demo. It's a good idea since not everyone will be familiar with HDR technology, but, except for a couple instances, the team doing the narration never goes too far into detail about what's going on. It's a shame that they didn't throw in more objects and environments specifically designed to show off the HDR effects. Have one of the Combine soldiers upend a barrel of glass balls at Freeman, for example. (Sure, it may seem out of place, but it's just a tech demo, right?) Then they could freeze the game and zoom in and around objects to really show off the effects, instead of just throwing an unmarked histogram up on the screen for a couple seconds.

What really interested me about the commentary track, though, was the few times one of the developers would talk about the reasoning behind the actual level design. I'd love to play through any game—let alone one as tightly-designed as Half-Life 2—and listen to the dev team talk about things like why they like vertical spaces, or what they've done in a scene to create tension or make it more fun for the player. I can only hope Valve will make this a standard practice, starting with Aftermath.

(Just in case people missed it, one of the more interesting commentary objects is actually back a bit from the starting location. Just walk around the rocks and toward the skeletal boat to hear a little about Valve's approach to puzzles.)