Half-Life 2 Interview: Part Two
I’ve skimmed the interview and highlighted on misogame the important stuff. Enjoy.
About limited inventory
Actually, in Condition Zero we really looked at the idea of limiting the amount of weapons that you have and making choices, and that’s really something that seems like it will be interesting, but turns out to be not a lot of fun. Some choices are cool, but having to constantly manage your inventory is tedious - at least, that’s how I see it.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say the inventory in Half-Life 2 is completely unlimited, but I would say that inventory management is not fun so we’re not going to place that onto the player.
About anti-cheat measures:
You’re constantly connected, and we can constantly touch your bits. Steam allows us to do an arbitrary number of updates per day/per hour/per minute, so if your code base is constantly changing then it’s hard to write a hack for that code base.
About supporting the mod community and the industry:
People ask me about the best way to break into the games industry - should they go to this or that university? And I’m like: “Screw university, make a mod. Get your feet wet, start building something, get it out there and show it to people”.
Game development happens in front of your computer, busting your arse, and so… We try to help those guys get better because we probably want to hire them at some point. And it also helps extend the viability of the product. Natural Selection, Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike - they helped sell Half-Life.
On hardware upgrades:
Well, we’re actually going to release a benchmark pretty soon, and once we put that out and we finalise it, folks will be able to decide for themselves what they want. I don’t think that there’s a bad experience out there for folks, but for the absolutely hardcore guys, they are going to want take a look at what’s available.
If you’re a hardcore guy, then you’re going to want to look at the latest from ATi and nVidia, and the latest from Intel and AMD.
on the release date:
The release date’s unchanged.
