The Ant Nest

Half-Life 2: Episode One Review

Many a Half-Life fan has tried to discern the true nature of the G-Man’s mysterious role in the game’s universe. It has often struck me that perhaps that universe is the wrong place to be looking. On the train journeys that bracket the games and that serve as a metaphorical transition between the Half-Life world and the real world, Gordon has one major companion - the G-Man.

Who else would want to make the journey from real world into the Half-Life world, other than the players? Valve’s game designers have a penchant for watching their players, as expressed in their extensive use of playtesting (documented in Half-Life 2: Episode One’s commentary) and statistics gathering. I’d wager that they would love to come along for the ride.

The G-Man’s role to date, then, is this: He is the personification of Valve within the Half-Life world.

He’s the nod and the wink that says “we both know this isn’t real, but let’s pretend it is anyway”. He’s the guy checking up on players, ensuring they don’t get stuck and smoothing the road ahead. He’s making sure they see everything he wants them to see and nothing he doesn’t. He’s the cartoon character on the front of the train, laying the track out just in time for the train to speed onto it. The G-Man and Valve’s designers are both in the business of giving an illusion of choice where there is none. Both are in the shadows, manipulating their puppet into willingly doing their bidding.

But Valve have announced their intent to give the G-Man a real role in the story over the course of their coming trio of episodes. The G-Man is physically forced off the stage at the start of Episode One, even. Much like Dr. Breen in the closing minutes of Half-Life 2, Valve’s designers find themselves in need of a new host body.

Step forward please, Alyx Vance.

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Virtual Real Cities

One of the more curious aspects of the city-based game, which has blossomed in this console generation, is the dichotomy between those games which strive to emulate a real city and those which do not.

The genre heavyweights, the Grand Theft Auto games, boldly embrace cities which, whilst clearly inspired by real cities, are very much their own creation. By contrast, many of its competitors, such as the True Crime series, Driv3r and The Getaway, choose to set themselves in ‘real’ cities, pursuing accuracy in both name and geographical layout.

This realness is a powerful marketing draw. It is an effective differentiator. Handled correctly, it can easily be made to imply a superiority in quality, derived both from the impressive numbers it generates (“25 square miles! Recreated from thousands of photos! Hundreds of developer man-hours!” etc), and the notion that accuracy is quality.

Assessed strictly from a design perspective, does the suggestion that real is better stand up? What benefits do these ‘virtual real cities’ and their real layouts bring? Are there disadvantages? There are two ways of looking at these questions, because there are two ways of looking at environments: as spaces and as places.

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This Dark Messiah video is one of my favourite things to come out of E3 2006.

As well as some stunningly beautiful environments, it reminds me a lot of some comments Gabe Newell made last year about Valve’s goals for Half-Life 2: Episode One: “You don’t want to have a sense that there’s a box around the NPC and you see these boxes bumping into each other. You want to have a sense that they’re in the world interacting with things closely, like they can reach out to stuff, they can push things to the ground, they can kick things. … Have it not be that sort of fakey box-box interactions.”

The great thing about this video is that it looks like Arkane is applying that approach to the player as well as the NPCs.

The cavalry charge of Oblivion

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is out, and garnering critical acclaim and great sales.

At the beginning of the week, Bethesda (the game’s developer) announced a series of paid downloadable add-ons to the game, the first of which is some armour for the game’s virtual horses. This turned out to be quite the controversy - one place I saw the announcement clocked up over 400 comments.

Though I’m not normally one to comment on the business side of games, the uncharted territory that Bethesda has waded into seems particularly fertile and worth trying to map out. Will their discoveries usher in a utopia of more game content for all and more money for developers? Or a dystopia of unfinished games and paid patches?

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