Finally! On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much confirmation on the non-episodic character of whatever will follow Episode 3:
TS-SWL: Are there any current plans after Episode 3 to have a Half Life 3?
DL: We haven?t announced anything specific, but Half-Life won?t end at Episode Three ? hang on to your crowbars!
Re: Recently Found
Posted by Crono on Fri Dec 14th at 3:25am 2007
Posted by Crono on Fri Dec 14th at 3:25am 2007
Stuff We Like
Apparently, it was during an exclusive interview about the Orange Box or something.
Edit: I need to stop hitting reply and waiting to submit.
Apparently, it was during an exclusive interview about the Orange Box or something.
Edit: I need to stop hitting reply and waiting to submit.
Blame it on Microsoft, God does.
Re: Recently Found
Posted by Yak_Fighter on Fri Dec 14th at 3:38am 2007
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Posted by Yak_Fighter on Fri Dec 14th at 3:38am 2007
That's... underwhelming. It's not like anybody seriously thought that ep3 would be the end of the HL franchise. I thought maybe there would be some real info :/
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Re: Recently Found
Posted by Naklajat on Fri Dec 14th at 3:38am 2007
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Posted by Naklajat on Fri Dec 14th at 3:38am 2007
UT04 BR is the shiznit, I was thoroughly disappointed when I found out it wasn't going to ship with UT3. I personally prefer BR to CTF, and both to onslaught. Next to impossible to find a server though, so the bots are generally who I play BR with, even though they generally really suck at both knowing when to pass and moving up to set you up for a pass 
I concur... still good to have it confirmed, at any rate.
? quote:
That's... underwhelming. I thought maybe there would be some real info
I concur... still good to have it confirmed, at any rate.
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Re: Recently Found
Posted by Yak_Fighter on Fri Dec 14th at 3:43am 2007
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Posted by Yak_Fighter on Fri Dec 14th at 3:43am 2007
Onslaught is horrible (with bots at least), no wonder UT3 is apparently tanking if that's the core of the warfare mode they were touting.
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Re: Recently Found
Posted by Cash Car Star on Fri Dec 14th at 7:39pm 2007
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Posted by Cash Car Star on Fri Dec 14th at 7:39pm 2007
I found bombing run to have a very difficult learning curve. Bot play was absolutely pathetic, not even remotely resembling the multiplayer experience. Joining a good multiplayer server meant you had no clue what was going on and largely meant you were a liability on any team on any map until you had figured some junk out. It nonetheless had some excellent gameplay design, although map design faltered frequently (BR-Slaughterhouse, anyone?) when it didn't constitute a blatant CTF rip in the first place.
I found Double-Dom to have a less sharp learning curve that added tactics, without diminishing the value of previously developed FPS skillz, leading to better online play. Sadly, maps were overly symmetric. Bots stunk in this one too, so I wound up playing CTF when the lack of a speedy internet connection limited me to bot play.
Onslaught -- it's a neat idea, but somehow, it almost seems like it would be better separated from the canonical Unreal franchise. Like Mario World titles v. Mario Kart titles. One of the downfalls of UT2004 was its intensely fractured playerbase, due to its variety of gameplay options.
Haven't looked into U3 much yet... hopefully I'll have a new computer soon that can run stuff like that. I miss getting my frag on.
I found Double-Dom to have a less sharp learning curve that added tactics, without diminishing the value of previously developed FPS skillz, leading to better online play. Sadly, maps were overly symmetric. Bots stunk in this one too, so I wound up playing CTF when the lack of a speedy internet connection limited me to bot play.
Onslaught -- it's a neat idea, but somehow, it almost seems like it would be better separated from the canonical Unreal franchise. Like Mario World titles v. Mario Kart titles. One of the downfalls of UT2004 was its intensely fractured playerbase, due to its variety of gameplay options.
Haven't looked into U3 much yet... hopefully I'll have a new computer soon that can run stuff like that. I miss getting my frag on.
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Re: Recently Found
Posted by Yak_Fighter on Fri Dec 14th at 8:40pm 2007
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Posted by Yak_Fighter on Fri Dec 14th at 8:40pm 2007
haha the first bombing run map I played was slaughterhouse and had a hell of a time figuring out that crappy map. After a no-fun, scoreless stalemate I was ready to give up on it. How different is BR online? More 'cherry picking' and firing the ball at opponents so they cant fight back?
I really haven't played DD that much but my initial reaction is I prefer UT's Domination. Then again you can't have four teams in 2004 so it would probably lose some of its fun craziness. :/
The bots seem worse than UT, which is surprising to me since that was one of the biggest selling points of the original and one of its strengths compared to Q3.
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Re: Recently Found
Posted by reaper47 on Fri Dec 14th at 8:48pm 2007
I guess a lot of people think similar. Which I think is a huge issue for PC titles in general these days. Game companies seem to overestimate hardware-developments and optimize their games for hardware few people are willing to pay these ridiculous prices for. In the late 90ies you could get a perfectly fine graphics card for < 100$. Today the relative prices have tripled.
Posted by reaper47 on Fri Dec 14th at 8:48pm 2007
? quote:
... hopefully I'll have a new computer soon that can run stuff like that. I miss getting my frag on.
I guess a lot of people think similar. Which I think is a huge issue for PC titles in general these days. Game companies seem to overestimate hardware-developments and optimize their games for hardware few people are willing to pay these ridiculous prices for. In the late 90ies you could get a perfectly fine graphics card for < 100$. Today the relative prices have tripled.
Re: Recently Found
Posted by Le Chief on Fri Dec 14th at 8:56pm 2007
Posted by Le Chief on Fri Dec 14th at 8:56pm 2007
My friend sent me a Dexus Ex 3 teaser trailer.
Re: Recently Found
Posted by Crono on Fri Dec 14th at 9:29pm 2007
These games are few and far between, in fact, the only one I can think of is Cell Factor. UT3, in particular, can run very well on several year old hardware. My machine it pushing two years old and I can max the thing out.
The 90s didn't have 3D accelerators for consumers for the bulk of the decade.
And you should keep in mind that there are plenty of people on this site that have computers that can barely run HL2.
Just to point out, for about $180 you can grab a GF7950 with 512MB of memory (this blows my card out of the water).
For about $70 you can grab a 7600GS with 512MB of memory, while it isn't the BEST and it wont run UT3 on the absolute highest settings it will get very close. (A friend of mine has one of these and it runs Oblivion very, very, well. The added memory makes the difference)
And both of the cards I'm mentioning have lifetime warranties.
No game out, for example, requires shader model 4, not even Crysis, and only a handful require shader model 3 (UT3 and CryEngine 2 are about it, everything else requires shader model 2) And nothing requires multi-core processors right now, either.
So what are you talking about? Hardware is light years ahead of most software right now, and that is a GOOD thing, since by the time you will need to hardware for these games, it will be cheap ... like it is right now.
Posted by Crono on Fri Dec 14th at 9:29pm 2007
? quote:
Game companies seem to overestimate hardware-developments and optimize their games for hardware few people are willing to pay these ridiculous prices for.
These games are few and far between, in fact, the only one I can think of is Cell Factor. UT3, in particular, can run very well on several year old hardware. My machine it pushing two years old and I can max the thing out.
The 90s didn't have 3D accelerators for consumers for the bulk of the decade.
And you should keep in mind that there are plenty of people on this site that have computers that can barely run HL2.
Just to point out, for about $180 you can grab a GF7950 with 512MB of memory (this blows my card out of the water).
For about $70 you can grab a 7600GS with 512MB of memory, while it isn't the BEST and it wont run UT3 on the absolute highest settings it will get very close. (A friend of mine has one of these and it runs Oblivion very, very, well. The added memory makes the difference)
And both of the cards I'm mentioning have lifetime warranties.
No game out, for example, requires shader model 4, not even Crysis, and only a handful require shader model 3 (UT3 and CryEngine 2 are about it, everything else requires shader model 2) And nothing requires multi-core processors right now, either.
So what are you talking about? Hardware is light years ahead of most software right now, and that is a GOOD thing, since by the time you will need to hardware for these games, it will be cheap ... like it is right now.
Blame it on Microsoft, God does.
Re: Recently Found
Posted by reaper47 on Sat Dec 15th at 1:09am 2007
Posted by reaper47 on Sat Dec 15th at 1:09am 2007
Well, that's just not what I mean.
In the late 90ies (I did say late, did I?) you would get a top-of-the-line card for little over 100 bucks and it could handle games for years to come, at 60+ FPS and high quality. $180 would have been the ultimate luxury model.
Today, unless you pay a ridiculous amount of money, a reasonably priced card is outdated pretty much the moment you buy it. A year from now, a card you could buy for $150 now will be obscenely outdated.
Cycles for new graphics cards get shorter but also more expensive and less powerful compared to predecessors.
The reason why Valve doesn't seem to have any problems playing on the PC market while almost all other developers more or less left for consoles and treat PC gamers as second-rate customers is because Valve doesn't follow hardware trends blindly. They add to their games what makes sense from the player's point of view but never clutter them with shader effects just to have "DX10 support" or "Real-time Shadows!" sticker on their boxes. They even decided to do some sorts of obscure particle-effects with multi-core support, not because it would look fancy in a review, but because multi-core is getting standard, relatively cheap and it makes sense to support it. While we all heard the "< 2% of gamers can run DX10" statement...
More developers should look at the current limitations and build their hardware around them. Instead of focusing so much on marketable graphics-technology superlatives. See what it's good for in UT3. Super-duper high-res: [i]grey walls![i] How ridiculous is that? They're ass-kissing GPU developers ("the way it's MEANT to be played!!1") without realizing that their PC player-base is moving away. Moving towards consoles, that is (so maybe they don't care).
It's just not fun to buy an expensive game and an equally expensive card only to realize you can just barely run the peachy settings. There might be a lot of possibilities for software but from the gamer's POV you just have this constant feel of running behind. And then there's this superabundance of crappy and/or near-identical cards which you don't even know why they got released in the first place.
Bah.
In the late 90ies (I did say late, did I?) you would get a top-of-the-line card for little over 100 bucks and it could handle games for years to come, at 60+ FPS and high quality. $180 would have been the ultimate luxury model.
Today, unless you pay a ridiculous amount of money, a reasonably priced card is outdated pretty much the moment you buy it. A year from now, a card you could buy for $150 now will be obscenely outdated.
Cycles for new graphics cards get shorter but also more expensive and less powerful compared to predecessors.
The reason why Valve doesn't seem to have any problems playing on the PC market while almost all other developers more or less left for consoles and treat PC gamers as second-rate customers is because Valve doesn't follow hardware trends blindly. They add to their games what makes sense from the player's point of view but never clutter them with shader effects just to have "DX10 support" or "Real-time Shadows!" sticker on their boxes. They even decided to do some sorts of obscure particle-effects with multi-core support, not because it would look fancy in a review, but because multi-core is getting standard, relatively cheap and it makes sense to support it. While we all heard the "< 2% of gamers can run DX10" statement...
More developers should look at the current limitations and build their hardware around them. Instead of focusing so much on marketable graphics-technology superlatives. See what it's good for in UT3. Super-duper high-res: [i]grey walls![i] How ridiculous is that? They're ass-kissing GPU developers ("the way it's MEANT to be played!!1") without realizing that their PC player-base is moving away. Moving towards consoles, that is (so maybe they don't care).
It's just not fun to buy an expensive game and an equally expensive card only to realize you can just barely run the peachy settings. There might be a lot of possibilities for software but from the gamer's POV you just have this constant feel of running behind. And then there's this superabundance of crappy and/or near-identical cards which you don't even know why they got released in the first place.
Bah.
Re: Recently Found
Posted by ReNo on Sat Dec 15th at 1:49am 2007
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Posted by ReNo on Sat Dec 15th at 1:49am 2007
Which is why I love my 360 ![<img src=]()
" SRC="images/smiles/icon_smile.gif">
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Re: Recently Found
Posted by RedWood on Sat Dec 15th at 1:57am 2007
Posted by RedWood on Sat Dec 15th at 1:57am 2007
I'm contemplating whether or not to buy a Ati 3070. I know 6 months later that i won't be able to play the new game coming out at the highest settings. I know how you fell Reaper.
Reality has become a commodity.
Re: Recently Found
Posted by RedWood on Sat Dec 15th at 2:41am 2007
Posted by RedWood on Sat Dec 15th at 2:41am 2007
For anyone who knows what a solid state drive is...
http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/
dear god... it loaded the first level of F.E.A.R. in 3.2 seconds...
http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/
dear god... it loaded the first level of F.E.A.R. in 3.2 seconds...
Reality has become a commodity.
Re: Recently Found
Posted by Cash Car Star on Sat Dec 15th at 6:37am 2007
Hardly. It's ALL translocator and telefragging. People move like the wind, and two or three strong players on a side can move that ball up like nothing else. It's quite typical to punt the ball over the opponents heads and shoot them all as they see were it lands... while a teammate translocates there within two seconds. Also, the ball itself is subject to physics in flight... why hello Mr. Shock Combo.
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Posted by Cash Car Star on Sat Dec 15th at 6:37am 2007
? quote:
haha the first bombing run map I played was slaughterhouse and had a hell of a time figuring out that crappy map. After a no-fun, scoreless stalemate I was ready to give up on it. How different is BR online? More 'cherry picking' and firing the ball at opponents so they cant fight back?
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Re: Recently Found
Posted by Crono on Sat Dec 15th at 6:48am 2007
Posted by Crono on Sat Dec 15th at 6:48am 2007
Yeah, you said, late, sorry.
Your entire rant is baseless and completely contradictory to what has actually happened in the last ten years.
1st: Every year since 1999, there has been a new graphics card generation debut (go look it up), in fact, only recently has it slowed down.
2nd: The cards coming out now, save the generation leap from GF6 to GF7 and GF4 to GF5 have shown VAST improvements.
3rd: Wanting the absolute highest graphical settings in any modern game is from the basis of pure luxury. Look at games that are multi-platform between consoles and PC (where the PC version isn't a console port) and you'll see that there is a far higher graphical fidelity on the PC.
4th: Developers are not using the absolute newest bandwagon technology that is around. Crysis, is seriously, the only game in town that actually utilizes shader model 4 (other games are just pushing Vista). But, the game still has an incredibly quality in lower models.
5th: Unreal Engine 3 requires Shader Model 3. NOT 4, but 3, something that debuted nearly three years ago and is now dirt cheap to get on a card. The aesthetic choices Epic made has nothing to do with the fidelity of their engine ... which has already been distributed in many games that people are going nuts over. Their strong suit has never been game development, but engine development. Their knowledge of engine technology is incredibly vast and what they have achieved in UE3 is incredible ... from a technology point of view. Again, it hardly uses the "newest" stuff.
Look, I get it, you're mad that your computer can't play every game ever at the highest settings for the next three or four years ... but stop complaining.
Things are MUCH better than they were. Games are drastically more scalable and there's exponentially more available every year. And, just to note, when HL2 was debuted to the public, their big selling point was the graphics and the use of the BRAND NEW Shader Model 2.0 to bring, "Shader effects only previously available in large budget animated films, such as from pixar" ... and the whole big selling point of the EP2 source changes, besides the cinematic physics, is real time soft shadows.
People don't even realize how good they've got it right now. The average price of a mid-line PC has only gone up about $50 in the last five years, and that is something that would last for more than a year.
Just to let you know, the reason why a lot of developers make their games have added features with future technology is so that WHEN that technology is adapted (because it will be, no matter how pissed off you get), their game will get a new coat of gloss and be able to continue to contend with newer games.
I'm done with this, it's ridiculous.
Your entire rant is baseless and completely contradictory to what has actually happened in the last ten years.
1st: Every year since 1999, there has been a new graphics card generation debut (go look it up), in fact, only recently has it slowed down.
2nd: The cards coming out now, save the generation leap from GF6 to GF7 and GF4 to GF5 have shown VAST improvements.
3rd: Wanting the absolute highest graphical settings in any modern game is from the basis of pure luxury. Look at games that are multi-platform between consoles and PC (where the PC version isn't a console port) and you'll see that there is a far higher graphical fidelity on the PC.
4th: Developers are not using the absolute newest bandwagon technology that is around. Crysis, is seriously, the only game in town that actually utilizes shader model 4 (other games are just pushing Vista). But, the game still has an incredibly quality in lower models.
5th: Unreal Engine 3 requires Shader Model 3. NOT 4, but 3, something that debuted nearly three years ago and is now dirt cheap to get on a card. The aesthetic choices Epic made has nothing to do with the fidelity of their engine ... which has already been distributed in many games that people are going nuts over. Their strong suit has never been game development, but engine development. Their knowledge of engine technology is incredibly vast and what they have achieved in UE3 is incredible ... from a technology point of view. Again, it hardly uses the "newest" stuff.
Look, I get it, you're mad that your computer can't play every game ever at the highest settings for the next three or four years ... but stop complaining.
Things are MUCH better than they were. Games are drastically more scalable and there's exponentially more available every year. And, just to note, when HL2 was debuted to the public, their big selling point was the graphics and the use of the BRAND NEW Shader Model 2.0 to bring, "Shader effects only previously available in large budget animated films, such as from pixar" ... and the whole big selling point of the EP2 source changes, besides the cinematic physics, is real time soft shadows.
People don't even realize how good they've got it right now. The average price of a mid-line PC has only gone up about $50 in the last five years, and that is something that would last for more than a year.
Just to let you know, the reason why a lot of developers make their games have added features with future technology is so that WHEN that technology is adapted (because it will be, no matter how pissed off you get), their game will get a new coat of gloss and be able to continue to contend with newer games.
I'm done with this, it's ridiculous.
Blame it on Microsoft, God does.
Re: Recently Found
Posted by Naklajat on Sat Dec 15th at 6:52am 2007
Hardly. It's ALL translocator and telefragging. People move like the wind, and two or three strong players on a side can move that ball up like nothing else. It's quite typical to punt the ball over the opponents heads and shoot them all as they see were it lands... while a teammate translocates there within two seconds. Also, the ball itself is subject to physics in flight... why hello Mr. Shock Combo.Hmm.. I never really played UT04 in it's heyday, played the demo briefly when it came out and finally bought it in 2006, mostly for the editor and bonus DVD of video tutorials. I guess I didn't account for how crafty online gaming communities can be. The way you describe it I can see how a small community would have formed around BR, gotten really damn good at it in ways the designers never even imagined possible, and then moved on, taking BR servers and much of any chance of the game regaining popularity with them.
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Posted by Naklajat on Sat Dec 15th at 6:52am 2007
? quote:
? quote:
haha the first bombing run map I played was slaughterhouse and had a hell of a time figuring out that crappy map. After a no-fun, scoreless stalemate I was ready to give up on it. How different is BR online? More 'cherry picking' and firing the ball at opponents so they cant fight back?
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=o
Re: Recently Found
Posted by Yak_Fighter on Sat Dec 15th at 8:48am 2007
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Posted by Yak_Fighter on Sat Dec 15th at 8:48am 2007
That seems to be a trend with most online games sadly, but at least the UTs have decent bot support :/
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Re: Recently Found
Posted by reaper47 on Sat Dec 15th at 2:27pm 2007
I won't. I know you're probably on the other side of this, because you're professionally interested in the technology (which of course has improved) while I am, in this case, looking at it more from the consumer side. But I'm not a ridiculous dips**t just because I think that getting a new graphics card has become quite an annoying affair lately, full of compromises and a mine field of bad cards which are only distinguishable by a "GS" or "XYZ" in their names.
Posted by reaper47 on Sat Dec 15th at 2:27pm 2007
? quote:
Look, I get it, you're mad that your computer can't play every game ever at the highest settings for the next three or four years ... but stop complaining.
I won't. I know you're probably on the other side of this, because you're professionally interested in the technology (which of course has improved) while I am, in this case, looking at it more from the consumer side. But I'm not a ridiculous dips**t just because I think that getting a new graphics card has become quite an annoying affair lately, full of compromises and a mine field of bad cards which are only distinguishable by a "GS" or "XYZ" in their names.
Re: Recently Found
Posted by Cash Car Star on Sat Dec 15th at 4:38pm 2007
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Posted by Cash Car Star on Sat Dec 15th at 4:38pm 2007
You know there's an entire Indie game movement happening right now that's producing some high quality games that aren't insanely taxing on your graphics card?
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