20-Nov-24: Gray's Gaming Gabs - Half-Life 2 w/ Developer's Commentary

I've always loved Valve Software's Developer Commentaries -- one of the main things that drew me into video games in general. They were the inspiration for my first bleb for Old Web Cobwebs. Of course, the thing is is that while just about every Source engine game has developer's commentary, the original Half-Life 2 didn't, for the longest time.

Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary was on the 16th, and in addition to a couple of things (tying all the Half-Life 2 content into one game, a full-length documentary and some early dev stuff), developer's commentary was finally added to Half-Life 2. Notably, this is far after the fact, one of the first commentary nodes remarks that the commentary is largely trying to remember what happened 20 years ago. It's not perfect, and one of my main problems with the commentary is the complete lack of it in the final few levels of the game. (endings always seem a weak point with Valve games)

One of the main things that kind of stuck out to me in the commentary is dealing with the performance issues regarding hardware at the time. Fights with allies were scaled back, new methods of optimization had to be developed, levels were designed in such a way that they felt big, but weren't actually big. It did sound like the wild west at times: developing for DirectX 7,8 and 9, contacting and working alongside a graphics card developer to figure out a driver issue.

It is a kind of trade-off. Modern development has consolidated game engines to like, three (Godot, Unity and Epic being the ones that come to mind), and engine development is largely an unknown, nowadays. I'm not that ungrateful, since I'd have no idea where to even begin with making my own game engine, but consolidation does suck for all those small and wild games that existed back in the day.

Aside from that, it was also nice hearing about tech that still wows me to this day. Faceposer, interactive cutscenes, and the prop system are still really good, and I wish games still had that kind of interactivity. Learning about pacing and hidden tutorials is always great to hear about, as teaching the player things is always an immense difficulty. Parts in where they 'cheat' a bit for a cinematic moment, or cut a bit due to constraints were also great to learn about, mainly since without the commentary saying so, I would have never really suspected.

Developing, creating, making any sort of art product is always a lot of thankless, invisible work. Drafts and beta builds can take hundreds of hours of work only for most of it to not be present in the finished work. Probably the biggest problem with making this all invisible is when you try developing your own work. Always feels like something's missing, or second-guessing, or just not knowing what to do. Going over the development process, all the grit and thankless work for a final product that can be experienced in a fraction of the time. Having these kind of behind-the-scenes added to works, even 20 years later, is always appreciated, whether it's showing off something you might have missed the first go-around, or elucidating about a favorite moment of the game and the work that was put into it.

Oh, uh, I should probably talk a bit about Half-Life 2? Still a good game!

Get Half-Life 2 here.