Valve will no doubt refine its successor, Source 2, for their future flagship titles, but the original Source will always be a snapshot of a truly progressive time in gaming. With 2016's Titanfall 2 running on a heavily modified version of Source, it's clear that there's mileage left in the aging engine. Why would the developer let you create new missions, weapons, characters and tools when they can spend a couple of weeks doing that and sell it as DLC? It hurts my brain to think what my life would be like now, if Valve had the same attitude towards modding." I feel like game designers are incentivized against that nowadays. When asked whether sandbox gaming is something that can be refined further by developers, Garry says: "I don't have high hopes. "Why would the developer let you create new missions, weapons, characters and tools when they can spend a couple of weeks doing that and sell it as DLC?" - Garry Newman, Garry's Mod But Source's crowning achievement in the modding community is Garry Newman's Half-Life 2 mod, Garry's Mod. A fan-made reboot of the original Half-Life called Black Mesa provoked a wave of nostalgia amongst zealous fans. Like GoldSrc before it, Source proved to the industry once again that fans could make titles to compete with corporate developers. It got you questioning why you expect what you do from games in the first place.īeyond the form-redefining indie and blockbuster titles, Source leaves behind it a modding legacy richer than any other engine. It may have been one big, corridor-driven narrative, but it got gamers thinking deeply about what lies beneath when you play. The Beginner's Guide was made to feel game-y, and the employment of the Source engine made it all the more powerful in its visual simplicity. Its story of a developer lost in his own unfinished creations, told from beneath puzzles, is one that can only be told through the medium of games, and one wonders how much of its impact would be lost if the game was built on a more detail-heavy engine, like Unreal 3 or 4. The formula would be refined with the addition of a mind bending co-op mode in 2011's Portal 2. You simply have to find the hidden corridor to get from A to B and into the next room but that thought never crossed my mind once as I played, so deeply was Iimmersed in the fabric of the game world around me. There's nothing to shoot and no vehicular sequences, quests or mini games. The original Portal is an archetypal corridor game in the sense that there literally is no other objective. As the mute heroine Chell, you're forced to navigate one boxy test chamber after another, while a barrage of demoralizing vitriolic taunts are hurled at you by a malignant and witty AI. The Portal games thrive on their own boxiness. As Davey Wreden would point out in his chilling Source-powered 2015 narrative meta-game The Beginner's Guide: "One of the things does very well is boxy, linear corridors." The portal gun is one of gaming's most inspired devices, but it's driven by limitations surrounding it. One of Valve's biggest innovations with the Source engine arrived in 2007's The Orange Box compilation: the Portal series. "One of the things the Source engine does very well is boxy, linear corridors." - Davey Wreden, The Beginner's Guide Of the three, Half-Life 2 has dated the least. Halo 2 pillaged sci-fi cinema in its cutscenes and designs to hide its narrowness, while Doom 3 used cheap pop-up scares and "no duct tape on Mars" (a reference to how there was no way to attach a flashlight to your weapon) to make the environment a constant threat. The physics puzzles and the ingenious gravity gun demanded a very deep level of interaction with the environment, in contrast to comparable games released that year. "It had refraction, actual working physics, real-time lighting, rope physics."Īt its core, Half-Life 2 was a corridor shooter, but it was one that assailed players with beautiful panoramic vistas to stop for a minute and get lost in. "It did a lot of stuff I'd never seen a PC engine do before," he tells me. The game also drew a legion of expert modders to Source, says Garry's Mod developer Garry Newman. Its vast literary pretensions juggled so many balls that it will take a truly inspired team of writers not to drop any should a sequel, a third Half-Life proper, finally emerge. Released in late 2004, Half-Life 2 needs little introduction. It would be the latter game that put the engine in the possession of pretty much every gamer on the planet. Developed to succeed their flagship GoldSrc engine-itself a heavily modified version of the Quake engine-Source debuted with Counter-Strike: Source a few weeks before the release of Half-Life 2. For many, this was the first glimpse of Valve Corporation's Source engine.
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