Half-Life 2 Ep 2: Valve Software Interview

We talk to Valve's Doug Lombardi on the making of Half-Life 2, what's really in store in Episode Two... and beyond!

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Kikizo: What's your view on quick-save 'cheap' way of getting through the PC version? Some people say it's 'cheating' but how do you address this as designers?

Lombardi: Well I think we always look at these things based on playtesting. We try to place the autosaves that we insert based on places that we notice upon playtesting are relevant areas, and then we always try to give people the option to do their own manual saves. I think for each person, they have their own play style, and each person needs their own level of help or support as they go through, and we just try to provide a bunch of options, so that people can kinda tailor the experience to their own liking.

Kikizo: How satisfied were you with the AI in the original Half-Life 2 game, and is something that you have been working on tweaking with the new Episodes?

Lombardi: Yeah, I mean AI is something we're always looking at and trying to advance, and to make the world feel more real and more natural. In Half-Life 2, I think some of the big advances were to make the non-player characters aware of what you were looking at and what you were doing, a great example of that was when you went to Eli's Lab, and you were looking at the pictures of his family, and he would say, "you remember my wife, don't you...?" and stuff like that, and hopefully folks, the first time that happened they were like, woah wait a minute, how did he know what I was looking at, and there was an element of surprise there.

In Episode One obviously there was a lot of work done to the AI, to make Alyx a formidable sidekick if you will, or partner in crime throughout the episode. Previously, all those characters that were with you in the non-combat situations, then when it was time to get to business, they would say, "OK, I'll meet you later"! So in Episode One, we felt really proud of the fact that we were able to let them go "no, I'm coming with you into the battle." And that was a big step forward for us. And as we move forward, we're always going to be looking for a ways to make the experience feel more natural and to have those players be people that you not only want around for story and for comic relief, but also to be viable partners in crime as well.

Kikizo: Can I ask about the voice acting - for me, the voice acting was one of the most impressive things to show off the quality of the game. Where did you find these voice actors and how did you cast them and get it all so right?

Lombardi: For us, finding voice talent is a critical piece, because you spend so much time developing the characters, animating those characters, playtesting the world, and then if they open their mouth and they sound like a duck, the whole scene just comes crumbling down. So for us it was very, very important to nail especially the key characters, and we spent a lot of time listening to audition tapes from professional actors, from aspiring actors, to local voice talent in the Seattle area, etcetera. And it was really on a case by case basis that we found people that worked.

In the case of [the bad guy] Doctor Breen, well Robert Culp was an actor who had done a lot of work through the sixties and seventies in TV and film, and he seemed sort of unlikely to us because he wasn't top of mind, but when we heard him read for Breen, there was a click right there, and then when we got to the studio and we were working with him, he became Breen, and he would take a line, especially from that end scene where he's sort of cackling and getting maniacal when you're locked up with Judith and what have you, and he would take a pass at a couple of those lines, and we thought maybe we had it, and he would be like, no wait a minute, there's one more - and he would go into his space and deliver it, and be like, that's the one, that's the line - and it turns out he was right!

So it's really great, not only to find those characters, but then for those folks to sort of take ownership of that. Kleiner's voice is done by Hal Robins, who did a fair amount of the voices in Half-Life 1, and he's a stage actor from San Francisco, who's an old friend of Mark Laidlaw, who's our storywriter. Merle Dandridge is a Broadway actress who plays Alyx, she's someone who's developed this affinity for that character, and she's a great person to work with - somebody we think really brings that role home.

So for us that's very important - equally important to the soundscapes and anything else - the audio cues that you're giving the player, and the believability of the characters, come through with that voice, just as much as the modelling and the animation. And one of the things that we also tried to do is we didn't really promote the fact that we had some famous actors and actresses in the game, until after the game came out, because we wanted them to obviously be acknowledged for their work but we wanted folks to experience the game and those characters, as those characters. So we didn't want people playing and saying, "oh, Eli is Benson!". We wanted folks to say Eli is Eli, and then maybe after, they'd realise, oh wait that was Robert Guillaume, the guy who played Benson [DuBois, in seventies ABC sitcom, Soap].

Kikizo: You have announced the pack that will come to Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, and the standalone Episode Two for PC, so everyone will be up to speed... how about Lost Coast, will that be in the console versions?

Lombardi: Uh... you know, it's still to be determined. Lost Cost may be something that we produce post-launch, and put out through the online systems for the consoles.

Kikizo: Is it going to be possible for players to play cross-platform on the different versions of the games, at least between each console to PC?

Lombardi: Technically it's certainly possible and Microsoft is showing signs that they want folks to develop cross-platform between Vista and 360, which we think is really exciting. I mean once upon a time, we had a version of Half-Life 1 running on the Dreamcast that could play against the PC, and since with the Dreamcast, Sega kinda exited the hardware business before we finished, that never came to fruition. But we know it's technically possible, it's really a matter of if the console platform holder wants to open up the platform to have that interoperability with the PC.

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