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: With Episode 1 I think that was the first time you have upgraded the Source engine to introduce things like HDR lighting to make the game even better looking. Is DirectX 10 something you will think will push what you can do even further in the future?

Lombardi: Well, it's still sort of to be determined how far we're going to be able to push with DirectX 10. But it does look very promising and we're very excited about the things that we've seen, and I think that we have a pretty good history of always trying to migrate our technology to take advantage of the latest stuff as soon as we can, and the episodic approach certainly gives us an advantage there.

Kikizo: Can you tell us more about your development structure at Valve in terms of the Half-Life 2 team, the side projects, and how you put it all together?

Lombardi: The team scales vary quite a bit. Usually they start off with a small group who are prototyping and getting the basic ideas together, and then the teams will grow as we get further into development. It's a little harder for us to put a head[count] on stuff because we have teams that are working on technology, and they sort of service the design ground - so a design group will come to the tech group and say, we want the following feature or we want to get this to work or to do that, and it's then the tech group's job to service those guys as their clients. So we don't break it down and say this team has its own engineers and its own designers - there's a lot of sharing and crossover that goes on.

It's really very much driven by getting something into a playable state, bring in some people to play the game, and what we do is we all sit behind that person, watch them play, and we're not allowed to speak. And folks will sit and take notes, and it begins with people taking a whole book's worth of notes, and hopefully by the end of the process it's a half a page, and we get to a point where we say, OK, now it's ready. And that's really the gage that we use, is to bring in people who play games, and say, are they finding the cool stuff that we're trying to deliver? If they're missing the big moments, we've got to redirect, or we've got to fix that.

A really good example of that is when you first stepped out into sort of the choreographed part outside of the station in Half-Life 2, and then you walked around the corner to progress and there was that scene where the striders were parading... the first time we did that, folks went zooming right by that because of the lighting and the way we had stuff put together. And it was like wow, we spent a lot of time animating that, and it's a big, foreshadowing moment of the story and what's to come, so we had to spend a lot of time revising that until we got it right.

And it's not just those moments, it's the gameplay moments, it's the puzzles, it's everything. And we really feel that we're too close to it to be able to say it's ready, or that it's right. So we very much sort of say, when we come in and we can say Gabe [Newell, Valve boss]'s dad got it, and he liked it, and a 22 year-old who plays Counter-Strike forty hours a week got it, and somebody else who's of a different skill set got it as well, then we know, it's right and it's ready.

Kikizo: That's what I was going to ask - how broad a range of players to you get in to do that testing...

Lombardi: We really run the gamut in terms of what sort of players we bring in for playtesting. I mean honestly Gabe's dad is one of the people that we bring in. You know, and we're always looking for new folks to bring in, but we do rely a lot on folks that are well within the community, and very core. And usually they are the first ones that we find a sort of success level with. And then, the harder trick is to say, how do we keep it interesting and challenging to them, but also make it so that someone who's a more casual player also has a great experience as well.

Kikizo: Who is your overall favourite character personally from the Half-Life 2 series?

Lombardi: Ah, there's no question the G-Man's my favourite character. I mean he is just the perfect foil, and there's something about him that is creepy, scary and also kind of humorous at the same time, and I sort of like the multi layers of him and the mystery around him!

Kikizo: Steam has been a huge success in terms of breaking new ground with distribution, is there any path forwards for the Steam brand in terms of developing the console versions?

Lombardi: I think that on any platform, you have to look at what the customers' needs are. And if people are going to be playing a lot of games online, there's a whole set of features that they're going to need - auto updating, they're going to want new content in the form of new maps, new weapons, new player characters etcetera. And being able to put that at people's fingertips and make it easier for them to access that content and get back into the game, is really the trick. How that's accomplished is sort of irrelevant. On the PC, we have Steam established, and we've got it now to a state where it's very mature and working very well, not only for our audience but for other people's games as well.

Microsoft is obviously making some movements in some direction to support their players as well through Xbox Live and they've got some good stuff going there. And Sony has something that's similar to support that group of people. And I think it's just something that as we evolve, and more and more people are playing online games, it's just a mandatory to have that. So hopefully everyone will have something in place that customers like, and feel like they're getting more out of their games than what they got for the first fifty dollars when they cracked the shrinkwrap.

Kikizo: Valve is quite notorious for its desire to be 'independent'; we've seen this with the distribution platform, the publisher agreement stuff, and I am curious how significant is it to your business model to be licensing rights to use the engine (and Steam) in stuff like Dark Messiah - is this something that's significant to Valve's autonomy?

Lombardi: For us, we build our technology from the standpoint that we're going to have many uses for it, for both ourselves, the model authors, and perhaps thirdparty, professional commercial developers as well. When we approached Source, we said, we're going to make a bunch of different types of games with this, and I think that's evidenced with Portal, Team Fortress 2 and Episode Two - I mean all three of them have pretty radically different art styles. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic did a lot of stuff with melee combat and hand-to-hand stuff that we don't do, but the engine was sort of build modular to support that.

And we really see anybody who wants to use the technology, whether it's Steam or Source, we invite them to approach us and talk to us about it. But for us, our staple of our business is to create content, but a by-product of that is that we create some pretty cool technology that others might find useful as well, and we're pretty open to doing that. But we're not in the middleware business as our primary focus, although those sort of relationships and deals if you will, are available for third parties.

Kikizo: Thanks so much for your time Doug.

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Half-Life 2: Episode Two - part of the two bundles, The Black Box and The Orange Box, is scheduled for release this September on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Click here for Kikizo's interview archive.