some stunning Half-Life 2 screens

[cucaracha]

Hey crowd, I just saw these very impressive screenshots of Half-Life 2 and had to share them:

http://www.counter-strike.de/newspics/multi/200305/news-1-1051956029.jpg

http://www.counter-strike.de/newspics/multi/200305/news-2-1051956031.jpg

http://www.counter-strike.de/newspics/multi/200305/news-3-1051956032.jpg

http://www.counter-strike.de/newspics/multi/200305/news-4-1051956034.jpg

god, they are pretty sick :evilbat: - this will be a very interesting game.
cu

[gekitsu]

not bad.
but it won't bring me to my toes as other games did. say quake, quake 3, challenge promode arena for q3.

i prefer good gameplay to good visuals since i will turn all the neat things off anyway when i want to play it seriously.
hl2 will most likely build upon the famous gameplay (more to be called gayplay, imo) of hl, so i won't be interested at all in it. hl sucked major ass. it is responsible for slowing shooters down. bad.

[Ian Mack]

I think you forgot a "In Your humble opinion"

Because IMHO, HL was an awesome game. With a story that beat the shit out of Quake or Unreall. Did they even have stories ? Or even levels ? Just tier-based combat eh ?

This game looks amazing. I just hope the gameplay is up to par of the original.

[gekitsu]

otherside: everything i wrote was either like "I won't be interested because..., I do this and that..." or in the one case (the gayplay one) i wrote imo after it, so what's wrong?

story... is the story so important to you? i mean... how long do you intend to play singleplayer mode?
quake (1) had a singleplayer mode, too. it had a story that affected the game itself as much as it did in hl (no-thing at all). but q1 sp was actually a challenge. and it kept me challenged because of the shooting and not of the riddles. i don't play shooters for solving riddles...

anyway... after a few days play, you should have beaten any singleplayer mode and then you are left with multiplayer.
combat - duel, free for all or team based. of what use is eyecandy and story there?
eyecandy is in your way and distracts from the actual game. everything that matters is a system of weapons, rules and physics that allow highly competitive play (so that the game will have a lasting apeal - no one plas games where noobs can blast pros to pieces regularly).
and that was were hl inevitably suffered. (NO imho here)
chess still rules the world because of the perfect gameplay balance in multiplayer. chess don't need no eyecandy. ;)

i got yer point about hl being an entertaining game but what if the challenge in a shooter is shooting? speak about enemies that are behaving intelligently, operating in formations, engaging snipers, close combat units etcetera and coordinating them properly. wouldn't that be a challenge more fitting to a shooter game instead of boasting it with adventure elements that it becomes an adventure with a few shooting parts?

off topic... sorry. :)

[nardfrog]

Yes quake 1 and 2 definatley had plots, 3... they had different motives, INTERNET! And id changed computer gameplay for ever. Oh yeah, half life is cool too.

[mtw]

I hope my computer will run that with the graphics turned all the way up. I'm just an off and on FPS player, but Half-life was a lot of fun.

[Phait]

That 'eyecandy' can often be misinterpreted as such - when it's also evolution of technology and expression of realism. Thus the function.

So long as it's all balanced, I say.

[sic1]

Originally posted by mtw
I hope my computer will run that with the graphics turned all the way up. I'm just an off and on FPS player, but Half-life was a lot of fun.

As opposed to the Doom3 engine, which is targeted towards the newer generation of video cards, HL2 is targeted to run on older cards, so your current video card should be fine, unless it's really outdated.

I'll be waiting to see the whole story unfold (the story about the engines). This is scheduled for a release before Doom3, and therefore looks to be comparable. Doom3, however, has a lot more in terms of technology on the side of the engine. This looks to me, like Valve just tried to upgrade the original engine (which looks strikingly similar to the Unreal Warfare engine; Splinter Cell, UT2003, etc).

If Valve did, infact create this engine, and didn't just license it, I may buy it. I'll surely be saving my cash for a Carmack engine ;)

[nova]

:)

[amphex]

OH MAN..i am so excited
of course, i probably wont ever buy the game..but maybe one of my friends will and then invite me over.
Thatd be sooo sweet.

[cucaracha]

Btw., the game-engine will be the "Valve Source Engine", which is a complete new one. I've seen screenshots in several game magazines where new technologies were discussed. The effects are awesome.

cu

[KayCustomz]

since your all on Half Life subject, any of you play counter strike?

[Fozzybar]

What's up KayCustomz...thinking of a conceptart-counterstrike session? :D

[gekitsu]

Originally posted by KayCustomz
since your all on Half Life subject, any of you play counter strike?

cs? omg! the spawn of satan! run!!!!! hideeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!
;)

no sorry, no cs here. i like to play, not sleep.

[.cfb]

Gekitsu. I have the opposite problem. I don't play CS (anymore) because I want to sleep.

I played for nearly 4 years. Many sleepless nights.

[thomasaurus]

cs is to tedious and boring now.

[gekitsu]

Originally posted by .cfb
Gekitsu. I have the opposite problem. I don't play CS (anymore) because I want to sleep.

I played for nearly 4 years. Many sleepless nights.

:)
i remember the allnightlong lan parties all too vividly.
starting off, we played quake 3 cpma. me and me friend were used to the faster and more competitive system so we basically owned all the others who only player baseq3. when they began complaining about being shafted in midair, catching one airrocket after the other or us dodging their rockets in curved jumps, we switched to playing quakeworld. :)
no one (besides me and my mate) wanted to play that for more than half an hour for different reasons. ;)

then comes the chaotic phase, dominated by 5-player super bomberman matches via zsnes lan, different mods for even more different games, neogeo emulators, cps-2 emulators, console games etc... until everyone seems to play something on his own.

in the end, we decide to slow down and all play the same game since that is why we play in lan anyway. then, ususally, we start playing cs to chill out and give the people with not too honed reflexes a chance for some frags.
raven shield might be a keeper for the cs position now, though...

was always fun...

[the machine god]

CS was one of the best things to happen to FPS's. I find Quake and UT to be frantic and mindless. And faster does not mean better. And the Weapons in CS were nicely balanced. Not in Quake or UT where you just ran around and tried to get the bigger and better gun until you had the rocket launcher. And Quack and UT seemed to be all about frags where in CS I found it more rewarding to beat the other team and get your objectives done and work as a team.
As for story, I don't really care. As long as it's got good gameplay and an online server so I can kill and be killed by living breathing people, then it's all good in my books.
And I do agree with Gekitsu, Game play rules all and that "eyecandy" is secondary. Unfortunatly that's all I found Quack and UT to be, is "eyecandy".

Cheaters killed CS!!!!!!:bash:

BTW these are just my opinions. Don't jump all over me about them. But rebuttals are welcome.

[cucaracha]

I don't think the cheaters killed CS.

I used to play the 1.0b version of CS. The weapons were balanced, you could bunny-hop around and so on.

With the newer versions, every weapon became more accurate and if you join an online-game today its just sniperwars.

You can't see anyone. You just walk around and wait to be shot from a very large distance. Everyone is sitting, camping somewhere, hoping that somebody is stupid enough to leave his position.

Games like Q3 are fun if you want to compete "physically" with your friends/opponents - it's all about fast reaction, jumping around and coordination etc. not only precise crosshair placing while sitting safely in a dark corner.

For teamwork, play Battlefield (the best mp-game up to now).

cu

[gekitsu]

Originally posted by the machine god
CS was one of the best things to happen to FPS's. I find Quake and UT to be frantic and mindless. And faster does not mean better. And the Weapons in CS were nicely balanced. Not in Quake or UT where you just ran around and tried to get the bigger and better gun until you had the rocket launcher. And Quack and UT seemed to be all about frags where in CS I found it more rewarding to beat the other team and get your objectives done and work as a team.


man, no problem with opinions differing from mine :) would be kinda boring if everyone loved the same things, ne? :)

the fun thing is that i see things just the other way:
in cs, i find weapons unbalanced as hell. why would everyone play mp5/grenades or m4/grenades only if it wasn't the ultimate ruling combo?
i agree with you on ut. it's meant to be a runner up on quake but just doesn't get it. it's just everything a huge bunch worse than q. these physics in ut make me wanna vomit. slow, unresponding, indirect, bah...
thing in quake about rcketlauncher is: you can have rl if you want and i promise i wont touch it, and i guess i'll still beat you. that's the clue in q: rl is good allarounder, fine. but it doens't beat rail on reflex shots and delivering damage on large distance. downside is huge reloading time, obviously. or lightning gun: delivers the most damage of all weapons. kills in less than a second are no problem. downside: you have to be constantly aimind directly on your opponent and reach is next to nothing.

so, basically you can beat everything with everything. like rock, paper, scissors, just with variable rocks, papers and scissors.

as for team objectives and such: i always found people not caring about mission objectives in cs since you won the round simply with killing all opponents.

re eyecandy: i promise you, a proper q3 setup, tweaked for ultimate playability looks way worse than cs :) looks like lego, or cubism at best.

but yeah, tastes are different.

i personally found the whole cs scene very annoying and immature. not every player but lotsa 14 or 15 year olds not knowing things about respect and honor.


i had lots of fun playing mechwarrior 4 online with a friend, too. :)
we two germans usually played against far outnumbered teams of americans. super funny since most us players make mechwarrior daishiwarrior and running all around with clumsy 100-ton mechs. we always kicked them with a mech payload half of their weight by simply outrunning them. no one got it and no one found it reasonabl to use anything else than daishi, so it became very one-sided :)

[the machine god]

I found the best game for balanced weapons was Tribes. Everything had it's upsides and it's downsides. Every weapon had a use and wasn't good in every situation. And it had great teamplay. And the jump pack was sooooo much fun. To bad they killed the jump pack in Tribes 2.

As for the sniper wars in CS. I had no problem with People sniping. It was the people who could see through walls and were sniping that bothered me. There were tons of maps that weren't good for sniping and even if people did there were always around it. And the fact that when you went online you could never tell if that guy who just killed you, killed you because he was better or because he was cheating. Anyway my fave part of online FPS's is the teamplay. I guess I just like working with people instead of on my own. :rolleyes:

[wassermelone]

I didn't like CS and loved Q3.
Yet I did have some great experience on CS... But I was a rather crappy player at it.
But most people who talk about how bad the CS community is, has not reached the level of Clan play. My friend has been playing for a long time and his clan was (they broke up because they are just now going to college and find college more important) one of the best in the world. Its very different playing with clans than just hopping on a server and not knowing who the hell your playing with.

But are you kidding me about the whole Rocket Launcher being the only weapon people get? Ive noticed people either get the rocket launcher, the rail gun, or the shotgun (my favorite weapon). I won a couple small tourneys with that shotgun...

Gekitsu: Ugh... Competitive play Q3 graphics were so crappy looking =P

[wood]

Hehe, I think all your guys opinions are valid, but my opinion is...

Quake 2 Rocked, it was awesome, the pinnacle of all of ID softwares creations. Quake 3 sucked balls, it was far worse than quake2 IMHO, Then cam Tribes 1 which was also amazing, it was perfectly balanced weapon wise because there was no one way to win and sniping, though viable, was not the end all strategy. Tribes 2 was fun but not as good. I loved Half-Life btw, it was amazing and the best single player FPS since Duke3d. the deathmatch was alright, but when counterstrike came about it revolutionized multi-player. Not since team fortress in quake 1 had I had soo much fun. TF for HL sucked IMHO. Anyway, I don't like deathmatch anymore because to me it is monotonous to just go around killing people with no penalty for death. In cs you want to win because you don't want to wait around for 3 mins. That makes it more competitive and strategic IMO. anyways cheaters kinda did ruin cs, but it's still good. The reason CS is so strategic also is that in the quake games and many others, your speed and firing tactics don't effect your aim. I think it takes much better reflexes to stop crouch and put 3 bullets in someones head after sneaking around rather than just shooting anything that moves as much as possible.

-Wood

p.s. Half-Life 2 looks amazing and I think the gameplay will be sweet. Also as far as Doom III goes, It looks great and I cant wait for someone to make a good game out of it(a.k.a. license the engine) cause id only makes good engines, recently their games have looked great but sucked(Q3A)...imo hehe

[gekitsu]

Originally posted by wood
...rather than just shooting anything that moves as much as possible.


you won't like to do this anyway when playing seriously.
in a duel, which is THE primal form of competition there is, there is only you and your opponent. no camping will rescue you. no one will not care four you camping somewhere because your opponent has one objective and that is you.
if he's good, he will know with a quite high possibility where you are, so no need to shoot around like a madman to give your position away & waste ammo.

i recently visited a lan where there were some counterstrikers who showed some videos of teh ownzors of cs. well, there came three people through a door and he *gasp* shot them all three!
and he didn't move a bit, just kept his crosshair on the door and fired.

wow.

he watched us play later and was a bit perplexed since in our quake duels or 2on2s, we pulled off maneuvers that were just eye-hand coordination. shooting a rocket behind someone to make him fly towards me, switch to rail and railing him before he started to fly away.
someone jumping out of a teleporter behind me with a doublejump, flying high over me. turning around, switching to lightning gun and shaft him down (ie following the entire course of his jump with crosshair) from 120 yellow armor and 80 health to zero befor he reached ground.
falling from level 2 to ground, flicking in midfall to put a grenade in a bunnyhopping enemy on level 1 -> direct hit.
and we were a) in rapid movement at the time of pulling off things like that and b) we are all far from professional level.

i don't think there is anything like movement involved in cs...

[wood]

hehe, and now, a rebuttle.

I agree that the movement in q3 and others like it can be frantic and have some amazing shots. I'm not saying it's a bad game, I just think it favors reflexes over strategy. In counter-strike, when played properly you don't just wait for people to come out of a doorway, and there is no such thing as splash damage(though grenades do some it's almost negligable) sure in quake3 once in a while you may pull off some spectacular move but much of the time it's just reflex shots around the corner or whatever. I just feel that when you used the word "primal" you were spot on. It's primal and primative, definately a display of reflexes and instinct where as conter-strike is more of a cat and mouse strategical fps. You must out-think your opponent, anticipate his every move, i know some of this is in quake3, such as anticipating somebodies rout to powerups. I have played much quake1 and 2 and a bit of quake3 it just didn't hold my interest. The movement is not as fast as quake1 and the weapons are not as perfectly balanced as quake2, and all in all it's pretty much the same game.

I guess that is why I prefer counter-strike(now that I see my thoughts develope as I write this post) I was just tired of the "Duel" type gameplay, I've been playing FPS's for about 8 years and I was tired of deathmatch and it's bastard stepchildren, I need variety, I need alternate goals, I need some sort of reason to kill the other guy. I like knowing that there is more than one way to win. Quake3 just didn't deliver this. This is not to say I don't see the validity of your points, and if I hadn't been playing deathmatch since doom II maybe I would love quake3 as much as you. I do think there is a crapload of skill that goes into the mastery of games like quake3, I just got tired of practicing and developing that skill, now I want cerebral strategy. I may try raven shield, I heard that game is really good. Plus I kinda have moved on from counter-strike to Planetside. And believe me Planetside is not really about skill, but it is freakin fun. Anyways laterz.

[Pontemonti]

HOLY COW! :eek:

/me orders new PC ;)

[Wolvie]

So sweeet... :nana

[gekitsu]

wood: definitely go for raven shield. it's superb if you're for what is called tactical shooters.

i play it myself, not for honing fighting skills but for the realism it shows. people are stunned for a short while when you blast the door in their room with breaching charges but you will have a hard time actually hitting them since there will be wood splinters and smoke flying around. good ballistics, great damage system.
the ai sometimes sucks a bit but well... human opponents make failures sometimes, too.

if you're a gun nuts, you can get even more out of it, since your knowledge about the weapons will help you a great deal and it's just a dream to see how accurately each weapon, model, physics, sound, animation... is crafted.

re fighting/strategy:
i played fps duelling since quakeworld, although quake 3 certainly took up most of the time spent on a single game. weapon balance and speed of physics was highly improved through the cpma mod that i played only.
opposed to you, i always was the duel type of player. i don't want to work with other people to strike down a team but i want to measure my skills against the skills of someone else.
i find the mental challenge in duels the highest there is... in team games when played really team-y, you won't be facing off single enemies and there isn't room for outthinking people.... it all boils down to plan a, plan b, counterplan c, etcetera...
in duels, i have to play the game twice in my head... my game and the game of my enemy. i have to know where he is all the time of the match, have to know his stats, what he'll most likely be heading for, everything.
unlike team games, there aren't really plans to stick to. your plan shifts and flows with the rhythm of fight. but to each his own :)

i liked tribes 2 a lot, that imho was a game where teamplay really payed off and that was the right scale for defensive or storming team units as well as "lone wolf" kind of players, like snipers or scouts, e.g.
due to size of the game, chances where not bad that you really could sneak in unnoticed somewhere when taking care and being alone. :)
even the good old sniper/spotter tactic seemed to work quite good. (and that is something i missed in lots of action based shooters... )

[cucaracha]

you won't need to @ponte

According to some rumours, it should work already with an Nvidia TNT2 - at lowest quality.

(lucky me, I own a GeForce4 Ti4600)

cu

[Pontemonti]

Originally posted by cucaracha
you won't need to @ponte

According to some rumours, it should work already with an Nvidia TNT2 - at lowest quality.

(lucky me, I own a GeForce4 Ti4600)

cu
Well, of course...if they make sure it's possible to run without all bells and whistles of the latest video cards, it will be possible to run with a TNT2. But with, say a Pentium 300MHz and a TNT2 card, you'll probably only get a frame per second or something out of it :P
And I really don't want to run a game at lowest quality - if I'm going to play it I want it to look good and even more importantly I don't want any stuttering at all. So...I really _have_ to buy a new computer to get it to work. I doubt I will do that just to be able to play a game, though...hehe :D