This is really sad news, but it's amazing how much of a profound impact he left on so many players, and without a doubt on so many past, current, and future artists.
Its just Eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s.
You'll really resonate with Remedy's Control and the Metro series if you haven't already played them.
I don't think any game has made me feel more like "this really is a forsaken desolate place" like Velen in The Witcher 3.
Sometimes I'd just hang out in either Firelink Shrine or Majula just for the music. And Majula's daily twilight moments are beautiful.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane haha!
The metro games are amazing though. Especially awakening in VR.
Such an interesting detail and I totally missed it!
The original? I thought the first person story telling mode of HL1 was really mind blowing.
HL2 was more refined, and the art style did help elevate the story telling.
Every game up until then had been full of 100% static assets and suddenly you could just pick up and throw anything with realistic physics
That said I still prefer HL1 overall. Its more high impact and brutal. There's nothing in HL2 that's quite like accidentally blowing away a black mesa scientist and having gore spray everywhere. HL1 is just viscerally more violent, and also I dislike how NPCs in HL2 have basically deified Gordon and constantly suck him off. In HL1 the security guards are bros but the scientists treat you with annoyance. I get the whole subplot of freed vortegants turning you into a heroic figure, but I think that's just a thin plot excuse for Valve's decision to make the player feel like a special person. Also all of the "girlfriend simulator" stuff is cringe that aged poorly.
That's not really it at all, it's the G-man's machinations that turn him into a "heroic figure". If anything he's more comparable to Paul Atreides. The Vorteguants just temporarily release him from the G-man's grasp in HL2:E1, but that barely lasts to the next episode.
He's a pawn of whatever game the G-Man is playing, and was unleashed as sort of an unwitying agent of chaos on Breen and the Combine ("the right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world").
> Also all of the "girlfriend simulator" stuff is cringe that aged poorly
Huh?
In Half Life 1 you start with a dogshit reputation and insofar as you gain any reputation with the NPCs its because you've progressed through the game to earn it. The scientists treat you like base labor in the beginning, then come to see you as useful, as a fighter, after you prove it. The soldiers start without knowing who you are, but after you tear your way through their ranks they start hating you by name.
In Half Life 2, all the NPCs you meet act like you're already a famous hero and there's really no indication in the game that this comes from g-man propaganda rather the vortegants and/or the black mesa scientists. In HL2 both the vorts and the scientists make a point of saying they owe Gordon a lot. The natural read on this, given the context of the first two games and not any later retcons, is that the scientists or vorts have basically deified you. Mossman talks about how she wishes she could have worked with you at Black Mesa as though you were not just a war hero but also a legendary scientist. What scientific achievements did Gordon have at Black Mesa? He pushed samples around and showed up late for work. What kind of stories were the other scientists telling her about you? Also Alyx starts hitting on you right away.
Whatever the plot justifications for it, clearly there was a commercial motivation of pandering to the player. It aged poorly.
I always felt embarrassed by the attention in HL2, more than ego-stroked. It’s awkward in-game but intentionally so, in my mind. Like with that Mossman line, Gordon is a nobody scientifically and famous for other reasons so that line says more about Mossman’s vanity and ego than anything about Gordon.
I was about 15, HL2 was my first "real" video game that I bought with money, the xbox did not exist in my country and I've never heard of game achievements before. In the second last act of the game, in the push towards the citadel through waves and waves of combine, I was low on ammo, and stresses out. I picked up my gravity gun and started lobbing junk to the enemies to get away from them. I picked up a toilet and chucked it into a whole pile of combine. As I paused to have a brief chuckle about the absurdity, Steam chimed with that achievement.
It was as if GabeN Himself looked over my shoulder and went "heh, nice" when I did it. Truly magical and a gaming highlight for me.
Ye. It is hard to remember how stale games used to be with "story parts" and "game play parts".
Small things like "two scientist runs towards you. One is eaten by head crab zombie unless you save him really fast" -- all these kind of small scripted events added so much. And fluently playing the whole mess up experiment and then try to escape overarching story.
But I've also gone back further than that in Bungie's back catalogue, having recently been playing Marathon 2 and Marathon ∞ (winner of the MacFormat(?) magazine award for "largest version number increase between successive releases") on Steam, and… well, 2 has still-interesting levels, but Infinity's levels are a spatially confusing mess.
Relevant PA: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/11/28/the-rest-of-th...
I feel the same, but incidentally one of the ones that blew my away like HL2 was Dishonored.
Level design is something that is often there as a way to simply service the gameplay. You make sections that enable to game loop. Half Life 1 is designed this way: set pieces for aliens and marines to have interesting encounters.
Viktor designed levels that felt part of worlds that are lived in. City 17, where Half Life 2 takes place, feels like a believable dystopia. With evil guards and propaganda and a looming techno tower of Sauron.
Dishonored pushed this even further, with levels that not only are equally well presented, but can be traversed in so many creative ways. It’s a sandbox for the mind.
Rip, your work was brilliant and inspiring.
Dishonored is kind of a spiritual successor to the Thief series, several team members from Looking Glass went on to work at Arkane. It's one of those rare times I've felt like I was playing a video game, yet still fully immersed. Every feature surprised or delighted me, nothing felt out of place. It felt very polished and ahead of its time despite its raw nature. The gameplay of the first two titles holds up very well. Make sure to consult PCGamingWiki for critical compatibility patches
If you have experience with games, play on expert, seriously. Thief makes the game harder by adding objectives and constraints, not just stat scaling. There’s a couple levels that have bullshit secrets to find or loot requirements, but overall it encourages exploration. I played expert my first time based on a post like this one and I was so so glad I did.
The controls and mechanics feel cumbersome at first because it’s such a different game than the usual halo/cod/unreal-influenced FPS. Until you get used to them and the mechanics don’t feel bad about save scumming.
Play with original graphics, don’t use texture mods (at least for a first playthrough). Once you get used to the old graphics, the art direction really comes together, and IMO it’s right up there with Dishonored.
The gameplay pitch is thus: LG wanted to make a mechanics-based DnD-like class based RPG videogame. Elder-scrolls is stat-based RPG: your character levels up in-game and their stats go up. If you go to your friend’s place, you don’t take any of that with you, it’s tied to the digital save file/avatar/character. Contrast this with fighting games, which are mechanics based: the characters are consistent and do not change. You get better at the game and accomplish more by learning the mechanics.
So as you get good at thief, you are leveling up. You can go to your friend’s house, take over playing and say “watch this shit” and pull some crazy stunt.
LG started building the mechanics for a thief class and realized they had nowhere near enough capital to make all the other classes. But they already had a pretty fun game. This is why Thief 1 has tons of different environments and locales and thief 2 is more focused on places a thief would be likely to go.
Thanks for that tip, will definitely remember it when I get around to playing it
The original Thief would largely be considered an immersive sim whereas Dishonored is a very well fleshed out stealth game with masterful vertical level design. Prey (2017) feels like a great mash-up of both games. I'd put the original Deus Ex and Human Revolution in there as well, though they also include rpg elements.
Let's gather for whiskey and cigars tonight, in honor of Viktor.
Only game I ever did that with in my life.
The credits song "Honor for All" was the cherry on top as well, it was like I'd been holding my breath the whole game until that moment when the story closed out so perfectly (spoilers for good ending: https://youtu.be/IM7TBRdferM?t=26).
I got the same feeling from GW2's ending song/credits "Fear not this Night" (https://youtu.be/HuwXaAIenJw?t=28).
The Ori games also have such amazing narrative/music, too. (Ending spoilers for the first game: https://youtu.be/Kx9DPTIDB_0?t=232).
Little bit spammy so my apologies, but I just love it when a game's narrative, art and music all come together to make some special. Ori makes me bawl my eyes out to this day. And Dishonoured I felt like I was actually living in Dunwall the entire time, all credit to Viktor Antonov.
"Shall we gather for whisky and cigars tonight?"
half life 2 and team fortress 2 and the subsequent intro into the source engine... i really needed them at that time.
Viktor dying makes me sad
It was all thanks to Antonov. And Half-Life 2 was (aesthetically) so much more memorable than the first game thanks to that influence.
The chaos/karma system also functions as a good counterweight to the "stealth archer" game design problem so player aren't heavily incentivised toward clearing levels by separating enemies and killing them one by one thereby removing all obstacles until the emptied out game is nothing but a boring walking simulator.