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Half-Life 2 and Steam?

gunner154

By gunner154
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gunner154

gunner154

Posted
Posted

What do you think about Half-Life 2, a singleplayer game, being run through Steam in order to get it started, as compared to how Westwood games ran (normal installation, update only when you want to play online, etc.)?

Just wanting to know everyone's opinion.

Cyborg

Cyborg

Posted
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I think all three solutions are good.

Steam is actually working great now.

Blizzard's updaters are good.

Westwood's patch system was the worst, but you didn't really need to patch their games unless you played online.

Kiyouta

Kiyouta

Posted
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It should, but Valve aren't very good at stable or flexible programming. They make a update system which allows them to repair code automatically at a later date but unfortunately the update system is buggy too. Ahh well. Steam isn't too bad these days though.

gunner154

gunner154

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Well, wasn't Half-Life pretty stable by itself? Why can't Half-Life 2 be the same? Does Steam allow them room for mistakes that are possibly rectifiable in future?

gunner154

gunner154

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Well, of course. But a singleplayer should be stable enough when it comes in the box. Patches for the singleplayer function are terribly wrong. It's something you can playtest over and over again and spot errors easily, unlike multiplayer.

Jack Leaf

Jack Leaf

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Retail Half-Life 2 would indeed be stable enough, but Valve wants to hold its users in an iron grip and ensure that something as bad as the theft of the source code won't happen ever again.

Steam itself works extremely well when it actually works, and admittedly lately it has, but when it's in angry mood something bad is bound to happen. The bliss of fast Internet connections...

erjin999

erjin999

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Posted

Well, of course. But a singleplayer should be stable enough when it comes in the box. Patches for the singleplayer function are terribly wrong. It's something you can playtest over and over again and spot errors easily, unlike multiplayer.

Whats different about multiplayer except the connection between the computers ? Why cant they test on LAN ?

Its the same game, juts some slightly different scenario, a link between two comps not just one...  :O

erjin999

erjin999

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By freedom, what do you mean ? Freedom to choose human opposition ? Thats true, you dont have that, so any issues should relate to that part of the online play (even that can be tested).

I know no software is perfect so I can understand patches being needed for SP and MP...

Look at emp on 1.04, where the drones were superfast and could out run AA.. :-

Jack Leaf

Jack Leaf

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Multiplayer can't be tested throughoutly no matter what. Balancing is always an issue, and a thing people complain about. Winter Assault (and the new patch) feels like an entirely differeng game from the one I got in December 2004...

Whats storyline got to do with patching problems ?

Nuvollari probably means that in singleplayer there is always a path given for the player (minus the few games that give the player 'total freedom,' but usually it is largely false). In multiplayer, however, there is no specific route for the player to follow and game play is the more complex the more players there are. Human players are also much more able to do complex movements, strategies, exploiting and cheating than any computer-controlled enemy.

Singleplayer is always at least somehow buggy because no developer has time to develop the game forever - the game NEEDS to be released before the publisher goes ballistic or the coders begin to starve.

erjin999

erjin999

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Shure, but all those things can be tested as much as the single player can be tested. The only thing they cannot test is the connection specific issues.

they can have lots of humans play together on their lans to see what thye can come up with. Agreed, they wont nail all the bugs, but why should nuvo accept multiplayer as being buggy and possibly needing patches but not single player ? Beats me..

Andrew

Andrew

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Hmm, my friend bought an AMD 64 bit processor and got HL2 for free with it. He needed to use steam to download the game. Was a slow download, needed to wait overnight to play it. Great game (as I'm used to games with low graphics). But on his custom built machine it was great, even though we couldn't turn up the quality for some things for some reason.

Steam was definitely confusing to use.

Jack Leaf

Jack Leaf

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they can have lots of humans play together on their lans to see what thye can come up with. Agreed, they wont nail all the bugs, but why should nuvo accept multiplayer as being buggy and possibly needing patches but not single player ? Beats me..

Well, I didn't really understand her that way. She's just saying that it's easier to eliminate singleplayer bugs than the ones in multiplayer. I support my argument with the fact that while singleplayer is played only one person, multiplayer has multiple players and thus things happen only the way the players play meaning that spotting bugs is harder than in singleplayer where computer is always the enemy. For example, in an FPS game a missing script sequence or incorrect patrolling waypoints are easier to spot than balancing issues in multiplayer since it is largery based on the skill of the players. Big beta tester groups don't prove anything. Also - remember that such luxury as unlimited developement time is usually impossible.

Yup...It took me 3-4 hours to update CS SOURCE

The installation of HL2 is one of my worst gaming memories... Steam crashed several times and at the same moment, the ISP started to whine about some totally nonexistant problem. It took me even five minutes to find the small print "Install Half-Life 2"... really, it was painful.

gunner154

gunner154

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I think now that I've discovered what a great game Battlefield 2 is (just by playing the demo), I'll give Half-Life 2 a miss. HL2 will take up more time than BF2 anyway ;)

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