'The animation doesn't touch HL 2, though (at least not in that clip). The clip is too low res to comment on the player models and textures.. '

Glad to see someone else with a bit of common sense.

'Name an RPG that looks better than Bloodlines'

There isn't one. Yet.

Looks awesome to me, I don't what the problem is... Models and animation are good, a lot of effort has obviously gone in to the adult dialogue and characters are very impressive. Deus Ex on steroids + Vampires = mmmmmmm

Bunko, I'm afraid you'll probably have to wait for Gothic 3 for that kind of richness. Who can blame them though when the gaming press and fanboys alike seem completely oblivious to the fact that Morrowind is a static and insipid world with only tread-milling, hundreds of fed-ex quests and a bazillion cardboard sign-post NPCs to sustain the player's interest. Developers quite simply have little impetuous to improve fundamental problems in their franchise when it is huge cash cow....
This comment was edited on Sep 2, 14:54.

That's all very well phorce phed, but missing a projected date by a year is hardly unusual for a such a big project let alone one with such security catastrophe.

We know both scheduling problems and the hack affected the length of the delay though not which aspects of the project or to what degree. We also don't know to what extent their plans regarding Steam, the Source Ports (particularly CS:S), the WON closure etc etc affected Valve's inner decisions and when HL2 could be released. A lot changes in a year including the audience expectations and average hardware.

The only sensible thing to do is bury the hatchet and evaluate the game on its own merits when it comes out. Though of course, as is only fair, Valve will now have to wheather the inevitable comparisons to D3.
This comment was edited on Jul 29, 01:45.

Ventry, how hard is it to get a friend to burn their relatively recent Steam directory for you? You certainly don't need four hours to download the minor updates.

"They say bullets taste like chicken." - Umm... what?

I thought it was a pretty obvious reference to the matrix. You know - that bit where the kid questions their knowledge of tasty wheat and chicken because the machines could have got it wrong. I'm surprise no one picked up the reference seeing that they directly cite the matrix movies for insipiration..

You're still not getting it. Everything depreciates - especially computer hardware and especially graphics cards - it's a fact of life. Valve has naught to do with this process.

As I said, if you didn't take longevity (including projected depreciation for cyclical upgrades), performance in retail released games, finance, opportunity cost and upgrade path into serious consideration when you got the card then it was a reckless purchase – end of story. You can bitch and moan about promises but nothing is certain ‘till it is in the store so to speak; buyer beware!

FFS it is not like anyone got a bum card that ran everything poorly and only the promise of running HL2 well could possibly justify it. Face it the XT was and still is the best card you can buy. There has been ample time (almost a year) to trade when HL2 was obviously MIA if you really wanted to regain some of the purchasing power of the card’s initial cost.

Oh, sorry I forgot there wasn't/isn't any sense in selling it yet because it is a great card for gaming in general, right? [/sarcasm]
This comment was edited on May 3, 19:19.

I don't understand that point. You still get the game - and the cards are almost universally going to play HL2 as well as indicated. Nothing has changed and you haven't lost anything.

Those who bought their video card solely for the HL2 voucher on a projected release date clearly aren't overly bright. Sensible people weigh up a number of factors when they make a purchase, and the voucher would be just one of several which might tip the balance - eg. their financial situation, a good upgrade path, longevity and performance in released games. If none of those things came up positive in their thinking then frankly they deserve no sympathy.
This comment was edited on May 3, 14:51.

Yet they both share the same engine with its same limitations, and the same grotesque platform "parity" development paradigm. What's more troubling to me is that Randy Smith left the game well before it finished adding fuel to all the speculation about dissent within ISA.

Anyway at least with Thief there is less to stuff up given the relative simplicity of the gameplay...

This comment was edited on May 2, 10:07.

Wazootyman,

It is not that ISA made only one bad game juxtaposed to an almost universally loved GoTY. It is that they unrepentantly believe IW is excellent and that the only reason it is reviled is because of fear of change, PC-centric elitism and a misunderstanding about "real emergent gaming". Funnily enough there are many quotes supporting the fact that Deus Ex's development was something of an accident with its depth and complexity more due to personality clashes, mismanagement and slavish doting on the legacy of SS1&2.

People are fond of letting Harvey take the fall for IW - but Warren approved the decisions and let him cut his teeth. Certainly Warren was and still is adamant that DX gaming should be simplified to the lowest common denominator across all platforms.

It still mystifies me that there are that many game reviewers with such terrible taste to give it an average over 80. How on earth? Unified ammo, cul de sac matchbox levels, severely truncated RPG customisation, non-existant reward mechanics (yay I've got a 5,000 credits and 20 biomods I have absolutely no use for), eliminated complex world interactions (computer interfaces, keypads etc), no tactical combat (reticle etc), nerfed stealth, pathetic character development and pacing, weak side quests, NO conseqeunces for actions (particularly "polar faction bouncing"), crap replayability, even more cliched plot than the original, low res textures. Even the little details - like spelling mistakes and missing digits on keypads. etc etc... The whole game screams mass-market rushed fud.
This comment was edited on May 2, 07:23.

'They did pin the delay largely on the code theft back in October stating that whole parts of the game had to be re-written from scratch.'

Please provide a single link to back that up. Thought not. :p

FYI Valve have continually said the game wasn't ready regardless of the hack, check the HL2.net Valve e-mail thread - Gabe says it repeatedly. This isn't a new admission... Anyway, none of that supports your conspiracy that the hack was an excuse just that Valve's communication was poor leaving people to speculate.

The Facts:
1. The Game and Steam weren't ready
2. A hack occured
3. The "beta" released was not all Valve had

Anything else is purely speculation. IMO the most plausible explanation is that Valve weren't ready (particularly with Steam and most likely content and polishing), then they got hacked and the immediate reponse was damage control. The legal and clean-up consequences were inevitable and compounded an already problematic schedule. Ergo, the target window for audience expectations and pc hardware was lost and a new one would have to be aimed at in order for the game to live up to potential and have a smooth release. HL1 was ONLY a GOTY because it got delayed a year, Valve would have hardly forgotten this.

Regardless, here's one for the x-files nuts, if Valve wasn't anywhere near ready at all then why did they reveal the game at all after all this silence? To deliberately piss fans off ?
This comment was edited on Apr 27, 15:43.

You don't need quicktime to watch qt movies. Just get quicktime alternative for windows media classic...

Drool. Bloodlines is shaping up very well indeed. Those videos are superlative.

Rictor,

Exactly the same slow-motion thing is happening to me. I've got no idea why - so if you find a solution please post it....

This comment was edited on Feb 17, 06:11.

Obviously. But looking at how beautiful it looks (even in that old build) and how well it runs on my aging oced Ti4200 @ 1024x768, I think it bodes very well for the game. It is not a bad unofficial teaser IMO because it only really shows off the environments ( particularly the mad skillz of their texture artists) and the feel of their impressive engine walking around, thereby not spoiling the proper experience with things like full shadows, music, wheather effects, AI, interactions, vehicles, physics, non-placeholder sounds etc etc...

I kind of figured their talk of scalability was the usual bull, but it seems they are genuinely great coders.

I wonder how the team feels now that one of their old little alpha builds has been leaked by some naughty journalists. At least we can be thankful it wasn't the source code or anything significant...
This comment was edited on Dec 30, 13:44.

Good to see I'm not the only one who thinks Ildon is trying to use black and white demarcations about what constitutes a 'new engine' which don't stand up if they're actually employed consistently, given they would mean a vast revision of what most gamers commonly regardly as 'new' outside the rolling Unreal tech (which is a special case).

btw - you never mentioned LOD scaling, netcode, facial animation, nor HDR & specular lighting - which are all NEW engine tech. Furthermore, even if you say that DOT3 bump-mapping and higher polys are common it doesn't change the fact that the engine has vastly different capabilities IN TOTALITY. Also, I only mentioned the 200 PS2.0 shaders to re-emphasise that it fairly cutting edge compared to the rest of the TWIMTBP handi-capped shader use we see in game now and on the horizon...

Anyway, whatever. If you have an axe to grind because some 12year-old HL2 fanboy stepped on your toes in a former life, so be it. Engine design is about compromises to produce a particular experience on a particular range of hardware. I happen to think Source makes compromises in the right areas, and emphasises things I can be excited about - you're free to disagree. But all this drama queen carring on about lying and other companies laughing at them, Bloodlines being a a nothing title, it is frankly very puerile.
This comment was edited on Dec 19, 18:39.

For a minute there I thought you might actually offer an intelligent argument about the evolutionary nature of the engine. Alas it was not to be. But still I must thank you for perfectly defining the expression fashionable fanboy bias.

Oh, you forgot the other 'mere' additions.. ah...like maybe an order of magnitude higher the poly counts, completely new LOD system, new netcode, new facial animation system, 200 ver PS 2.0 shaders (more advanced than both STALKER and Doom3), specular illumination and HDR effects, bump mapping (DOT3), the new spacial audio system... Yeah sure apart from JUST those meaningless little things, it is exactly like HL1.

btw- Troika are hardly nobody.
This comment was edited on Dec 19, 08:32.

I wouldn't put Valve in anywhere near the same company as 3DRealms.

Valve certainly botched their Steam release, but at least we know they are regularly working to improve it. I'll be very surprised if it doesn't have offline play and p2p when HL2 comes out. Also WON still exists atm so there really is no problem there.

As for CZ - Value kept outsourcing the game to various companies and rejecting the mediocre results, so I can't fault them for the crap made by third parties. Who cares about old generation CS these days anyway?

In contrast to Valve, 3DRealms haven't produced a modern 3d game at all, let alone a GoTY. Duke3d was great gameplay for its time, but there can only be so much love for a 2d cliche peroxide misogynist. :p I'll admit to being impressed by the E3 video, but having to sell IP and whore mother out to maintain wages for a 7 year development cycle on a game - most of which has been wasted updating art assets and piss-farting around with engine swaps. Hard to respect that without tangible evidence of progress.

Oh, in what way is Source not a new engine?

Give me a break. Don't put words in my mouth. I said the hacker did not get the build resources for HL2 which match E3 let alone September. I never denied there wasn't CZ and CS2, TF2 et al related code and other up-to-date ENGINE code in there. I never made a claim about two separate times the hacker compromised the network either.

You clearly know very little about game development if you don't think there would be lots of old/mismatched proof-of-concept folders, un-compiled resources, branching dev trees and other inaccessible offline files etc. The fact is the hacker put together an ad hock stolen build based around recent engine code WITH proof-of-concept / demo resources that aren't representative of HL2's progress. I'm not denying that HL2 may be incomplete or not up to the level of polish that Valve wants, I just think it is completely asinine the way some people uncritically accept the word of a petty hacker against the *gasp* evil corporation, when the contrary evidence is overwhelming.

This comment was edited on Dec 15, 19:56.