I thought your discussion about “will we be playing HL2 in 6 years” was an interesting one, and it carries a certain resonance with me as I am still active in the Quake (1) community after what feels like an eternity :)

I think you guys hit the nail on the head with your thoughts, the longevity of any game at the end of the day comes down to the community surrounding it and what tools are available, in Quake’s case we have access to literally everything, including John Carmacks sometimes hilarious code commenting, so we have had the luxury of being able to completely change the game engine to suit our requirements where needed. I find it interesting that Valve has not done this for Goldsrc yet, but I can see why perhaps as they still tweak and patch various things on Steam for Goldsrc games occasionally. I suppose they are still including Half-Life in steam retail packages also which makes releasing the engine source questionable (perhaps?).

It would be very interesting to see what Goldsrc modders could do if they were given access to the engine code, I know for a fact that some of the most impressive mods & maps for Quake have shipped with their own executable and they have really pushed the limits of what is possible in the game, and by doing so inadvertently inspired others to create even greater works themselves. It would be great to hear some opinions from Goldsrc modders on what they would do with the engine source, what barriers could be broken through and what directions they would take their respective mods.

Now then, just quickly, I have a minor niggle with some of your podcasts, the volume differences between each participants voices is sometimes really huge, which makes listening late at night quite difficult :) I think I have a nice volume level whereby I can hear whats being said while not keeping the neighbours up, but while Phillips voice is usually very clear and at a good volume level, others seems to be very quiet or extremely loud by comparison.

I enjoyed the show, enjoyed what you had to say and look forward to hearing ya on a future episode!

@CubicVirtuoso: Please don’t apologize for saying that Night Terror was for Half-Life 2 Episode 1, I think there was a bit of a misunderstanding when Phillip read a comment where I said that Night Terror used the Ep1 engine, which isn’t necessarily Half-Life 2 Episode 1. But I’m not to fussed about it, I’m weighing up the pros and cons for porting this map over to Half-Life 2 Ep1, not that its a big job at all, just be nice to take advantage of the new entities and such but I want to target the largest possible audience for this map and don’t want to cloud out people that don’t own Ep1.

I bought the original game for 98 cents on Wednesday and the game is Awesome! But in my opinion is not as good as HL2. But this game is better than 98 percent of all shooters even today. This will also be a new favorite for me.

@Scott: I think you have explained your point rather clearly. You certainly have a valid opinion, I just don’t think companies should abandon singleplayer because they have a “foothold” I believe its unethical and doesn’t do justice for a subset of gamers. I’m not saying Valve is doing that, but I believe there are some dev groups out there who just don’t care about singleplayer anymore. I think L4D will bring our community into a new genre of gaming, more and more games will concentrate on the “coop” experience; which is extremely needed. Also this whole notion of “a million different gameplay types; ala Call of Duty” will be abolished with simpliar “you get what you get” gameplays like L4D.

@mel: Even though your post was directed towards Phillip I like to comment and try to defend him to the best of my abilities. I always love reading your posts because they are thoughtful and intelligent. Phillip has outlined other reasons throughout various podcasts as to why he doesn’t like Heart of Evil, unfortunately he wasn’t able to define other reasons, other than: “I don’t like zombies”, as to why he disliked “They Hunger”. But I still think this is a valid reason. He really doesn’t like zombies and that’s fine, it’s like some people who don’t like say… Mechs; so they dislike all mech games; or teletubbies… or kittens. Sometimes I wonder why Phillip dislikes some of the mods he dislikes and likes some of the ones he likes; this is why Phillip is so mysterious to me :P I personally enjoy it and I love picking his brain, he is certainly a “singleplayer” thru and thru which is why I think he is great on the show.

@aaron: I think there might of been some confusion or lack of clarity. In my opinion people originally got excited for Halo3 because of the singleplayer, but lets face it… that lasts for a mere 2 days (at most).. it’s the multiplayer that draws the players attention and its the multiplayer that keeps halo famous. No one ever says Half-Lifes multiplayer is incredible they always say it has an intriguing story line that keeps them asking for more and sparking creativity. Of course it is the mods that are associated with Half-Life that have the keen multiplayer, but even then… they aren’t as big as the current Halo franchise… maybe because Half-Life is like fine wine and Halo is like a cheap beer. I know us at podcast17 can’t wait for the next release of Night Terror and I apologize for saying it was for EP1; I think I still might hold out for the final though. I think it’s great that you released a demo and from the looks of it, it wasn’t the first few levels of the final game; and this is the real way to release a demo and I encourage more of this… a perfect example of demo release is the Half-Life Uplink demo… it really has nothing to do with the game, doesn’t spoil the storyline, but it shows the engine, features, and mapping style. I for one am still on the fence on whether I like multiplayer or singleplayer better. I think at heart I still enjoy singleplayer better than multiplayer, but multiplayer (with a good group of online friends) is slowly catching up. I personally love sitting in my basement alone playing a good singleplayer mod and drinking frangelico… maybe that’s because I’m an only child… and maybe an alcoholic? lawlz

@firba1: ” I don’t think that L4D will be fun for it’s gameplay, but rather the “Counter-Strike” aspect: goofing around with people on the internet.” I will have to disagree with you on this one. The only time i goof around with people in L4D is when we have cheats on, otherwise it’s strickly buisness and stategy. Maybe I am just playing with a specific group of people, I think once L4D has evolved a bit more there will be more of that goofing around.

@ducksauce: we didn’t get your email, but I’m assuming it was about Fragout. We will be talking about it this week.

@azelito: I agree with you that this year has been a lot about multiplayer, but those games you talk about; DeadSpace, Mirrors Edge, Fallout3 will be lost in the sea of multiplayer games that will reign popularity. DeadSpace has already lost its flavour and you rarely see it in the media anymore, Mirrors edge only just came out and same with Fallout3 so we will be hearing about that for a bit longer, but they will soon fade as well. I just wish there was a way to increase the lifecycle of singleplayer games.

@Everyone else: Thanks for all the kind words your support and comments is what drives me to do these types of podcasts! For the community by the community.

In response for the two people who bought Halo 3 for the story, good on you for enjoying because most people can’t myself included. Working at a game store I am exposed to the gaming demograph and I actually did a mini poll one day and asked my customers if they had bought Halo 3 and why. They provided me with the answer of the multiplayer. Just as a heads up that I didn’t pull that out of my backside.

At the end of the day, we all have our opinions and some of us are louder than others and in different numbers. I hope you guys enjoyed the rest of the podcast and enjoyed something I had to say. :-)

Cheers and I hope to return at a later date,

Tom

On the subject of games today focusing more on multi-player I have to disagree. Several of the biggest triple-A-titles released this autumn has their sole focus on single-player (Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge, Fallout 3 to name a few).
I get the feeling that now is the time for single-player games more than ever before (post-internet-era of course), with multi-player often meaning you can play “single-player” campaigns in co-op mode.
The games of this autumn, with their well written scripts and enormous attention to detail (read Dead Space), take so much work to complete. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there used to be two or three ambitious games like this a year. The fact that we’re seeing so many of them show us what a huge market games are nowadays.
That is most likely, as you addressed in an earlier transmission, the reason why the mod community seems to have cooled down. I get the feeling it hasn’t though, but rather that it has spread over a wider spectra of games.

So yeah, great podcast…