Gabe Newell - Valve Software

Driverheaven.net: When making Half-Life 2, did it ever cross your mind that you might not be able to make it as successful as Half-Life?

Gabe Newell: We usually don't think in terms of success, more in terms of living up to the community's expectations. We certainly have been really worried about living up to expectations and paying everyone back for the support they've shown us over the years.

Driverheaven.net: Is Half-Life 2 similar to Half-Life in terms of the plot, leaving you on your own running in whatever direction you see fit until arriving at your next objective? And how will the level design enhance this aspect of the game, does the player have the option to choose multiple routes through the game or is it more linear than that; maybe one or two routes available?

Gabe Newell: To steal and paraphrase a line from Sid Meier, games are a collection of interesting choices. We want to give the player lots of interesting choices, but they grow more out of the character interaction, AI, physics, and so on (the things we can simulate to a fine granularity to give the associated level of fine-level player choices) than they do out of tree-branching level or plot structures (things we can't simulate yet). Tree-branching in things like technology trees seems to work well; tree-branching in things like levels or plot seem to work poorly.

Driverheaven.net: From the video previews that have been released its clear that the graphics in Half-Life 2 are going be amazing. How does Half-Life 2 will live up to the original in terms of atmospheric sound? Half-Life was very scary at times, what advancements in technology have there been since Half-Life that you feel have added to the gaming experience sound wise?

Gabe Newell: Kelly has been developing the notion of soundscapes, which turn out to be pretty powerful. It's more in the direction of an AI foley artist than a synthesized score. I like what he's done a lot, as the effects seem to disappear in terms of your conscious awareness of sound, and instead you just get the emotional impact of them. That sounds
horrendously vague, so I'll try to give a concrete example. Let's say there's a hole in the ground. Let's say there's a basic set of 3D ambients playing (creaking, procedurally varying wind sounds). As you come up to the hole, there's an entity placed at the bottom of the hole, and when it can see you it fires and says "put the scary low rumbling tone into the mix" and it gets added in. Most of the time people won't be able to tell you "oh, that's when the sound showed up" but they will tell you that things got a lot scarier all of a sudden and they're not sure why. When they jump into a hole, there's a crescendo that gets added in that peaksas they hit the ground. There are blended transistions between ambient scapes, so as you move away from the scary things, the scary sounds become less prominent, and get replaced by more pastoral "let's go explore" sounds.

Driverheaven.net: From a developer's perspective when creating Half-Life2 how did the major graphics card companies assist in resolving any issues? Were they quick to respond with driver fixes or technical responses, and would you have hoped for more input from them?

Gabe Newell: If you look at the surveys we've done of the hardware our customers have (on Speakeasy.net), there are two companies that dominate - NVIDIA and ATI. We've spent a lot of time working with both companies. Right now for the DX9 generation, ATI is significantly ahead in terms of absolute performance and price/performance. We are working pretty hard with NVIDIA to try to optimize the situation with regards to getting their performance up to snuff. We spend more of our time with ATI working on new features like high-dynamic range rendering (HDR) which is a new technique to create more life-like lighting.

Driverheaven.net: On average, how long did it take to create each part of the game, such as the engine, the maps, the weapons, the missions, script etc.? And how many people have been involved in creating the game?

Gabe Newell: We actually don't keep super close tabs on that stuff that way as we tend to iterate and revisit stuff over the course of the project. For example some of our models were "finished" four years ago, but now that we have the rest of the game, we are going back and doing another pass on them to bring them up to the same art standards as the rest of the game, simply because our art has matured over the process of creating Half-Life 2. We share a lot of pieces in the company. The Source engine is being developed and used by both Half Life 2 and Team Fortress
2. The same is true for the tools. The Steam group is building the UI and VGUI 2, which is incorporated into Half-Life 2. If you count everybody who has touched something that will go into Half-Life 2, then that's most of the company (we're at around 85 people right now).

Driverheaven.net: Half Life 2 will obviously push the boundaries in PC gaming, when your team is in the process of coding/creating the game, do you keep a constant focus on your targeted minimum or recommended hardware, or do you let the game specify the minimum requirements and recommended hardware as it develops?

Gabe Newell: You have to pay attention to this throughout the course of development - from how you architect scalability into your engine all the way to final art polish on the maps, models, audio, or other assets. Any time you stop paying attention to this constraint, it gets out of control and then you have to spend a lot more time trying to push the lizard back into the cage.

Driverheaven.net: As with any design process, some ideas live on throughout the entire design, and others get cut early on for various reasons, ranging from lack of hardware support to incompatibility with the goals of the design. What are some of the ideas that were cut that you wish you could have implemented, and if any of them were cut because of a lack of hardware support, what do you think will happen with these concepts in future games and future technology?

Gabe Newell: The coolest technology that we cut was the image-based rendering techniques that Gary McTaggart was working on. It would have opened some very cool design choices for us. I'm pretty sure we'll see that used in the future.

Driverheaven.net: There have been rumours that the gravity gun seen in the tech demos will not be a featured weapon in the game as it is there to demonstrate the physics engine. If this is the case will there be a hidden option or a mod that would allow players to activate it. Additionally are there any plans for post-release improvements and additions to Half-Life2?

Gabe Newell: If you have physics in a game, you need to give the player the ability to have inputs into that system in order to create gameplay.

Driverheaven.net: What do you feel is more important in the user interface:
Many controls that provide finer control, but are perhaps less intuitive and more complicated or a minimalist interface that provides more intuitive and simpler control of the game?

Gabe Newell: I'm not sure that is a valid dichotomy. Most UI problems are not the result of too many or too few knobs, but of a failure to correctly internalize the user experience.

Driverheaven.net: How much support does Valve plan on providing modders, indirectly through SDKs and other interfaces, and directly through support and question answering through developers?

Gabe Newell: This is an area we plan on investing a lot of time and energy. We can't wait to see what the MOD community does with Source.

Driverheaven.net: Finally, what games have the Valve staff been playing in recent times and when making Half-Life 2 did any of these games inspire/influence ideas in Half-Life 2?

Gabe Newell: Just about everything we play is grist for the mill. Bad games that do things wrong are often more helpful in making the design issues obvious than good games.

Interview conducted by Stuart "Veridian3" Davidson

 

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