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They are out… They are out before Half-Life 3…
Fun fact:
There was actually 4 games planned with the fourth one being an epic End Game style cross over finally of Portal, TF, Left for Dead, CS, and Half Life all coming together to fight the combine But unfortunately the series only had a Half Life and decayed down to 2 games in each series.
I want this to be real
I think portal was supposed to be in the HL2 universe, at least at some point… obviously l4d and tf2 are not.
They are canonically in the same universe, there are references to Black Mesa in Portal 2
When I die, I’m gonna close my eyes and dream of this.
Lol we got affordable multi terabyte SSDs before HL3
I haven’t bought a non-NVMe drive in the last 5 years.
Get a NAS.
Well, Petabyte drives are out there for a while. I think their price drop is imminent.
Oh really? I’m assuming not in a consumer form factor? If so that’s completely passed me by
This is as much of a valid complaint now as it was back then.
There is absolutely no excuse for games now to be over 100GB in storage space. Unless you have the longest game ever that span across like 1 and a half “normal” game lengths. The biggest games now should be 60GB or less. So many developers refuse to compress things that could be compressed with zero noticeable loss in quality except for maybe a camera being really close to an object with an 8k display resolution.
At the absolute worst, do what games used to do for like 6 months before not caring: make the game for 1080p players, compression and all, then offer a free DLC with all the uncompressed stuff. At least make the storage feast optional.
I mean, if the base game folder is .8 Gb, then aren’t their 3 mods the 1 Gig culprit? That’s a moddev issues and not many are concerned about optimizations.
Edit: I did misread the bit about the original game size.
You did misread but you’re probably also still correct. The modded game files are 1.82 total while the previous version of the game was 0.837, while I don’t know for sure what the newer version filesize was it was still an odd complaint for them to make.
A lot of that is shadows and lighting data, sometimes in unusual data structures without readily available compression methods. Compressing textures also impacts load times, obviously decompressing 10gb of jpgs could take a while. Still probably there are good compression methods and good tradeoffs to make, if any AAA studios actually cared about storage space (They do care a lot about GPU memory, just not storage space).
I wish games would release with low/medium, up to 1024x1024 textures and stuff by default and let people choose to download/install higher res stuff. If I’m not going to use the 4k pack, I don’t need it sitting on my hard drive
Reminds of the those shitty Battlefront Remasters with upscaled 8 or 4k textures or whatever it was. Games went from being less than 5gbs to being 60 gb or something like that.
I was about to say, I recognize that name… Then I saw forum name and the year…
I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago…
Kids these days don’t know how to have a proper brick party in forums anymore.
I hope 100 TB drives are out by the time HL3 comes out.
By the time H3 comes out your great great great grand children will be reminiscing about how games once were about gameplay and plot and not the 100th version of Call of Duty or Assassins Creed. I’d say Madden too but let’s face it no one will play it 150 years from now unless it’s VR.
Nah, I’m willing to bet HL3 will come out (at the latest) 5 years after Gaben’s death. Not because he’s witholding it, obviously, but because whoever comes next will probably try to make as much money as possible and that’s an easy first way to do it.
It’s gonna suck when Steam immediately enshitifies to the max after he dies.
I’m still holding out hope that Valve becomes a worker-owned coop when Gaben goes. Internally they’ve been structured that way for years, without traditional “management,” everyone having moving desks where they work on whatever they feel motivated by and most useful at, etc.
unless its VR
I thought the same thing about touchscreens when they first came out. I really did think they were the future of gaming. Seemingly limitless buttons in limitless combinations. Touch and drag game pieces directly, action and vision in the same place.
Turns out gaming on mobile is shit. So so shit.
Maybe VR will end up the same way. Its pretty neat now while its still new and shiny, but maybe it never actually reaches potential.
Its pretty neat now while its still new and shiny
The current crop of VR tech dates back to 2012, not exactly what I’d consider new and shiny
I hope not
1.82 GB out of 160 GB and they are worried. Imagine how they feel now with 500 gb and 1 TB drives with some AAA games being 250 GB.
I’m old enough that I got HL2 in a retail box, when it was new.
and the fucking disks installed the game encrypted, and I could not use my computer until the next day, due to it thrashing my HDD and CPU so hard to decrypt the files that my computer was functionally useless that evening, and overnight.
now THAT was some bullshit.
This was too, cause I remember steam games bloating with temp files back in the day and regularly having to clear out the folder so you had HDD space.
Me too. I still have it.
Edit:
HOLY SHIT!! I’ve been missing my civ II disc for 20 years. It was in my half life 2 box!!!
I miss box games.
I miss feelies.
Same.
And this spurs me to bring up the lie of digital purchases… Which was sold to us on the promise of cheap games. We were promised that if we gave up on physical games, then the devs/publishers wouldnt have to pay for printing manuals/boxes, packaging of games, warehouses to store them, and the cost of shipping to get them to the stores/consumers… Which meant they could sell games for lower costs, that game prices would plumet to 25-30 dollars for brand new day 1 releases… and devs/publishers would still get a bigger chunk of revenue/more money from that, than from the old 50 dollar physical big box games with all the feelies, delicious manuals, disks that meant you can install the game however you want, whenever you want, etc etc.
Instead, what digital purchases have gotten us is… a total lack of ownership, that our games can be taken away from us at any time, for any reason, because buried in all the legalese we don’t “own” anything, we just have a “lease”…and for that, we’ve been given the right to pay 10-20 dollars more for games than what they cost during the physical game era, and the risk of the platform disappearing and taking our or games with it (which I’ve already ran afoul of and drastically altered how i buy games)
Congrats on finding your Civ2 disc! Do you have a drive to see if it still works?
Yeah I’ll have to hook it up soon. :) I’m just stoked that I found it haha.
I remember when Steam came out and everyone hated it because of how slow and buggy it was. Crazy how times have changed.
The client is still rather resource intensive, it’s just that computers have gotten so much faster that you don’t notice it.
Now, if Valve would ever deal with the download and sync issues, that would be nice.
Steam is still slow and buggy.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Steam used to be slick and fast before it changed over to chromium and started trying to become a social media platform… also wish it had a simplified legacy version so people could still run it on older OSes to run the games they own that only run on older OSes. but apparently thats a super controversial topic that makes people unhinged
I still have my 3 disk box
I still have my original box/CDs too… i have no idea where they are, but I know i have them…somewhere.
Few things more precious
I got a code with my 9600XT, it was delayed so long the card was pretty much outdated by the time it came out, but I still had the code that came with it!
Pretty sure I was able to pre load it on steam before release day, I remember I took the day off work just to play it.
That bridge level still, to this day, fires every one of my acrophobic neurons.
did counter-strike 2 come with half life? i vaguely remember half life but i remember counterstrike 2 being played a lot in the dorm floor in uni. i feel like i remember them being connected some how but i can’t recall.
No, Counterstrike 2 came out a couple years ago.
before that was global offensive.
the counter strike that came with HL2 was Counterstrike Source.
CS:S was such a phenominal game… So many years of nights spent staying up till 2am playing on the same server, with the same guys… and all of them gone now, like tears in the rain…
oooh that makes sense; yeah this would have been in 1999/2000ish. i remember a name similar to counterstrike but i wasn’t sure
i did a search and i think it was this one i was thinking of actually (source seems to be 2004 remake of it but i was out of uni at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike_(video_game))
You probably played Counter Strike 1.5 or 1.6, or both at different times, these are the ones that were made off the original Half Life
Kinda miss waiting fucking forever for games with multiple CDs. I know I had a game that came retail with 5 discs, I just can’t remember which one. I remember KOTOR had 4.
I don’t personally remember any game retailing with 5 CDs, 4 was the limit, anything over that and they’d just go for a DVD instead
Tech prophet circa 2003.
surprised there hasnt been a linux distro called SiskOS yet.
You know, I wouldn’t be surprised. Space Jesus needs his own OS.
monkeys paw: it gets released but its named after the thong song guy
We’ll have petabyte drives for $50 before HL3 appears.
Gone are the days when a game delivered on seven floppy disks was considered “overblown”.
I installed HL2 from five CDs back in the day
Saaaame
The reason why HL3 is not out yet is because valve is waiting for consumer adoption of 10TB drives
Not many people these days understand that Steam used to suck bad.
I have heard that people used to be super PISSED that steam is required for valve games. I guess it makes sense now considering hdd sizes back then.
When I was young, I was not allowed to install anything on the family PC whatsoever. I had a 100MB Zip disk and was told anything that I wanted to keep, I could keep on there. That disk got a big workout. Had Duke 3D and the Half-Life Uplink demo on there, plus about 30MB to spare! Great days man.
Man I was jelly green over classmates that could afford zip drives. They’d bring it to school retiring computer class, whip it out, both showing off and fake-lamenting that oh they didn’t know the school didn’t have zip drives.
Hah I was the same. Downloaded demos (happypuppy.com, gamesdomain.com), installed on a Jaz drive.
Those iomega devices had a pretty awesome design.
Oh, maaaan. HappyPuppy. I haven’t thought of that in ages.
I still remember when I had to reinstall my WindowsXP from the 3GB HDD onto my 1.5GB HDD so I could install The Sims 2
And now 1.5GB RAM won’t even load Windows.
It will. I’ve tried. It’s not a pleasant experience though.
But 2GB on Fedora was pain as well, though definitely more usable.
Not even close to loading it
Damn I miss half-life mods.
New ones are still being made. I can’t give specific examples since I don’t play Half-Life mods but I’m sure you can find some pretty cool stuff by looking around.
There are indeed, but the thriving multiplayer mods community is mostly gone. I miss there being dozens of little multiplayer mods with full lobbies. I haven’t found anything that hits the same spot but perhaps I’m just unaware of what’s out there. I wish I could play a few rounds of HL: Vampire Slayer in a full server.
Action Half-Life represent
Is it anything like Action Doom?
