Since Half-Life 1, Geoff Keighley has produced several ‘minibooks’ about Valve, containing
exclusive behind-the-scenes information about the company and the games that they’ve made…
and the ones they haven’t. They’re worth checking out- the information in this video
has been obtained from ‘Half-Life Alyx: Final Hours’, which is the latest one he’s
done. THESE ARE NOT GAMES. They’re a series of super polished ‘interactive storybooks’.
Kind of like PDFs, but with animations, sounds, and full 3D jumping headcrabs and stuff.
I feel I need to make what these Final Hours are as clear as I can since his Titanfall
Final Hours -despite a glowing recommendation from Geoff Keighley- has gotten a lot of hate,
mostly from people who have spent .1 hours in it, before realising it wasn’t the game
they thought it was. Half-Life Alyx: The Final Hours doesn’t
just cover the making of Alyx, but also fills the gaps between HL2 Episode 2 and that game.
And it makes for fascinating reading. It even has a fully 3D scan of the Valve offices,
so you can see what it would have been like to be there as the magic happened.
When Half-Life 2 came out, the Source engine it was based upon was shiny and new. But the
same engine was used for Episode 1, and then again for Episode 2, in 2007. Even then, Valve
knew Source was a dated engine. But in 2008, during development of Episode 3, Valve finally
decided that Source was restricting what they could do, and that they needed a new game
engine. Instead of building the world out of pre-made lego bricks, they wanted to give
themselves the ability to design their worlds ‘with the freedom of a paintbrush’. That
was the goal of Source 2. While many at Valve were busy with Left 4
Dead 1 and 2, it seems that some members took this time to start work on the new Source
2 engine. It seems they chose Left 4 Dead 2’s plantation campaign to build Source
2 around and to test it out on, and by mid 2010, less than a year after the game’s
release, they had finished the entire plantation campaign, all re-envisioned in beautiful new
Source 2 graphics. Just for comparison, here’s Left 4 Dead
2’s Source 1 version.
This image of Source 2 has been floating about the internet for ages. But in Alyx: The Final
hours, for the first time, this flyby was showcased. Compared with Source 1, the shadows
are much more intricate and realistic, and surfaces which would have been flat textures
in Source are now fully modelled in 3D. This would have looked incredible in 2010. It still
holds up quite well by today’s standards, but I notice that a few of the props would
perhaps have been more detailed had they been made for Half-Life Alyx. And it is weird to
see some of the props and textures that would later be used in stuff like CS:GO.
Source 2 was to be the engine to power Valve’s next batch of games! But just as it was a
solution to the problems they had been having, it also proved to a problem itself, hindering
development of many potential Valve games for the following decade.
Up till this point, Valve had been churning out a game a year. Episode 2 in 2007, Left
4 Dead in 2008 and 9, Alien Swarm in 2010 and Portal 2 in 2011. I guess you could count
CS:GO in 2012 and DOTA 2 in 2013, but the old style of single-player experiences Valve
had been known for effectively stopped after Portal 2.
And that’s when the dark period for Valve began, which the Final Hours describes as
‘the Wilderness’. Valve as a company believed that the best stuff would be created when
people worked on what they wanted to work on the most. Everybody was free to do whatever
they wanted, and to work with whoever they chose to, in the hope that great ideas would
lead to awesome products. But we know how that turned out! While a lot
of stuff got started, project after project failed to be completed. People lost interest,
or things changed, or the unfinished state of the Source 2 engine prevented them from
progressing further with it. There’s a timeline in the Final Hours, detailing
all of the different projects the company seriously worked on before giving up. Let’s
talk about a few of them.
In 2012, Valve started work on an RPG. Kind of like Dark Souls, sort of like Monster Hunter,
even a bit like the Elder Scrolls! The idea was to release a small game, then to gradually
ship new bits and features over time. But this project never got too far, it almost
became a single-player DOTA experience… then ceased to exist.
In 2013, they started work on Left 4 Dead 3. It was to be an open world, based in Morocco,
and with hundreds of zombies. More recently we’ve seen all of these images of it, which
looks like it could have been from this project. Now it isn’t specifically said in the final
hours, but it’s implied that you could build your own base as well. But sadly, L4D3 failed
because Source 2 wasn’t ready to handle such an ambitious project. Pieces of your
base would go missing, and zombies would float in.
In 2015, when Source 2 was in a better, more finished state, they tried again to make a
Left 4 Dead game. To avoid internet hype they decided to call the project name ‘HOTDOG’.
But this was only worked on for a few months before they started repeating the same old
bad development habits, and the game was canned again.
In 2013, they started on another new game that skipped the Source 2 mess by having its
own engine: and that was a game called ARTI. Based in a voxel environment, kind of like
Minecraft, this was to be a light-hearted experience similar to Portal where players
could create, destroy and manipulate the world to complete tasks. The player helped a character
called ‘King Kevin’ to break out of prison by tearing down walls, building bridges and
shrinking animals and objects. This script for the game hints at the sort of things the
player had to do. On the timeline, ARTI was worked on for years
and years, only stopping in 2017, right when Valve announced another game: Artifact. Coincidence?...
In 2013, they also started on Half Life 3. Half-Life 3 might not have become Half Life
3, but the name was used for the project. Inspired by Left 4 Dead’s campaigns, the
goal was to make a replayable Half-Life experience by making the world change every time you
played it. Perhaps similar to Left 4 Dead’s director, placing objects and enemies in the
level based on how well you were doing at the time.
You’d have the same goals every time- like, say, to rescue a prisoner from a building.
But every time you played, the building would be different, and enemies would be in different
locations and so on. These procedurally generated sections would
then lead back to more ‘crafted’ story moments that the Half-Life series is known
and loved for. They were serious about this project! They
even rescanned the G-Man’s face and dabbled with updated character animations. But again,
the Source 2 engine wasn’t ready to handle such a complicated project. They mention the
lighting, visibility calculations and save game features weren’t up to the task, which
I assume would be down to the procedurally generated nature of the environments.
So I believe ‘Half-Life 3’, much like L4D3, was put on hold until Source 2 was ready
to handle it. But something came along before this that changed everything again.
On top of all these new projects, as well as creating and maintaining CS:GO, Team Fortress
2 and DOTA 2, in 2012, Valve started something else as well: it wanted to get into hardware.
Sort of like what Steam had done for software, but for hardware. We know the Steam controller
and Steam machines failed. But their VR journey, which at this point appears successful, started
back in 2012. Back then the focus was on ‘wearable hardware’ and ‘augmented reality’, but
Gabe quickly realised that being able to interact with a virtual world was better than simply
being able to peer into it, so they moved their focus over to virtual reality.
The Final Hours documents how their controllers and headsets progressed. The headset started
as a series primitive prototypes in QR-covered rooms. Then in 2016, following a collaboration
with HTC, came the VIVE headset. Valve then had plans for the ‘Vader’, which was a
super advanced headset which, had it been released, would have cost about $5,000! They
got the best ideas from that and put it into ‘Project: Frank’, which later became known
as the Valve Index. Which, although still expensive, managed to get the cost down considerably!
I won’t be covering the hardware any more than this, but the Final Hours covers its
development extensively, along with the controllers, audio and other features.
The collaboration between Source 2, and Valve’s VR intentions, became known in 2015 when they
showcased Robot Repair. This demo was used by Valve to experiment with how a player would
interact with a virtual world, and I believe shaped their future products, both hardware
and software. Although it started as a standalone demo, Robot Repair ended up becoming just
one of the minigames in ‘the lab’, which was used by Valve to understand the uses of
VR better. The rest of it was done in the Unity engine, since Source 2 was still very
limited at the time. And get this: in just 8 months, Valve actually
finished The Lab! They said they had tough deadlines for it since it needed to be ready
for when the Vive shipped. So it seems like, while creativity and freedom is good for starting
projects, Valve still benefited from pressure and deadlines to help them to finish things!
As is said in the Final hours: they were wrong to assume people were happiest working on
what they wanted to work on. They were in fact happier working on a big thing, even
if it wasn’t exactly what they wanted to work on. And so ended the Wilderness, as members
of Valve slowly but surely began to work together on fewer, but bigger projects again.
While Half-Life Alyx is Valve’s first full, ‘proper’ VR game, the company dabbled
with a number of smaller, Half-Life themed VR experiences first. Apparently, they liked
choosing Half-Life for VR projects because it helped the team at Valve to imagine what
it could be like. In comparison to all the vague, unfinished experimental projects during
Valve’s ‘Wilderness’ period, ‘Half Life but in VR’ proved to be easy to imagine,
and an easy sell to help get a team together to all work on a larger, combined gaming project.
The first Half-Life themed VR project was actually intended to be one of the minigames
in The Lab. It was to be a shooting gallery experience, taking place in Half-Life inspired
environments, using existing Half-Life assets. It was nicknamed ‘Shooter’, and seemed
to be the Half-Life equivalent of Super Hot VR.
So while it never came out, it got Valve thinking about other things they could do with VR in
Half-Life. In 2015, project ‘Borealis’ briefly existed
as the idea of a Half-Life game set on the bridge of the Borealis ship. Players would
explore it as it travelled in time between the Seven-Hour War, and the bit of time just
after Episode 2 was set. There was the idea that players could fish off the bow of the
ship as some kind of VR fishing minigame. But the project never gained much momentum
inside Valve. It was just a small project featuring Laidlaw, the writer for Half-Life,
and he eventually retired from Valve at the end of 2015.
The ‘third’ Half-Life VR prototype was made in just 6 weeks, and was codenamed ‘E1M1’.
It was a 10-minute long demo, kind of like Half-Life Alyx, but using existing Half-Life
2 assets. There’s a nice long demo of this in action in ‘The Final Hours.’ The bits
I found interesting were as follows: The movement system is extremely similar to
the one eventually seen in Half-Life Alyx. The environments are dark and depressing,
also similar to most of the ones seen in Half-Life Alyx.
It’s super buggy- grabbing a crate caused it to explode, then the player took lethal
fall damage by landing on the crate they were already standing upon. He drops to 1 HP because
I assume for playtesting reasons, the player was made to be invincible.
While it was only 10 minutes long, in playtesting people would often spent 30-40 minutes exploring
it, which made Valve realise just how much potential VR environments had, and why Half-Life
Alyx’s gameplay focuses so much on exploration and scavenging.
The Final Hours says that the gloves from CS:GO were used in this demo, but chronologically,
this prototype came out first, with custom gloves coming to CS:GO at the end of 2016.
Ridiculously large keys are used to gain access to new bits of the level.
The headcrab AI looks to be the same speed as Half-Life 2’s. I guess this is where
they learned that enemies had to be slower for VR.
AND you get to see a crowbar in action! I recall Valve saying that they removed stuff
like this for Alyx because players would get it stuck on doorways, and also because it’s
more associated with Gordon Freeman. I think those are poor excuses to NOT feature melee
combat in VR, so here’s hoping for their next VR game they feature it again.
Anyway, this basic prototype got them thinking about a larger Half-Life VR experience. This
started out as a 4-5 hour long adventure through Half-Life 2’s world, using Half-Life 2’s
assets so that it should only take them about a year to develop. They rushed the pre-production
and wanted to get started on developing the levels as soon as possible, so as to avoid
the same unfinished fate as the other projects Valve had been working on. They called it
HLVR. Even some members of Valve initially thought it was a joke, and didn’t even know
if Gabe was aware of the project. HLVR continued to grow bigger and bigger.
It ended up getting its own assets. More and more members of Valve began moving to the
project. After years of mess and fragmentation, it was the project that helped unite the company
under one project again. It helped get the Source 2 engine finished, and eventually became
what we know today as Half-Life: Alyx. As you might expect from Half-Life Alyx: The
Final Hours, it talks a lot about this project, too. But I’ll leave that for another day.
From it, I’ve learned just how bad things got in Valve. It’s so sad to hear of all
the projects which were cancelled for one reason or another, and makes me imagine a
world where we continued to get a game a year from the company. So much lost time. It’s
made me realise that Half-Life Alyx has more significance than to be just another Half-Life
game, or the world’s first BIG VR title: it’s the project that fixed Valve, and that
has laid the Source 2 foundations for whatever they do next. And it kind of mirrors my own
thoughts about HLA: it’s a fun enough title, but I’m even more excited for what they
have planned next. I hope this is the start of an exciting new period for the company.
I strongly suggest you check out the Final Hours on Steam, it’s a fascinating read
and I’ve only covered a tiny fraction of its content in this video. Find a link to
it in this video’s description.