IGN had a half-hour interview with Gabe Newell and Robin Walker about Half-Life Alyx and
Valve. This video will summarise it. The feeling I got is that Gabe is living about
15 years in the future in some Matrix-like reality and that Robin is the one who has
to try and convert this all into fun gaming experiences for us to enjoy. There are key
bits of this interview where I suggest you check out the main video, because words can
only describe so much of what Gabe is saying. But I’ll let you know when those times are.
REACTION TO HALF-LIFE ALYX IN VR Gabe said that it’s a huge amount of fun
to work in the Half-Life Universe again- it symbolises that they’ve found some new game-design
challenges, and Half-Life is like the crowbar they’re using to tackle them and I assume
to make them into a fun, playable concept. He wasn’t surprised when Robin told him
it was VR since it can greatly improve a single-player, immersive experience, and he thinks people
will realise that when they play it. As Robin kept telling himself: ‘As long as it’s
good, fans be happy.’ Gabe couldn’t be happier with it, but he says newer members
of the team were afraid with the challenge of living up to the series’ expectations.
He urges people to tell him what they think of it my sending him an email.
WHAT GABE DOES THESE DAYS A lot of his day is spent on his email, or
trying to solve problems which aren’t super obvious. He’s working on brain-computer
interfaces at the moment. Gabe does all sorts of stuff in Valve, ranging from dealing with
personnel issues, to press… he varies it up because it keeps it fun. He describes his
job as being like ‘playing a game except on steroids’.
Rather than looking back at what they’ve done, they look ahead at what the future challenges
they might face will be. As an example, rather than thinking about how their past stuff has
changed the world, he’ll instead work on figuring out why Artifact was a disappointment
because that helps them more when it comes to making better decisions in the future.
He even says you learn more from failure than you do from success.
HOW HE GOT STARTED WITH VALVE AND HOW IT OPERATES Before Valve, Gabe worked for Microsoft on
Windows. People didn’t believe an operating system could handle intensive games, so they
ported Doom to show it could. Game devs said he’d have more fun making video games, so
he contemplated whether it was a good business venture, but also saw it as a good reason
to play games. He self-funded Half-Life 1 with his Microsoft money. And he says that
being private helps them to have as few people between them and their products and customers
as possible- meaning they get to make the product for the people who are going to be
using it. The alternative would be something like shareholders, who might be short-term,
profit-driven… which might not always benefit the Valve way of doing things. For a while
they had publishers, but that was a headache too. You could see Steam was being their way
of going publisher-free. I suggest you watch this bit, Gabe speaks
about how he can’t think of a better way to spend a few decades than with game developers,
and how he’s still in touch with the co-founder of Valve, Mike Harrington. His responses are
quite moving. BUILD-UP TO HALF LIFE ALYX
Gabe says that they achieved stuff with Half-Life 2, and then the episodes, but after 2 of these
they decided that this approach would be better suited to a connected economy in a multiplayer
environment... which I guess led to stuff like the hats in Team Fortress 2, and the
skins and operations in CS:GO. I got the impression from the interview that they didn’t even
seriously consider Half-Life 3 until VR came along, but once it did seemed like the perfect
match since they felt really strongly that (VR) was going to give them exciting opportunities.
Modders have been responsible for many of Valve’s game series. Robin explains these
people might not have had the resources to build a full game but they may have had a
lot of ideas and later went on to form indie studios, and he told Gabe that they should
pay more attention to these types of people because they do all kinds of interesting stuff.
A few years ago, Valve acquired the Campo Santo game dev studio who were working on
Firewatch at the time. Gabe explained that an acquisition isn’t financially driven,
or about the games that they’ve developed, but because they like the PEOPLE in the organisation.
After a lot of chatting to the guys at Campo Santo, they decided they were the perfect
fit for Valve. Gabe describes game development is a bit like married life- in that they’ve
got to be able to tolerate spending 40, 60, 80 hours a week with the people they’re
working with. In Valve’s case, sounds like they enjoy it.
So the guys from Campo Santo helped to finish Half-Life Alyx, and integrated a lot of the
ideas from Firewatch into it. Robin talks about how the development team comprised of
a bunch of people who had worked on older Half-Life games (And yes, Ricochet too!),
and others from the Firewatch team who came along with very different narrative forms.
The result is a new blend of narrative for Half-Life Alyx, which Robin says contains
a lot more (and more dynamic) narrative than the previous games in the series.
When it comes to constructing Half-Life Alyx, they went back and looked at all of the Half-Life
games and cherry-picked what worked best from each. Robin said that some things seem better
on paper, but in practice isn’t as good and you can’t quite understand why at the
time. They’ve had time to pick the best of everything this time. HLA is also better
because the team developing it has gotten better than they used to be, and the new developers
help bring something fresh to the experience. Robin comments that from his point of view
as a game-dev, he remembers less about the game, and more about periods of time when
a set of people worked on solving a problem of some sort. Gabe also shares the kinds of
experiences that arise from game development, which I can summarise as:
Gabe likes Miracle Whip. THOUGHTS ON CONSOLES
Gabe just sees consoles as a way of delivering games to people. He’s more interested in
what their designs mean for game devs. I recall him having some strong, negative opinions
about the PS3 back in the day because it was hell to develop for its custom multi-threaded
processor. But he says that their hardware is becoming increasingly similar to those
found in PCs, and that’s good news for game devs.
SOURCE 2.0 He doesn’t explain what’s new with Source
2, but Gabe pretty much says that they’ve done some stuff to Source 2 for Half-Life
Alyx and that the engine will be licensed out to other developers, and if there’s
interest in it then Valve will invest more into it. But I got the impression that they’re
not that interested in what other developers do with it- Source 2 is something Valve has
made for Valve, and if other people like it then great, but it’s not a priority for
them unless they get told that. FAVOURITE HALF-LIFE GAME
If given a choice between Half Life 1 and 2, Gabe chooses… Portal 2. He prefers it
because he did less on it, so is more easily able to appreciate it for what it is. He says
that when you work on something, it’s never finished, only abandoned, so with the Half-Life
games he can see all the compromises, the flaws and mistakes. But with Portal 2, he’s
all like ‘oh that’s pretty good. Good job guys!’
But he still says that Alyx is the best. Jocularly. Seriously. Right now, Gabe pretty much only
plays DOTA 2 and rather jokingly, can’t imagine why anybody would play anything other
than that. But Robin thinks that’s sad because he thinks that there are many good games out
there. HALF LIFE 3
When asked which Half-Life game was closest to Half-Life 3, aside from Half-Life Alyx,
Gabe seems confused by the question and says that Alyx is the closest and that it’s a
progression. Half-Life as a series is about solving interesting problems. And while that’s
the case with its gameplay, I think he’s saying that from a developer’s point of
view. The Half-Life games have typically introduced a new element, be it physics or VR, and Alyx
represents the collection of interesting problems and solutions that they’ve used to transform
it into a gaming feature. He then goes on to say that they don’t crank
out Half-Life games for the money. He then talks about how much of a risk it is. More
as how, from their point of view, they won’t know if Half-Life Alyx is the right direction
to take the series until fans have played it and given them feedback about it.
He explains how they’ve made mistakes like Steam Machines. He doesn’t even beat about
the bush, he calls Artifact a ‘giant disappointment’ and that they screwed things up. I suggest
you watch this next bit of the interview for yourselves, it’s powerful to hear him talking
about it so earnestly and with genuine interest in what the community will think of it and
they want to know if they’re on the right track or out of touch with the community.
It’s time to release it into the world and to see what people think of it. How the community
receives it is going to affect every internal conversation at Valve for the next 18 months.
‘This is actually a really powerful moment for us. This is as good as we get. We want
people to come back and say, oh my God, the magic is still there, I think we’ve nailed
it.’ They’re not expecting it to sell well, but
they’ll gauge its success by how much the people who play it enjoy it, not from the
sales numbers which will no doubt be constrained by the current state of VR adoption.
VALVE’S FUTURE When asked what they want to do in the next
10 years, Gabe thinks that Valve as a company is productive, a great place to work and will
continue to grow. Robin says he wants to make more Half Life, which he thinks turned out
amazingly and they’re as tooled up as they’ve been in a while. Gabe believes The Valve Index
is good step forward for them to use to develop products around, and that they need to do
more with that. And Brain computer interfaces. BRAIN COMPUTER INTERFACES
Oh yes. Gabe talks about this throughout the interview. It’s the big challenge that he
returns to whenever he’s got spare time and isn’t playing DOTA 2. It seems more
important to him than anything else! It looks to be the next step beyond VR. With the Valve
Index, you can see, hear and interact with objects convincingly, but brain-computer interfaces
will be a big leap beyond that. To put it into perspective, he says that when it arrives,
it’ll be an ‘extinction level event for any entertainment business that isn’t doing
it’. And if they’re not thinking about it now, they will be!
He says that we’re way closer to the Matrix than people realise. But it won’t be the
Matrix because that misses the interesting technical subtleties that make up how weird
this new world is going to be. But it’ll have a huge impact on the experiences they
can create for people. What is it exactly? I’m not sure if he’s talking about something
that can pick up on brain signals, or if he’s suggesting something that can CREATE brain
signals. He goes off on tangents about it throughout this video, like how he explains
that visual and motor stuff is easy to do, but getting somebody to feel ‘cold’ is
harder because your brain receives inputs from various places, including your immune
system. He’s excited about it… and it shows.
So it sounds like a fully immersive world, without the same limitations or rules as the
one we currently live in. It may have the wrong connotations, but when listening to
him describe it, the word ‘drug’ came to mind. He likened brain-computer interfaces
to trying to describe the internet to somebody who doesn’t use the internet. Once they
know it allows for rapid transport of information, they’d understand that it would help them
to do stuff that they can do already like cookery recipes, but they probably wouldn’t
have thought of UBER, or automatic car software updates, even though those things have proven
to be incredibly useful. This next bit is my speculation about it…
because it’s too exciting NOT to speculate. What Gabe was saying reminded me of Jeff Bezos
and his plans for space travel. In Jeff’s presentation he said how he didn’t see his
purpose as being to find uses for SPACE TRAVEL, but rather about lowering its barrier of entry
and making it as accessible to as many people as possible in order to let THEM find uses
for it. He said how it’ll be the next generations who will find the best ways of utilising it-
Jeff just saw it as his mission to enable them. While I don’t know Gabe’s master-plan
for brain-computer interfaces, if it’s anything like what Valve’s been doing with Steam
and VR, it could be about building a platform for it which other people can use.
If you want my opinion on it, it does seem scary. Listening to Gabe talking about these
things, he’s 10 steps ahead of the rest of us! It seems like, to him, VR is old-hat.
He’s already trying to advance things to the next stage beyond that. I don’t know
how I feel about computer systems which can tap directly into my brain. But then, I know
people who feel that way about VR and I’m cool with that, so who knows.
Check out the interview here.