Chet Faliszek on Valve and Left 4 Dead

[Evo]

Valve's Chet Faliszek has opened up about Valve and Left 4 Dead and more to Jim Rossignol in Jim's Ragdoll Metaphysics column on Offworld. Before you start asking, no Chet doesn't have any Episode 3 news. However he does have some other interesting things to say:[br]

The Orange Box was weird. It reminded me of 8-bit era game packs. Three Games In One! That seems really unusual in the contemporary market. Did it seem unusual now? Did it seem totally logical to create a three-game pack like that? It still seems weird, now that I think about it.[br]Faliszek: Well, at the start Portal wasn't mature enough for us to be sure that we should do it like that, and Team Fortress 2 has had plenty of false starts. It kind of formed as we developed the games. There was no "this is how we do it" from the get-go, instead we're a company that can experiment and yeah, it's a throw-back to earlier eras, those ways of doing things. We experiment, and it pays off.

You can find this in-depth interview here.

 

[Big_Odessa]

i think valve lumped all these games together because they would sell better as one than separately. and more people would get into portal or tf because its together with the half life series, but they would never play them if it was in a separate package. thats how i would be.

 

[DEATH eVADER]

I have to agree on the German Alyx, the Voice fits well with her profile

 

[Xevrex]

Eh... I could never imagine Alyx speaking like that, ever. Even though I've just seen it.

 

[Barnz]

German Eli is horrible.

 

[Cornerstone]

German Eli is horrible.

German screwing over blacks? Never!

 

[StarBob]

Valve made a great choice in pooling these games. People who may have just gone in for one or two games were exposed to all of the games and thus they opened individuals to a market they may have avoided. Sure here we all love HL episodes, Portal, and TF2, but the general market and more casual gamers may only want the fast paced action of TF2 and not care about the solid story driven classic gameplay of HL or even consider puzzle games like Portal. Yet now that they've played them they're more likely to buy an individual Portal 2, Team Fortress 3, or HL Episode 3 by itself.

As for the Alyx... she's voiced by the individual she was designed to resemble so it'd be hard for anyone to truly match the voice of someone else. It's the same way for Eli, though he is not as similar to Robert Guillaume as Alyx is to Merle Dandridge, he has a very unique voice. Kleiner on the other hand is kind of terrible... he's an old man and the made him sound like he's 25.

 

[Absinthe]

Alyx's model didn't voice the character. Merle only provided the voice, although she does have a resemblance.

 

[StarBob]

Hm I didn't know that. They are very similar in facial structure (though Merle has a sharper jaw line. It's weird that both the character Alyx and Merle are both have Asian mothers and African American fathers.

Still I don't think that there are many peopel who can match Robert Guillaume's voice. I recognize him more for his voice than his face. Imagine what the German voice counterpart of Morgan Freeman...