Greetings!
To avoid bothering You, let's proceed to the questions:
1) Hello, Gabe! In the beginning of our short interview I'd like to ask You
about the success of the Orange Box. Did You expect that the first official
gamepack released by Valve would make so much "noise" in the game industry,
placing itself on many toplists as the Game of The Year?
We tend to focus on inputs more than on outputs, if that makes sense. Pay
attention to gamers, make sure you ship a quality product, and then whatever
happens, happens.
2) Let's focus on Your completely new child for a little while - Portal.
a) little bird told me, that Valve's new game was made with help of an indie
gamedev team - Nuclear Monkey Software, and based a little on their innovative
technology, used firstly in one of their first games - Narbacular Drop.
There were a group of students at Digipen who made Narbacular Drop and we hired
them en masse to keep them together.
b) What about the future of Portal? Will we meet glaDOS once again?
We usually don't talk about what our future plans are until we have something to
announce. And even if we wait that long, we still have problems (see how long
it took us to get Team Fortress 2 out).
c) Players have noticed that there must be a connection between Portal and
Half-Life, Aperture and Black Mesa. Should we expect the situation when Gordon
Freeman meets glaDOS?
For my own amusement, I want to see what happens when you put the G-Man and
GlaDOS into the same scene.
3) Well, let's talk about Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
a)Firstly, I'd like to say that whole community is extremely satisfisfied and
pleased about new graphical effects implemented in the Source Engine.
<a little commentary about 'em would be great here >
One of the reasons we wanted to move towards episodic content development is
that we think it actually speeds up the pace of engine technology. We're very
happy with where the Source engine is as far as performance and features.
b) Ofcorse graphics won't make a great game by themselves! The plot is fabolous,
but here comes a question, that bothers me a bit: how was the HL:Episode Two
plot created? Was it really made episode-by-episode, or whole three episodes
plot was written at once, and then divided to make an episodic content?
When you are creating serial narrative, and I assume people working on TV shows
or comic books have the same kind of issues, you have to deal with a host of
plot and character scale issues. You need to write dialog for a scene, but you
also need to understand where the character is going and how that relates to the
overall progression of the series and the world it is set in. You make each of
these layers of structure as explicit as they need to be in order to make as
compelling a story as possible.
b) Theres another question which whole community tries to resolve, so I just
need to ask You about that - Will the Episode Three be the last part of
Half-Life anthology? Or should we expect the sequel for Half-Life 2? Many
players think that the Episodes 1-3 basically IS Half-Life 3..
We still have a lot we want to do in the Half-Life universe.
4) We certainly should talk about Steam. It's growing with every month, it's
great to look how it changed through few years of its evolution. Could You give
us a little information about the future of Steam platform? What fresh features
are You planning to add?
We've done a lot to make Steam a better platform for software developers, which
is why we've seen so many new titles showing up. Now, starting with the
Community tools, we are going to be spending time on features that are more
gamer focussed. There's a bunch of nuts and bolts e-commerce stuff we are
doing, and then behind that there's a set of tools that will make Steam more
useful for a wider range of media.
5) The Orange Box is the second project released on Xbox 360 by Valve Software.
What about the future of Your next-gen activity? Are You planning to keep
exploring that part of gamedev industry and releasing Your next games on
consoles? What about the IMO GREAT idea of the achievements? Are You going to
keep implement that 'em in Your games for good?
Yes, we plan on continuing to support consoles with Source as well as with our
own games. Yes, we iwll have achievements and commentary in our future games.
6) Now, maybe the most disturbing question, Gabe. I know, that You don't like
being asked about it, but members of the Polish HL community wouldn't forgive me
if I wouldn't ask You about the last part of HL2 Episodic Trilogy. Could You
give us a small, little, tiny peek about the plot of Episode Three? What should
we expect?
That it takes us longer to ship than we would like.
7) Thank You very much for an interview, Gabe. We knew You would let the
community down! Is there anything You'd like to say to the Polish Half-Life
community?
I'm looking forward to visiting Poland.
Thank You personally for giving us an interview. You have no idea how much does
it mean for the community. I wish You good luck in the future of Valve and Your
next projects. Keep rocking!
