CS-Nation

Covering the future of Counter-Strike
half-life, all-mod
counter-point: half-life, all-mod
Half-Life 2 is still on everyone's mind this week. Those crazy cats, asspennies & rizzuh, are back this week to discuss Half-Life 2 and what it means, or doesn't mean, for mods.
From: asspennies [mailto:asspennies@counter-strike.net]
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2003 8:00 AM
To: rizzuh [mailto:rze@counter-strike.net]
Subject: Modplay

As long as HL2 is still the subject everyone is talking about, let's talk mods.

There's no question in anyone's mind that one of the things that made Half-Life so successful was the development of so many popular mods, Counter-Strike of course being the most popular, but certainly not the only one. For every Day of Defeat there were also hundreds of smaller mods that were still worth playing—Science and Industry, any Neil Manke single player mod, Natural Selection—the list goes on and on.

Certainly one of the reasons for Half-Life's success in this arena is that they made it easy for the mod makers to work. But that's hardly the only reason. Half-Life will run on nearly every machine you throw at it these days. That makes the possible audience for your mod limitless. And lest we forget, Half-Life was so good that it sold millions before Counter-Strike or any other major mod (with the exception of the Valve-created TFC) burst on to the scene. That made the possible audience for mods at the time still remarkably huge, which no doubt led to success of the initial word of mouth propagation of Counter-Strike.

Still, something isn't quite right about this formula. You can't just make a game sell with a good game. System Shock 2 didn't sell at all, and I don't believe that either of the NOLFs really achieved anything approaching a critical mass of copies.

Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 each had their share of mods, and certainly their share of popularity, but none came even close to Half-Life's near ubiquitous saturation levels.

Could it be that some of Half-Life's success is simply dumb luck? Truly being in the right place at the exact right time? Is it possible that if Sin were a better game, could it be where Half-Life is right now?

What does Valve have to do to come as close as possible toward duplicating their mod success with Half-Life 2, I wonder. Is it even possible?
From: rizzuh [mailto:rze@counter-strike.net]
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2003 3:20 PM
To: asspennies [mailto:asspennies@counter-strike.net]
Subject: Minding the Mods

Half-Life 2's biggest segue to success will be Half-Life's current popularity. HL2 will get tons of press coverage and hundreds of thousands of gamers are going to buy the title simply because it will be a damn mod train. It's bound to be. Mod developers will think that gamers will be there to play their mods, and gamers will think that mods will be there to be used by gamers.

I know your eye sockets have probably collapsed at that paradox, but it's true. PC gaming hasn't had a long history. We certainly can't find patterns. Something like Half-Life has never happened before. Whatever we say will just be a baseless prediction. So you should probably skip over what I have to say and go back to photographing your headset every 24 hours so you can have the definitive evidence that will once and for all prove that aliens are inside your room and are moving stuff while you sleep.

Anyway, I want to tell you that Half-Life didn't sell millions before TFC or CS came along (only because PC gaming is relatively niche). What you mean to say is that Half-Life was a great, definitive game on its own which is absolutely true. Modifications made it more successful and, hell, even better overall, but Half-Life's single player campaign was easily "Game of the Year" for almost all of the gaming media in 1998.

System Shock II and both No One Lives Forever titles were great games and didn't sell as well as Half-Life which is a bit disheartening to me. The original No One Lives Forever, for example, is my favorite game of all time. Yes, both the PC game with hilarious social commentary and the real life 'game' where you stab everyone around you are family favorites! Well, the second would be a family favorite if they were alive, anyway.

But what Half-Life did for the First Person Shooter (FPS) genre is infinitely more than what No One Lives Forever did. NOLF, released nearly two years after Half-Life, refined Half-Life's many advances to make a game that, in my opinion, is far superior. However making a better game and making a ground-breaking game are going to attract different levels of attention.

Half-Life wasn't just a lucky rimshot. The game had a lot of concepts that were pulled off well. Scripted sequences, moving mouths, and enemies that worked together to take you out, for example. Half-Life was like the introduction of the musket into warfare or the breakthrough operation for transsexuals. Games for years in the FPS genre were compared to Half-Life at every turn and in many ways they still are.

In the otherly-dimension where Half-Life was a failure and SiN wasn't a rushed mess, I don't think mods would have flocked to HL like they have now. Counter-Strike may have been there, but would the gamers have been? I feel sorry for mod teams moving on to UT2003 and such simply because HL is too old. While those games certainly have technology and are great mod platforms, they simply don't have the player base to support new and creative ideas. Half-Life did.

Half-Life 2's will be a successful unless it, for some reason, has to compete with Team Fortress 2. In that way I'm sure one of the titles will be very limited in mod support. Keep in mind that VALVe could pull a, you know, "VALVe," and bundle TF2 with Half-Life 2. That would be amazing and would make the game fly off the shelves, but it is fairly unlikely.

I think the biggest unknown is the TF2 situation. The next big online VALVe title is going to be the mod platform of choice; that's really a no-brainer as Hannibal Lecter might say.

Of course, you read the IGN.com review of Half-Life written nearly five years ago and you get a sense of perspective on how commentators, like you and I, sometimes have no idea what can happen or what is happening:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/153/153107p1.html

The lasting appeal score is 7.5 out of 10. It should be an 11.