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Source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=145846When stacking Episode One, Episode Two and Three up against each other, do each have a different gameplay style? In Episode Two, for example, you have the open environments...
Gabe Newell: They are bringing new things forward on the technology side, the game design side and on the story side. Episode One was very much about Alyx - about having this companion in the world, and how she made the gameplay better for you. And she could be a proxy for emotional states, like she would say: "You should be scared now". It gave us a very useful tool on the story-telling side.
Episode Two is different: we're using that similar approach with the Vortigaunts this time, instead of Alyx. We didn't want to do Episode One again, because you can always go and play Episode One again.
And the G-Man plays a bigger role in Episode Two, doesn't he?
Gabe Newell: Yes. The overall progression of the three episodes is that the G-Man is losing control of you. In Half-Life he made you; in Half-Life 2, he used you for his own purposes, which are still mysterious to you; and now he's starting to lose control. At the same point that he's losing control, you've come to the attention of other forces - the Combine hierarchy is now saying, "We thought that Earth was under our thumb, and this one person is being such a pain in the ass for us. So we're going to have to pay more attention to this person." So, although you have more freedom from the G-Man, other forces will come to bear on you.
So you know what is going to happen in episode three?
Gabe Newell: Yes, we know what happens after this episode; there's a fairly large chronology. Things tend to vary more in the specific details of the minor characters, so as we're working through the issues in an episode, we discover stuff about the characters regarding what is and isn't working. For example, Dog is getting much more of a role than we had originally envisioned for him.
To what extent are you reacting to people saying whether they liked this vehicle and so on?
Gabe Newell: We have this overall plan where we sit down and say: "Where can we get the most bang for our buck - here are the technologies we need to develop within that road-map." Then we order it based on feasibility and risk. You want to have some things that are risky and some things that are predictable in each of the chunks. Then we map that against how the story needs to move forward. We still have lots of flexibility in the production - if, say, we need more exploration, more story-telling and less action. One of the things we did was the re-use of areas in Episode One: some people liked it and others didn't. So we've gone back and re-edited Episode One to reduce that.
What can you tell us about Portal?
Gabe Newell: Portal is sort of at that beginning stage, where it's showing a lot of potential and we're working through all the technology issues, such as: "Oh, how do sounds work through portals and so on?" We're used to using DSPs as a method of determining sound attenuation, but that doesn't work when you're putting holes in everything. And we're looking at gaming issues: we want to make sure we can teach people how to use these things - it's such a change from how people are used to thinking of the world working. You know, a cliff is no longer a barrier - it's kinetic energy that you haven't used yet. Is it something that people can pick up on? It's great for us to get that out there earlier and learn as much as possible from gamers about how it's going to be received.
Episode Two is the second in the trilogy - it has been about seven months since Episode One. Can we expect to see Episode Three come around slightly quicker?
Gabe Newell: It will probably be about the same distance between the two.
How is your foray into episodic gaming shaping up?
Gabe Newell: We decided we wanted to do three episodes, then sit down and see how that was received, what the pros and cons were. And to assess the impact it had on our development, as well as how it was received by gamers. We think that the industry is facing a sort of explosion in game budgets - we're at $20 million now and, following movies, we're going to be at $200 million in the not-too-distant future. That's driving everybody to become very conservative in their choices. Rather than building their intellectual property and their own worlds, they're going to license the next big action movie, ship day one with that and take advantage of the $60 million marketing budget. They don't want to be innovative on game design - they want to do exactly the same game design that worked before with prettier graphics. And I think that's kind of a dead end - it's a disaster for the games industry if that occurs. So, managing that is one of our challenges as an industry.
The solution that we're trying is to break things into smaller chunks and to do them more regularly. So far, it seems to be working. When we look at how long it took us to build a minute of gameplay for Half-Life 2, versus how many man-months it takes us to build a minute of gameplay for Episode One or Episode Two, we seem to be about four times as productive. But we'll go through all three episodes to see... We sort of made a commitment to do it three times and then assess.
And you always said that you could plug new things into the engine as you went along...
Gabe Newell: You saw that in Episode One with the new lighting, and in Episode Two, you can see it in the cinematic physics - the wide-open areas forced us to solve problems of performance with those battleground kind of areas, with the particle systems. We're about an order of magnitude faster at drawing the kinds of smoke and weapon effects that show up when you have lots of Striders running around with lots of Combine forces.
Can that be retrofitted to, say Episode One?
Gabe Newell: Yes. We definitely think that content needs to move forward. For example, one of the things we're reacting to is the speed at which microprocessors are coming out. So, Intel has very aggressively moved up delivery of desktop processors with four different cores; we'll have support for that in Episode Two, and we'll definitely go back to affect, you know, Episode One or Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike Source, so they can take advantage of that. We'll definitely try to keep the existing games - especially the multiplayer games - current as technology evolves.
Some new companies, such as PopCap, have committed to Steam. What plans do you have for Steam?
Gabe Newell: The way we think of it is that we need to continue to make Steam more useful to other game developers and to customers. For an example of that on the customer side, we want to improve performance. The engineers said: "Rather than guessing what's bottlenecking performance, let's go and measure what's actually going on." We instrumented all the Steam clients, and the answer was surprising. We thought that we should go and build a deferred level-loader, so that levels would swap in. It turned out thatthe real issue was that gamers' hard drives were really fragmented, and all of the technology we wanted wouldn't have made a difference, as we were spending all our time waiting on the disk-heads spinning round. So we put something in Steam that automatically detects and defragments people's hard drives.
Does it tell people what it's doing?
Gabe Newell: Yes it does - it'll pop up a message saying: "Your hard drive is really fragmented, we're going to go out and fix it unless you say don't". For other developers, I think there's a perception that these emerging systems are only good for selling people bits. I think that's the least useful thing that we'll be able to do. For example, we've been able to gather a lot of statistics from Episode One, about which weapons people use, and which ones they don't use, where they're getting stuck in the game, how far they have progressed and where they are dying. In some cases it has been what we would expect, but in other cases there have been surprises. So, not only is it helping us sell the games, it is going to help us make the games better. That's where anything that helps us close that loop with customers - not thinking of them as the other end of a warehouse full of boxes, but instead thinking of them as a huge, distributed computer platform. That's going to be helpful.
What is the split between sales of Episode One via Steam and boxed sales?
Gabe Newell: That isn't something that we've talked about. It's something we're keeping to ourselves.
So, how do you manage your relationship with EA when you're selling games via Steam?
Gabe Newell: Our relationship with EA is fine. I think that retailers are really frightened of these kinds of changes in the industry, and I think that we're learning stuff that is going to be very important for them. For example, Steam enables new ways of doing promotion: we've been doing these free weekends where people can play for a weekend and then the game shuts off. You can't do that with boxes - boxes sit in warehouses, you know, past the time, and you have no way of turning the box off. The interesting thing we found is that when we turned the game off, we generated a bunch of sales on Steam.
And we generated three times as many sales among people who had never played Day of Defeat before, who then went down to a store. So just as a promotional tool, it was way more effective than advertising. Even if you just view it as a way of driving people into stores to buy boxes, Steam is a better solution than these traditional approaches to marketing and sales. I think retailers are starting to understand that communicating more efficiently with customers is a way, not of taking money away from them, but of driving people into stores. It's not a way of cutting them out of the equation.
The thing that happened with Red Orchestra and Darwinia is that, once they were able to prove to people that they could be successful - in this case through a direct relationship over Steam - the retail success followed. Red Orchestra wasn't even getting a retail deal until after they could prove that there was an audience, and Darwinia's sales went up as a result of being on Steam.
What's your take on next-gen platforms? You've always been primarily a PC games company.
Gabe Newell: The PC is going to continue to be our primary focus. It gives us a lot of advantages as a development platform, and it also forces us to confront a bunch of issues, like for us it's very important to work well on older hardware and also take full advantage of new hardware. So the DX7 generation is much slower than the next-gen hardware, but DX10 is actually going to be more advanced than either the Xbox 360 or PS3.
For us, the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are challenges for designing a system so that it is as simple as possible for publishing simultaneously on all three platforms. The Wii is more of a challenge because of its input - that's something that we're going to have to work harder to understand. It's easier to think of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 as things that live within the flexibility you already have to think of on the PC side. And the Wii is the thing that is both furthest outside and most exciting, because of the controller. I have to say that we don't understand how to take advantage of that yet. We think there's a lot of potential there, and our respect for Nintendo goes up a notch, as they're the ones who are doing the things that are disruptive and exciting.
Sony has always said that it is going to leave the ultimate control of its online service to developers and publishers. Could you envisage Steam and the PS3 Online Service merging in some way?
Gabe Newell: We'll certainly take advantage of whatever flexibility and openness they have, and if we can run our games through Steam, and get updates and new content to those customers, then that would be great. We'd encourage them to go in that direction, because we think the publishers and developers can do a really good job of figuring out how to deliver those services. That might be a key part of their strategy against Microsoft, because Microsoft wants to have that stuff very controlled through their systems.
It's nice that in general, those consoles that have lagged in their appreciation of the value of having the connected customer are starting to realise how important that is. Obviously, given our history, going back to the very beginning of the company, we've really believed that having that connected customer presents opportunities in game design, support and communications.
Right now, I think the benchmark game in the industry is World of Warcraft, and every platform could be measured against its ability to give advantage, or fail to give advantage, to building a better World of Warcraft. In the way that, in previous generations, it might have been a Grand Theft Auto or a Final Fantasy that was the benchmark. If your platform helps developers build something that beats that, then you're on the right track. If you're not offering that capability, then you're probably going to struggle.
How feasible is it for companies with less resources than Valve to build a game split into a number of episodes? Because you can't build part of a game and then release it.
Gabe Newell: I think that's one of the challenges. In the Quake era, one of the big challenges was working out how to build a 3D graphics engine. In Half-Life 2's era, one of the big challenges was scalability. One of the challenges now, for a developer, is managing risk: how can you build something that's useful and have only one roll of the dice, because most of the time, you're going to fail. I think building stuff that's smaller and managing to reduce the scope is one of the big challenges for game developers right now. It seems to work: I think the guys who built Darwinia could have made their job impossible, but they made some really good choices. Their art direction by itself made their art production workload enormously less, and those are the sort of smart choices people have to make.
How much nicer is it working with EA rather than Vivendi?
Gabe Newell: Well, EA hasn't sued us yet, so that's an improvement.
Have you got any comments to make on what happened with Vivendi, or would you rather not?
Gabe Newell: (Laughs) That was our old girlfriend... We've been very happy with EA, they're a very professional, very effective organisation. And nobody is suing anybody, so that's a vast improvement.
What is your take on in-game advertising?
Gabe Newell: I think it's interesting, and that people need to explore it. What it comes down to is that it's a monetisation issue. In Korea, for example, there are a bunch of games where the base game is given away for free, and you make money as a developer by allowing people to customise themselves. I think advertising is another way in which you can move away from trying to charge your customers. Hopefully, it's going to be a way of increasing the distribution of certain kinds of games, by reducing the direct cost to customers.
Could it ever be made to work in something as well-defined as the Half-Life universe?
Gabe Newell: The way we've designed the game, it would struggle if it had advertising intruding on it, because we weren't thinking about that when we were designing it. Obviously, any sports games are very well suited to having advertising.
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