Half-Life 2 is 10 years old

One of the most legendary games of Valve studio was released on November 16, 2004.

After six years of development and several postponements of the release date, a game with a budget of $ 40 million hit the shelves and made a splash.

Even the hacker attack did not stop the critics' unanimous opinion of success , as a result of which the public was surprised to learn about the small deception of a large corporation leader. The fact is that at the E3 exhibition a technical demo version of the game was shown . The expectations from illustrating the possibilities were so great that the game received several awards even before the release.

Valve promised that the game would be ready by September 2003. This did not happen due to the next postponement. But on October 2, sources leaked into the network appeared on the Internet. Gabe Newell even asked the community for help in catching a hacker. Along with the source code, 22-year-old German Axel Djembe, like millions of gamers who were looking forward to the release, pulled out a technical demonstration from the corporate network of the company , which was deeply scripted. Almost everything that was shown on E3 was not the work of AI, but only a set of ready-made scenes.

The leak nearly disrupted the development process, the cost of a month of which cost a million. Designers seriously wondered if this would kill the company. But Valve survived and released a game whose innovations to this day are emulated by others.

Even taking into account its beautiful graphics for that era, it was very deeply optimized. Half-Life 2 officially came out on the original Xbox, and the specifications of this set-top box were extremely modest: the Pentium III version with a frequency of 733 MHz, RAM 64 MB and a video processor similar in strength to the GeForce 4 Ti4200. The game goes well on many modern media centers, the insides of which are intended only for streaming images from a more powerful device.

Half-Life made a number of innovations in the industry: it was one of the first seamless games, the gameplay of which began and ended without cutscenes. There was an illusion of being in the real world, the borders of which were difficult to sense. This effect was created by a love of detail - even cockroaches have artificial intelligence.: they are afraid of a sharp change in light and other creatures and run for food by smell. Where to some kind of dog simulator with interactive fish until the masterpiece of 1998.

And Half-Life 2 successfully accepted the baton of the pioneer of new products in the industry. The background of the plot is not told in kilobytes of text or dialogs, conclusions about what happened can be made by the user himself as if he was living in a game situation. The player’s eyes stop at the right places with skillful level design.

Throwing objects and the damage inflicted by it today is not surprising, but this was not always the case. Thanks to the gravitational gun, any fairly heavy or sharp object could become a weapon. Already in 2005, its counterpart will appear in Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil. In addition to the real need to save ammunition, at some locations of Half-Life 2 there were many simple physical puzzles that competently diluted the monotonous scenes of chases and shootings.

A breakthrough was facial animation. In favor of her, I even had to change the plot - an air exchange station was cut out, forcing the heroes of the half-game to drag gas masks on their faces. But it really was worth it: now the characters, due to real emotions, were people, not caricatures.

The behavior of artificial intelligence, animation in general, and sound became an order of magnitude better. Again, today it seems to be taken for granted. But we do not consider the “ Seven Samurai ” from the perspective of modern shooting techniques, we will always remember that Akira Kurosawa showed many methods for the first time.

In total, in 2004 Half-Life 2 was named the game of the year 35 times. To date, approximately 12 million copies of the game have been sold. And to this day, it remains one of the best-selling in history.

But not only in sales was the value of this product. The game was an excellent demonstration of the technical capabilities of the Source engine. In fact, the gravity gun aimed to illustrate an unprecedented level of interactivity. Best of all, the audience’s enthusiasm is characterized by a quiet “wow” when showing on E3 a particularly sophisticated fall of barrels .

The engine can be configured to render both cartoon scenes (Team Fortress 2) and photo-realistic graphics. Source is available on all modern consoles, the main three operating systems of PCs and Android. Since 2004, it has only been partially updated, adding to the network physics, automatic synchronization of lip movements, the effect of water flow, the inverse kinematics of skeletal animation, many new details: HDR, facial animation calculated on the accelerator, multi-core support, morph target animation, and others. Several dozens of games (both from Valve and licensed from other studios) and countless mods

have been released and continue to be released on Source . And this is an unambiguous indicator of the correctness of the principles laid down in the engine at the beginning of the zero.

Now the second version of Source 2 is being prepared for release. Who knows if work is underway on Half-Life 3, or is it just a rumor.