Journal #7931

You can replicate the feeling by doing as much acid as possible and watching the video again!

Disclaimer: Don't actually do this.

Oh the good ol days

I just love the bullshit that the presenter is feeding the audience. If you've ever played the E3 Demo leak you can see that it is scripted to fuck, and that still goes on at E3 these days too.

Watching this again made me realize how much they have to live up to with their next engine, whatever it is. My mind was like

Never saw those, when I was first introduced to PC's I believe Hl2 was already out, or just came out

It still impresses me. Dunno why but the visuals almost look pre-rendered. Plus I prefer the sounds they used for the guns in that build, I'm pretty sure they used the machine gun firing sound in CSGO :S

The combat looked a bit more 'punchier' in general. He's taking pot shots with the SMG and killing metro cops in one or two hits. That gun feels much more useful than the hose we ended up with.

So many things promised in those videos that never made it into the game. I hope they use a lot of these ideas in whatever the hell the next Half-Life game ends up being.

AI that adapts to barricades. More clever, subtle physics traps like the rooftop bin. Characters that actually react to you staring at them, and screwing around with their stuff. The AI in general seemed much more reactive and interactive. Shame it was all a scripted ruse.

Of course, you can still see a lot of these level designs in HL2:

• The beginning of the Ravenholm demo is where you fight your first fast zombie.
• The combine were cut completely from this area so the rooftop dumpster trap was scrapped and is now where you acquire the shotgun from Grigori, etc.
• The highway chase / gunship battle hasn't really changed at all apart from the fact that you have to use a magnet to get your buggy off the beach now.
• The Kliener's lab scene occured earlier (I get the impression that the demo version was set later on in the plot) and was generally a lot less interactive, which is a shame.

The thing that gets me is stuff like the vending machine which busts open when hit by the radiator and some of the other destructible/interactive elements you see in the video. Valve kinda just, removed all that stuff huh? I'm no expert in Source but I'm pretty certain the engine was capable of handling that sort of destruction back then.

Yeah, the areas still made it into the game. A lot of the other ideas didn't.

I really don't know why they removed all the little destruction bits. It wouldn't have been hard to make a prefab vending machine/physics blind set/dumpster/whatever else that they could use around the game for continuity.