[Broco]

[Broco]

[Broco]

[Broco]

I'd say Another World is more soundly designed in that it naturally keeps you tightly on the rails and there's no expectation of freedom, whereas HL2's great weakness is that the organic feel of the world is constantly threatened by a player trying to go off the beaten path and failing, or staying in place and noticing that the sense of danger disappears completely.

[Broco]

[Broco]

I played a ton of co-op on the original Left 4 Dead (but I'm not a fan of the versus mode), mostly with random players on public servers. It's the first multiplayer FPS I've spent significant time on since Quake 3, since it feels so fresh and really I had been craving a great co-op FPS all along (I wrote an article for PlanetQuake expressing excitement for possible future co-op FPSes back in ~1998. It seems to have fallen off the net though.)

The greatest thing about L4D co-op is that just by virtue of the game's context, reward system, and other design details like the HUD, it turns what was considered a law of the internet on its head and makes all kinds of Internet assholes automatically friendly and cooperative. I have met very few griefers, maybe a dozen in total in hundreds of other players. It's a fucking zombie apocalypse, you're feeling assailed from all sides so the last instinct anyone has is to turn on their only natural allies. If you try to go it alone, the game will immediately smack you down -- special zombies have the ability to paralyze individual players, and even regular ones make you slow like molasses when they hit you so it's very difficult to move quickly unless you have multiple players covering all angles. There are all kinds of tooltips the game throws at you, reminding you that a player needs to be rescued or is low on health and could use your medpack. And the very existence of versus mode makes assholes gravitate to it instead of co-op (you can see in people's names! Names like DieFags, BlackDeath8583 are typical versus players, neutral names like mine are co-op players).

L4D's other great innovation is the procedurally generated enemy positioning, which gives the game some of the good qualities of a roguelike -- constantly needing to improvise in new situations and manage a different set of resources at each playthrough. But players need to do this as a team -- perhaps there are two good, but mutually exclusive solutions to a situation (throw a molotov and crouch in that corner until the horde is all dead, or sprint through the open area that the molotov would cover and try a hail mary to the safe room), and if players can't agree, then they're screwed. The best teams I've been in have this organic, instantaneous agreement where everyone sticks close and move decisively as a group in the same direction, like a flock of birds. The bad teams often have competent individual shooting skills, but constant disagreement and splitting up or moving too slowly because a player or two sticks behind.

[Broco]

One of the biggest problems with Versus is that the capabilities of the special infected were clearly designed with them in mind as AI-controlled enemies. Shoehorned into a player-controlled UI, they're very awkward. It's hard to accurately pounce with the Hunter when the distance is determined by "charging" time, to lurk out of sight as a Smoker when the first-person perspective doesn't really give you insight on what your enemy can see of you, to vomit properly with the boomer when a single accidental touch blows your load for a very long time and it's not clear how long your vomit stream will last. And the HUD crosses the line into overly complicated, with the "climb points", four different thru-wall highlight colors and those little circular charge bars. It's a mess.

The second thing I don't like about Versus is that it's hard enough to find four good players in co-op, at 8 players it becomes very rare to have balanced skill levels on both sides. I don't enjoy being on either a crushingly winning or crushingly losing team, and that's been most of my experiences so far (including one that Cuba probably remembers where I ragequit when I ended up teamed with publics against his militarily disciplined group).

[Broco]

I think it means that he's blaming the fact that fans liked to overrepeat the game's funniest lines on the game itself. Chauncey, you must really hate things like The Simpsons and Monty Python, then.

And that makes another person saying Valve's art direction is boring. I'd rather say that the art in Portal and HL2 is nuanced, tasteful, and quietly beautiful.

[Broco]

[Broco]