Valve: HL2 Aftermath coming April 24

Making my way through Half Life 2 now. Awesome game! I'm on the "Follow Freeman" chapter. Intense stuff. I think I'm about to face the Striders...should be good!



Can't wait for this expansion. Anyone know if it's including HDR? Lost Coast looked fantastic and I hope some of the levels have that vertical aspect. Plus, more gravity gun madness never hurts :-)

You wrote Dathmatch instead of Deathmatch...

I assume it will have HDR, all Valve releases recently have had HDR. I assume Aftermath and DoD:S are the games that will showcase the new Source engine features in the coming months. Then at some point TeamFortress 2 will pick up with more neat stuff :P



HL2:Platnium Edition? Sounds like they are going to charge up the butt for it on Steam. $70? $80?. I bet you that you will be better off buying these games retail on sale and entering the CDKey in Steam.



You can find some stores online that still sell the original Half-Life for less than $5 USD. Enter that CDKey into Steam and you get every Half-Life 1 based game available on there, including the countless (and many very good) 3rd party mods for free. That's the best value, despite the fact HL1 was released in 1998. More people still play HL1-based games than any other action/FPS on the internet- by far. Every iteration of UT gets mugged in player minutes per month by the same nearly 7 year old games. Mostly because of Counter-Strike but there are a lot of other excellent games as well.



Everyone should be on Steam playing HL1-based games, I tells ya! Source just doesn't feel as nice and polished and the player numbers reflect that.

The reason HL1-based games are still so popular is because they can be played on any old 400mhz crapbox.



"Source just doesn't feel as nice and polished and the player numbers reflect that."



Please. Source is the superior product. It just requires far more computing power/cash to run. That's what the player numbers are reflecting.

I wonder what "DathMatch" is like? Sounds fun! Can't wait to play. ;P

Now where is Tetris Attack DS with WiFi? :p

Agreed that Source is an incredible engine. And the Mod community for HL2 is getting some good stuff out there. Dystopia is cool. Goldeneye is in Alpha stage, but it looks sweet and very promising. I think there was a Perfect Dark conversion in the works.



Source reminds me of the Goldeneye/PD engine. Didn't look as snazzy as the competition, but it could do a whole lot.



I'd take it over the Unreal and Doom engines. Unreal 3 looks great, but what else does it have going for it? (genuinely curious, b/c I don't know)

"Please. Source is the superior product. It just requires far more computing power/cash to run. That's what the player numbers are reflecting."



FALSE. What makes you think it's a "superior product"? Because it is a newer engine and has better graphics and more features? Please. There are dedicated server issues which seriously mess up lag correction, probably related to ticrate which have gone unfixed. And considering most of the games are being played online, this is a very serious problem. CS is more complete than CS:S. CPL uses CS over CS:S still and will continue to in 2006.



In general, the engine is buggy. The 64bit version is worse. The SDK is crap in numerous aspects. The Source SDK is difficult to work with and is very picky. Compare this to the HL engine which was based on the rock solid Q1 engine. HL has none of these problems. We see a lot of mods breaking and/or not being able to cope with it. The development tools are greatly inferior to the Unreal engine, for example. The stability and development of the Source engine is greatly inferior to the Unreal or ID Software engines, by far. IMO Valve has a lot of work to do if they want to stay competetive in the engine market against these other developers. HL was a great base for mod development in particular and really brought modding to the mainstream. Now of course it is in a developer's best interest to use the engine with the most users for next-gen mods (aka Source), but its much more difficult to do so compared to other engines. Valve has promised that Source would be like modding for HL, but better, however nothing could be further from reality. They really dropped the ball.



Sure, some people are playing HL1 because they have shitty computers. But this doesn't account for everyone, nor even the majority. Let's look at the facts.



HL2 Minimum Requirements:

1.2 GHz Processor, 256MB RAM, DirectX 7 level graphics card, Windows 2000/XP/ME/98, Mouse, Keyboard, Internet Connection



HL2 Recommended:

2.4 GHz Processor, 512MB RAM, DirectX 9 level graphics card, Windows 2000/XP, Mouse, Keyboard, Internet Connection



http://storefront.steampowered.com/v2/index.php?area=game&AppId=220&



Now, it's easy to find out what people have. Valve has a poll with 830,000+ people reporting their computer info:



http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html



CPU Minimum: ~97%

CPU Recommended: 30% (hard to say since ghz req. is different for AMD)

RAM Minimum: ~83%

RAM Recommended: ~41%



With the graphics cards, a huge majority is at least a DX7 and a lot are DX9, with the only exceptions in the top being the GF4MX (DX7), GF2MX (DX6?), 9200 (DX8),



A huge majority of people CAN play Half-Life 2 and in fact almost half can play it at "recommended" settings, which is more than enough. Your little theory that the only reason people aren't playing Source is because their computers can't handle it sounds like a load of shit to me. Next time try getting some facts.

Oops. Wrong window on the tetris attack comment :P

"A huge majority of people CAN play Half-Life 2 and in fact almost half can play it at "recommended" settings, which is more than enough."



I'm sure you ment a huge majority of people WHO TOOK THE SURVEY can play Half-Life 2.



Just because 97% of the machines surveyed have the required processor, does NOT mean 97% of the world's computers can play HL2. Every computer in my office has more than enough CPU and RAM to run Source, but none have the vid card to do it. Amazingly though, we can play CS on any of them since you need squat to run HL1



Next time understand your own facts before telling anybody to get their own.

I just finished looking at the demo trailer-it's super-a true sequel. Just finished QUAKE 4 on 360 so I'm back playing Half-Life 2 on Xbox for the 2nd time and it just purrs! One of the finest.games.ever. Hope they port Aftermath to Xbox/360 soon. By the w?if you can latch onto a copy of Half-Life 1 [ps2] grab it! They are getting tough to find-I let my orig. go [sob]

i play cs source a lot, and i must say, it is much more fun than any of the previous ones, but when comparing other mods, its sort of like comparing say...pac man, and halo. also id like to add that halflife, both of them, should me played with a keyboard and mouse. (ever play cs on an xbox?-yeah, it really sucks.)it otherwise just ruins "the expirience."