The big Half-Life interview
Why it took 13 years to come, and why it shouldn't be 13 years until we see another.
Interview by Martin Robinson, Features and Reviews Editor
Updated on 24 March 2020
It actually happened. A new Half-Life game is out in the wilds,
and it's a pretty fine one too. Alyx took some 13 years to arrive, though of course it wasn't the only time Valve meddled with a follow-up to its much-loved series in that time - and it certainly seems like it won't be the last. Just ahead of Half-Life: Alyx's release we spoke to game designer Robin Walker and level designer Corey Peters about the long and winding road Half-Life has taken to its return, and what possibly lies in wait for the series.
I'd like to rewind to how the project started. I'm sure you're well aware there's been a lot of anticipation and excitement about a Half-Life game for quite some time - you might have seen that around in the few years since Episode Two. How did this project get off the ground within Valve?
Robin Walker: It started because we wanted to work on a VR game, and we were looking at what we felt was the biggest problem facing VR as a platform - we felt like there'd been a lot of technology investment that was moving rapidly and improving in lots of ways. As we often do, we found ourselves looking forward a few years in the future and asking what's the biggest problem we'll be facing - and what could we do to help?
And it seemed, if you went and looked at what customers were saying, they would say VR looks interesting, but I'm waiting for the big games to show up, or you'd see people saying stuff like they're waiting for a
real game - which we thought was adorably derogatory to all the interesting games out there! There's so much amazing stuff being done by what's essentially the indie developer community. But we felt that those are companies that don't necessarily have the resources or the freedom or the capability to really make something with the sort of scope that it seemed people were referring to when they said they want to be triple-A title. One of the great things about being a customer is you don't have to make trade offs. That's not your job. You're like, I want it all and I want it all now!
So it seemed obvious that given where we're at, we could justify putting a real serious and significant resource investment into a VR title. We started with that premise - we weren't talking about Half-Life or anything, we were just saying let's try and build something in VR that looks like we could justify putting a whole bunch of our time and effort into it. Once we started doing that, we started out by doing what we almost always do, which is use all the tools we have at our disposal to try and get a head start. We started looking at the various IPs we had, what codebase could we use to start prototyping, what game design space can we explore?
Multiplayer was pretty much out from the get-go - if we're trying to get a whole bunch of people to move into VR, to do that with a product that requires a bunch of other people to be in VR already before you come on the scene... So we're looking at our single-player IPs. Most people in the company often sort of jumped to the assumption that Portal would be a really good choice. We started looking at that and thinking about it and realised that beyond the first third, we use momentum transfer as a huge part of that game... It's definitely something we could solve, but the whole point was how do we start with something that gives us an enormous amount to start with. And so we decided to build a small Half-Life prototype.
This was also influenced by some of the work done when prototyping on The Lab and on a piece that we'd never shipped as well. And we'd been playing all the other things coming out in the VR space as well - in particular, I remember Budget Cuts.I think that was the first game that now, if we're looking back on it, we would say that was a game we all experienced where the VR thing just kind of falls away behind you, and you're completely in the experience. And so we decided to build a small Half-Life 2 prototype. We built a 15 minute experience - it was like, six or seven different rooms, all using Half-Life 2 assets, Half-Life 2 code. And then we wrote a bunch of code just around having rudimentary hand manipulation. We built one weapon. And that was a couple months of work, I think, and then we started putting people in that and they would take 45 minutes to play through it. And they really enjoyed it - they explored every inch of it. It seems sort of obvious in retrospect, that Half-Life's gameplay loop is ideal. It's always obvious in retrospect, but for us, we always learned so much from watching people play games, I think that's the silver bullet always. Just just watch people play your game.
So we watched people play this prototype, and it was like, wait a minute... There are all sorts of things about the Half-Life DNA that align really well with VR. It was always a shooter that focused on stuff other than just shooting. It always encouraged exploration. It always wanted you to take your time to pay attention to try to deliver its narrative as much as it could. And, you know, in some ways, we've always thought of attention essentially as like a budget that we get to spend as game designers. The player's attention is everything you have to work with. And one of the things that was immediately obvious and incredibly exciting as game designers was seeing how people pay way more attention in VR to everything - they look up, they look down, they look at things, they look around things. And at that time, the whole question was like, well maybe they do this in a 15 minute experience, or a 45 minute experience. Maybe they weren't over the whole game, but let's just build it. Let's build it and see what happens. And the more work we did, especially on the world, the more dense the world got, the more people paid attention and they just keep going. The game got longer and longer and kept paying attention. That was super exciting. And there were all sorts of ways that Half-Life improved, because of the fact people pay more attention.
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It must be lovely for all the level designers and for your artists who finally get their assets noticed. Corey Peters: The artists are very happy! You could spend an enormous amount of time on every room and people are going to explore it. We would build spaces out in the early versions of the product, and we wouldn't have a lot of art. Then they'd have a table, a chair, you know, and people would teleport into the room, look around, then leave. As we started adding more and more art, they would teleport to that same room and all of a sudden on that table there'd be some stuff for them to look at. If there's a box and it's upside down they'd pick it up and look underneath the boxes. There's nothing under it this time, but they're still gonna look under that box pretty much every single time. So it was just interesting, they would explore those spaces in just more interesting ways than they ever have before. So you'd end up building unique opportunities into those spaces. We'd never had to deal with this exploratory nature of humans before. It's been super interesting, and rewarding as well.It's something that is very much part of half life DNA. I'm one of those people - like lots of others, I'm sure - who spent way too long in City 17 tossing cans in bins, pushing swings, stacking stuff up on the seesaw, and then seeing if I can make it fly off. Robin Walker: I worked on that area that you're talking about. We knew that people were being given a new toy they'd never had before, or hadn't really had before in physics, and we wanted to show that off, but also give them opportunities to learn what they could do with itWatch on YouTube I'm sure this isn't the first project within Valve with the Half-Life attached to it since Episode Two. What made this one stick? Why did this one survive? Robin Walker: Valve's a strange company, right? We have a lot of freedom to work on things. I think there's a sense of responsibility in the company towards this IP, there's a lot of affection towards this IP. I think after the first Half-Life we thought, man, we'll never be able to do that again. And then I think we managed to do it again with Half-Life 2 after that. It was like All right. Now we're definitely not going to do that again. But it's more about humans than it is about anything else. I think other companies, the decisions would be much more around business, but at Valve it's a lot more in humans. And to some extent, perhaps a way to think of it is that Half-Life is an IP where I think we tend to have some real significant problem or technology, some piece of it that we're really interested in attacking, and Half-Life is the weapon we use to hit it with. With the first Half-Life, we felt like there was clearly an opportunity for the way that first person shooters could tell stories. Half-Life 2, we felt like there were significant opportunities in the way that we could portray real people, and we thought there were opportunities in how physics could be used for gameplay.Looking in from the outside, Valve is quite a mysterious company, especially in terms of its games development. I kind of had the assumption that there would never be another Valve game shipping without a big economy attached to it, like Dota or like CSGO. Was it hard to make a business case for making Half-Life: Alyx? I guess having a piece of hardware you're selling attached to it helps, still was it difficult to make the case for? Robin Walker: Not really. I mean, there are some people at Valve who that's a big important factor in the personal choice about what they work on. I think for them, they were more interested in working on some of our other titles, but I mean none of those games that you described started out that way either, right? I think we've been fortunate in our history to have gone through the experience of building games that had no business justification at all. Not even really a sense of how they were even going to make money for years, but players were really enjoying them. We've always felt that as long as people are really happy, and enjoying playing a game, there'll be some way we can find to make money off it. I think for us, we've always sort of thought of it as you make customers happy - I think when people hear that they'd say it sounds super wishy-washy, sort of hand wavy stuff, but for us these are concrete things we've learned.It's a smart way to be. With VR as well, you said never kind of predicted it exploding, but this does feel like one of the defining moments of VR and that it might help it explode a little bit more. Is that your hope? The other problem is there's a lot of people made their mind up about VR already, and it's not for them, for various reasons. What can you do to persuade them to put a headset on again? Robin Walker: A lot of that problem was created by a conflation of various different types of VR, right? There was a period of time where I found it maddening that people were talking about trying out VR on their mobile phone and not working and it's like, can't we call that something else? It is, you know, it might be a thing that is interesting for certain entertainment products, but it is not when we're talking about PC VR, it is not remotely the same thing.On that note, though, how do you feel in the knowledge that one of the first things people are going to try and do with Alyx is mod it to work in 2D, and make a non-VR version? Robin Walker: I so want them to do that! I'm so excited to see that! There are a lot of people on the team who have asked this question many times. It's going to happen, and I can't wait. To some extent, everything we just described is about what does VR as a platform and experience bring to the table? And if that is not significant, then it's not interesting? We believe it's significant and interesting. And there's no better way than to play this game in non VR, I think, than to experience that. Of course, a bunch of people on the team probably will be super unhappy with me because they're worried about this. But we can't stop them. I think it would be a lot of work.Another challenge you're going to face, which I'm sure you're aware of is it's been a long time since the last Half-Life. I was talking about Alyx here recently and getting all excited, pretty much jumping up and down on the table about how it's a new Half-Life game coming, and some of the more junior members of the team were like, why is that interesting? It's before their time, and they've never played a Half-Life game before so they're just like 'sit down granddad'. How do you make it relevant again? Robin Walker: We've played testing with a bunch of people who haven't played the previous games, obviously, as well as people have had. We've tried to make sure we have a narrative that is interesting and self contained and both important to Half-Life. Actually, it's sort of interesting, if I could waffle for a little bit.Please do! Robin Walker: A lot of us work on Half-Life because this is a particular kind of game we really like. One of the things we've always being crabby about is how few other games in the intervening time have really attacked Half-Life, in terms of it as a design problem, or gone after the same things. We're huge fans of the Metro teams, you know, because they build wonderful things that we get to play, and The Witcher of course, but everyone's fans of that these days. But we were there first! Anyway...Okay it's my turn to waffle now. I'm such a huge fan of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and I see their influence more in cinema than anything else - not that single-shot cinema was a thing before Half-Life 2, but I remember watching Children of Men, the climactic battle in Bexhill that's all one shot and turning to a friend and screaming 'this is so Half-Life!' Obviously 1917 more recently has that kind of storytelling too. Robin Walker: So you just reminded me of what the actual question was in terms of new people coming to it! We put a lot of people in front of this game, we're excited to see new people's reaction to this. I think the way this game is built, we're confident it works really well. And it's also worth noting that we did get a good influx of new people to Valve working on this game. And a lot of them worked on, in some cases, heavily narrative focused games in that intervening time. They brought a whole bunch of new thoughts to the way this should be done as well. We've had a couple of the journalists who have played through the game have mentioned that they feel like it is sort of this weird mix of both the old things that worked in Half-Life combined with more modern ways that narrative connects to games, and so it sort of gets the best of both worlds there. We hope the experience is both familiar to those who've played the previous games yet at the same time doesn't feel like we're just retreading a bunch and there's novel stuff in there.Speaking of those new people, obviously Campo Santo was one of the teams that were kind of folded into this. Do you know what the plan is for them once Half-Life Alyx is finished? Are they going to be their own entity again and do their own thing, or is that still to be decided? Robin Walker: I have no idea what they plan to do and that is up to them. I don't think they think of themselves as a unit like you've described, or that the rest of the world seems to think of them. People come into Valve in all sorts of ways, some of those groups stay together, some of them split up immediately. We think it's really healthy for people to intersperse and learn from each other. One of the reasons we hire a group like Campo Santo, actually the only reason we're doing it is because we want to drain as much knowledge as we can out of their brains into our own! We can't do that if they just show up and sit in the room by themselves. So, you know, that had already been happening at the point where some of them started to help on Alyx.Well the other thing is obviously you've said this is a return to Half-Life, not just a one off thing. I know you're not going to commit to anything, but I'm hoping our next Half-Life isn't going to be 13 years away - it might be a little bit sooner than that. Robin Walker: I think we all certainly hope so. There's a lot of excitement around both the IP and just this product. We're very happy with how this turned out. I think it's better than we hoped it was gonna be, and we had pretty high hopes. There's a lot of energy and excitement around it.I'm sure it's gonna be fine. It's been a delight to talk to you and it's so energising to have you guys back in this space. I don't want to sound ungrateful, but you're really good at making video games like this - you should make more of them!
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