By now, it should be evident to most any living soul that Half-Life 2 has been officially announced, meeting the eager 4 (going on 5) year anticipation of PC gamers everywhere. Easily putting last year's showstopper Doom III on the proverbial back burner of minds alike with but merely a few screenshots to please the masses, Half-Life 2 has already set itself as the number 1 selling game this year. (Yes, that's right… this year!)

More surprising than the announcement of existence, and more amazing than the graphical quality represented in the recently released images, was the statement of the game being released roughly 5 months post announcement. September 30, 2003 has been marked as the day of the second coming – the day the PC world shall stand still. This approximately marks the fifth anniversary of Half-Life, which continues to sell to this very day. Comparatively, Doom III, which was announced quite some time prior to last year's E3 (Mac Expo anyoneIgor) still has a longer road ahead of it before reaching store shelves (Quarter 4 2003), placing Half-Life 2 in a thunder-stealing position. While I hesitate to say which game is visually and "physic"-ally superior, I do know that audience anticipation for HL2 far surpasses the fever pitch reached post E3 last year for Doom III – and rightly so.

The phenomenon that is Half-Life has hardly gone unnoticed. Winning several awards the year it was released, the game found itself on the shelf with a "half-life" nearly thrice any other title, in addition to a couple successful spin-offs. To date, the Half-Life franchise has sold over 8 million copies, though not entirely due to its "at the time" enveloping single-player experience. Spin-offs such as Opposing Force and Blue Shift, later packed together with Half-Life in a myriad of ways lent a hand to its staying power, though arguably the mod community has been the main drive behind Half-Life's overall success. With that in mind, Valve has made it evident that it wishes to once again capitalize on this factor, and release a game engine much more accessible to the less than adequate coder.

We were given the opportunity to admire Valve's long toiling at this years Electronic Entertainment Exposition (E3) fashioned in a makeshift mini-theater which could be quite easily found at ATI's booth. The demo was run on a Radeon 9800 PRO, coupled with almost certainly a 3.06GHz P4. What we would soon witness, was – as they so commonly say – nothing short of amazing.

Enter Source

So how does a company keep something so huge, so secret, so long? With an audience large enough to take over the world, how was it possible for Valve to keep plans under wraps for nearly 5 years (Valve apparently began work on the engine that would power Half-Life 2 shortly after Half-Life proved itself), with nary a speculation of what would amount to what we will all soon witness? The world may never know…

What we do know however, is that Valve has built their own engine to power their pride and joy this time around, dubbed the Source - although the original Half-Life's engine was based on the aged Quake engine, and arguable modified enough to be it's own. Regardless, Valve has spent the better part of this century developing what will undoubtedly be one of the most sought after engines to license over the next few years, and by default, the engine that will power yet another Valve sequel, Team Fortress II – though this has as of yet to be officially announced.

Development of Half-Life 2 itself had actually only reached production state as of September 2002, once Valve had fully laid the groundwork – Source. From what we witnessed, Source has few contenders, and contains everything needed to make a game of the caliber a Half-Life sequel would require. Rendering, physics, facial animation and vocal matching – Valve has built it all (The physics portion is actually a highly modified version of the Havoc engine). If Half-Life 2 flops, they could certainly regain losses as a middleware company quite easily.

A short list of the rendering capabilities include:

  • Normal mapping, the technique by which a texture map is made from an extreme poly-count model, and applied to a lesser poly-count model, with the end result being that matching the detail of the former.
  • Reflective lighting – realistic light/shadow casting, both within environments and on models
  • Shader-based renderer (similar to the Pixar's rendering technique)
  • Intricate Artificial Intelligence
  • Advanced facial animation – 40 distinct facial "muscles"


The physics engine, coupled with Valve's new material system makes for some of the most believable environments and objects ever seen in a game. The material system provides the developer a way to "texture" an object with a "material", such as wood, metal, and anything in between, the object inheriting the material's properties. Properties such as flamboyancy, penetrability, buoyancy, and breakability become part of the object, as well as the associated sounds of interactions with such objects. The rabbit hole goes much deeper…

Poetry in Motion

A brief example of the material system was given when a few rounds were fired at a wooden platform-like structure several feet above a pool of (the most amazingly rendered) water, supporting the weight of both itself and an oil drum by a few support beams. Once the wooden structure collapsed in a hyper-realistic fashion, chunks of wooden planks fell to the water below, leaving little to support the weight of the full drum. With the weight and gravity of the drum taking over, the remaining support planks of the structure collapsed, sending both itself and the oil drum plunging to the pool below. Once the objects hit the surface, the "material" component of each was further demonstrated as the drum sank straight to the bottom, leaving only a large circular surface ripple, as the planks submerged for an instant, quickly rising back to the top of the pool.

Source is capable of some pretty nifty effects, all of which can be applied to character models as well as typical applications. An example of this was shown wherein a water effect was applied to a character model. Behind the model was a fire that reflected and refracted through the translucent character in a way that was simply put, stunning. A few other rendering tricks were shown off, leaving many of the onlookers speechless, though sounds of jaws hitting the floor could be heard throughout the demonstration.

The better part of what the Source engine is capable of was shown in tech-demo, or proof of concept setting – basically an obstacle course having little to nothing to do with the game we all came to see. That was fine however, as seeing what the engine was capable of only mounted anticipation further for what we would no sooner witness. While details of the storyline behind the sequel are sketchy at best, one thing's for sure. Gordon's back, and so are a few familiar faces. He's mad as hell, and he ain't gonna take it anymore!

Character roster given thus far include Alyx Vance – token hot-chick sidekick, Alyx's father Eli – scientist present at Black Mesa incident, the mysterious G-man – also present at Black Mesa incident, a few familiar extra-terrestrials (umm… present at Black Mesa incident as well), and one good cop – Barney. The setting takes place in and around what looks to be a European city, though aged and ruined in some unnatural event. City 17, as it was called was where most of the demo took place; though it is unclear as to how much of the action will take place in or nearby this particular location. It has been stated that Gordon will not be returning the Xen planet he briefly visited in his first round of action, though other worldly exploration should not be entirely ruled out.

From what we could gather from the dialogue presented at the beginning of the actual Half-Life 2 demo, humankind is losing a war against what Alyx referred to as the "Combine". The level later consisted of a battle in the streets, between what looked like human figures, but somehow oddly different. One could only conjecture that this "Combine" was some sort of fusion of possibly man and alien. The enemy fought with conventional weapons, giving the human feel to them, but they weren't human – at least as far as we could tell. Again, details are scarce on the storyline of Half-Life 2 – everything from its exact location, time since the Black Mesa incident, Gordon Freeman's role in the whole thing, who the enemy is, and so on. We can only guess as to what Valve has in store, but we can be certain that we won't have more details until Valve is ready to give them – judging from their stealth-like job with keeping HL2 under wraps as long as they did.

Weapons shown thus far include the standard HL fare: Pistol, automatic machine gun, shotgun, rpg (rocket propelled grenade), hand grenades, and of course, Half-Life just wouldn't be Half-Life without the crowbar. You can be certain that the game will include other-worldly weapons as well, though none have been announced as of yet. One device that was employed throughout the demo, possibly man made, was one capable of lifting or pulling objects into the air, fixating them a short distance in front of the player; a gravity modifier of some sort. Objects could be thrown, shot, or used as shields, depending on the object and the situation. One demonstration had Gordon ripping a radiator off a wall and using it as a shield against an enemy firing a short distance away, and then forcefully repelling the radiator away from the device at the enemy, taking him out. Almost everything of small size within an environment will have some sort of interaction possible with this device, as was shown when it was later used to rip large letters from a building's sign to be used as ammo against…

The Strider

One of the few creatures we saw, the Strider, like nothing you've seen in game. The creature, standing over 10 stories high, on four spider-like legs, was able to traverse the broken uneven streets of City 17, as it chased what remaining human resistance lied in the area. Not only was this thing huge, it also had a friggin' laser beam mounted to its head! (Looks like the work of Dr. Evil!). And… it was smart. When it was unable to pass through an area with an elevated walkway joining two buildings, it knew enough to squat and crawl under it. Brilliant AI is yet another next gen feature of the Source engine, which is what the first Half-Life was remarkable with.

Enemies are also able to interact, and WILL interact with objects within the environment, as seen when a Zombie kicked a drum at the player. NPC characters, such as Barney will fight alongside the Gordon smartly and cautiously, hopefully staying out of in front of Gordon's gun this time!

As mentioned earlier, the player will be able to interact with most anything as well, particularly with anything made of wood, though not tied to just that. Grenades can be used to launch heavy objects, such as vehicles, or in one example, a garbage dumpster into the air, potentially landing on the enemy, or the player if not careful. Drivable vehicles may be available this time around as well as was shown in a scene of Gordon trying to outrun an alien airship. It should be noted that the engine is capable of rendering vast environments utilizing a LOD (level of detail) system, giving Half-Life the opportunity to offer substantially larger levels than what the past engine could possibly muster. This will no doubt come as a highly welcome feature for the HL community.

Characters Models

Every 6-8 months, I get the opportunity to say "X" game has the most detailed models I have ever seen in a game. Half-Life 2 is no different, though it may widen the gap between it and the next "most detailed models I have ever seen in a game". The most stunning feature of the characters was not so much the detail and high polygon counts, but the facial construct and animation. Alyx's eyes eerily followed Gordon around as he traversed around the laboratory, with a realistic wet-eye glow to them. As she spoke, her facial "muscles" moved as one would expect a real person's to do – eyes and brow animated believably and such. While we still have a bit longer to wait for facial animations such as those found in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, gaming technology inches ever closer. This is as close as I can imagine it will get for a while.


It Will Run on a What?!

The E3 Half-Life 2 demo was shown running on one of Dell's new gaming series Dimension XTSs. The machine was most likely running the latest of Intel silicon, namely a 3GHz processor, and probably stuffed to the gills with RAM. The graphics card used to run the demo was ATI's new flagship card, the Radeon 9800 PRO, and actually, the demo was given in a small makeshift theater inside ATI's booth. Does this represent what gamers will need to power Half-Life 2 once it is released? Nope. According to Valve, the Source engine is highly scalable, and the minimum system requirements given for HL2 are quite amazing. Supposedly, a mid-powered PC (700MHz-1GHz) with 128MB of memory, and a DirectX 6.1 capable video card will be able to run Half-Life 2, though it has as of yet to be seen. You can bet that most all visual features that will make Half-Life 2 the most visually stunning game ever will scale way down, perhaps making the game look more like its predecessor. It will be interesting to see.

There are many other features that I wish we could go into more detail about, but fact is, it really has to be seen to be believed. The screenshots, while not doing the game and engine justice, don't necessarily do them injustice. Many of the screenshots we have seen contain a photo-realistic quality, which is more or less, what the game in action represents. Half-Life 2 will undoubtedly mark a milestone for gaming – one that I couldn't possibly imagine being surpassed for another few years. With so many excellent contenders readying for release between now and the end of the year, Half-Life 2 belongs on the wish list of every PC gamer alike, and from what we've seen thus far, will certainly not disappoint.