So Why Do You Think Valve Scrapped the Alpha/Beta?

Half-Life Series
#1

So, guys here’s what’s up. I need help to remember why Valve scrapped the alpha/beta. My brother isn’t a Half-Life 2 fan, but he agrees that the old story was darker. And h says the released version is gay and bright. (Stupid idiot). I told him I think they changed it to be more action-like and the older weapons were redundant you know. He said they were probably just laying the ground work to get a shit ton of money by stretching the story line out because VALVe is money hungry and horse shit like that. I told him that’s something Activision would do. So, I need some answers. Although, I would never agree with my dumbass brother on what he said. It’s definitely not bright and gay, although the games he plays pretty much are.

All-in-all, I need to have a good reason to back up why they did what they did.

#2

It was leaked?

#3

^ [COLOR=‘Black’]…

#4

^^

#5

Well, Axel Gembe, when he leaked the game, he did not interrupt the path valve was already going with Half-Life 2. I’ve seen this in the newer Half-Life 2 alpha and Beta maps and others have said this as well. Without Gembe, we may not have seen the alpha/beta storyline and stuff at all unless you cracked open a HL2: Raising the Bar copy which may not have existed if Gembe had not hacked Valve’s offices.

Plus, explain why valve would need to throw away all those weapons? Besides the fact that they were supposedly redundant. Either way, valve is adding the beta and alpha content in with the episodes, which gives my brother more reason to believe they are just stretching the story out to be money hungry. He was saying shit about how they had to be money hungry, especially with steam. Which really, it is an anti-pirating movement and companies are at THEIR OWN WILL to have their games distributed through steam. I’m thinking this gigantic steam game distribution deal didn’t really happen until VALVE partnered with EA. And we all know EA is getting a little money hungry with their 60 dollar PC games.

#6

Read raising the bar, they wanted to taker it to the next level or something.

I love beta/alpha shit but in the grand scheme of things a lot of it was superfluous junk. Hl2’s retail content was perfectly fine.

Missing Information is gonna be great for all the people that can’t get over it

#7

I wouldn’t agree that it was junk, but I agree that the retail was fine, and really people would have just bitched about the Beta (The alpha really), and sometimes I think…maybe not. I read the entire raising the bar book. I just need a valid reason myself as well as to why they really scrapped all of this. Who cares if it was 50+ hours overblown gameplay that’s what we would have wanted. The game in all respect, would have gotten an 11/10. I still can’t see why GTA4 got a 10/10. To get a 10/10 you have to have a 10 in graphics and gameplay and everything else. The graphics were bad. It was just a hyped game because everyone loved vice city.

#8

They were either fucked for time or they wanted a fluid product.

#9

Valve was relatively close to done in 02 with all the alpha stuff, they had all the time they needed. I don’t know why they switched. Something tells me valve wanted the player to WITNESS the coming destruction of the combine, hell I think you get a glimpse at the combine overworld in Breen’s Portal. They must’ve felt 20 years was not enough time for the combine to establish that much damage in the alpha. But really, when it comes to it, it might have been completely a story related problem. Now that I think of it, I remember now. Captain Vance was Alyx’s father and Eli Maxwell wasn’t even related. There were NO ties to the original game what-so-ever. I think that’s why they did what they did with Eli Vance, yeah that’s exactly what it was.

They still could have kept the setting and all though, which they seem to be reestablishing with the Half-Life 2 episodes.

#10

They cut most of the content because it was crap. The “old story” wasn’t darker, it was full of redundancies & might only seem darker because most of the concept art depicted it as night time. The weapons that were cut were either virtually useless, very poorly balance, or overly powerful. You wouldn’t have gotten “50+ hours overblown gameplay” you would have gotten several dozen maps of little more than walking from point-A to point-B because the developers couldn’t find a way to make the maps any fun.

The leak also had nothing to do with it. If you look at the leaked content (IE the 1,000 or so uncompiled maps) you’d see that most of what they had until then was placeholders, code testing maps, E3 demos & maps that had almost no gameplay at all, or were the maps from the retail game with significantly less polish.

Not to mention the fact that people will make fun of content found in the retail game but blindly defend unreleased content that’s guilty of the exact same thing.

I think the thing is, Half-Life 2 didn’t really take us five years. It took us two and a half years, and another two and a half not really knowing what the hell we were doing.

#11

What people mean by darker is more tainted and that the combine were more involved and more proactive in robbing the earth of its resources and torturing humans. Not so much the color, but that is a plus.

But yeah the “leaked” maps were missing a lot of gameplay elements, but the environment is, for me to damn die for. It was awesome.

#12

I appreciate Dhabih Eng and Ted Backman’s sweet, meaty concept art for HL2. Greatly so. It’s fun to look at and imagine what could have been, but then you play the game and get a feeling of how poorly all that shit fits in with a good majority of the campaign. That’s why the retail game uses only what Valve deemed to be the best parts of what they had going for the earlier builds.

#13

I think the juxtaposition of a “brighter” environment with the bleakness of humanity’s situation is more effective than it would have been if everything was gray and brown.

#14

Aside from replacing the atmosphere with toxic gas & child labor what was there that wasn’t in the final game? There’s the manhack arcade, sure but that idea is too silly when you think about it. Hell, they stole the idea from Toys.

Every single piece of concept art is depicted as night time, foggy or otherwise poorly lit. It does so much for making people thinking that the game was darker & they don’t even realize it.

Out side of the concept art most of the unused maps were either blandish or simply looked like more of what was already in the final game. Not to say the final game content isn’t great, just that gameplay comes first & if they couldn’t get that up to par in time then it shouldn’t be in the released game.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.