How Valve made Half-Life 2 and set a new standard for future games
It's Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2-a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we'll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.
There has been some debate about which product was the first modern triple-A" video game, but ask most people and one answer is sure to at least be a contender: Valve's Half-Life 2.
For Western PC games, Half-Life 2 set a standard that held strong in developers' ambitions and in players' expectations for well over a decade. Despite that, there's only so much new ground it truly broke in terms of how games are made and designed-it's just that most games didn't have the same commitment to scope, scale, and polish all at the same time.