Major Banter wrote:I personally found the trailer to be largely a tech show, the same as several people here. I'd be repeating what they say if I gave my opinion. I would especially note what Panther has said; the particles seem very weak, and from what I've seen from older things it's either too much or too little. Absolutely love the projected light from the weapons - they just need a nice set of particles to do the effects justice. I'm sure you'll manage that in time.
In terms of notability, I feel the potential lies in the code and textures you've made rather than the gameplay and maps. Releasing such powerful and beautiful shaders to the public community is going to be the biggest success of this mod, not the mod itself. Whether or not that seems a worthwhile endeavor is up to you.
Equally, I have enormous praise for what you're making and though it's just HL2 with prettier graphics, I cannot fault HL2 for being a bad game. There's nothing bad about a little more of a good thing with a deluge of epic graphical updates.
I am glad that you really dig the shaders. With shaders we have kinda designed things with the approach of what Source kind of needed, or could really use, and ideally what would be nice for modders to use. So we haven't really designed any of the newest changes or shader stuff without thinking about how it would benefit the community in some way. So instead of just making cool shit and releasing it, we've wanted to make that cool shit run really nice, and have a lot of options, even if we would hardly use them. Like there's some stuff in there we're we've said to each other that it be really nice for an RPG game, or something outside of an FPS. Or even little tiny optimizations here and there where we've noticed people could likely get away with a larger scene complexity.
On the gameplay not though, and specifically on hl2 mods I'd have to say I am honestly quite surprised. I mean, looking back you see how the rise and decline of hl2 based mods have progressed. So there was this point where we kinda stood back and gauged on whether or not C17 would still be worthwhile making.
Like I had said previously in the reply to Hollow, we're fully concentrated on making a top notch quality mod, and specifically that goal was mainly around story telling, and story building for the Resistance. Though we honestly can't say we didn't enjoy making the game look nice while we were at it. Again a lot of that was just getting into the "doing these things to improve Source in general". With what I was saying earlier though about HL2 popularity, I think the mac updates really brought this large influx of players.
It introduced HL2 to a ton of people who likely had no idea about it, so the percentage of people who were already kinda of tired of HL2 dramatically fell. Or rather, was entirely overshadowed by the people that now did. So I think that overall, there's still a lot of love for this game, but it's really the novel things that are what make a HL2 based mods so special, like for instance the physics puzzles with Research & Development. So while hl2 is probably going to quickly get old-ish again, unless Valve releases HL3 or something soon, I personally feel that as long as HL2 mods are top quality they'll still be welcome. So we definitely know we have to kick it up a notch, otherwise we might as well not even try.
I think another thing is a lot of mods kind of have lost sight of what made HL2 really cool, and in general, the Source engine. So every time we design something, we're constantly thinking about whether or not it really takes advantage of the engine (water rendering, physics etc), and if it's a nice unique thing in terms of experience. I remember saying in a super old media release thread we had here (maybe last year or two), that gameplay wise, we try and make sure we never present the same thing twice, or at least in the same way. So it's definitely not going to be >room full of gys>kill them> progress>repeat. Whereas rooms can even in the literal sense mean outdoor areas. With regards to Hl2 combat against combine, and really all the NPC's in general, we try to make sure the environment functions for gameplay, versus being pretty just because it can.
So for combine, I think we actually have a lot more unique ways we bring them into the arena, or combat area. Or enough dynamics in certain areas so it's never the case of always moving and shooting forward. We like to make sure you actually have to turn around and move in a 3d space, versus current Triple A titles make you do these days. Same thing with zombies, we even have them jump, or rather just toss themselves into combat areas.
Hopefully players will notice those little touches, and feel somewhat refreshed to see we aren't just having guys walk into an area, or already be there when you arrive and have plain gameplay. But again like you said too, I think it's just based on how Novel Hl2 is to some, and that will entirely effect the overall fun people have playing C17 regardless of how much attention we put into those aspects. We just hope it's enough to have people notice, and feel like there's something refreshing there.