XLC Executive
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Home: Michigan, US
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07-02-2007, 02:39 PM
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Half Life 2: The Orange Box
I never got into the Half Life games, but I hear a new version of Half Life 2 is coming to the 360(The Orange Box). It's going to feature a lot more bells and whistles. Plans to come out on October 9, 2007. What's everyone think about the past Half Lifes? Do you think the title is good as the other games like Halo and Call of Duty. I just remember hearing all this ranting and raving about the game's graphics for the PC. Few weeks after it was released for the PC, it died down completely. Do a lot of people still play this game?
Quote:
When it was released on Xbox last year, nearly everyone's reaction to Half-Life 2 was the same: It's great, but why didn't Valve just wait for the release of the Xbox 360? After all, Microsoft's new console would be more than capable of handling the shooter's admittedly intense demands on a system's CPU and GPU. Instead, we got a game that looked excellent (for an Xbox title), but had a number of issues that could have been solved by just waiting a few months. Well, we soon found out that Valve had intended to bring the game to the Xbox 360 all along, packaging it with the first two follow-up episodes, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. That's a lot of bang for your buck, and we were happy to learn that the Xbox 360 version of Half-Life 2 actually features more bells and whistles than the PC version.
We had a chance to check the game out on the show floor at Microsoft's X06 event in Barcelona, and we walked away looking forward to the game more than ever. It was an extremely brief demo, serving more to show off the new graphical flourishes than to give us a taste of the game itself (of course, we've already played through it several times anyway). Our demoer explained to us that the team had improved the Source engine several times since the game's release, and this version of Half-Life 2 would be taking full advantage of the new features.
All of the levels, he explained, have been redone with high dynamic range lighting in place, meaning you'll have some neat bloom effects around objects against the daytime sky, and Gordon's "eyes" will have to adjust when going from extremely dark areas to brighter ones (and vice versa). The new lighting engine looks very impressive, as does the reflection system. Our demoer told us that while the original game featured some cool reflections off of water and the like, there were some instances when the team was actually forced to turn the system off, even when the game was running on the most powerful PCs. This was due to limitations in the Source engine, and the upgrades have made it possible to keep the reflections on at all times without risk of frame-rate drops.
Speaking of frame rates, the first thing the Valve representative told me when I mentioned that I played the Xbox version of the game was that the Xbox 360 title would be locked-in at 60 frames per second, even during the most intense firefights. While that wasn't the case when I was checking it out, he explained that the game was only running on one of the Xbox 360's cores at the time, and even then it was running fairly smoothly. He also mentioned that the collision calculations in the game were four times faster than in the previous version of the game, meaning everything would react more realistically when hit.
Although we didn't get to play Half-Life 2 for ourselves, it certainly looks a lot closer to a high-end PC version of the game than the Xbox version. The new lighting and reflection effects add a great deal to the experience, and we're hoping that Valve's claim that the game will be running at a solid 60 frames per second isn't just wishful thinking. Will we be getting the definitive Half-Life 2 experience? Only time will tell, but it's definitely looking promising.
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