The narrative had to be baked into the corridors.” These were all economical ways of doing storytelling with the architecture - which was my whole obsession. Then we just worked backwards from there to flesh out the preceding events. But after all the work of building broken levels, it seemed like a waste not to get more use out of them. “The plan up until that point had been to start immediately after the disaster, as the smoke cleared. “It solved the problem of how to start the game,” Laidlaw says. That came about when Laidlaw and level designer Brett Johnson decided to fix up some of the latter’s ruined lab areas and bring them to the rest of the team. Nowhere was this more keenly felt than in its famous opening train ride, into the bowels of Gordon Freeman’s unorthodox and intimidating workplace. Half-Life’s continuous and consistent fiction left you with the sense you were passing through a cross-section of a larger world, rather than a set of fairly narrow levels. It’s this approach that resulted in Half-Life’s trademark flow and perfect pacing - as well as a lot of black comedy, in which scientists were pulled into vents and belched out again in pieces. Then when characters do pop up, they can say lines of dialogue that make them feel like characters instead of signposts.” You don’t need NPCs popping up to tell you what to do if your visual grammar is clear enough. “Really good level design tells its own story. “Lots of traps and detours and obstacles and occasional moments of breakthrough,” he says. Rather, Laidlaw had the dev team explain the stories they were trying to tell, and helped them solve narrative problems through level design. In fact, by modern standards, there’s very little dialogue in Half-Life. ![]() ![]() That loneliness became a defining characteristic of a campaign that only ever granted you temporary friends - an endless succession of AI tagalongs. “You were supposed to be alone in this vast scary environment, but also alone in your head, and you could be whoever you wanted to be in that world.” “The main one was simply the chance to not wake you from the dream,” Laidlaw says. But when they ran out of time, the team doubled down on the unbroken first-person perspective and found unexpected strengths in it. Originally, Valve planned to tell its story more traditionally through third-person cutscenes. Half-Life was already recognisable as the FPS that would change everything: the disaster at the government lab, the dimensional breach, the battle to break through to Xen and end an alien incursion.
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