Half-Life 2: Aftermath

Valve in "good at making Half Life games" - shock!

Walker admits in the PC Gamer interview: "Right now, we're really, really good at making Half Life 2. We think our customers want a lot more of Half Life 2. That's what we're going to give them. But we'd just got comfortable with all our tools and what we could do. That's normally the point in which we'd go off and make new tools - we didn't want to do that."

The focus for Aftermath appears to break with the Half-Life tradition of presenting the storyline from the viewpoint of other key characters in the game, with the mooted Al-based episode apparently not happening as many of us imagined it might. Instead, it would appear that as a compromise, Al figures as a much more active partner of Gordon Freeman's adventures.

As Walker asserts in the PCG interview, the rationale is for the player to get a much greater sense of attachment to Al, after doing so much to introduce her in Half-Life 2: "It's kind of ironic that despite so much of the theme of Half Life 2 being about other characters and other people, you spent most of the game alone."

Get up close and personal with Al

"We really want Al to grow as a character," he insists in the Gamer piece. "There was the promise of that in the first game, but we spent so much of our time introducing her as a character, we didn't really get a chance to spend time with her for an entire section. She would flit in and out. Since she's with you quite a lot, we're working on ways to make her a lot more interesting to be around, a lot more interesting to interact with." Ahem. A burgeoning romance perhaps?

As for where Aftermath is set, and the timeline, it's very much a logical continuation from where Half-Life 2 left off, as Laidlaw goes on to explain in the PC Gamer feature: "[Aftermath] deals with the events and issues set in motion during Half-Life 2. You've done critical damage to the Citadel. The whole place is going to go up, taking out City 17 and what's in its immediate radius. You and Al are leading the flight from the city getting up close and personal with some of the creatures and sights from the end of the game." Interestingly, apart from a few ambiguous illustrative captions, the PCG piece at no stage makes it 100 per cent explicit that Al's sidekick will be Gordon. However, writer Tim Edwards has subsequently clarified that you do play as Gordon in Aftermath.

Unlike in Half-Life 2, creatures that were barred from the confines of City 17 have now found a new home unfettered by the barriers that kept them at bay previously. "We have a philosophy that we try to re-use and provide interesting twists to our core concepts," says Walker in the same PC Gamer feature. "Like the Antlions started the game as your enemy, and then became your friends later on. In Aftermath, City 17 was 'one thing' and now it's this 'other thing'," he continues, refusing doggedly to elaborate despite probing from PC Gamer UK writer Tim Edwards, the man who unearthed this stunning exclusive ahead of the world's press.

Letting off Steam

One very big question mark over the fate of Aftermath is how much the game will cost over Steam and whether the game will be also be released in boxed form through long-term publisher Sierra/Vivendi-Universal Games at any stage in the future; if the PC Gamer piece is to believed, no boxed version is planned - although how VU Games feels about missing out on this expansion pack would be very interesting indeed.

Walker states in the piece: "The reason we're able to do this, and why it's so exciting is because of Steam. If we were doing this without Steam we'd have to put it in a box, we'd have to start figuring out shelf space over a year beforehand. You'd see it six years from now."

Six years? An exaggeration for comic effect, maybe, but we don't recall Blue Shift or Opposing Force taking "six years" to emerge after Half-Life. The Steam online content delivery system admittedly speeds up the process by cutting out the middle men, gets piped straight to the end user and generates a huge amount of cash for the game creators, but producing a boxed version shouldn't hold up the delivery of new content to a significant degree.

"We're enthusiastic, we want to make games. We're people who love to create, but we don't have the thrill of smaller projects," admits Walker in the PC Gamer exclusive. "We can't just throw something out there and see how the customers enjoy it. As soon as Half-Life 2 came out, the mod community created all these combinations of monster battles that we hadn't gotten around to. We never did the Xen Controller versus the Tentacle. This time we want to be the ones to have that fun." Walker also admits later in Gamer's feature that he's "desperate" to work on a mod based on Lemarr, the little headcrab.

Even less specifically, Walker goes on to talk in general terms about Valve's concept of "design economy". "Simply: how economically do we use each game element?" he asks in the PC Gamer piece. "How well is an object in the game connected to all the others? The heart of the game design is making those connections, and making them more interesting. By the end of Half-Life 2 we could see them very well and understood how they work. The better you understand those connections, the better you are at processing new gameplay. Can I sit today with five other people, and create a new level using the elements we already have?" We don't doubt it.