Gabe, aka the G-Man,
You mentioned in your commentary tracks that you read every e-mail you get, so I feel significantly more motivated to write one to you. So, let me just go into some things I did and didn't like:
Some General Pros:
- Achievements. Considering that you deliver short, tightly focused games that are meant to be beaten relatively quickly, having an extra means of tracking stats, and measuring the extent to which the player has explored the world to its fullest provides some useful feedback and encourages getting more out of the experience than a single playthrough.
- Commentary. Always fun, hearing about the evolution of the game's design is particularly interesting, and all the mistakes made.
- As always, your game design style favors novelty over grinds and experiencing unique challenges over long and painful stretches of the same old thing
Some General Cons:
- Turnaround time, a good deal of expansion packs and sequels running on the same engine as their original game have delivered more gameplay content (in terms of time) for the number of years spent in development. The schedule may have very well passed your expectations as well as ours, they're great games, but the trickled out pace is slow compared to a lot of series
- New content in each title. Your strategy appears to be taking all your cast of characters, your weapons, enemies, and NPCs, and developing them further by placing them in new environments and settings. Since HL2 in the two episodes, we've seen one variation on a zombie, the hunters, acid spitters, and no new weapons. We've gotten some great environments like the antlion caves, but largely the same cast of characters otherwise, I would typically expect a bit more from an expansion pack, the undersea monster from the teleportation mishap in HL2 has never even shown up.
Some game specific comments:
Episode Two:
- The antlion caves were gorgeous, the texturing felt a lot more real than the typical narrow corriders
- The open-ended battle at the end of the game fighting the striders is one of my favorite moments in the series, it makes practical use of a vehicle, involves some larger scale strategy and resource allocation, and feels more like you're involved in a real large-scale battle rather than a one-man skirmish
- Never been a fan of crossing radioactive waste, or sentry guns that can you for standing up, it makes movement uncomfortable and inspires a lot of quickload for taking a wrong step, much more so than typical gameplay
Portal:
- Great use of the basic game mechanic to set up puzzles, and from the fire onwards it turned from a straight-up puzzle game to an engaging story
- The vast majority of levels are basically setup and training for the game's mechanics and their consequences. For those of us who didn't have a problem figuring out Narbacular Drop for ourselves it takes a bit to get into the meat of the game. What was there was short, and extremely sweet, and feels like a great tech demo, you just wish there was more
- Sparse use of basic actors/element of gameplay: crates, buttons, turrets, those glowy ping pong balls and receptacles. All of which were used to great effect, but for future titles it seems you'll have to involve new elements to keep the gameplay fresh: deal with portals in relation to moving enemies you may have to trick or trap, possibly dealing with an enemy who has access to portals, and maybe even allowing your portal gun to have a "memory" and maintain more than one set of portals
Anyway, keep it up, and thanks for your time in reading this and in developing.
Sincerely,
Mark Newheiser
Anyway, after what looked like some brief forward in the email chain between Gabe Newell and a designer, I got this response:
Dear Mark
Thanks for the thoughtful comments. We’ll keep it all in mind as we go forward, at our usual tortuous pace.
Yours,
Marc Laidlaw
Sending out emails to major game developers is a little bit like writing a personal blog in terms of tossing feedback out into the great googlish void of the internet and hoping someone notices, but it was an encouraging moment for me, back before I was doing any serious writing related to games. Valve is apparently well-known for doing stuff like this in general, they send back custom feedback forms related to fans who mail stuff related to Team Fortress 2, and have mocked up custom comics around their content for the sole purpose of interacting with fans.
Along with Blizzard, they're a company that has an excellent reputation for taking as long as they damn well please to make a game, but ultimately turning out something amazing. And while I'm not sure if the Half-Life 2 episodes really qualify as episodic gaming anymore in any meaningful sense, they've managed to turn out a caliber of game that I'll probably be introducing my kids to many years from now as I gripe at them to check out the classics of my era.

One of the interesting features to Chrono Trigger is the extent to which your choices have actual consequences in the story. Video games are notorious for letting you get away with anything, it's assumed that anything in the world you can interact with you're supposed to. You can typically burst into people's houses and take anything that's not nailed down (or if it is, pry it loose), and help people or ignore them as you see fit. Early on in Chrono Trigger you're put on trial for "kidnapping" a princess when she simply ran off with you, and whether or not you're declared innocent or guilty depends upon a variety of actions you might have done or not done. If you tried to sell off the princess's pendant that's a strike against you, likewise if you stole someone's lunch, and the extent to which you're honest about the mistakes you made also affects the result. It puts you in a reflexive state of mind very early on in the game, the decisions you make very well could have consequences, you're not necessarily just going to watch the story play out for itself, your actions could conceivably change the course of events.




