Portal - Kupo, you're going to love this :)

S

subedii

Great Teacher
http://kotaku.com/gaming/top/clips-first-look-at-valves-portal-188140.php

This is the demonstration of Portal from Valve's presentation at the EA Summer Media Event. It was as much overshadowed by the announcement of Team Fortress 2 as it was unfairly overshadowed by it. Yes, this is very much inspired by Prey's cool-ass portal system, but Human Head Studios certainly didn't explore the mind-bending infinite dimensional paradoxes of portals like this.
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Watch the video. There's no possible way to describe this, not even with still pictures, this is one of those things you have to see in motion to understand. And even then I didn't understand how they did some of the stuff there. :lol:

Looks frigging incredible. Valve can largely be credited with making physics a part of the FPS, but this is completely out there.

The spatial and temporal thinking it must require is something we've never seen in an FPS before.

It's amazing how they took such a simple concept as creating your own portals and implemented it with such creativity there. If you gave that concept to some other developement studio it would just end up being a gimick. Here it looks like they've got ideas for molding an entire gameworld out of this concept already.

I can't wait for them to incorporate this into a game. Personally, I wouldn't mind Valve having a major franchise other than HL. :wink:

Admittedly the footage looks as if it's more demonstration / proof of concept, the potential it showcases is mindblowingly cool.
 
That is really cool, the idea of it is great and i see why you need to watch it to really fully understand it. Its just like the prey portal system but you don't get to control that i think, mind you i have only played the prey demo so i can't say for sure :? , Still really cool film of the portal system
 
Arbalest said:
Its just like the prey portal system but you don't get to control that i think, mind you i have only played the prey demo so i can't say for sure :? , Still really cool film of the portal system
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The Prey portal system is limited in that way, but there's a user-made mod out there that has already got something pretty much identical to Portal working. It's currently the most popular fanboy skirmish out there, with indignant Prey fans claiming valve stole the idea from under their noses, with all the accusations of unoriginality that got levelled at Doom 3: Ressurection of Evil's Gravity Gun.

In actuality if anyone did it first, it was the people who did Narbacular Drop. They released that for free game ages ago and before Prey resurfaced after years of being vapourware (not to mention that I don't really see how Prey's portals are such a quantum leap from the portals in Unreal 1 maps like DMRadikus). Interestingly, the team responsble for that were hired by Valve to create Portal :p At the end of the day though, it doesn't matter who came up with something, but how it is implemented and whether it works well. Valve didn't create object physics, they were just the first to give the player a way of interacting with objects that was a new kind of awesome. Now Valve are working the magic with Portals, I think we can be even more excited about them as a gameplay device.

As for what Portal will actually be like, that's all a bit mysterious. The gameplay videos put me heavily in mind of the sandbox-like areas that were shown in the First Half-life 2 video all those years back. Non-descript boxes without art-assets that made viewers focus on the gameplay aspects. Also, word going round is that Portal, rather than being a seperate franchise, is in fact in some way linked to the Half-Life continuity. I'll believe that when I see it.

Bit worried about the length too. Or perhaps I should be worried about the Price? Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2? I'll be surprised if that's the same $20 they were offering Episode One, HLDM:Source and HL2:Deathmatch for. Those packages can barely be compared in value for money terms.
 
kupoartist said:
Bit worried about the length too. Or perhaps I should be worried about the Price? Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2? I'll be surprised if that's the same $20 they were offering Episode One, HLDM:Source and HL2:Deathmatch for. Those packages can barely be compared in value for money terms.
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I'm also sceptical about the length, but hopefully it doesn't matter too much whether Portal's going to be short. With a system like this I can see plenty of people creating their own custom 'puzzle' levels for this game.

Multiplayer would certainly be mindbending though. :mrgreen:
 
kupoartist said:
The Team Fortress 2 Trailer is up and about as well.

I like what Valve have done with it TBH. Brotherhood of Arms would have been a brilliant game had it been released when it was supposed to, but now it would just come across as a Battlefield clone. They needed to differentiate it... and, boy did they differentiate it :p
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Didn't know they'd changed anything. I'll have to have a look, the last screenshots I remember were from around 98 / 99. :mrgreen:

EDIT: OK, just had a look. You weren't kiding about the changes. Those guys looked as if they could have been lifted from The Incredibles. :eek:

Shame there was no indication of how the game's going to actually play. I presume they must have made some enhancements to the gameplay. Since this is supposed to be coming with Ep2, Release date ought to be somewhere around November / December this year right?
 
subedii said:
Since this is supposed to be coming with Ep2, Release date ought to be somewhere around November / December this year right?
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Well, yes, in an optimistic world in which Valve meets the first release date they roll-out to the public...

I.E. Expect all three games in Q1 2007 :p On the bright-side, I can't imagine it'll be Team Fortress that is holding things up. I mean, they've had 8+ years to work on it, and delaying it again would be pretty ludricous :p I wonder just how much hard work got scrapped in the process? On the bright-side, it's clear that they're aiming for something truer to TFC now rather than going off on a tangent and making Teamfield 2 (Really, Team Fortress is as much about crazy weapons and physics tricks as it is about a good ol' game of teamplay war, Brotherhood of Arms didn't have that feel at all). The map in that video looks suspiciously like a cartoonish 2Fort to me...
 
The soldier and the pyro seem to be the least creatively designed classes in terms of their looks. Everyone else looks funky cool, but the other two wouldn't look out of place in most other FPS's.

Shame really, since I was always a little partial to the Pyro. :twisted:
 
subedii said:
The soldier and the pyro seem to be the least creatively designed classes in terms of their looks. Everyone else looks funky cool, but the other two wouldn't look out of place in most other FPS's.

Shame really, since I was always a little partial to the Pyro. :twisted:
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Of course the Soldier wouldn't look out of place in most other FPS's, he IS in most other FPS's :p Since the stereotype is so widely used in FPS games (he reminds me personally of the soldiers in Day of Defeat), all Valve can really do is take the stock soldier and make fun of his intelligence and give him a meat-head style. I quite like it. You can't really do much more with a Pyro either perhaps, as the iconic pyro-soldier is a rubber-suited gas-masker. Suppose they could have done something funny with a mad looking guy with singed clothes, but then that may have been too hard to tell apart from some other character. It may not be the most distinct design in market terms, but it's unmistakable actually in the game.

The Engineer and the Scout are notable for me to have changed the least from what I remember of Team Fortress Classic. Guess if they ain't broke you just make their weapon bigger and elongate their jaw. Personally, my favourite is the Demo-man. He truely looks like a guy who likes to blow **** up :D
 
I was thinking more something like this maybe:

http://www.bradfitzpatrick.com/character_design/cartoon_soldier_01.htm
Although lower in rank. Square jawed, square headed type. Meh, doesn't really make oo much difference.

I just hope the Pyro gets some teeth in the new incarnation. I liked Pyro but it always felt like 'that extra class you can also choose'. If you know what I mean. He didn't really excel at anything that another class wouldn't have been a better choice for. And if you wanted an all-rounder you may as well have gone with the soldier class. :?

Althgough to be fair, I never played the original Quake incarnation so I don't know how he was balanced there.

EDIT: Personal favourite new design is probably the 70's style big-game hunter (Sniper) with the cheesy sideburns. Class.
 
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