cpoint: simcity

[CSN NewsBot]

Tapdance!! After a brief (not brief at all) hiatus, Counter-Point is back! This week our hosts--rizzuh and asspennies--ponder whether the HL2 "community" is a firmly rooted forest or simply a leaf ready to blow away in the wind. If you understood the clever gaming pun you've already scored the +5 geek bonus! Here's your snippet:

What's the role of a Doom 3 or Duke Nukem Forever community? Have you seen the Max Payne community? I think not! A community for a single player game is almost transparent. I can't think of a single player title with a coherent community at all. While all of us might be looking forward to HL2 single player right now, what will really make a community is how good or bad the multiplayer is. There is a huge difference between an online community and an offline. Half-Life 2's online community, initially, will be web forums and walkthroughs. Presumably, the multiplayer won't be too much of an issue until mods come out. Right now, the HL2 community (which we're a part of!) is just dreaming of single player.

You can read the rest right here, so why don't you go do that now and we'll wait for you in the comments.

[f0liage^]

im not really a big fan of the counter-point feature and it is just a rambling between 2 guys that doesnt seem to go anywhere.

[Spartibus]

f0liage^ wrote..

im not really a big fan of the counter-point feature and it is just a rambling between 2 guys that doesnt seem to go anywhere.

maybe because you can't read very well?



their discussions on cpoint are pretty interesting and show some valid points, different kinds of opinions, and ask some good questions.



keep up the good work asspennies and rizzuh

[Cannibalistic Muffin]

Yeah definately some good stuff.



About that whole community thing. I help out in forums, I play the game (CS, TFC, etc) on a near daily basis but I don't feel like I'm well within any community. I'm just there to play, be it a good day, or a bad day, just having some fun. Of course that tendency to not feel part of the community would probably be because I only started playing about 2-3 years ago, but still.

[Doodleman3]

Personally I'd rather play a fantastic single-player over a craptastic multiplayer any day of any week, the problem is most of them can only be played once and the best of them can be played two or three times and the masterful ones the ten or fifteen times I've been through Half-Life. Recently I've been playing through all the mods and add-ons for HL whether I've played them before or not, because I'm gearing up to invest some time in HL2 and I have a feeling HL is gonna get forgotten about for a few weeks(or hopefully a few years till I'm feeling nostalgic)I'll probably play through the campaign at least twice and then I'll get into HL2's multiplayer, which is something you didn't mention in your article that HL2 will have a multiplayer and the way valve is being right secretive about it I would suggest that it's a bit more then standard deathmatch.

[chainz]

ok

[asspennies]

I can't wait to see the group who decides to translate Valve's entire single-player from Half-Life into the HL2 engine.



You know it will happen. Just thinking about redoing that whole campaign...yowza. That will take a LOT of time. And a lot of patience to do right.

[Chrono]

I would love to see the original HL single-player game ported into HL2. I definatly would play it.

[Diamond Dust]

I'm wondering what they are going to do with hl2 multiplayer. Hl multiplayer really wasn't much fun in my mind. Maybe they will have some good gameplay types.

[SonicB00m]

you are a genious rizzuh...



Will you marry me ?

[{-ATFW-}pAnDa]

What about a CS2 mod? Are they coming out with a counter-strike mod for HL2 or are they just gonna let counter-strike stay in the HL realm?

[Julio Caesar]

....no +5 points for me then.

[GriffinMouse]

Nice read. Like 'Tech N9ne' already said, it`s got some good points in there. ( /me is pretending to be smart)



I guess CS as a game, and by extention its community is quite

unique because of the changes CS has gone trough.

Most multiplayer games have a singleplayer setting (graphics, controls, etc.) underneath them, and simply have updates or patches that rarely include any drastic changes, whereas CS

started pretty much from scratch and has went through

many many transformations.

(I played it first time at beta7 stage, so I`m actually over my head talking about 'changes in CS' :/ )



As the pointless personal opinion of this comment; I`ve been tilting towards singleplayer games more and more recently, because of the

lame-o factor of players in multiplayer enviroments.

And I really don`t like the competitive nature of mp games anyway,

I just wanna have fun.



(and the a bit off-topic, but HL2 related anyway:)

But isn`t it inevitable that when HL2 comes out,

a whole lot of people will try desperately to copy the succes of CS

by making

"The Next Counter-Strike but Only Better!!" ?



...and fail miserably(?)

[peagle]

Counter-Strike hasn't ended since it started on June 18th, 1999

Masterfully put, exactly. Ever since the original doom went multiplayer (at first through some mods as I remember it, then officially) it became a game that had no limits, something to look forward to like a sport with friends rather than a movie with an ending.



Multiplayer games naturally spawn larger and enduring communities because they operate on a different cultural and social level than single player games (imho). CS offers gamers a 24/7 public forum for displays of skill or stupidity, honor or backstabbing, leadership or solo glory hunting, and always at the end of the tunnel, respect and triumph dangles like a carrot on a string, rarely rewarded - briefly felt - but endlessly addictive.

[ja]2ev]

How soon we see new mods will completely depend on how easy the editing tools are, I think. (I wonder if Barney has had his hands on the new tools...) Within months I would think that we would see variations of CS/DoD if not released by valve then made by the community.

What I can't imagine is how the net code is going to handle all the little variables of all the interactive objects. Instead of shooting up a box and having a little scripted sequence of wood shattering the same way every time the box gets so much dammage we would see the holes from our bullets going through the wood.



I really hope that with the new engine CS and other great mods don't turn into these massive bf1942 environments. The tight squad play is the most addictive aspect of CS.



Do I feel like a part of the community...since I'm not hosting a website or anything - not really. Do I play ALOT and get others to also...hell yeah - and I always will.