T w e n t y S i d e d

Another note on the Half-Life 2 Episode 2 stats from yesterday: About 75% of players leave the difficulty on Medium – the default. 15% play on Easy and the last 10% play on hard. (It’s actually a pie chart, those are eyeballed percentages on my part.)

When I was young and poor I tried to get the most out of my games by ratcheting up the difficulty. I’d play through on Medium, then Hard, then “Nightmare” (or whatever super-hard was called in the given game, if it was available) and then continue to play at the highest difficulty with various self-imposed limits.

The most obsessive was when I beat Quake on Nightmare difficulty without dying. If I died, I started a whole new game over from the very beginning. I suppose you could call this “Sisyphus” difficulty. It took several tries to make it, but it did a good job of squeezing some additional hours out of the game. I can’t believe I did that. I would find that sort of thing infuriating and tedious now, but as I’ve aged I’ve been increasingly stingy with how much time I’m willing to spend re-experiencing the same content.

In fact, I seem to do the opposite now. I start on Medium, but on subsequent play-throughs I’m not really interested in the combat. I’m usually experimenting with scripted situations, looking for hidden areas, and testing alternative solutions to problems and puzzles. When I do this I usually play on “super-easy” by cheating my way through the thing.

In Half-Life 2 the main sort of cheating I enjoy is upping the allowed ammo restrictions so that I can carry tons of whatever weapon I’m currently interested in, and then going to town with it. Allowing myself tons of grenades or (better) alt-fire explosives for the machine gun is a favorite of mine. Those are very powerful and tend to be severely rationed in the normal game, and it’s fun to cut loose and bomb the enemy senseless. It would ruin the game if I did this on the first play-through, but on later trips it can be fun. Giving myself a pistol that does 2,000 damage is also stupid in a hilarious sort of way.

But all of that is just a diversion. The real goal on later trips is to is see how the game behaves when you do things the designers don’t expect. You have to be careful with Valve games, because they are very tightly scripted and thus not very flexible when you leave their tightly scripted rails. (In HL2, during the final push to the Citadel, you have to fight your way past a bunch of Striders. If you kill them before the game intends – before you reach the crate of rockets – you can get trapped because the Striders aren’t around to blow open key walls for you.) Note that in this case being “tightly scripted” (or railroaded, if you will) is not a bad thing. It enables them to fill the game with lifelike reactions from the NPCs and movie-like pacing. The more sandbox the game is, the more generic it has to be. With most games I’m always wishing for more freedom, alternate paths, open-ended play, and divergent choices, but in the case of Half-Life I’m willing to trade freedom for story because they do it so well.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Via Rampant Coyote I see the stats for Half-Life 2: Episode 2. It has the breakdown of how much time people spend beating the game, how long the average play session is, how far through the game the average player is, and other bits of interesting trivia.

The average play session is about 25 minutes? How odd. I tend to play for an hour or more, and I’m sure this isn’t an unusual practice. That means there must be a good supply of players out there who play for much less than 25 minutes. There is a good bit of annoying overhead to firing up the game in terms of loading times and whatnot. Hardly seems worth it for ten minutes.

Another surprise in the Episode 2 stats is that 76% of gamers have cards capable of HDR, which means an Nvidia 7800 or higher. Due to my own prejudices I expected this number to be closer to 50%. Whenever I do one of my posts about how “games from four years ago still look fantastic and I see no reason to upgrade”, I get a lot of agreement in the comments. I think this eventually distorted my idea of what sort of hardware “most people” have. Perhaps I’m just projecting in an effort to justify my cheapskate lifestyle.

The site of the train crash at the start of the game. That huge red blob marks the cliff where you can go and look down into City 17.

My favorite part is the “death map” section. It shows an overhead view of each map in the game, with regions colored according to how many players died in the given area. There are some predictable death hotspots – like when the player must jump the car over a chasm – but some hotspots that are harder to understand. There is one in the very first area at the opening of the game. I wasn’t even aware it was possible to die there. There are no foes. You have no weapons. The whole area is exploration and dialog. It’s a playpen for new players, easing them into the game. There is a cliff there, and I guess some players manage to blunder off of it, which produced the big red splotch on the map. But what about the blue areas of “sparse deaths” nearby? How are those people dying? The only thing I can think of is that maybe they pick up the boulders with the gravity gun and fling them around, which could lead to deadly mishaps.

Perhaps standing near the fence during the scripted portal storm / bridge collapse is dangerous. That fence falls open, allowing progress, and maybe impatient players are waiting right by the fence, anxious for the gate to open. The designers clearly intended for you to stand on the south edge of the map, looking at the vista of ruined City 17. It’s hard not to do so. It’s an amazing sight, and Alyx is down there talking to the player, which gives them a pretty good incentive to go over there.

The final battle area against the striders. The green dot near the top is the sawmill. The bright red dot near the bottom is right outside the missle silo.

Another interesting map is that of the final battle area. Note the nice, even distribution over most of the battlefield. Then check out the two blue dots on the south side of the map. You can’t get there until the battle is over, and once you do there isn’t anything dangerous going on. So, some players completed the huge outdoor battle, then wandered back into the compound and blew themselves up for no apparent reason. I’d love to know what’s going on there.

The stats reveal the sad truth that my play experience is a lot like everyone else’s. When you find a secret or overcome a challenge it’s common to get the rush of having done something special, but then you realize everyone else did pretty much the same thing.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.