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Dustland Delivery plays like a funny, tough, post-apocalyptic Oregon Trail

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Road trips with just two people always have their awkward silences. In Dustland Delivery, my character, a sharpshooter, has tried to break the ice with the blacksmith he hired a few towns back, with only intermittent success.

Remember that bodyguard, the one I unsuccessfully tried to flirt with at that bar? The blacksmith was uninterested. What about that wily junk dealer, or the creepy cemetery? Silence. She only wanted to discuss “Abandoned train” and “Abandoned factory,” even though, in this post-apocalypse, abandonment was not that rare. But I made a note to look out for any rusted remains; stress and mood are far trickier to fix than hunger and thirst.

Dustland Delivery release trailer.

Dustland Delivery, available through Steam for Windows (and Proton/Steam Deck), puts you in the role typically taken up by NPCs in other post-apocalyptic RPGs. You’re a trader, buying cheap goods in one place to sell at a profit elsewhere, and working the costs of fuel, maintenance, and raider attacks into your margins. You’re in charge of everything on your trip: how fast you drive, when to rest and set up camp, whether to approach that caravan of pickups or give them a wide berth.

Some of you, the types whose favorite part of The Oregon Trail was the trading posts, might already be sold. For the others, let me suggest that the game is stuffed full of little bits of weird humor and emergent storytelling, and a wild amount of replayability for what is currently a $5 game. There are three quest-driven scenarios, plus a tutorial, in the base game. A new DLC out this week, Sheol, adds underground cities, ruins expeditions, more terrains, and a final story quest for four more dollars.

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Hands-on with Frosthaven’s ambitious port from gigantic box to inviting PC game

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I can say this for certain: The game’s tutorial does a lot of work in introducing you to the game’s core mechanics, which include choosing cards with sequential actions, “burning” cards for temporary boosts, positioning, teamwork, and having enough actions or options left if a fight goes longer than you think. I’m not a total newcomer to the -haven games, having played a couple rounds of the Gloomhaven board game. But none of my friends, however patient, did as good a job of showing just how important it was to consider not just attack, defend, or move, but where each choice would place you, and how it would play with your teammates.

I played as a “Banner Spear,” one of the six starting classes. Their thing is—you guessed it—having a spear, and they can throw it or lunge with it from farther away. Many of the Banner Spear’s cards are more effective with positioning, like pincer-flanking an enemy or attacking from off to the side of your more up-close melee teammate. With only two players taking on a couple of enemies, I verbally brushed off the idea of using some more advanced options. My developer partner, using a Deathwalker, interjected: “Ah, but that is what summons are for.”

Soon enough, one of the brutes was facing down two skeletons, and I was able to get a nice shot in from an adjacent hex. The next thing I wanted to do was try out being a little selfish, running for some loot left behind by a vanquished goon. I forgot that you only pick up loot if you end your turn on a hex, not just pass through it, so my Banner Spear appeared to go on a little warm-up jog, for no real reason, before re-engaging the Germinate we were facing.

The art, animations, and feel of everything I clicked on was engaging, even as the developers regularly reassured me that all of it needs working on. With many more experienced players kicking the tires in early access, I expect the systems and quality-of-life details to see even more refinement. It’s a long campaign, both for players and the developers, but there’s a good chance it will be worth it.

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11 standouts from Steam Next Fest’s thousands of free game demos

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Let Ars help you find some needles in Steam’s massive haystack of game trials.

If you head over to the Steam Next Fest charts right now, Valve will offer you a glimpse of the 2,228 games offering free downloadable demos as part of the event through Sunday, March 3. That is way too many games to effectively evaluate in such a short time, even with the massive resources of the Ars Orbiting HQ.

But we haven’t let that stop us from trying. With the assistance of some early access provided by Valve and game publishers, we’ve spent the last few days playing dozens and dozens of the most promising Next Fest demos in an attempt to pull out some interesting-looking needles from Valve’s massive haystack. Below are the results of that search—a varied list of 11 titles we think are worth investing some time (and zero dollars of money) into a demo download.

But this is just a starting point. Please use the comments below to share any other diamonds in the rough you think your fellow Ars readers need to know about.

Afterblast

Developer: Lumino Games

Planned release date: April 2025

Popular steam tags: FPS, Online Co-Op, Action Roguelike, Roguelite

Steam page

Start with the roguelike, room-based shooting action of Returnal. Move it to a first-person perspective and add in the double-jump-and-dash movement system of the new Doom games. Throw in a Halo Infinite-style grappling hook that can be used for traversal or combat. The result would come pretty close to Afterblast, a twitch-action shooter that shines from the jump in this fast-paced demo.

This is the kind of game where halting your movement for even a split second often means being instantly overwhelmed by enemies that swarm from all angles. Rather than being hard to handle, though, the game’s zippy movement makes it feel relatively simple to jump and dash from ledge to ledge, avoiding bullet-hell style projectile patterns as you do.

The grappling hook is by far the most satisfying part of the demo, though. Beyond jumping out of the way of opposing fire, you can also use it to drag yourself over to stunned enemies, exploding them into piles of goo and collectible items. Bouncing from enemy to enemy in this way, with a few well-placed jumps and dashes in between, felt like being a kid bouncing on a trampoline.

The Afterblast demo provides a feel for the game’s randomized item system, which gives access to automated drones, powerful grenades, and other superpowers that should make each run feel unique. We can’t wait to see more.

-Kyle Orland

Castle V Castle

Developer: Nopopo

Planned release date: “Coming soon”

Popular steam tags: Card Battler, Roguelite, Card Game, PvE

Steam page

If you remember cult-classic Flash game Castle Wars, you already know the basics of Castle V Castle. You and your opponent take turns using a handful of cards to either build up your own castle or break down the castle on the other side until one castle has been reduced to rubble. You then improve your deck and do it all again.

Playing effectively means figuring out when to attack, when to defend, and when to use cards to bulk up the various resources needed to play future cards. Strong play requires thinking a few moves ahead, both to avoid being left with a hand of unplayable cards and to counter or reflect potential incoming attacks from your opponent (or deny them the resources they might need).

An extremely clean black and white interface and quick, amusing animations make this a very easy game to pick up and play. But it’s the strategy of taking on short-term risks to get long-term rewards that will keep you coming back for round after round. And while the demo’s extremely punishing daily challenges are good for some continued longevity, we’re hoping the final game will add online multiplayer battles rather than just letting us beat down the AI over and over again.

-Kyle Orland

Dragonkin: The Banished

Developer: Eko Software

Planned release date: March 6, 2025 (Early Access)

Popular steam tags: Action, Hack and Slash, Adventure, RPG, Loot

Steam page

If you’ve grown tired of Diablo IV but are looking for another dark, mouse-based action RPG to scratch the same itch, Dragonkin: The Banished should be right up your alley. Just like in Diablo, the name of the game here is clicking to move and attack swarms of enemies in dark isometric dungeons, throwing in some magical attacks with the number keys on your keyboard as needed.

The Dragonkin demo leads you through a lot of extremely expository and overwrought cutscenes, broken up by short playable vignettes that introduce you to the main character classes: the heavy, the archer, the fire mage, etc. These introductory characters seem extremely overpowered for the early game, cutting through enemy grunts like butter while barely taking a scratch from underpowered opposition attacks. But it gives a good feel for the wide variety of available attacks available, from radiating lightning to a satisfying bull charge.

It’s only after this introduction that you’re thrown into a more standard challenge, clearing out a dungeon with a low-level character that needs all the help they can get. While the moment to moment gameplay will be familiar to Diablo heads, a few small touches like a handy dash-dodge maneuver make it all lean a bit more towards the “action” side of “action RPG.”

If you’re looking for pyrotechnic explosions, cinematic cut scenes, and plenty of things to click on, you could definitely do a lot worse.

-Kyle Orland

Glum

Developer: CinderCat Games

Planned release date: 2025

Popular steam tags: Adventure, Funny, Singleplayer

Steam page

First-person shooters are obviously all about the shooting—it’s right there in the name, after all. But the most satisfying part of these games is often running right up to an enemy and pounding them with a suspiciously powerful close-range melee attack.

Glum takes this satisfying melee bit and makes it the focus of the whole game. Instead of fists or a bludgeoning weapon, though, your main melee weapon in Glum is a steel-toed boot. You’ll see that boot hovering menacingly and incongruously in front of you as you zip around vaguely medieval-themed rooms, charging back with a bent knee for perfectly timed strikes as soon as an enemy gets in your face.

The Glum demo already takes this “first-person booter” concept in some interesting directions, providing plenty of barrels and other heavy objects you can convert into single-use projectile weapons with a kick from the right angle. You can also kick off of walls and other angled surfaces to fly through the air in some surprisingly satisfying and floaty platforming, which is key to finding the many secrets hidden in the demo’s tutorial-esque rooms.

But the most satisfying part is still kicking an enemy directly and watching the ragdoll corpse fly off a wall and back toward your boot, where you can send it flying into other encroaching foes. The light-hearted comedy action is especially welcome in an industry that sometimes seems full of first-person games that are too full of themselves.

-Kyle Orland

Guntouchables

Developer: Game Swing

Planned release date: “To be announced”

Popular steam tags: Action Roguelike, Multiplayer, Post-apocalyptic

Steam page

Seeing and hearing the pre-game logo screen for Ghost Ship Games immediately puts my brain into Deep Rock Galactic mode: headset on, workday stress abandoned, beverage ready. Guntouchables, published by Ghost Ship and developed by Game Swing, could readily fit into that slot. It’s a multiplayer-first overhead shooter in which you and up to three other sausage-y folks with tiny stick legs grab loot, kill baddies, and get the heck out of there. If it’s been a moment since you and your squad have shot some things together, send them a message and link the demo.

A horde of mutants have overrun the world, and you and your fellow redneck preppers are having their moment. You pick a weapon, like the precise but slow hunting rifle or pray-and-spray SMG, and a character, each with their own secondary weapons and skill trees. The game shows you a map with stuff to grab or destroy and the car you need to reach to escape. Then you’re off, moving with WASD keys and aiming in a circle with a mouse. The demo wasn’t ready for controller play yet, but I could see it coming in the future (along with another justification for the trackpads on the Steam Deck).

I cajoled a friend into playing, and we had a great time, both blasting and winning, but also explaining to each other just how dumb that last move was. The game could do more to help you quickly identify and distinguish among your teammates, as they’re currently all green names and health bars. And an optional tutorial mission would go a long way to help explain weapon and item mechanics that we had to test out live. But it’s a demo, and the core experience—shoot, run, grab, swarm coming, panic—already feels plenty strong. There’s a goofy, lightly icky charm to the voice-overs and visuals, and the upgrade paths are pleasantly addictive. It’s a ridiculous game with a ridiculous name, and I recommend it.

-Kevin Purdy

Hyper Empire

Developer: Fair Weather Studios

Planned release date: Q1 2025

Popular steam tags: 4X, Turn-Based Strategy, Auto Battler, Strategy

Steam page

When you play an RPG or strategy game, do you spend hours just staring at the tech tree, trying to figure out the upgrade path that will maximize your power going forward? If so, you’ll probably love Hyper Empire, a super-condensed 4X space simulation where a good 80 percent of the game is spent staring at a menu screen and deciding how best to spend your limited resources.

That’s actually more interesting than it might initially sound. You need to spend money on a fleet of ships to defend your carrier from potential attack, of course. But spending too much on powerful ships means you can’t invest in the outpost stations and tools that will bring in even more resources (and more powerful ships) later in the run. The balance between short-term risk and long-term reward seems well-tuned for those who like to agonize over every potential decision.

When battles inevitably happen, they play out as automated orgies of interstellar explosions that can be a joy to watch, especially once you hit a critical mass of defensive ships. And while random happenings can influence your resources between those battles, none of them have seemed too impactful in the demo so far.

The biggest problem with Hyper Empires right now is that the demo caps out at 30 turns, right when the “just one more turn” resource-building loop is starting to get good. We can’t wait to continue to juggle a bunch of numbers like an intergalactic accountant in the full game.

-Kyle Orland

Monaco 2

Developer: Pocketwatch Games

Planned release date: 2025

Popular steam tags: Co-op, Heist, Indie, Arcade, Top-Down, Loot

Steam page

It’s been well over a decade since the first Monaco wowed us with its ultra-stylish overhead “heist simulator” gameplay. This long-delayed sequel keeps the same basic find-the-Macguffin-and-escape gameplay, but now with vibrant 3D graphics and more complex, multi-floor building layouts.

As with the first Monaco, this is a stealth game that doesn’t absolutely require stealth. Sure, it’s easier if you sneak by the guards and cameras without raising the alarm, using handy sightlines and quiet movements to avoid detection. But if you’re found, the game quickly transitions into something of a 3D game of Pac-Man, where you have to outrun the guards and use hidden corridors or hidey-holes to outsmart them.

The Monaco 2 demo includes four classes of thieves, each with their own unique way of distracting or avoiding the guards. I especially liked the socialite, who uses a toy poodle to charm nearby guards into ignoring her, and the tech specialist, who can use a drone to interact with doors and items while he hides in relative safety.

The updated 3D viewpoint loses some of the simplistic charm of the original’s overhead perspective. Still, this modernized version of the classic stealth game is incredibly easy to pick up and play, especially with a few friends in co-op mode.

-Kyle Orland

Monster Train 2

Developer: Shiny Shoe

Planned release date: “Coming Soon”

Popular steam tags: Strategy, Card Game, Roguelike, Demons, PvP

Steam page

Monster Train 2 is a lot more Monster Train. Given that the original is in my top five of all-time Steam game hours, I’m happy about that. Just 30 minutes into testing it, I had to tell myself, “No, this really is the last round,” and physically walk away to enforce it. Well, the last round, and then some upgrade shopping. OK, one more and then no more.

Monster Train 2 is, like the original, an amalgam of turn-based tactics and roguelike deckbuilding, with a heaven-versus-hell backstory that is arch, goofy, and entirely skippable. Enemies enter your train on the bottom of three decks and fight their way upward, turn by turn. Your card deck has hellish monsters that you place across three levels of your train and spells that can damage, buff your monsters, and debuff their misguided angels. The music is high-energy melodic metal, the art pops off the screen, and the challenge is largely the same: balancing momentary threats against the need to prepare for future baddies.

Besides new monsters, cards, and clans, the sequel adds some new things, all of which might add up to be a bit too much to manage for some folks. Hero-type creatures can have abilities with cooldowns. New card types include equipment you can put on creatures and abilities you can apply to train floors. You can customize your train and upgrade its core pyre with abilities. This demo had me forgetting monster abilities and feeling overwhelmed with where to focus my upgrades. And yet I had a good time, and I’ll probably learn a new approach to turn actions over time. Hell, after all, devours the indolent.

-Kevin Purdy

Reignbreaker

Developer: Studio Fizbin

Planned release date: March 18, 2025

Popular steam tags: Indie, Hack and Slash, Action Roguelike, Combat

Steam page

The surface similarities between Reignbreaker and Hades are hard to ignore. But Reignbreaker‘s flavor of isometric run-and-gun-and-bash gameplay sets itself apart instantly with an extremely compelling steampunk aesthetic, full of clanging metal sound effects and relentless robotic enemies. That extends to the art direction, with thick outlines making it easy to pick out the color-coded hazards from the dull blues and grays of the metal-and-stone backgrounds.

Reignbreaker also stands out for some extremely chunky-feeling melee attacks and a javelin that can be used for powerful ranged projectiles or slammed down as a temporary turret. Tight controls make it a joy to dash between enemy projectiles as you wait for the opportune moment to go in for the kill. The Reignbreaker demo also shows off a few of the powerful bosses that will require most players to acquire a few permanent power-ups before making it too deep into the game’s randomized corridors.

This is one to keep an eye on as Hades 2 continues to barrel through Early Access toward its eventual final release

-Kyle Orland

Shuffle Tactics

Developer: Club Sandwich

Planned release date: “Coming soon”

Popular steam tags: Singleplayer, Roguelike, Tactical RPG, Isometric

Steam page

Like any good game with the word “Tactics” in its title, Shuffle Tactics is all about positioning. Move your units on a grid to maximize the damage they can inflict on enemies while minimizing the counterattacks that will inevitably come on their next turn. You know the drill.

But Shuffle Tactics adds just a hint of Slay the Spire into the mix, limiting your actions to those drawn from a deck of cards that you can build and modify between battles. As the game goes on, that means you might not be sure what options will be available on your next turn, forcing some quick improvisation if you want to maximize your chances.

I’m already a big fan of the demo’s satisfying sword-throwing mechanic, which lets you toss your melee weapon for a ranged attack and then call it back for more damage when it returns to your hand. I’m also enamored with the game’s evocative pixel-art animations, which make every movement and attack a joy to watch.

My biggest problem is that the demo gets very difficult very quickly; I had quite a few runs fall apart incredibly early when faced with an unavoidable “Elite” matchup that I wasn’t yet powerful enough to conquer. Hopefully. the developer can work out the balancing issues before launch because this mix of tactical strategy and card-based luck is a match made in heaven.

-Kyle Orland

Squirreled Away

Developer: Far Seas

Planned release date: “Coming soon”

Popular steam tags: Exploration, Third Person, Cute, Relaxing

Steam page

“Be the squirrel” is Far Seas’ description of its upcoming game, and while that’s a big promise, Squirreled Away seems on track to deliver. You’re not just a squirrel, mind you, but a tool-crafting, home-building, achievement-unlocking squirrel, owing to the demands of the gaming format. But when moving around, you get to experience the manic, sticky-pawed, and often weightless nature of squirreldom. Why do squirrels run corkscrews around the perimeter of a tree instead of climbing straight up? Maybe because, like me, they’re trying to keep up with their camera view on their right controller stick while moving with the left.

Squirreled Away‘s demo gives you a taste of its core mechanics, like stashing away items in a cache for winter or building an axe out of a pebble and twig so you can break larger branches into sticks for a fellow squirrel. The look, feel, and sound of the experience are decidedly calm, with single-instrument melodies lilting in and out as you scamper about, gather resources, and unlock quests and areas. You have health and stamina bars, but the game is gentle if you run them out, sending you back to safety or reminding you to eat some food.

It feels like a more kinetic Animal Crossing, with friendly animals and low-stakes challenges. Except that at any time, you could bail on your tasks, scamper upward, and leap from one far-out branch to another, living out the daydreams of anybody who works next to a window overlooking a tree.

– Kevin Purdy

Photo of Kyle Orland

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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Valve releases full Team Fortress 2 game code to encourage new, free versions

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Valve’s updates to its classic games evoke Hemingway’s two kinds of going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. Nothing is heard, little is seen, and then, one day, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Day of Defeat, and other Source-engine-based games get a bevy of modern upgrades. Now, the entirety of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) client and server game code, a boon for modders and fixers, is also being released.

That source code allows for more ambitious projects than have been possible thus far, Valve wrote in a blog post. “Unlike the Steam Workshop or local content mods, this SDK gives mod makers the ability to change, extend, or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible.” The SDK license restricts any resulting projects to “a non-commercial basis,” but they can be published on Steam’s store as their own entities.

Since it had the tools out, Valve also poked around the games based on that more open source engine and spiffed them up as well. Most games got 64-bit binary support, scalable HUD graphics, borderless window options, and the like. Many of these upgrades come from the big 25-year anniversary update made to Half-Life 2, which included “overbright lighting,” gamepad configurations, Steam networking support, and the like.

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The Sims re-release shows what’s wrong with big publishers and single-player games

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Opinion: EA might be done with single-player games—but we’re not.

The Sims Steam re-release has all of the charm of the original, if you can get it working. Credit: Samuel Axon

It’s the year 2000 all over again, because I’ve just spent the past week playing The Sims, a game that could have had a resurgent zeitgeist moment if only EA, the infamous game publisher, had put enough effort in.

A few days ago, EA re-released two of its most legendary games: The Sims and The Sims 2. Dubbed the “The Legacy Collection,” these could not even be called remasters. EA just put the original games on Steam with some minor patches to make them a little more likely to work on some modern machines.

The emphasis of that sentence should be on the word “some.” Forums and Reddit threads were flooded with players saying the game either wouldn’t launch at all, crashed shortly after launch, or had debilitating graphical issues. (Patches have been happening, but there’s work to be done yet.)

Further, the releases lack basic features that are standard for virtually all Steam releases now, like achievements or Steam Cloud support.

It took me a bit of time to get it working myself, but I got there, and my time with the game has reminded me of two things. First, The Sims is a unique experience that is worthy of its lofty legacy. Second, The Sims deserved better than this lackluster re-release.

EA didn’t meet its own standard

Look, it’s fine to re-release a game without remastering it. I’m actually glad to see the game’s original assets as they always were—it’s deeply nostalgic, and there’s always a tinge of sadness when a remaster overwrites the work of the original artists. That’s not a concern here.

But if you’re going to re-release a game on Steam in 2025, there are minimum expectations—especially from a company with the resources of EA, and even more so for a game that is this important and beloved.

The game needs to reliably run on modern machines, and it needs to support basic platform features like cloud saves or achievements. It’s not much to ask, and it’s not what we got.

The Steam forums for the game are filled with people saying it’s lazy that EA didn’t include Steam Cloud support because implementing that is ostensibly as simple as picking a folder and checking a box.

I spoke with two different professional game developers this week who have previously published games on Steam, and I brought up the issue of Steam Cloud and achievement support. As they tell it, it turns out it’s not nearly as simple as those players in the forums believe—but it still should have been within EA’s capabilities, even with a crunched schedule.

Yes, it’s sometimes possible to get it working at a basic level within a couple of hours, provided you’re already using the Steamworks API. But even in that circumstance, the way a game’s saves work might require additional work to protect against lost data or frequent problems with conflicts.

Given that the game doesn’t support achievements or really anything else you’d expect, it’s possible EA didn’t use the Steamworks API at all. (Doing that would have been hours of additional work.)

A pop-up in The Sims says the sim has accidentally been transferred $500 because of a computer bug

Sadly, this is not the sort of computer bug players are encountering. Credit: Samuel Axon

I’m not giving EA a pass, though. Four years ago, EA put out the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, a 4K upscale remaster of the original C&C games. The release featured a unified binary for the classic games, sprites and textures that were upscaled to higher resolutions, quality of life improvements, and yes, many of the Steam bells and whistles that include achievements. I’m not saying that the remaster was flawless, but it exhibited significantly more care and effort than The Sims re-release.

I love Command & Conquer. I played a lot of it when I was younger. But even a longtime C&C fan like myself can easily acknowledge that its importance in gaming history (as well as its popularity and revenue potential) pale in comparison to The Sims.

If EA could do all that for C&C, it’s all the more perplexing that it didn’t bother with a 25th-anniversary re-release of The Sims.

Single-player games, meet publicly traded companies

While we don’t have much insight into all the inner workings of EA, there are hints as to why this sort of thing is happening. For one thing, anyone who has worked for a giant corporation like this knows it’s all too easy for the objective to be passed down from above at the last minute, leaving no time or resources to see it through adequately.

But it might run deeper than that. To put it simply, publicly traded publishers like EA can’t seem to satisfy investors with single-purchase, single-player games. The emphasis on single-player releases has been decreasing for a long time, and it’s markedly less just five years after the release of the C&C remaster.

Take the recent comments from EA CEO Andrew Wilson’s post-earnings call, for example. Wilson noted that the big-budget, single-player RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard failed to meet sales expectations—even though it was apparently one of EA’s most successful single-player Steam releases ever.

“In order to break out beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category,” he explained, suggesting that games need to be multiplayer games-as-a-service to be successful in this market.

Ironically, though, the single-player RPG Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 launched around the same time he made those comments, and that game’s developer said it made its money back in a single day of sales. It’s currently one of the top-trending games on Twitch, too.

It’s possible that Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke hit the nail on the head when he suggested at the Game Developers Conference last year that a particular approach to pursuing quarterly profits runs counter to the practice of making good games.

“I’ve been fighting publishers my entire life, and I keep on seeing the same, same, same mistakes over and over and over,” he said. “It’s always the quarterly profits. The only thing that matters are the numbers.”

Later on X, he clarified who he was pointing a finger at: “This message was for those who try to double their revenue year after year. You don’t have to do that. Build more slowly and make your aim improving the state of the art, not squeezing out the last drop.”

In light of Wilson’s comments, it’s a fair guess that EA might not have put in much effort on The Sims re-releases simply because of a belief that single-player games that aren’t “shared world experiences” just aren’t worth the resources anymore, given the company’s need to satisfy shareholders with perpetual revenue growth.

Despite all this, The Sims is worth a look

It’s telling that in a market with too many options, I still put the effort in to get the game working, and I spent multiple evenings this week immersed in the lives of my sims.

Even after 25 years, this game is unique. It has the emergent wackiness of something like RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress, but it has a fast-acting, addictive hook and is easy to learn. There have been other games besides The Sims that are highly productive engines for original player stories, but few have achieved these heights while remaining accessible to virtually everyone.

Like so many of the best games, it’s hard to stop playing once you start. There’s always one more task you want to complete—or you’re about to walk away when something hilariously unexpected happens.

The problems I had getting The Sims to run aren’t that much worse than what I surely experienced on my PC back in 2002—it’s just that the standards are a lot higher now.

I’ve gotten $20 out of value out of the purchase, despite my gripes. But it’s not just about my experience. More broadly, The Sims deserved better. It could have had a moment back in the cultural zeitgeist, with tens of thousands of Twitch viewers.

Missed opportunities

The moment seems perfect: The world is stressful, so people want nostalgia. Cozy games are ascendant. Sandbox designs are making a comeback. The Sims slots smoothly into all of that.

But go to those Twitch streams, and you’ll see a lot of complaining about how the game didn’t really get everything it deserved and a sentiment that whatever moment EA was hoping for was undermined by this lack of commitment.

Instead, the cozy game du jour on Twitch is the Animal Crossing-like Hello Kitty Island Adventure, a former Apple Arcade exclusive that made its way to Steam recently. To be clear, I’m not knocking Hello Kitty Island Adventure; it’s a great game for fans of the modern cozy genre, and I’m delighted to see an indie studio seeing so much success.

A screenshot of the Twitch page for Hello Kitty

The cozy game of the week is Hello Kitty Island Adventures, not The Sims. Credit: Samuel Axon

The takeaway is that we can’t look to big publishers like EA to follow through on delivering quality single-player experiences anymore. It’s the indies that’ll carry that forward.

It’s just a bummer for fans that The Sims couldn’t have the revival moment it should have gotten.

Photo of Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica. He covers Apple, software development, gaming, AI, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

The Sims re-release shows what’s wrong with big publishers and single-player games Read More »

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Sony removes PlayStation account requirement from 4 single-player Steam games

gaming, God of War Ragnarok, helldivers 2, horizon zero dawn, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, PC Gaming, PlayStation, PlayStation Network, Sony, Spider-Man 2, steam, The Last of Us Part II / /

Sony’s game publishing arm has done a 180-degree turn on a controversial policy of requiring PC players to sign in with PlayStation accounts for some games, according to a blog post by the company.

A PlayStation account will “become optional” for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. Sony hasn’t lost hope that players will still go ahead and use a PlayStation account, though, as it’s tying several benefits to signing in.

Logging in with PlayStation will be required to access trophies, the PlayStation equivalent of achievements. (Steam achievements appear to be supported regardless.) It will also allow friend management, provided you have social contacts on the PlayStation Network.

Additionally, Sony is providing some small in-game rewards to each title that are available if you log in with its account system. You’ll get early unlocks of the Spider-Man 2099 Black Suit and the Miles Morales 2099 Suit in Spider-Man 2, for example—or the Nora Valiant outfit in Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Some of these rewards are available via other means within the games, such as the Armor of the Black Bear set for Kratos in Ragnarok.

Sony removes PlayStation account requirement from 4 single-player Steam games Read More »

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RIP EA’s Origin launcher: We knew ye all too well, unfortunately

EA, EA app, ea play, Electronic Arts, gaming, microsoft, Origin, steam, Windows / /

After 14 years, EA will retire its controversial Origin game distribution app for Windows, the company announced. Origin will stop working on April 17, 2025. Folks still using it will be directed to install the newer EA app, which launched in 2022.

The launch of Origin in 2011 was a flashpoint of controversy among gamers, as EA—already not a beloved company by this point—began pulling titles like Crysis 2 from the popular Steam platform to drive players to its own launcher.

Frankly, it all made sense from EA’s point of view. For a publisher that size, Valve had relatively little to offer in terms of services or tools, yet it was taking a big chunk of games’ revenue. Why wouldn’t EA want to get that money back?

The transition was a rough one, though, because it didn’t make as much sense from the consumer’s point of view. Players distrusted EA and had a lot of goodwill for Valve and Steam. Origin lacked features players liked on Steam, and old habits and social connections die hard. Plus, EA’s use of Origin—a long-dead brand name tied to classic RPGs and other games of the ’80s and ’90s—for something like this felt to some like a slap in the face.

RIP EA’s Origin launcher: We knew ye all too well, unfortunately Read More »

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The Raspberry Pi 5 now works as a smaller, faster kind of Steam Link

gaming, Raspberry Pi, single board computers, steam, steam link / /

The Steam Link was a little box ahead of its time. It streamed games from a PC to a TV, ran 1,500 0f them natively, offered a strange (if somewhat lovable) little controller, and essentially required a great network, Ethernet cables, and a good deal of fiddling.

Valve quietly discontinued the Steam Link gear in November 2018, but it didn’t give up. These days, a Steam Link app can be found on most platforms, and Valve’s sustained effort to move Linux-based (i.e., non-Windows-controlled) gaming forward has paid real dividends. If you still want a dedicated device to stream Steam games, however? A Raspberry Pi 5 (with some help from Valve) can be a Substitute Steam Link.

As detailed in the Raspberry Pi blog, there were previously means of getting Steam Link working on Raspberry Pi devices, but the platform’s move away from proprietary Broadcom libraries—and from X to Wayland display systems—required “a different approach.” Sam Lantinga from Valve worked with the Raspberry Pi team on optimizing for the Raspberry Pi 5 hardware. As of Steam Link 1.3.13 for the little board, Raspberry Pi 5 units could support up to 1080p at 144 frames per second (FPS) on the H.264 protocol and 4k at 60 FPS or 1080p at 240 FPS, presuming your primary gaming computer and network can support that.

Jeff Geerling’s test of Steam Link on Raspberry Pi 5, showing some rather smooth Red Dead movement.

I have a documented preference for a Moonlight/Sunshine game streaming setup over Steam Link because I have better luck getting games streaming at their best on it. But it’s hard to beat Steam Link for ease of setup, given that it only requires Steam to be running on the host PC, plus a relatively simple configuration on the client screen. A Raspberry Pi 5 is an easy device to hide near your TV. And, of course, if you don’t end up using it, you only have 450 other things you can do with it.

The Raspberry Pi 5 now works as a smaller, faster kind of Steam Link Read More »

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These are the lasting things that Half-Life 2 gave us, besides headcrabs and crowbars

gabe newell, gaming, half life 2, Half-Life 3, marc laidlaw, portal, portal 2, source code leak, Source Engine, steam, Team Fortress 2, valve / /

Beyond the game itself (which rocks), Half-Life 2 had a big impact on PC gaming.

This article is part of our 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 series. Credit: Aurich Lawson

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

“Well, I just hate the idea that our games might waste people’s time. Why spend four years of your life building something that isn’t innovative and is basically pointless?”

Valve software founder Gabe Newell is quoted by Geoff Keighley—yes, the Game Awards guy, back then a GameSpot writer—as saying this in June 1999, six months after the original Half-Life launched. Newell gave his team no real budget or deadline, only the assignment to “follow up the best PC game of all time” and redefine the genre.

When Half-Life 2 arrived in November 2004, the Collector’s Edition contained about 2.6GB of files. The game, however, contained so many things that would seem brand new in gaming, or just brave, that it’s hard to even list them.

Except I’m going to try that right here. Some will be hard to pin definitively in time to Half-Life 2 (HL2). But like many great games, HL2 refined existing ideas, borrowed others, and had a few of its own to show off.

Note that some aspects of the game itself, its status as Steam’s big push title, and what it’s like to play it today, are covered by other writers during Ars’ multi-day celebration of the game’s 20th anniversary. That includes the Gravity Gun.

How many film and gaming careers were launched by people learning how to make the Scout do something goofy?

Credit: Valve

How many film and gaming careers were launched by people learning how to make the Scout do something goofy? Credit: Valve

The Source Engine

It’s hard to imagine another game developer building an engine with such a forward-thinking mission as Source. Rather than just build the thing that runs their next game, Valve crafted Source to be modular, such that its core could be continually improved (and shipped out over Steam), and newer technologies could be optionally ported into games both new and old, while not breaking any older titles working perfectly fine.

Source started development during the late stages of the original Half-Life, but its impact goes far beyond the series. Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Portal 1/2, and Left 4 Dead, from Valve alone, take up multiple slots on lists of the all-time best games. The Stanley Parable, Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, and a whole lot of other games used Source, too. Countless future game developers, level designers, and mod makers cut their teeth on the very open and freely available Source code tools.

And then, of course, where would we be as a society were it not for Source Filmmaker and Garry’s Mod, without which we would never have Save as .dmx and Skibidi Toilet.

Half-Life: Alyx is a technical marvel of the VR age, but it’s pulled along by the emotional bonds of Alyx and Russell, and the quest to save Eli Vance.

Credit: Valve

Half-Life: Alyx is a technical marvel of the VR age, but it’s pulled along by the emotional bonds of Alyx and Russell, and the quest to save Eli Vance. Credit: Valve

A shooter with family dynamics

Novelist Marc Laidlaw has made it clear, multiple times, that he did not truly create the Half-Life story when he joined Valve; it was “all there when I got there, in embryo,” he told Rock Paper Shotgun. Laidlaw helped the developers tell their story through level design and wrote short, funny, unnerving dialogue.

For Half-Life 2, Laidlaw and the devs were tasked with creating some honest-to-goodness characters, something you didn’t get very often in first-person shooters (they were all dead in 1994’s System Shock). So in walked that father/daughter team of Eli and Alyx Vance, and the extended Black Mesa family, including folks like Dr. Kleiner.

These real and makeshift family members gave the mute protagonist Gordon Freeman stakes in wanting to fix the future. And Laidlaw’s “basic dramatic unit” set a precedent for lots of shooty-yet-soft-hearted games down the road: Mass Effect, The Last of Us, Gears of War, Red Dead Redemption, and far more.

Remember when a Boston-area medical manufacturing firm, run by a Half-Life fan, got everyone thinking a sequel was coming? Fun times. Credit: Black Mesa

Intense speculation about what Valve is actually doing

Another unique thing Laidlaw helped develop in PC gaming: intense grief and longing for a sequel that both does and does not exist, channeled through endless speculation about Valve’s processes and general radio silence.

Half-Life 2 got “Episodes” but never a true numbered Half-Life 3 sequel. The likelihood of 3 took a hit when Laidlaw unexpectedly announced his retirement in January 2016. Then it got even less likely, or maybe just sad, when Laidlaw posted a barely disguised “snapshot of a dream” of “Epistle 3” to his blog (since deleted and later transposed on Pastebin).

Laidlaw has expressed regret about this move. Fans have expressed regret that Half-Life 3 somehow seems even less likely, having seen Valve’s premiere writer post such a seemingly despondent bit of primary source fan fiction.

“Fans of popular game eager for sequel” isn’t itself a unique thing, but it is for Half-Life 3’s quantum existence. Valve published its new employee handbook from around 2012 on the web, and in it, you can read about the company’s boldly flat structure. To summarize greatly: Projects only get started if someone can get enough fellow employees to wheel their desks over and work on it with them. The company doesn’t take canceled or stalled games to heart; in its handbook, it’s almost celebrated that it killed Prospero as one of its first major decisions.

So the fact that Half-Life 3 exists only as something that hasn’t been formally canceled is uniquely frustrating. HL2’s last (chronological) chapter left off on a global-scale cliffhanger, and the only reason a sequel doesn’t exist is because too many other things are more appealing than developing a new first-person shooter. If you worked at Valve, you tell yourself, maybe you could change this! Maybe.

What, you’re telling me now it’s illegal to break in, take source code, and then ask for a job? This is a police state!

Credit: Valve

What, you’re telling me now it’s illegal to break in, take source code, and then ask for a job? This is a police state! Credit: Valve

Source code leak drama

The Wikipedia pages “List of commercial video games with available source code” and its cousin “Later released source code” show that, up until 2003, most of the notable games whose source code became publicly available were either altruistic efforts at preservation or, for some reason, accidental inclusions of source code on demos or in dummy files on the game disc.

And then, in late 2003, Valve and Half-Life superfan Axel Gembe hacked into Valve’s servers, grabbed the Half-Life 2 source code that existed at the time and posted it to the web. It not only showed off parts of the game Valve wanted to keep under wraps, but it showed just how far behind the game’s development was relative to the release date that had blown by weeks earlier. Valve’s response was typically atypical: they acknowledged the source code as real, asked their biggest fans for help, and then released the game a year later, to critical and commercial success.

The leak further ensconced Valve as a different kind of company, one with a particularly dedicated fanbase. It also seems to have taught companies a lesson about hardening their servers and development environments. Early builds of games still leak—witness Space Marine 2 this past July—but full source code leaks, coming from network intrusions, are something you don’t see quite so often.

Pre-loading a game before release

It would be hard to go back in time and tell our pre-broadband selves about pre-loading. You download entire games, over the Internet, and then they’re ready to play one second after the release time—no store lines, no drive back home, no stuffed servers or crashed discs. It seems like a remarkable bit of trust, though it’s really just a way to lessen server load on release day.

It’s hard to pin down which game first offered pre-loading in the modern sense, but HL2, being a major launch title for Valve’s Steam service and a title with heavy demand, definitely popularized the concept.

Always-online for single-player games

Here’s one way that Half-Life 2 moved the industry forward that some folks might want to move back.

Technically, you can play HL2 without an Internet connection, and maybe for long periods of time. But for most people, playing HL2 without a persistent net connection involves activating the game on Steam, letting it fully update, and then turning on Steam’s “Offline Mode” to play it. There’s no time limit, but you need to keep Steam active while playing.

It’s not so much the particular connection demands of HL2 that make it notable, but the pathway that it, and Steam, created on which other companies moved ahead, treating gaming as something that, by default, happens with at least a connection, and preferably a persistent one.

It’s Game of the Year. Which year? Most of them, really (until Disco Elysium shows up).

Credit: Valve

It’s Game of the Year. Which year? Most of them, really (until Disco Elysium shows up). Credit: Valve

A place on “All-time” video game rankings forever

Half-Life 2 introduced many ground-breaking things at once—deep facial animations and expressions, an accessible physics engine, a compelling global-scale but family-minded story—while also being tremendously enjoyable game to play through. This has made it hard for anyone to suggest another game to go above it on any “All-time greatest games” list, especially those with a PC focus.

Not that they don’t try. PC Gamer has HL2 at 7 out of 100, mostly because it has lost an understandable amount of “Hotness” in 20 years. IGN has it at No. 9 (while its descendant Portal 2 takes third place). Metacritic, however fallible, slots it in universal second place for PC games.

So give Half-Life 2 even more credit for fostering innovation in the “arbitrary ranked list of games” genre. Rock Paper Shotgun’s top 100 is cited as the best “to play on PC today,” as they have “paid no mind to what was important or influential.” And yet, Half-Life 2, as a game you can play in 2024, is still on that list. It’s really something, that game.

Photo of Kevin Purdy

Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch.

These are the lasting things that Half-Life 2 gave us, besides headcrabs and crowbars Read More »

half-life-2-pushed-steam-on-the-gaming-masses…-and-the-masses-pushed-back

Half-Life 2 pushed Steam on the gaming masses… and the masses pushed back

gaming, half life 2, steam, valve / /

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day leading up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

When millions of eager gamers first installed Half-Life 2 20 years ago, many, if not most, of them found they needed to install another piece of software alongside it. Few at the time could imagine that piece of companion software–with the pithy name Steam–would eventually become the key distribution point and social networking center for the entire PC gaming ecosystem, making the idea of physical PC games an anachronism in the process.

While Half-Life 2 wasn’t the first Valve game released on Steam, it was the first high-profile title to require the platform, even for players installing the game from physical retail discs. That requirement gave Valve access to millions of gamers with new Steam accounts and helped the company bypass traditional retail publishers of the day by directly marketing and selling its games (and, eventually, games from other developers). But 2004-era Steam also faced a vociferous backlash from players who saw the software as a piece of nuisance DRM (digital rights management) that did little to justify its existence at the time.

Free (from Vivendi) at last

Years before Half-Life 2’s release, Valve revealed Steam to the world at the 2002 Game Developers Conference, announcing “a broadband business platform for direct software delivery and content management” in a press release. Valve’s vision for a new suite of developer tools for content publishing, billing, version control, and anti-piracy was all present and stressed in that initial announcement.

Perhaps the largest goal for Steam, though, was removing the middlemen of retail game distribution and giving more direct control to game developers, including Valve. “By eliminating the overhead of physical goods distribution, developers will be able to leverage the efficiency of broadband to improve customer service and increase operating margins,” Valve wrote in its 2002 announcement.

Valve’s Gabe Newell on stage unveiling Steam at GDC 2002. Credit: 4Gamer

On stage at GDC, Valve founder Gabe Newell took things even further, positioning himself as “a new-age Robin Hood who wanted to take from the greedy publishers what independent game developers deserved: a larger piece of the revenue pie,” as Gamespot’s Final Days of Half-Life 2 feature summed it up. Cutting out the publishers and retailers, Newell said, could be the difference between a developer taking home $7 or $30 on a full-price game (which generally ran $50 at the time).

Half-Life 2 pushed Steam on the gaming masses… and the masses pushed back Read More »

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How Valve made Half-Life 2 and set a new standard for future games

first-person shooter, Game Design, game development, gaming, half life 2, steam, Valve Software / /

From physics to greyboxing, Half-Life 2 broke a lot of new ground.

This article is part of our 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 series. Credit: Aurich Lawson

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

There has been some debate about which product was the first modern “triple-A” video game, but ask most people and one answer is sure to at least be a contender: Valve’s Half-Life 2.

For Western PC games, Half-Life 2 set a standard that held strong in developers’ ambitions and in players’ expectations for well over a decade. Despite that, there’s only so much new ground it truly broke in terms of how games are made and designed—it’s just that most games didn’t have the same commitment to scope, scale, and polish all at the same time.

To kick off a week of articles looking back at the influential classic, we’re going to go over the way it was made, and just as importantly, the thought that went into its design—both of which were highly influential.

A story of cabals and Electronics Boutique

Development, design, and production practices in the games industry have always varied widely by studio. But because of the success of Half-Life 2, some of the approaches that Valve took were copied elsewhere in the industry after they were shared in blog posts and conference talks at events like the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC).

The cabals of Valve

Valve is famous for influencing many things in gaming, but it was most influential in its relatively flat and democratic team structure, and that played out even during Half-Life 2’s development in the early 2000s. While many studios are broken up into clear departments big and small for different disciplines (such as art, level design, combat design, narrative design, AI programming, and so on), many parts of Valve’s Half-Life 2 team consisted of a half-dozen multi-disciplinary small groups the company internally called “cabals.”

Each major chapter in Half-Life 2 had its own unique four-to-five-person cabal made up of level designers and programmers. These groups built their levels largely independently while frequently showing their work to other cabals for feedback and cross-pollination of good ideas. They all worked within constraints set in a pre-production phase that laid out elements like the main story beats, some of the weapons, and so on.

A resistance soldier shoots at a Strider in the streets of City 17

Each major chapter, like this battle-in-the-streets one toward the end of the game, was designed by a largely independent cabal. Credit: Valve

Additionally, similarly sized design cabals worked on aspects of the game’s design that crossed multiple levels—often made with representatives from the chapter cabals—for things like weapons.

There was even a “Cabal Cabal” made up of representatives from each of the six chapter teams to critique the work coming from all the teams.

Ruthless playtesting

Many game designers—especially back in the ’80s or ’90s—worked largely in isolation, determining privately what they thought would be fun and then shipping a finished product to an audience to find out if it really was.

By contrast, Valve put a great deal of emphasis on playtesting. To be clear: Valve did not invent playtesting. But it did make that a key part of the design process in a way that is even quite common today.

The Half-Life 2 team would send representatives to public places where potential fans might hang out, like Electronics Boutique stores, and would approach them and say something along the lines of, “Would you like to play Half-Life 2?” (Most said yes!)

A group of game developers sits on couches and takes notes while a PC gamer plays Half-Life 2

A photo from an actual early 2000s playtest of an in-development Half-Life 2, courtesy of a presentation slide from a Valve GDC talk. Credit: Valve

The volunteer playtesters were brought to a room set up like a real player’s living room and told to sit at the computer desk and simply play the game. Behind them, the level’s cabal would sit and watch a feed of the gameplay on a TV. The designers weren’t allowed to talk to the testers; they simply took notes.

Through this process, they learned which designs and ideas worked and which ones simply confused the players. They then made iterative changes, playtested the level again, and repeated that process until they were happy with the outcome.

Today’s developers sometimes take a more sophisticated approach to sourcing players for their playtests, making sure they’re putting their games in front of a wider range of people to make the games more accessible beyond a dedicated enthusiast core. But nonetheless, playtesting across the industry today is at the level it is because of Valve’s refinement of the process.

The alpha wave

For a game as ambitious as Half-Life 2 was, it’s surprising just how polished it was when it hit the market. That iterative mindset was a big part of it, but it extended beyond those consumer playtests.

Valve made sure to allocate a significant amount of time for iteration and refinement on an alpha build, which in this case meant a version of the game that could be played from beginning to end. When speaking to other developers about the process, representatives of Valve said that if you’re working on a game for just a year, you should try to get to the alpha point by the end of eight months so you have four for refinement.

Apparently, this made a big impact on Half-Life 2’s overall quality. It also helped address natural downsides of the cabal structure, like the fact that chapters developed by largely independent teams offered an inconsistent experience in terms of the difficulty curve.

With processes like this, Valve modeled several things that would be standard in triple-A game development for years to come—though not all of them were done by Valve first.

For example, the approach to in-game cutscenes reverberates today. Different cabals focused on designing the levels versus planning out cutscenes in which characters would walk around the room and interact with one another, all while the player could freely explore the environment.

A screenshot of Combine soldiers fighting antlions in Nova Prospekt

Nova Prospekt was one of the first levels completed during Half-Life 2‘s development. Credit: Valve

The team that focused on story performances worked with level designers to block out the walking paths for characters, and the level designers had to use that as a constraint, building the levels around them. That meant that changes to level layouts couldn’t create situations where new character animations would have to be made. That approach is still used by many studios today.

As is what is now called greyboxing, the practice of designing levels without high-effort artwork so that artists can come in and pretty the levels up after the layout is settled, rather than having to constantly go back and forth with designers as those designers “find the fun.” Valve didn’t invent this, but it was a big part of the process, and its in-development levels were filled with the color orange, not just gray.

Finding the DNA of Half-Life 2 in 20 years of games

When Half-Life 2 hit the market via the newly launched Steam digital distribution platform (more on that later this week), it was widely praised. Critics and players at the time loved it, calling it a must-have title and one that defined the PC gaming experience. Several of the things that came out of its development process that players remember most from Half-Life 2 became staples over the past 20 years.

For instance, the game set a new standard for character animations in fully interactive cutscenes, especially with facial animations. Today, far more advanced motion capture is a common practice in triple-A games—to the point that games that don’t do it (like Bethesda Game Studios titles) are widely criticized by players simply for not taking that route, even if motion capture doesn’t necessarily make practical sense for those games’ scope and design.

And Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun, which dramatically built on past games’ physics mechanics, is in many ways a  concept that developers are still playing with and expanding on today. Ultrahand, the flagship player ability in 2023’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, could be seen as a substantial evolution from the Gravity Gun. In addition to offering players the ability to pick and place objects in the world, it gives them the power to attach them to one another to build creative contraptions.

There’s also Half-Life 2’s approach to using environmental lines and art cues to guide the player’s attention through realistic-looking environments. The game was lauded for that at the time, and it was an approach used by many popular games in the years to come. Today, many studios have moved on to much more explicit player cues like the yellow climbing holds in so many recent triple-A titles. As you’ll see in an upcoming article this week written by someone who played Half-Life 2 for the very first time in 2024, Half-Life 2’s approach may have set the stage, but modern players might expect something a little different.

A trainyard in City 17

Environments like this were carefully designed to guide the player’s eye in subtle ways. Today, many triple-A games take a less subtle approach because playtesting with broader audiences shows it’s sometimes necessary. Credit: Valve

One thing about the environment design that Half-Life 2 was praised for hasn’t been replaced these days, though: a commitment to subtle environmental storytelling. World-building and vibes are perhaps Half-Life 2’s greatest achievements. From BioShock to Dishonored to Cyberpunk 2077, this might be the realm where Half-Life 2’s influence is still felt the most today.

A legacy remembered

Looking back 20 years later, Half-Life 2 isn’t necessarily remembered for radical new gameplay concepts. Instead, it’s known for outstanding execution—and developers everywhere are still applying lessons learned by that development team to try to chase its high standard of quality.

Even at the time, critics noted that it wasn’t exactly that there was anything in Half-Life 2 that players had never seen before. Rather, it was the combined force of quality, scope, presentation, and refinement that made an impact.

Of course, Valve and Half-Life 2 are also known for multiple memorable cultural moments, some of the industry’s most infamous controversies, and playing a big part in introducing digital distribution. We’ll explore some of those things as we count down to the “Red Letter Day” this Saturday.

Photo of Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica. He covers Apple, software development, gaming, AI, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

How Valve made Half-Life 2 and set a new standard for future games Read More »

sega-is-delisting-60-classic-games-from-steam,-so-now’s-the-time-to-grab-them

Sega is delisting 60 classic games from Steam, so now’s the time to grab them

ecco the dolphin, gaming, Sega, Sega Dreamcast, Sega Genesis, sega saturn, steam / /

Sega has put dozens of its Master System, Genesis, Saturn, and other console titles onto modern game stores over the years. But, like that Dreamcast controller stashed in your childhood garage, they’re about to disappear—and getting them back will cost you a nostalgia tax.

Those who have purchased any of the more than 60 games listed by Sega from Steam, Xbox, Nintendo’s Switch store, and the PlayStation store will still have them after 11: 59 pm Pacific time on Dec. 26. But after that, for reasons that Sega does not make explicit, they will be “delisted and unavailable.” Titles specific to the Nintendo Switch Online “Expansion Pack” subscription will remain.

As PC Gamer has suggested, and which makes the most sense, this looks like Sega is getting ready to offer up new “classics” collections on these storefronts. Sega previously rearranged its store shelves to pull Sonic games from online stores and then offer up Sonic Origins. The title underwhelmed Ars at the time and managed to pack in some DLC pitches.

Sega already offers a few bundles and collections in Steam, like the Mega Drive and Genesis Classics and Dreamcast Collection. As with individual titles, buyers will retain access to them, even after Sega comes back around with new bundles.

First-person RPG screenshot showing a character named

Shining in the Darkness might be the turn-based retro RPG missing from your collection (for 99 cents). Credit: Sega

So if you’ve felt like you wanted to reclaim some Sega moments now, piecemeal, while you still can, the Ars writers can suggest a few places to look. These are links to the Steam store, and are mostly Windows-only, though they can often work through Proton on Linux or Steam Deck, and some work with older mac OS versions. Xbox has a smaller list, while PlayStation and Nintendo offer only the Mega Drive Classics at the moment.

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