Apparently, we suck at Episode One.
Quick background for the non-Halflife players: the game Half-Life 2 is distributed by the company Valve, and they have a whole game delivery system called Steam. Steam’s generally kinda handy, in that you can buy and download their supported games fairly easily, and if these games need updates, Steam automatically downloads them for you.
Steam also sends some general info back to Valve, and a while back Valve released some statistics on how people were doing in their most recent (and most unfortunately named) game, Half-Life 2: Episode One. This includes things like how long people took to finish the game, where most of the player deaths occur, etc.
But apparently, a lot of people were dying in a certain place in Ep1, so Valve’s decided to modify that part to make it easier. The next time players connect via Steam, their game will be updated to add more ammo and remove some bad guys from a certain point.
I get how this sounds good from a marketing perspective and all–the player base is much bigger than the playtest base, and if the players are having and extra-hard time with a certain spot, then let’s modify it. It’s like thousands of playtesters saying ‘this part is too hard”, so who are we to ignore them?
But it kinda pisses me off. There’s a part in the previous Half-Life 2 game that is hard as holy hell (the multiple gunships getting into Nova Prospekt), and it kicks my ass a predictably large number of times, but it is far and away one of my favorite parts of the game. Sometimes I’ll go back into the game just to replay that part. If they collected the same stats for Half-Life 2 and saw people were dying a lot and decided to make it easier, I’d be pretty ticked about it.
