| Half-life 2 Controversies And Criticisms |
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PRE-RELEASE Source code leak ''Half-Life 2'' was merely a rumor until a strong impression at E3 in May 2003 launched it into levels of hype only equalled by '' Doom 3 '' at the time. It was forecast to come out in September 2003, but it was delayed several times. This pushing back of HL2's release date came in the wake of the Cracking of Valve's internal network, through bugs in Microsoft Outlook , resulting in the leak of the game's Source Code in early September 2003. On October 2 , Valve CEO Gabe Newell publicly explained in the HalfLife2.net forums the events that Valve experienced around the time of the leak, and requested users to track down the perpetrators if possible. Initial claims that the leak was a hoax turned out to be in error as the code quickly spread widely and was verified to exist by a large number of people. The leak contained many unfinished parts of the game in a partially, albeit buggy, playable state, as well as some of the tools used to create game content. The leak was also the origin of the "physgun" weapon - a tool which could be used to interact with the physics objects in the game in a far more powerful, but confusing, way than the final ' Gravity Gun ', such as picking up ragdolls and welding objects together. The "physgun" has since been recreated in the game by various mods such as JBMod and Garry's Mod . The source-code leak had more of an effect on morale for the developers than it did on the schedule—it was later revealed by both Gabe Newell and PR man Doug Lombardi that the September 2003 release date was 'aggressive' and could not have been met even if the leak had never occurred. Many gamers were not surprised by the early delays, recognizing that Valve's first public mention of the game came just four months before its intended release date. In June 2004 , Valve Software announced in a press release that the FBI had arrested several people suspected of involvement in the source code leak. The game had been leaked by a German hacker named Axel G., also known as "Osama Bin Leaker". Going gold hoax On August 27 , 2004 a post on the Half-Life Fallout forums apparently by Gabe Newell from Valve Software said " Going Gold on Monday". This caused much excitement among ''Half-Life 2'' fans but it later turned out that the post was a hoax and was posted by someone who had guessed Gabe's password (according to the hacker, "gaben"). Rumours of a PHP leak from the site earlier in the day were never verified. Contract dispute with Vivendi Universal Games On (VUG) was in a legal battle with Valve Software over the distribution of ''Half-Life 2'' to Cyber Cafés . This is important for the Asian PC gaming market where PC and broadband penetration per capita are much lower (except Hong Kong , Singapore , South Korea and Taiwan ). Therefore, cyber cafés are extremely popular for playing online games for large numbers of people. According to VUG, the distribution contract they signed with Valve included cyber cafés. This would mean that only VUG could distribute ''Half-Life 2'' to cyber cafés—not Valve through the Steam system. On November 29 , 2004, Judge Thomas S. Zilly, of U.S. Federal District Court in Seattle, WA , ruled that Sierra/Vivendi Universal Games, and its affiliates, are not authorized to distribute (directly or indirectly) Valve games through cyber cafés to end users for Pay-to-play activities pursuant to the parties' current publishing agreement. In addition, Judge Zilly ruled in favour of the Valve motion regarding the contractual limitation of liability, allowing Valve to recover copyright damages for any infringement as allowed by law without regard to the publishing agreement's limitation of liability clause. On April 29 , 2005 , the two parties announced a settlement agreement. Under the agreement, VUG would cease distributing all retail packaged versions of Valve games by August 31, 2005. VUG also was to notify distributors and cyber cafés that had been licensed by VUG and Sierra that only Valve had the authority to distribute cyber café licenses, and hence their licenses were revoked and switched to Valve's . RELEASE AND POST-RELEASE Release problems
Post-release unauthorized copying Three days after the game was released a crash-prone (which runs on the same technology) had already been publicly available for some months. Despite being a single-player game, copies of ''Half-Life 2'' require online activation through Steam in order to play. This enabled Valve to ensure the CD key used was both genuine and not a duplicate. On sites on the Internet to get the game without paying. On December 22 , a further 30,000 Steam accounts were disabled for exploiting a similar flaw, as announced on another forum post . "Bad" updates HDR implementation Following the implementation of HDR in the Source engine, numerous problems ensued. Many of the larger Source mods ceased to work or suffered serious stability issues, including Dystopia and Garry's Mod, due to engine code changes that were neither warned of nor supported for some time after. Significant numbers of users also saw a vast reduction in frame-rate across all Source games, mods or not, regardless of video settings, and there were reports of high latencies in online games. Others still simply crashed to the desktop when attempting to run any Source game. These issues were mostly addressed and resolved , but some still remain to date. The aforementioned "vast reduction" in frame rates is a problem that is only seen on low-end PC's that have limited graphical capabilities and CPU processing power. However, this problem can actually be fixed to make the game run at the speeds experienced preceding the update. Open up Steam, go to the Games tab, right-click on Half-Life 2 or any other Source-powered game, open up Launch options, and add the command parameter "-dxlevel 81" without the quotations. There will be no graphical detail losses from before the game update was made. This works on all versions of every Source game, including (but not limited to) ''Counter-Strike: Source'', ''Half-Life 2: Deathmatch'', and community mods such as ''Dystopia'' and ''Garry's Mod 9''. Part of the reason why the frame rate slowed down was due to HDR's reliance on DirectX 9.0, which used far more system resources than what was previously being used to power the graphics, DirectX 8.1. Therefore it ran the game more sluggishly on lower-end PCs that were previously able to run it at smooth framerates. OTHERS
Motion sickness and field of view Some complained that playing ''Half-Life 2'' resulted in Motion Sickness and many attributed the problem to the game's low Field Of View , which defaults to 75 degrees instead of the more commonly used 90 degrees. While players can increase the FOV through console commands, it can detract from the realism, as the characters face and distances in the level become distorted. A monitor is only around 50 degrees in scope, depending on its size. Players most commonly reported that they experienced motion sickness while driving vehicles in ''Half-Life 2''. Valve's Bill Van Buren responded to a question on this asked by a fan on the Half-Life2.net forums with this response: Others attribute the motion sickness to the default Refresh Rate setting of 60Hz in DirectX applications. |
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