Gabe Newell's opinion about Xen.

[MediArgentum]

In the recent "Ask Me Anything" event Gabe Newell was asked what he regrets about Half-Life. He's answer was:

If you are involved in a game, everything ends up being a set of trade-offs. Anything in a game is a sacrifice of things not in the game. I just feel those more personally about Half-Life for a bunch of reasons.
And Xen.

So yeah.
Make Gaben proud guys! Make Xen as good as it can get!

[MediArgentum]

Link to context

[Spaghettacus]

The concept of Xen is fantastic in every aspect. But the excecution in the original was subpar. Thank Gabe for quicksave.

[that's what she said]

Everyone regrets about Xen, not only Gabe. Statistically most players just dropped the game when they got to Xen. It was great change of pace and aesthetics but it was pretty convulted and boring gameplay-wise. Personally it took me like 10 years to get back to beating HL1.

Well, Crowbars know their stuff, BM is amazing recreation of true-to-the-bone aesthetics of HL1 while making it much more streamlined and fun, so I'm really looking forward to their rendition of Xen. I'm sure it'd be very different, but it's for the better. It'd gonna be a blast. I just hope they make me feel like exploring new alien world living by different sets of rules.

[Dark Redshift]

I hope the Nililanth fight is even better than the awesome and hard but fair one it was in Half Life 1. Still hard but fair please, and some proper battle music to get the juices flowing.

Also, has it been decided yet if the bad ending to the game just results in a game over until the players choose the portal, or will it be the same as HL1?

If it's the former, it could be like the Lone Wolf level of Halo Reach but you just respawn on the tram if you die instead of get the credits. (New achivements could be endurance rounds of the bad ending)

[El Fuerte]

I actually loved Xen. Maybe Newell doesn't think its bad, but not good enough.

[MediArgentum]

I loved Xen too. It was my favourite part.

[Reggie]

It's been a while since I played the original Half Life. What was so off putting about Xen?
It didn't look terribly out of place given the game's age and graphics.
Where people expecting so much more imagination wise?

[thray]

Originally posted by Adrian:

It's been a while since I played the original Half Life. What was so off putting about Xen?
It didn't look terribly out of place given the game's age and graphics.
Where people expecting so much more imagination wise?

I don't think people were expecting more imagination wise, if anything it was too imaginative.
You were tossed into a jumping puzzle on small platforms with no cover. Some had difficulty discerning which direction you were supposed to go.
Not to mention the unexplained healing pools, minimal ammo and no idea what is going on.
After coming from a relative straight forward first person shooter, it was jarring and felt tacked on.

Even Xens daddy recognized that it had problems.
IMHO Crowbar Collective could not find a worse part of Half Life to improve upon. Summer 2017 can't get here soon enough. :)

[Dark Redshift]

Originally posted by RedEye:

Originally posted by Adrian:

It's been a while since I played the original Half Life. What was so off putting about Xen?
It didn't look terribly out of place given the game's age and graphics.
Where people expecting so much more imagination wise?

I don't think people were expecting more imagination wise, if anything it was too imaginative.
You were tossed into a jumping puzzle on small platforms with no cover. Some people had difficulty discerning which direction you were supposed to go.
Not to mention the unexplained healing pools, minimal ammo and no idea what is going on.
After coming from a relative straight forware first person shooter, it was jarring and felt tacked on.

Even its daddy recognized that Xen had problems.
IMHO Crowbar Collective could not find a worse part of Half Life to improve upon. Summer 2017 can't get here soon enough. :)

The platforming puzzles were fun, as was the grunt factory and Nihilanth battle, but everything else that you said like the jarring lack of ammo, cover and of course, the difficulty at this point wasn't very good.

98% of the Nilhilanth's phrases never played anyway, and I only know of the ones I missed thanks to the Combine Overwiki and youtube.

Hopefully all those can be improved in Black Mesa, considering the game is more challanging anyway. (both flavours but with slight differences in places for reasoning)

[Animalman]

literally EVERYONE says that EVERYONE hated original xen and stopped playing the game however, when i was younger, the whole focus was GETTING TO THE XEN MAPS - because THE XEN MAPS were imaginative and a healthy break from IMPOSSIBLE ENDLESS HECU battles, it was FINALLY good to do abit of LOW GRAV platforming and utilise the LONG JUMP MODULE MECHANISM as well as play around with all of the interesting tentacle trees, watching the lights drop in and turn off, working out the puzzles with no obvious solution, using the cool weapons you found not long before entering xen due to increase ammo availablity, XEN was GREAT


The game didnt BEGIN as a super tactical balanced first person shooter and it certainly didnt end like that, it was all about the EXISTENCE OF AN ALIEN WORLD, where THIS subsequently, is where half-life 2 and all of its episodes went wrong (aside from having less weapons). When i played half-life 2 for the first time, i was waiting and waiting throughout the chapters for cooler and cooler weapons that never came, i was waiting for that moment you'd have to go to xen, but it never came, and to me that let half-life 2 down a substantial ammount, as it was PART of the game, it was WHAT IT WAS ALL ABOUT

[Olde]

Like it or not, it's going to get changed.

[MediArgentum]

But it's going to get changed for the better. I really liked the original, so that means I'll most certainly love the new one.

[Snarplord XVI]

am I the only one that kinda liked Xen

[Dark Redshift]

Originally posted by Sir Snarplord IV:

am I the only one that kinda liked Xen

Personally I didn't mind it besides the difficulty.

I'd first got to it with god mode on easy on my disk version, then I played it legit first on easy, then normal. Even then most of the current difficulty I encounter on it is because I'm playing on hard.

[Animalman]

Yeah, the grav gun was certainly cool, i was hoping to get the gaus cannon unmounted, and the bugbait was cool, but no snarks :( hive-hands or that hoover looking devise :( All in all, no xen really ruined the game, there was no chaotic progression everything very uniform, remember xen was featured in all 3 original releases because it was a big part of the franchise.

What was even more of a let down was the episodes didnt add any new weapons either, 2 additional addons but no new weapons, all they did was focus on a story that i couldnt connect with, and didnt go anywhere, it really sucked. tbh gaben developed a little fetish over alyx's voice actor and then it augmented just wanted to milk her out. episodes 1 and 2 i found alyx to be extemely annoying, at not one point in the original could you get a guard to accompany you the whole damn way. you could also blow their brains out if they pissed you off.

The most satisfying moment of half-life 2 was the super grav gun, but they kept teasing it out.