Half-Life 2 controversies and criticisms

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The following are problems encountered by Valve Software, Vivendi Universal and gamers before and after the release of the computer game Half-Life 2. Note that the following does not necessarily reflect the game itself.

1 Pre-Release
- 1.1 Source code leak
- 1.2 Contract dispute with Vivendi Universal Games
2 Release and post-release
3 Others
- 3.1 Motion sickness and field of view

[edit] Pre-Release

[edit] Source code leak

(also known as 'Half-Life 2 Beta' in Russia and Ukraine, as they were released there too.)

Half-Life 2 was merely a rumor until a strong impression at E3 in May 2003 launched it into high levels of hype, and won a few awards for best of show. It was forecast to come out in September 2003, but it was delayed. This pushing back of HL2's release date came in the wake of the cracking of Valve's internal network, through an unpatched security flaw in Microsoft Outlook XP (2002), 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 very 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 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". Axel G. later contacted Gabe through e-mail (also providing a un-released document playing the E3 events). Axel G. was tricked into believing that Valve wanted to employ him as an in-house security auditor. He was to be offered a flight to the USA and arrested on arrival by the FBI. When the German government became aware of the plan, Axel G. was arrested in Germany instead, and eventually put on trial for the leak as well as other computer crimes, such as the creation of a mildly successful virus which destroyed computer hard drives.

[edit] Contract dispute with Vivendi Universal Games

On September 20, 2004, the gaming public learned through GameSpot that Vivendi Universal Games (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.

[edit] Release and post-release

[edit] Release problems

On November 16, 2004, Half-Life 2 was officially released. While the launch was mainly regarded as successful, later in the day a significant number of buyers (both through Steam and retail) found themselves unable to play the game, due in part to a bottleneck of Valve's Steam system. The European authentication servers went down for about 5 hours before being fixed, preventing those with accounts using them from decrypting or playing the game they had bought. The problem was, according to Steam engineer Taylor Sherman, "a little more involved" than lack of bandwidth. He predicted that the problem would never happen again. Valve's releases of other games including Half-Life 2: Episode One, did not suffer from such problems.

Shortly after release, many users complained about excessive stuttering during gameplay, especially when new areas of levels were being loaded. When playing, the screen freezes, while the last half-second or so of audio loops until being brought out of the stutter. This stutter can last from fraction of a second to even ten or more seconds, depending on the user's system. With the release of Half-Life 2: Episode One, Valve attempted to fix this problem with a new sound cache system, but many users reported lags even after the update.[1]

The auto-save feature can cause a "freeze" when it is triggered, often at important points of the game—during this time the game saves all applicable information about the player's current progress in the game so they can start off from the same point and generates a small thumbnail of the screen. This lag can be quite disruptive to play, but can be avoided by changing hidden settings in Half-Life 2's configuration file. A patch was released in January 2005 which decreased in the stutter, shortly afterwards the stutter problem was almost completely removed, even on the majority of slow hardware systems.

An update was released on November 30, 2004 which inadvertently prevented scores of customers from launching the game. A minor update was very quickly launched to resolve the issue.

On December 10, 2004, Valve released a Steam update that solved a "disc in drive incompatibility error" by removing the Securom disc check routine. This change also allowed users to play the game without the game CD or DVD in their drives.

[edit] Post-release unauthorized copying

Three days after the game was released a crash-prone cracked version which did not require Steam or a CD appeared on the Internet (nearly a week before a stable version was widely available)^{[citation needed]}. While some believe this demonstrates Steam's weakness as a DRM solution, others point to the fact that Steam allowed the game to be encrypted on CDs and as such it was not leaked during manufacturing, unlike every other major title at the time, and that Counter-Strike: Source (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 November 23, a week after release, Valve announced that they had disabled 20,000 Steam accounts that had used a technique involving a specific CD key and the disconnecting of the user's phone line, which was being distributed by warez 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. As the game's popularity increased, Valve invested more effort into anti-piracy mechanisms, which included a revamp of their old Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC), which was highly criticized for being unable to curtail cheating on popular games such as Counter-Strike. While pirated copies continue to circulate on the Internet, these illegitimate copies do not enable the user to take advantage of new features from upcoming updates and online play is impossible.

[edit] "Bad" updates

[edit] 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. However, shortly after the third-party mods updated their engines in order to reflect Valve's updated code, the aforementioned problems cleared up. Significant numbers of users also saw a vast reduction in frame-rate across all Source games, there were reports of high latencies in online games. Others reported a simple crash to the desktop when attempting to run any Source game. One of the identified causes was the fact that many users ran Half-Life 2 by hitting the minimum requirements, and when HDR was introduced into the updated Source engine, it was enabled by default. These issues were mostly addressed and resolved.

The aforementioned "vast reduction" in frame rates is a problem that is only seen on low-end PCs 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. By Opening up Steam, going to the Games tab, right-clicking on Half-Life 2 (or any other Source-powered game), opening up Launch options, and then adding the command parameter "-dxlevel 81" without the quotations. This effectively reduces the visual quality of the games by using simpler shaders, lighting, and other effects. This workaround is reported to work 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.

[edit] 64 Bit Bugs

When the game is running in 64-bit mode, it can be (virtually) impossible to finish the 13th chapter, "Our Benefactors", due to constant crashing when using the enhanced gravity gun (usually on energy balls). However it should be noted that at time of writing the market for 64 bit computers is very small and commonly unstable due to the natures of the new processing technology, although the 64-bit market is slowly growing with a small selection of 64-bit games and the release of newer games such as Unreal 2007 and Crysis. It should also be noted that playing HL2 in 64-bit provides almost no increase in frames per second compared to the regular 32-bit mode, and can even substantially reduce performance in this regard; loading times, however, have been reduced in the 64-bit version. While some people have encountered bugs and glitches, other people have played the 64-bit version with acceptable game performance and a crash free game play experience.

The only available solution, at time of writing, is to add the flag "-32bit" to the game's command line to play the 32-bit version. Saved games are not compatible between the 64 and 32 bit versions, so the chapter-unlock cheat may be helpful to avoid having to replay large sections of the game. To unlock chapters, add the command-line flag "-console", start the game and bring up the console with the tilde key ("~") and enter the command "sv_unlockedchapters 15" (unlocks up to chapter 15 - which is the credits).

The introduction of the 64-bit version is also known to have caused other, less serious bugs. Most bugs have been fixed since the updating of this page.

[edit] Others

While many players and reviewers complained about Valve's implementation of Digital rights management (DRM), the public was generally more tolerant towards its use in Half-Life 2 than they were to other such schemes.

Some users have complained of constant character freezing during gameplay, usually at points where the character in question must move to a certain location for the game to progress, patches have been released on the internet to stop certain character freezing points. Ones that users complain of most is when the building is being raided by the secret police near the beginning of the game and all of the characters freeze in the building if Gordon Freeman (the hero) dies while travelling through the building.

If a user does not install Counter-Strike: Source with the original Vivendi retail edition, he or she may encounter an error approximately 80% of the way through the installation procedure. Only if the user chooses to install Counter-Strike: Source will the installation complete (after which it can be specifically uninstalled). While not all users experienced this error, the error was commonplace enough that a warning was issued before the game was released.

Some users reported game crashes when HL2 initiates its auto-save feature (since fixed), as well as audio and video stuttering and hitches. Patches are periodically released by Valve which attempt to correct these issues. The initial patch, released in December 2004, fixed the audio stuttering but also reduced the game's performance for some players, either through a lowered frame rate or lowered resolution, unless they disabled the changes through the console. The cause of hitching has since been identified as low FSB values, a factor not mentioned in the game's system requirements.

To play either single-player Half-Life 2 or Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, players must create an account on Steam. This process normally takes only seconds, but times of several hours were reported during peak times. Accounts also mean that anyone without internet access must obtain internet access before playing, whether through using a friend's connection, or obtaining their own. Although a majority of players have internet access, it still affects a significant number of prospective consumers. The more recent versions of the both Half-Life 2 and Episode One, while still requiring Internet access in order to install the games, does not require Internet connections to play the single-player versions, as the Steam application now offers an "Start in Offline Mode."

Although the Gravity Gun is viewed by many as an innovative and skillful weapon, some consider the weapon ruins the entire gameplay sequence. Because Half Life 2 and Episode 1 are mostly based on using the Gravity Gun besides puzzles and protection, some felt that the lack of support of ammunition for the other weapons killed the entire uniqueness of the gameplay. Additionally, some feel that the Gravity Gun takes no skill at all to use due to the fact that the weapon itself can launch certain objects at fast rates as well as an unlimited ammunition, which again, kills the whole concept of "balancing" gameplay.

To sell a Vivendi retail copy of Half-Life 2, the seller must either pass on their account information (which technically violates the Steam contract), or the buyer must send the game's box and CDs to Valve's offices to have the CD key reset. Initially the reset procedure involved a $10 surcharge levied by Vivendi, but lawsuits in Germany forced them to waive the fee. Those outside America were left with little choice but to pass on account information - luckily, Valve does not mind the process as their rule is designed to remove any possible legal loophole allowing account farming and such legitimate trading does no harm. Due to proof-of-purchase issues, games bought through Steam cannot be transferred. More recent retail editions, distributed by Electronic Arts, require only a scan or digital photo of the key, and do not levy a charge.

In several cases in certain mods, crashes were often (and still are) experienced by online players with dial-up. This is caused by the time it takes for dial-up to transfer updated in-game information into the player's computer. People who play online mods for Half-Life 2 should note that dial-up is not recommended for multiplayer. In most cases today the only thing one with dial-up will experience is horrid lag. Rarely, these players can cause the server to "lag-out" and cause all players who are in-game to lose connection.

[edit] 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 introduce stretching and distortion of objects around the edges of the screen, due to increased perspective projection distortion, as in any other 3D game.

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:

We've been rigorously playing and testing Half-Life 2, Counterstrike Source and Half-Life Source for a long time now - and we've found nothing to suggest that the FOV change is a significant factor in causing motion sickness. We have, however, put a great deal of work and attention into reducing the motion sickness that can be experienced in the vehicles in Half-Life 2. During our early playtests, many of us were experiencing motion sickness from driving the buggy and the airboat—especially the airboat. We've done a lot of work on tuning the experience to reduce any ill effects— especially looking at how we manage the players head/view in relationship to the movement of the vehicles. Interestingly, for all of the vehicle sequences we revert back to FOV 90 so that you have more peripheral vision which is helpful when moving at these faster speeds. Even so, some people still do experience some motion sickness effects from long stretches in the vehicles - personally, I find that I am most affected by the intense jarring that occurs when you slam into something in the airboat at high speed - like when you miss a jump or something.