Page 22: Oh My God (Reprise)
Early March brought an important milestone on the project: the alpha play test. In the fall of 2003, the idea of playing through the entire game from start to finish seemed like an unattainable goal. Now, thanks to months of hard work and perseverance, the Valve team was ready to put all 14 chapters of the game through a rigorous play test. The entire company stopped what it was doing and played for an entire week. Even Gabe's dad, a retired Air Force officer, came in to play the game and provide some feedback.
As the team played through the game, they began to realize just how much had changed over the past three years. The story no longer started on the icebreaker Borealis. Instead, it started with Gordon arriving on a train at City 17's central station. The Jet Ski, which never quite worked from a control perspective, had been changed to an airboat. But the most significant change was made to the physics-manipulator gun. In the original design, Gordon wasn't supposed to acquire the gun until the latter stages of the game. Early play tests, however, indicated that players particularly enjoyed manipulating objects in the environment. So the team decided to give players access to the gun at an earlier point in the story.
After the play test wrapped, Newell gathered the team to solicit feedback. Was it fun? Was it revolutionary? Was it long enough? Did all the disparate elements fit together in the right way? Newell thought so, but he never trusts his own judgment. ("I'm the most negative person in the company," he explains. "The-world-is-going-to-end, all-life-is-going-to-cease-throughout-the-universe negative.") So he listened carefully to what the team had to say. One by one they got up and praised the game. "Guys were standing up and going, 'Oh my God, this is actually a great game!'" Newell remembers. Valve was on the right track--there would be no need to redo the game. Finally, there was light at the end of the tunnel.
Of course, the game was still nowhere near done. Levels were still incomplete, the enemy placement had yet to be finalized, and the pacing of the game needed to be reviewed with a fine-tooth comb. The next step was to improve what Valve calls the game's experiential density--the amount of interactivity a player encounters in any given environment. "We went through the game minute by minute and said, 'OK, what is the player doing right now? How long has it been since something cool happened?'" Laidlaw says.
Valve knew it had months of tweaking and polishing to do before the game was done. But Newell was confident the worst part of the development was over. "The fact that you could go from one end of the game to the other was a really big thing for us," he says. "Then we knew it just had to get better--but it was all there."
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