Displaying items by tag: HalfLife

The franchise Bioshock has often be described as the spiritual successor to the original SystemShock Series. Because of this there was a high expectation to meet simply because of the quality of both the original and the follow on to SystemShock. Fortunately for us the team (some actually worked on the original at Looking Glass Studios) was more than up to the task and we have had three excellent games from this team. Now, we are both excited and a little worried about Bioshock as they are talking about moving to an “episode” model for this great game.

Valve as a game development company has been a big hit in the past. Titles like Half--Life (and all the follow-ons) Day of The Ancients, and more have made them a name that still is respected by gamers. At least that was the case until they teased the gaming community with the third installment of Half-Life too many times. Now the consensus is that Valve cares more about getting Steam Working for Linux out of spite for Microsoft than it does about releasing games. In fact the whole thought of seeing Half-Life 3 in the foreseeable future has become something of a joke in the gaming and development community.

Although this is not a new or novel concept we are seeing companies begin to use the power of branding to make their games more attractive to the consumer. The concept really started many, many years ago when software companies noted an increased demand for games that had not only similar themes, but the exact same theme and setting. To capitalize on this they began making follow-on installments to their games. Some of the more notable are Doom, Quake, and Wing Commander. Certainly there are more than this small list, but these represent some of the early franchise names that pushed the market along. For those of you wondering why HalfLife is not in there, it is simply because of the length of time between the first and the second games, but yes HalfLife is certainly one of the major Brand Names in gaming now.