Last year I had the chance to interview Valve Software’s Doug Lombardi. I couldn’t wipe the childlike grin off my face—I loved every second of it. This year, Icrontic returned to Valve’s E3 dominion to talk Portal 2. I was now an E3 veteran, so shooting the breeze with Doug Lombardi would be business as usual this year.
The truth is, I’m a heck of an actor. I could barely contain my excitement. It was Christmas day all over again. Living the dream.
To begin, we were all huddled into a small room to learn some of the details on Portal 2. Erik Johnson, project manager at Valve, lead us along the journey. Erik explained that the studio had one major challenge when tackling the sequel: how do you continue to surprise players in the sequel? Players have become very attached to the characters, music, and surprises of Portal. They now know what to expect, and their expectations are high. How do you keep things fresh? Erik assured us that everything you love about Portal is still intact, but keeping the experience new and unique has been a cornerstone design component.
Portal 2 takes place a considerable amount of time after the first game. Players assume the role of Chell, the test subject who escaped the labs of Aperture Science in the first game. Chell has returned to the decrepit chambers for reasons yet unknown to us. The mute, white chamber walls are now covered in foliage. Chell soon discovers a mobile artificial intelligence robot named Wheatley that guides her around. Based on the video clip we were shown, it seems that the wonderfully British Wheatley somehow manages to reactivate GLaDOS, who immediately begins to rebuild the science center. Erik explained that the only way GLaDOS knows how to interact with Chell is to test her, so rebuilding the test chambers is the only thing she knows to do.
Portal 2 introduces many new tricks that will change everything about how the player must think to pass the chambers. The new elements have all been given quirky, humorous names. Erik mentioned that these names were created to reflect what they felt GLaDOS would have named the devices herself.
First displayed to us was the Excursion Funnels. These were large, beam-like tunnels that suspend all objects (including the player) and slowly moves them toward the end of the line. While floating through an Excursion Funnel, the player can still fire portals, and the tunnels themselves can be completely re-directed with cleverly placed portals.
Aerial Faith Plates are giant spring boards that launch items and players across great distances. As soon as an object comes into contact with the Aerial Faith Plate, the device activates, and sends the object on a high speed flight across the chamber. Some of the examples we were shown had multiple Aerial Faith Plates linked together into a chaotic mess of deadly springboards.
Thermal Discouragement Beams are high intensity lasers that burn through anything in its path. Special cubes with glass centers can be used to redirect the beam to take out turrets and complete objectives. Multiple cubes can be used to link the beam to any area, as some chambers require the beam to be connected to certain receiver points, much like the energy spheres in the original game.
Pneumatic Diversity Vents are giant vacuum tubes that suck up anything close enough to be captured into their deadly grasp. The video we were shown had Pneumatic Diversity Vents being used primarily as a means to dispose of the turrets that guard the chambers. A portal would be placed at the opening of a vent, and the other portal placed near the turret. The helpless machine would be sucked through the portal and into the vent.
Propulsion Gel... Originally a diet aid!
Arguably the most impressive additions are Repulsion and Propulsion Gels. These liquids can be unleashed from their receptacles and spread around the chambers via portal, or any of the aforementioned new elements. The liquid actually coats the surfaces of the walls and floors, radically changing the behavior of those surfaces. For instance, Repulsion Gel causes the player to bounce along the coated surface, while Propulsion Gel causes the player to gain radical speed while on the surface. With the concept of being able to spread around the gels via portal, and combining the two gels in one chamber, you begin to see the kind of complex possibilities that these new elements introduce to the test chambers.
Erik’s presentation ended with a short, but intense video that displayed all of these new ideas being put together in a variety of puzzles. Chell would speed along Propulsion Gel into a portal, be rocketed into the sky on the other end thanks to the additional velocity, speeding through quickly-closing spike walls, and then being caught in the embrace of an Excursion Tunnel. The reality of Portal 2 became very clear—that this game would be much more difficult and complex than the first one, and it will be unbelievably exciting.
When we exited the small room, we managed to catch Valve’s Doug Lombardi as he was leaving an interview. Despite being in a hurry, Doug graciously gave us what little time he had to answer a few of our questions. Doug is always a class act, and we anxiously rattled off our questions.
Our first matter of attention was asking him about Steam on the Playstation 3. Doug explained to us that Sony was the only console company that was open to the idea of deploying Steam on their network. While Steam on Xbox might be a possibility down the road—Doug ensured us that Microsoft was not yet willing to allow such a service on their platform.
Sony’s willingness to allow Steam still didn’t line up with Valve’s long history of PS3 neglect. The Orange Box was known to be the worst of the three releases on the PS3, and Sony’s console never even saw releases for Left 4 Dead and its sequel. I asked Doug if this meant a change of heart towards Sony. Doug responded by explaining Valve’s own disposition towards The Orange Box on PS3. The PS3 release has about a 10 percent deficit compared to the other two releases on MetaCritic, and Doug explained that such a score did not meet Valve’s standards. PS3 development at that time was outsourced to an external development team, as Valve didn’t have an in-house PlayStation team. After their dissatisfaction with The Orange Box on PS3, Valve decided to do all of their work internally. In the mean time, they’ve been getting together a PS3 development team, and from here on out, Valve Software will handle all of the ports themselves.
Shifting the attention to the Source Engine itself, I asked Doug about the future of the aging engine. Source was originally released in 2004, but Valve has continually added features and expanded the ability of the engine, and the way Source appears today is radically different than it its original incarnation. Doug explained that today the graphics engine might as well be called Source Engine 1.5 thanks to the many changes made to it. He explained that at inception, Valve decided they would rather build an engine that can be modular and incrementally upgraded over time rather than relying on a full refresh every few years.
I asked Doug if there was any possibility that the studio would rebuild Source from scratch. Doug responded by suggesting that when the next generation of consoles roll along, or possibly when CPU/GPU hybrids hit the streets, Valve may be open to the possibility of an engine overhaul. In the mean time, there are no official plans to rebuild Source.
Finally, knowing that Valve has recently moved into new office space in the Bellevue area, I asked Doug how adjustments to the new place have been coming along. He said the new building is still a work in progress, but the studio is very happy with it so far. The old studio was built for 140 people, and with Valve currently at 300 people, a larger building was necessary. They are excited about the new building, and how its design contributes to the style of Valve’s corporate culture.
It was a pleasant meeting with Valve at E3, and we always enjoy our interactions with the people from that great studio. Valve rolls on as they always do, and we can be assured that another hit is on its way from the studio that made swinging crowbars famous. We can only hope that this time around, the cake memes will finally be put to rest.
Articles RSS