Gabe « Slim Fast » Newell explique à Eurogamer pourquoi Half-Life 2 et Half-Life 2: Episode One ne sont qu’un gigantesque couloir sans aucune liberté d’action. Attention les yeux, c’est très fort :
What we try to do is get people through as much entertainment as possible. This is an argument I have with Warren Spector; he builds a game that you can play through six different times. So that means that people pay for the game, but don’t get to play five sixths of the game, which I feel is a mistake. You spend all of this time to build stuff that most players will never ever ever see, and I feel we try to maximise… I mean, I understand the exploration impulse and we try to make people happy doing that because it’s an important part. Exposition, exploration, combat and so on are things that we need to make sure are present, but if only one per cent of your customers see this cool thing that takes five per cent of your development budget, that’s not a good use of resources.
En bref, créer un jeu offrant une grande liberté d’action au joueur est une perte de temps et d’argent, et la plupart des joueurs n’en profiteront de toute façon pas. Il part du principe qu’il est indispensable que tous les joueurs d’un même jeu voient sensiblement la même chose. Autant aller au cinéma, à ce compte-là.
