Black Mesa mod ties Portal to the original Half-Life.

Crowbar Error 42 writes "Its been very heavily hinted at that Portal is set within the Half-Life universe but like many things added to the Half-Life universe in the sequel and in the following episodes there is no mention of things like Aperture Science in the original game.

While there is nothing Valve can do about it as hopefully they are hard at work on Half-Life: Episode 3, it looks like the creators of the Half-Life 2 mod, Black Mesa are hiding small references to Portal in their mod."

[Pandamobile]

Anyone who's actually played HL2 and its episodes, and Portal would have realized that they are in the same universe. I mean, in Episode 2, they talk about the Borealis, which was Aperture's research vessel that was lost along with the part of its drydock.

Aperture was Blackmesa's rival research company. Like Apple to Microsoft, or AMD to Intel, etc.

Portal is completely canon with HL.

[Persistantthug]

Does Valve actually make anything besides mods?

[Pandamobile]

Do you even know the definition of mod? Do you think because a game runs on the same engine as another game that it's a mod?

Do you classify every UE3 game as an Unreal Tournament mod?

And if you mean Black Mesa, this isn't a Valve game. It's a small team that is recreating Half-Life in the Source engine. This is a mod.

[Persistantthug]

Other than Half Life, Valve makes nothing but mods....sometimes they don't even do that....they get their community to do and/or inspire it.

Valve is really overrated as far as I can tell.

[Pandamobile]

Go learn what a mod is, then come back.

Counter Strike, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress all started as Half-Life mods. Valve hired the mod teams and then you got CSS in 2004, DOD:S in 2006, TF2 in 2007, etc.

Just because the games run on the Half-Life 2 engine, doesn't make them HL2 mods. I don't know how many times I've had to explain that on N4G...

[Persistantthug]

Sophisticated Mods is the majority of what Valve does.....

Oh...

That and poaching....Poaching from Steam, that is.

[Pandamobile]

Are you stupid?

I've told you the same thing twice. Just because the game runs on the same engine, doesn't make it a mod. Get that through your skull.

And yes, Valve takes ideas from the community, that's why they're so awesome. They listen to what their fans have to say. This is partially why Valve has such a large and loyal fanbase. If you and some other people send a hundred emails to Valve requesting the same thing for a Team Fortress 2 update, they'll do it, because that's what their customers want, and it will offer a better experience for the gamers.

Mods are 3rd party games created from modifying game content. Does TF2 really look like a modification of Half-Life 2 to you?

[Persistantthug]

You want my nutshell version of Valve...here it is:

Valve is one of the biggest and overrated frauds in the games industry.
Other than the Half Life franchise, Valve has done little for actual game development. All they've done is basically milk the same engine, which is about 6 years old now, and make an endless supply of mods, to which, some of their most popular mods aren't even made by Valve. Seems valve likes to sponge off of the mod community and pretend they're all "sharing" information when in actuality, Valve's simply raiding the chicken coup.

That's Valve.

[Pandamobile]

Lol. You're as dense as a fruitcake.

[shiner]

LOL, I think Persistantthug learned everything he knows about Valve and it's games by reading comments on N4G.

[Pandamobile]

Pretty much. I've never seen Valve hatred on any site except for N4G.

[Persistantthug]

And like to remain stagnant.

Instead of wanting to be good programmer engineers that like to be on the cutting edge of technology, They like to remain stagnant.

Valve is really a 1 trick pony.

[Pandamobile]

Oh, I get it. Another PS3 fanboy who's pissed that Valve doesn't develop for the PS3.

And get over it. The PS3 is not at the cutting edge of engineering. It's got an overly complex CPU which is extremely inefficient at running simple programs without thousands more lines of code than it would take to get the same program to run on a normal CPU.

Valve's a fairly small company with a lot going on right now. From a business standpoint, it would be completely illogical to suddenly jump ship and start developing for the PS3.

[Persistantthug]

I must admit, for honesty's sake, that I enjoy the Half Life series. I like the story, the gameplay, the characters, and I even enjoyed Benson...even though they killed him. lol

But make no mistake about it, as sweet as Half Life is, Valve is a one trick pony. Outside of Half Life, they don't behave like good programmer-engineer game developers....they don't really "push" anything at all tech and graphics wise. They prefer to sit comfortably making Mod, after mod, after mod. And one of the lesser talked about, semi-heinous things about it....they don't even inspire half of their most famous mods...their STEAM community does.
What Valve has done with Steam, is devised a way for themselves to PILFER and cherry pick code and techniques right from the comfort of their own back yard, while PRETENDING everyone is there to share in peace, love, and harmony. So instead of actually innovating with REAL development creation...valve steals better tech. and assimilates it as its own....and oh yeah, sometimes they offer 75K per year jobs to some of their most talented victims. Hooray.

Does all of this sound familiar to any of you that may, or may not, be paying attention....well, it should.
Just remember this...Valve is very closely related to MICROSOFT.

Just food for thought here.

[Pandamobile]

Lol. Everything Valve is famous for, you spin it around and make it look like a negative.

The reason Valve is still using the Source engine is because Half-Life 2 isn't done yet. You don't halt development midway through a cycle to completely redesign the game engine. Because I really want to wait 4 more years for the conclusion to Half-Life 2 just so they can revamp the engine.

"valve steals better tech. and assimilates it as its own"

Like what? What is that even supposed to mean?

I still love how you think Valve taking community suggestions is a bad thing. Every time there's a TF2 update, there's a section in the change log for 'community requests'. There's no other developer in the world that listens to their fans the way Valve does. Just take your head out of your ass for one minute to see.

"Valve is very closely related to MICROSOFT. "

Okay, Gabe Newell was a Microsoft employee, he hasn't worked with them in 16 years. I wouldn't call that 'closely releated'. And he even openly criticized Windows Vista and the Xbox 360. Stop being a baby.

[Lich120]

Ohhh, I get it. He's a persistent thug. In that he just makes crap up over and over again.

Im not sure how a roughly 150 man company is even remotely like microsoft which has thousands upon thousands of employees.

If you think valve is a one trick pony it's because you're assuming they are this massive company that just chooses not to advance their tech. They don't advance it atm because they're finishing the HL2 series and don't have the man power to do both simultaniously.

[Bobby Kotex]

The last 2 full retail games released by Valve:

Half-Life 2 (2004)
Left 4 Dead (2008)

[NaiNaiNai]

I never beat HL2 yet I still new enough to know portal was in the same universe.

[Scudd]

Cant wait to play this mod, small changes and additions are great to keep the game in the half life universe. I reckon Valve shud embrace these guys and work with them to create a truly epic experience for the fans of Half-Life. They should hire these guys and contribute to what could possibly be the best mod ever created. I would happily pay full whack for this game.

[omni_atlas]

lol, looks like Pandamobile ran out of speech bubbles.

Take a valium dude, if someone doesn't necessarily agree with you, don't need to get so worked up about it :)

As for me, I have a PS3 and a PC and I enjoy Valve games on the PC where they are meant to be played.

[cheapndirty]

They make quality games. Sure they are not going to win any graphics awards but they are all good games. I have around 500 games and I play the ones that have good gameplay more than the ones that have great graphics and ok gameplay.

[dabri5]

On the topic of Half Life 2 having bad graphics, I would like to point out that the game came out nearly six years ago. As a comparison, the Unreal 3 engine came out in 2005 (when they started showing off the engine). Epic is hoping to have unreal 4 engine ready by at least 2012. That is a 7 year cycle. Of course they have released many games through this engine. None I think you would classify as mods.

If you think that Valve isn't working on a new engine to Power their next big set of games, you are crazy. I can also pretty much promise you that this time around they are taking the idea of console development into consideration when designing their engine. Source was too difficult for them to easily port stuff to the PS3 because of how strongly it was designed around PC architecture. That's why it was easily possible to port to the 360. Their next engine, just like the next Unreal engine has the idea of porting to consoles built into the engine from the ground up. You will see Valve games on everything next gen.

The fact that they haven't released a new engine yet is dumb. It generally takes companies this long to release new engines as pointed out with the Unreal engine.