Half Life 2: Episode 3 deaf character?
Valve, for the most part, have completely failed to see the point of episodic content. Rather then developing a new, modern, robust games engine with a brand new title, they’ve been conning themselves that Source has been a valuable investment for the games industry, all the while holding off on Half Life 2 “episodic” content for far longer then any fan wants to remember.
Of late, the company has been mum over episode 3 and any potential content that might pop up in there. Finally, at a recent talk (video’s below), founder & CEO of Valve, Gabe “I hate Sony” Newell popped out of his local fast food restaurant to discuss the idea of Half Life having another unplayable NPC friend for your mute character, Gordon.
Episodic content is been less then episodic
The character’s main trait though? S/he would be deaf. Thus, the game would have to utilise sign language to allow communications. This is a bold move by Valve. Do it right in a gameplay sense and you’ve managed to become the darling of everyone once again. Do it wrong, and no doubt the deaf community will hang you for exploiting their disability in their video-game. Though with Valve’s long track record of producing top titles, I imagine the latter is something no one is worrying about.
The idea behind the character in the test video’s, apparently, is that Gordon Freeman’s BFF, Alyx would have fallen for this character long before Gordon popped into her life. In order to learn sign language, she would program dog the robot to sign with her as practise.
An interesting story and certainly different in the games industry. Absolutely worth looking at.
The video author has disabled embedding so links will have to do. Sorry!
Part 1 (10.02)
Part 2 (10.01)
Part 3 (5.16)
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