I never played HL but HL2 and the associated “chapters” were part of the Orange Box and I got around to playing the much acclaimed HL2. It’s… okay?
So far I have…
– Ran across some roofs and escaped to a lab
– “We’ll teleport you to the other lab… lol, that darn wacky alien pet!”
– Hoofed it through some assorted landscape and got an air boat.
– Spent far too long cruising down some canals to the other lab
– “Yay, you’re here! LOL, lookit the wacky robot dog! Yikes, you gotta run!”
– Roaming my way through some alien infested abandoned town, met a preacher killin’ aliens. Just left him.
So far the entire plot has been “You’re Gordon Freeman! Yay!” and shooting dudes with parasitic alien heads. Granted I’m missing background from the first game but the plot so far from HL2 could be jotted down on a cocktail napkin and still leave room for my glass. Why all the fuss?
Completely agree. However, it might be like watching Seven Samurai now, where the camera tricks don’t seem all that impressive, but you realize that was the first time it was done and now every director copies Kurasawa.
I played through it a few years back and was only moderately entertained. The plot, as such, didn’t engage me and way, way too much of the gameplay consisted of doing a lot of fleeing while taking huge amounts of enemy fire.
I think the plot is executed much better than it sounds when you boil it down. Yes, it can be written on a napkin, and it is laughably reliant on “OH NOES RUN AWAY!” However, the game design is well. They introduce a mechanic, and then train you to use it. They perfectly pace the puzzles and the combat, and the way the set pieces interact and lead into another are great.
I’d have to play it again to get a really good analysis going for you, but there’s just something about it, from just a technical standpoint, that is really good.
ETA: And you have to remember, it was one of the first games in a long while to not rely on cutscenes to move along the narrative (well, the first game in a while WITH a narrative to do that), you’re always more or less in control, in person. Other FPS games have done it since, but it was the leader.
I agree the game play is very entertaining. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
But, you gotta remember a big part of what was so entertaining about HL2 is the game mechanics that just weren’t out there before. It came out 8 years ago. What was revolutionary then wouldn’t raise an eyebrow now.
I was blown away by it. Almost everything can be interacted with. The water looks sooo real! Just alot of cool effects, amazing graphics (for the time) and a pretty good storyline. Plus, I had already played HL1, so I had a loyalty to Gordon Freeman.
The plot starts In medias res. All the characters assume you have been around for the past years since Half-Life, so it’s always, “the Combine eats babies for fuel, but you already knew about that!” You can get hidden snippets of plot by reading things like newspaper clippings in the lab at the beginning.
Right. For example, the gravity gun was a huge innovation in Half Life 2. The first time I ripped a sink out of the wall and beat a guard to death with it was a high point of my career as a gamer. But now, that sort of mechanic is a relatively common FPS gimmick. The character animation was incredible, too. Compare Half Life 2 to Halo 2, which came out the same year. There’s really no comparison. HL2 was the first game to escape the uncanny valley - the character looked and behaved real to an extent that was unprecedented at the time, and is still pretty rare even today. The physics engine, likewise, while not an enormous leap beyond what other games was doing, really hit a sweet spot in realism and interactivity that very few other titles could approach.
One thing that, I think, still makes it stand out is the lack of scripted scenes. Valve used that strong physics engine, and some of the best level design in the industry, to create situations that would naturally lend themselves to awesome action movie scenes based purely on emergent behavior, instead of scripted set-pieces. That, and the sheer atmosphere of the game - the sense of quiet, dying desperation in the city, the desolation of the countryside, the triumph at the end when the humans start fighting back. Plus the way the game buries an enormous amount of story and world building in little incidental details, while avoiding giving you big info-dumps on stuff that everyone in the game already knows about. It’s really a masterpiece of design and storytelling.
Here’s a thread I started about it back when it was new, which might give some insight to how people were reacting to it at the time.
I didn’t like HL2 enough to finish it. I may try to finish it co-op with a friend (there are co-op mods available.) The graphics and physics were great for their day though. I liked a few parts, like the fanboat parts.
I got to go with disappointing. I remember shelling out 300 bucks for a vid card to play this game only to find it delayed a week later because of the leak and then buying a new one the year it came out. When it finally shipped I was underwhelmed… I really wanted to love it, but something was missing. I got it release day too. I still think half life one is the better game.
I really liked it, and still do. Even now I will pop it in at least once a year just to replay it. There are parts that I don’t like (the canal/air boat section), but, by and large, it’s a great game. The AI is good, the plot/storyline is OK, and the gameplay is very good. I loved the Ravenholm sequence, I thought Alyx is a great character, the power you feel with the gravity gun was outstanding, and it was extremely well balanced in terms of difficulty and in terms of storyline/action mix (although I’d have liked more storyline). I felt bad watching fellow freedom fighters get taken by head crabs or killed by the Combine. And it was fair, a majority of times I found myself dying or stuck were the result of me being impatient or stupid. It was pretty much what I like in that genre of games. And, unlike the Star Wars trilogy or Goldeneye, it certainly stands the test of time.
I don’t quite understand the backlash against it now.
I never understood why Half-Life got the praise it did. To my POV it was just a bland linear shooter…in the days when linear shooters could still be laughed at as a silly concept. Half-Life 2 comes along and it’s more of the same. Meh.
I think it just happened to land at a really good time to catch a market, and it had a big marketing push that gave it the attention that other titles had managed to miss out on. There’s not much else that can explain why it was hailed as revolutionary when it didn’t do anything that was actually new. Heck, System Shock predates Half-Life by four years, and it barely blipped on the gaming world.
I think the backlash is partially due to death-by–hype. It has gotten many (well deserved, imo) “Best Game Ever” nominations, mentions, and wins. People sing its praises like mad. I think a lot of people are expecting a game that will transcend the fabric of reality; or at least with the amount of love it STILL gets, that it will completely stand up to and be better than modern games.
This is, unfortunately, not true. It stands the test of time, certainly a HELL of a lot more than other games from 2004. The problem is that for every thing it did well, some game (and often multiple games) since then has distilled it and done it better. That’s not the point of loving HL2, not only was it the first, which is usually a weak argument for it continuing to get awards, but it tied together all of these different elements and made them work. Most games since then haven’t done that, preferring to pick out and polish just one or two of the mechanics.
That’s still not to say it’s PERFECT, it has some issues with difficulty early on in the Canal, most people (not me, but I’d be blind to ignore it) complain about the boat and the car, and there are tiny things like it being not too difficult to get lost in Ravenholm, and the antlion sections can tend to drag on after a while. That said, I think it’s remarkable that a game from 2004 can stand up in graphics, gameplay, AND narrative for so long without any major modifications to it. Most “great” games from that day and age only stand up if you take a step back and remember that the graphics are subpar and the mechanics primitive, it’s very rare that a game can really stand up not just for its time, but for the fact the even if it wouldn’t be remarkable, it could probably become a moderate hit if released today.
ETA: You can certainly make your case for other games being better, I’m not going to argue that, but I think that HL2 is definitely up there.
I think Half-Life 2 could be described as the “World of Warcraft” of first person shooters, most of the stuff it did it wasn’t the FIRST to do. But it took everything it could, stepped backwards, and said “okay, what can we do to make this work and tie it together?” It wasn’t as revolutionary as people say, though it did have a few flairs with the physics engine and unique game design (I can elaborate on what I mean by that in a little bit) that nobody really did as well before. In other words, it perfected the “Linear FPS” genre, it didn’t redefine it.
I’m not lashing out at it personally. I was just wondering where the praise was coming from. Really, I guess I was hoping to hear “Yeah that part is meh but the next part will be awesome”.
It’s the narrative bit I’m missing. The graphics are good enough for me. The gameplay is fairly standard – maybe it was once newer but shooting people is pretty self-explanatory. But I was expecting a lot more from the story than “You’re Gordon Freeman! Yay! Now go here…”
There’s bits of exposition and I get that the bad guys are the Combine and people think I’m super snazzy but that’s about where it ends. Admittedly I’m playing without having played the first Half Life but that shouldn’t be essential for there to be any story worth mentioning. I was hoping the story would pick up and make all this shooting and airboat driving worth it. The other Valve offerings I’ve played (well, except TF2, heh) all had better stories. Portal, Portal 2, even L4D2 told a better story with the safe room graffiti and group banter and that was just a shoot-em-up excuse to kill zombies. People say how groovy-keen G. Freeman is but all I’m seeing is a guy with a crowbar who wanders from point A to Point B.
I’m a casual gamer, I generally don’t like first-person shooters, but HL2 is keeping me entertained (no, I haven’t finished it yet. I’m at some bridge part with a giant friggin mothership trying to kill me. I think I’m somewhat near the end–I started the game two years ago, made a lot of progress in a week or so, then work and life got in the way, and I just got back to it last week.) It’s still a lot of fun for me. I don’t see what’s not to like about it. What is considered a really good game in this genre, then? For example, I was never get into the Halo series, but Half Life 2 I enjoyed right off the bat.
That’s one fo the unusual things about it. Gordon Freeman is a total cipher. There is no personality exept what you imagie, and there’s no story except what physically occurs. It’s an intensily immediate experience. The game doesn’t tell you what goes on. It shows you, and anything Gordon wouldn’t see you don’t. People don’t leave tapes for you to find and don’t tell you what’s going on. It’s just there if you care to look.
I can see it’s not for everyone, but it was definitely an innovative approach. The game is pure experience.
That’s not much of a narrative though. Which is cool but I was obviously under a mistaken impression that it told a better story than it does and gave you more reason to groove on Freeman than what actually exists.
I haven’t disliked it, per se, I’ve just heard so many people laud it as fantastic that I apparently had my expectations set higher than they should have been.
There’s actually a lot of story in there, but you literally have to search for it. It’s kind of the same thing they did with the grafitti in the safe rooms in L4D, except instead of concentrating it all in a room between levels, it’s spread over the entire game, in stuff written on walls, in Breen’s speeches, in radio broadcasts, and over heard conversations. It’s a very interesting and unstructured way to deliver a narrative. The drawback is that it’s very easy to miss the entire thing. The advantage is the scavenger hunt aspect to finding it gives a greater sense of reward, and the patchwork nature of what you find out allows a lot of room for your imagination to fill in details.
Half-Life 1 isn’t necessary. In fact, Half-Life 1 is practically irrelevant to Half-Life 2. Yeah yeah, fans of the series will note that the portal storms were caused by the end of HL1, and that’s how Gordon got in the hands of the G-man (the guy in the suit who wakes you up). But really, you’d be just as lost if you’d played Half-Life 1.
That’s part of the praise of it, it tells a story with immediacy, where you’re thrust into a world where all you know is that shit went down. Nobody has TIME to explain, you just have to go about what you do and piece together the information. It’s definitely minimalist, but the execution is amazing, and the characters are remarkably likable and instill a certain amount of empathy for them by the end of HL2, and especially by the end of Episode 2 if you get that far.
It’s short on details and dialogue, but the point of the story is the minamilism. Perhaps it’s not the most realistic thing that Gordon doesn’t ask questions or whatever, but I think what you’re seeing as a flaw is what most people see as the strength of the story.
That said, I think story-wise it picks up once you hit Nova Prospekt.
Agreed, it’s the story of you being thrust into a world where you don’t know what’s happening and nobody has time to explain. But if you sit around and REALLY look, you can piece together an imperfect representation of what happened. It’s not as thorough as L4D, but the story is there if you look and listen.
I still like it; I just recently started up a new game in fact and have just reached Ravenholm.
I agree with the theory that it suffers from what I think of as the Tolkien Effect; when you get praised and imitated enough, it takes a lot of bite out of someone encountering the original for the first time. How many people these days first read Tolkien (or watch the movies for that matter) without knowing about Elves, Dwarves, Orcs and a Quest to destroy the Artifact of Doom? And overhype can spoil anything.