Half-Life is 10 Years old!

[Pidesco]

Ultima VII added dialogue trees, party NPCs that reacted to your actions and massively improved world interaction.

 

 

Being revolutionary is important in the case of Half Life because everyone proclaims it to be some sort gaming revolution. As such, determining whether Half Life is overrated or not depends on its revolutionary qualities.

 

Also, on the subject of games being improved upon by later games, Half Life hasn't exactly aged well. No One Lives Forever took the Half Life experience turned and into a much better game, with better scripted events, better AI and more varied gameplay. Unfortunately, as it hasn't sold 1 million copies a year since release it's most definitely a worse game than Half Life.

 

 

I'm not really arguing against Half Life which is a fine game that took the Doom formula in the right direction. My beef is with two notions that often show up in "My dad is could beat up your dad" discussions:

1. The more and the longer an item sells, the better it is.

2. There's no arguing against taste.

[alanschu]

Ultima VII's dialogue tree was essentially a graphical version of the dialogue from Ultima VI. Though because we were no longer typing, we no longer needed to remember the key words required to have discussions with other NPCs (nor could we cheat and just type in the words if we already knew them). At times Ultima VII makes fun of the keyword system, such as when you talk with the actor that is playing The Avatar and he says his most common words are "Name" "Job" and "Bye." Dialogue was still very much a keyword based system, as it was in every Ultima game preceding it.

 

I also remember party members getting upset with me for breaking the virtues (particularly stealing since I was prone to do it), in fact moreso than in Ultima VII (where NPCs typically only got mad if you moved something that did not belong to you...even if it meant moving the invisible caltrops out of the way so half of your party wouldn't die walking into the treasure cave). I didn't play Ultima VI nearly as long as I did Ultima VII (since I didn't own it), so I can't comment a whole lot on the world interaction. I know you could bake bread and whatnot in Ultima VII; I don't know if you could do that in Ultima VI. I do remember having everyone chill at the Blue Boar Inn, however, eating a meal (which I could do since it was possible to control each individual character with in a solo mode). NPCs had schedules and would go to bed, go to work, and all sorts of fun stuff like that. They'd lock their doors when they weren't home and so on.

 

The big thing about Ultima VII is it was now a mouse driven interface. Outside of that it was very much Ultima VI with improved graphics, and a change to a real time environment (which was definitely a good thing, as the world otherwise stood still unless The Avatar did something).

 

 

As for NOLF. That game was great too. It's sales are obviously lower because it doesn't have what Half-Life has that extends the life of FPS games, was a multiplayer mode (and in the case of HL: mods) that captured the attention of the players.

 

While it's possible for a poor game to have good sales numbers due to hype and so forth (look at Driv3r), rarely is that success sustained. Half-Life may just be a Doom clone (a point a whole heartedly disagree with), but it does it really well and with a style and presentation better than other games at the time. But if you want to get super picky, you could make arguments that any FPS game is just an evolution of Doom (or Wolfenstein 3D if you prefer).

 

Does a game need huge sales to be considered a good game? Of course not. Many of us consider Planescape: Torment or the first two Fallout games to be excellent games, and none of them were huge sellers. But if a game is able to keep selling copies for a significant number of years even if that game, as you yourself say, hasn't exactly aged well, it seems likely that it did something right. At the very least argue that much of its sales were a result of mods like Counterstrike and Day of Defeat before simply stating "Pfft, Doom clone that's overrated."

 

 

As for how Half-Life hasn't aged very well, I am willing to bet that if you were to take someone and show them Half-Life: Black Mesa when it comes out, people will be impressed by it. Regardless of whether or not they played through the original Half-Life. In fact, I think the fact that a group of modders are willing to spend time recreating the original experience in Source is a testament to just how highly regarded the original Half-Life is. People don't seem to be out there creating mods that recreate the original Doom or anything like that.

[karka]

http://www.moddb.com/mods/classic-doom-3

[Hurlshort]

Both Half-Life 2 and Ultima 7 are blatant rip-offs of Pong and should never be called revolutionary. Pong is also a rip-off of Table Tennis, so that's not revolutionary either.

[Zoma]

Without Quake, there will never be such a thing as Half-Life.

 

Half-Life owes it to the Quake engine.

[Morgoth]

Without Quake, there will never be such a thing as Half-Life.

 

Half-Life owes it to the Quake engine.

No. Without Quake, they'd have just programmed their own engine, or licensed another one. Either way, Half-Life would have been released anyway.

[Zoma]

But that didn't happend. Never know if that will even happend at all.

 

Nonetheless Quake engine was the best engine at its time and was the first true 3D real time engine.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_engine

 

Could Half-Life happend in the Unreal engine? That's 2 years later and Valve could not last that long since it was a newly founded company and had probably used inferior engines by then to make Half-Life which will become a far different game than we know now. Programme their own engine? Maybe but we'll never know what kind of engine it comes out which may even result the same game, or even a 3D game.

Edited December 11, 2008 by Zoma

[Slowtrain]

Half Life was a pretty incredible experience when it first came out, compared to what we were seeing at the time.

 

 

Yeah, it's easy to look back now and ask what was so great about it since pretty much every element of Half Life was pretty much been adopted as gospel for modern FPS games. But at the time? What was Half Life's FPS comptetion doing? Heck, what was Half Life's competiton? Quake, Quake 2, the hypothetical Duke Nukem 4, Sin. Both Sin and HL were billed as the Quake killers, and while SIn pretty much failed utterly, HL pretty much did mosh all over quake/quake 2 as far as a single player experience

 

What first person shooter raised the post-Doom bar as much as HL did in regards to single player gameplay? Blood? Shadow Warrior? Heretic 2? You could make an argument for System Shock 1, except SS1 was pretty much concurrent with Doom not post-Doom and offered a variant FPS gameplay that took quite a few years to catch on. You could make an argument for Duke Nukem 3 with its pipe bombs and tripwire mines and jetpacks and flushable toilets and explodable walls. Maybe.

 

But HL really skyrockted the bar in level design, immersion, weapon implementation, story (for a shooter, as in there actually was one, sorta), soldier AI. The soldier AI alone WAS revolutionary. We had never seen anything like that before, calling out to each other, working together, chucking grenades around corners.

 

Is it a perfect game? I don't think so. The platforming elements blew chunks, the final level was freaking hideous, the entire second half of the game lost much of the atmosphere that the first half achieved, the alien creatures weren't nearly so interesting as the soldiers.

 

I don't consider HL even remotely one of my favorite games, but that doesn't negate what a gaming milestone it was.

[Zoma]

But at the time? What was Half Life's FPS comptetion doing? Heck, what was Half Life's competiton? Quake, Quake 2, the hypothetical Duke Nukem 4, Sin. Both Sin and HL were billed as the Quake killers, and while SIn pretty much failed utterly, HL pretty much did mosh all over quake/quake 2 as far as a single player experience

 

Thief came out at the same time as Half-Life. System Shock 2 released 9 months later. Both lost to Half-Life because its niche but still a greater game than HL IMO. HL is awesome because of its moddable engine that made "revolutionary" games like Counter Strike that shapes the modding gaming community, giving Valve more opportunities to sell Half-Life because it expanded the market audience with Counter Strike, Day of Defeat and later, Natural Selection.

Edited December 11, 2008 by Zoma

[alanschu]

The other big one that came out at that time was Unreal. I remember it being sort of Unreal vs. Half-Life. Both games had a fair bit of hoopla to them (though it wasn't until I read a review for Half-Life that I knew what Half-Life was, but at the time I wasn't really into PC gaming).

 

As for whether or not Half-Life would have come out if Quake hadn't existed...I don't care. Quake does exist, and Valve liked the engine, licensed it, and modified the tar out of it.

 

 

As for the progression of FPS games, I definitely put Duke Nukem 3D on the next evolution after Doom. It created a persona for the character, had interesting levels that we were able to related to (well, on the Earth levels anyways). It had basic scripted events which were pretty cool at the time. The sounds were great, and it actually added the ability to jump and voluntarily move in the Z-axis. It had style and substance, and as a bonus was FUN! I remember hearing about a "Doom killer" and scoffed at it, but Duke3D delivered. Environments that could be interacted with (often in humorous ways) and so forth.

 

When I heard about Quake, I was hoping for a Duke Nukem 3D killer. Quake had kickass deathmatch, but the single player game was boring and uninspired, and while I was too young to truly appreciate that it was a fully 3D polygonal engine, I preferred sprites because quite frankly I found the low polygon characters to look rather foolish. Sure a necessary step to what we have today, but even games like GoldenEye and Turok for the N64 weren't games that made me think "ooo, the graphics for this game are awesome" especially when you got up close to the characters.

 

I played a variety of FPS games...but ultimately when I first got my grubby little paws on Half-Life, I couldn't stop playing it until I was done. My cousin that started watching me play it about halfway through was equally enamored just by watching me play it.

 

 

Add in pretty much the most successful mod of all time (as well as some great times with TFC, since I didn't get a chance to play TF for Quake 1), it's quite the recipe for success. I agree with Crash Girl that many of the games we see today are heavily influenced by Half-Life, which is in part why we look back on Half-Life and go "meh."

[karka]

Ok. I understand now. HL was revolutionary. It was nothing like before it and it became the initiator of FPS reborn. Ok. So, what about HL2? Was that revolutionary too? Was it completely different from the past FPS titles? Or did it change the FPS genre completely? No.

 

Please defend HL2. It's very funny.

[Stephen Amber]

That was around the time pc games started getting good... I swear to god I did nothing but play baldur's gate and half-life in late 98 and into 99. Half-life had so many cool elements that made it great... head crab paranoia, the 'copter that would badger you til you could shoot it down(yes!), that huge sound sensitive thing of tendrils you had to sneak past...

[Calax]

Ok. I understand now. HL was revolutionary. It was nothing like before it and it became the initiator of FPS reborn. Ok. So, what about HL2? Was that revolutionary too? Was it completely different from the past FPS titles? Or did it change the FPS genre completely? No.

 

Please defend HL2. It's very funny.

It was certainly the prettiest at the time I came out IIRC, It also had the first real physics engine that was used for puzzles and combat, compared to some of its contemporaries. Also it was pretty good at making you like the characters. It did have an infulence on games today (people still use the source engine) but it didn't have anywhere near the amount of influence that it had in the past, and it also was held back because the developers had not changed the way they told the story from 1998. I think this hurt it because there are several points early on where you are supposed to look around at various things and trigger one of the doctors talking to you (Eli's and Kliners labs) It also suffered from not having what happened between half life's one and two being told to you except through easily missed things. Also they don't really explain who the combine are or their "benefactors"

[Nick_i_am]

Calling HL2 a revoltion depends quite a lot on how revoultionary you find the engine/physics/implimentation of said physics to be.

 

I'm not calling it one way or the other, but the physics (in particular, the grav-gun) was the real gameplay innovation here, if you wish to call it that (extending the definition of HL2 slightly, this goes for Portal too, even if Prey had some similar mechanics).

 

I enjoyed the game as a shooter, and I loved seeing physics being used as a gameplay mechanic on a scale that hadn't really been done before but no doubt captain bitter here will disagree on the basis that valve sucks.

[karka]

Well

 

- Far Cry had better graphics and physics.

- Lots of games used Unreal 2 engine in the past. So, Did Unreal 2 influence lots of games, uh? Nope.

Edited December 12, 2008 by karka

[Hell Kitty]

HL was pretty fab back in the day, but I don't have any interest in it now. Duke Nukem 3D was much more influential in turning me into an FPS fan.

 

HL2 was alright but didn't feel like much of a leap and bothered me in several ways. The silent hero thing is all fine and dandy in stuff like Doom where you're just a grunt following orders, and it worked in HL, but in HL2 it was all "Oh wow, Gordon Freeman? THE Gordon Freeman? This is so exciting, you're such a great hero to us all. Now run along and do exactly as I say errand boy."

And why the hell does Alyx seem to have a romantic interest in a man without a personality, too rude to say a single word to her? Maybe they were going for "YOU are Gordon Freeman, so Alyx loves YOU" or something, but to me it just makes her pathetic. She belongs in a Sci-Fi Channel Original.

Edited December 12, 2008 by Hell Kitty

[Nick_i_am]

YOU belong in a Sci-Fi Channel Original.

[Hell Kitty]

YOU dream of being in a Sci-Fi Channel Original, but sadly you're beneath their standards.

[WILL THE ALMIGHTY]

Eww, HL2's characters were terrible. So joyful and happy, nothing interesting to say. Except for Dog and the Gman, which I'll admit were awesome.

 

Whatever HL2's strong points were, they weren't the story or characters. Story was basically ''aliens invade, Earth is enslaved, save humanity''.

 

Call me bitter, but I did not enjoy HL2 at all. Every other Valve game has been amazing in a lot of ways (Portal is brilliant, Left 4 Dead is fun, etc.), but not HL2.

[Slowtrain]

Thief came out at the same time as Half-Life. System Shock 2 released 9 months later. Both lost to Half-Life because its niche but still a greater game than HL IMO.

 

 

Yes, I was not intending to slight either of those games. Those are both fab games and are actually much higher on my personal fave list than Half Life. I didn't include them though because I really don't feel like they are doom-style shooters. WHich HL still is; it just raised the bar in that genre. ANd true, to some degree for games in general.

 

The other big one that came out at that time was Unreal.

 

I remember Unreal as being incredible graphics-wise with some interesting weapons but failing to raise to the overall level of HL. Unreal iirc was a lot more Quake than HL. I barely remember it though.

 

 

Duke Nukem 3D was much more influential in turning me into an FPS fan.

 

 

D3d was awesome! I would still probably rate it as my number 1 fave pure shooter.

[alanschu]

Ok. I understand now. HL was revolutionary. It was nothing like before it and it became the initiator of FPS reborn. Ok. So, what about HL2? Was that revolutionary too? Was it completely different from the past FPS titles? Or did it change the FPS genre completely? No.

 

Please defend HL2. It's very funny.

 

 

Define revolutionary. System Shock 2 isn't revolutionary. It's a sequel! Deus Ex isn't that good, as it's just an evolution as well. Don't even get me started on how crappy Planescape: Torment is. It didn't add anything new to gaming.

 

 

As much as I loved playing through Half-Life 2, it didn't leave the same wow factor that Half-Life 1 did. Probably because of Half-Life 1.

 

 

 

I remember Unreal as being incredible graphics-wise with some interesting weapons but failing to raise to the overall level of HL. Unreal iirc was a lot more Quake than HL. I barely remember it though.

 

Exactly.

 

At times I wonder if some of the Half-Life hatred I see is simply because it's popular, and it's in vogue to bash the popular stuff.

Edited December 12, 2008 by alanschu

[Llyranor]

HL2's gravgun was awesome. The rest of the game was ok.

 

HL1 was ok.

[Calax]

Is it more interesting than Half-life 2?

 

The problem I had with HL2 (the big problem, I've had way too many problems with it) is that Valve uses lots of scripted events. But those scripted events are incredibly dull and ordinary. I'll explain.

 

Scripted event in Call of Duty 4 (heavily linear scripted game):

During a particularly rushing escape scene, a copter turns the corner of a building. You shoot it in the engine part (or something like that) and it crashes. The crash is devastating, throwing dirt everywhere and slowly drifting towards you and your captain, while screeching against the two walls to the sides that basically make it so you can't escape. The copter is still exploding and literally looks like it's going to tear you in half. It stop at the right moment but hurts your captain.

 

F***ing awesome. And that wasn't even one of the best moments it had to offer.

 

Scripted Event in Half-life 2:

You are walking on a street. In front of you there are cars blocking the way, and there is a large hole into an underground parking lot right in front of them. You walk towards the hole, obviously thinking to go in, and one of the cars goes flying, after being hit by a strider. You are forced to retreat into the very large hole.

 

... okay. I was going in that hole anyway. Not much of a problem, and the car didn't really look like it could hit me. I guess the strider posed some sort of threat, but I could take a thousand bullets before dying. And there's no real sense of rush anyway.

 

That's it. That's the most awesome scripted event of HL2.

 

Also:

-No ambience.

-No mood.

-Long cutscenes that say little.

-Only the Gravity Gun is actually innovative (and it is really awesome, I'll admit that).

-The only interesting characters are Dog and... that's it. The rest are really really forgettable.

-No plot hook. Why am I saving humanity?

-Incredibly dull environments (apart from the Citadel, which was okay, I guess).

-Stupid squad gameplay (get the **** out of my way).

-Combat gets about as staetegic as "headshot or no headshot" (excluding the super gravity gun parts).

-Dull art direction... or was there even one?

-Terribly clich

[Slowtrain]

At times I wonder if some of the Half-Life hatred I see is simply because it's popular, and it's in vogue to bash the popular stuff.

 

 

Possibly. But I think also that people forget old games if they didn't like them all that much. For example, in my case Unreal, which I played, but which also did not thrill me very much, so I remember bits and pieces and and an overall impression that might or might not be accurate

 

Otoh, when people like games, they tend to play them more and repeatedly, leading to a more accurate recollection of what the game was like. People who enjoyed HL are probably more able to recollect its positive points, simply since they played it a lot more and were obviously more engaged by it.

 

Ultimately of course, it should be possible to not love a game but still give it credit for its accomplishments. I think that becomes difficult though if we only played the game once, a long time ago.

 

Regardless of whether people liked or disliked HL, the fact remains that the game was revolutionary in the FPS genre and had a profound impact on the development of future FPS titles. It is as much a classic now as XCOM or Civilization or Diablo.

[Humodour]

*smacks karka upside the head*

 

Stop trolling.