Now here me out. I love Half Life 2, and all the episodes. They are fun, inventive for their time, and they helped launch Steam and skyrocket Valve into the juggernaut of today.
But retrospectively, they don't hold up quite as well as Valve's other games. A lot of this can be attributed to the Source Engine. When Half Life 2 was first released, Steam was almost unusable, Source required high end graphics cards, and the engine was not very optimized to run across multiple PC setups.
As time has gone on, Valve has become far more skilled with their use of the Source Engine, to the point where Portal 2 is still capable of providing very pretty looking environments on a seven year old engine. Valve has simply become more skilled at using the assets they have to create more polished gaming experiences.
Improvements to AI, as seen by the devilish Left 4 Dead director, optimized graphics settings for TF2, and innovative use of the HAVOC physics engine in Portal, Valve has continued to improve damn near everything regarding their products. With Team Fortress 2, they showed that they were capable of updating a game weekly, a practice that has gone on for the past four years and counting.
But despite all this, the Half Life series has sort of begun to stagnate. I'm not talking about the wait for Episode 3, but about how the series has been handled compared to Valve's other franchises. Patches and updates to the Half Life 2 games have been a little sketchy, and sometimes have actually done more harm than good. The MAC release update, for example, updated both Episode 1 and the Original to the Episode 2 engine, at the same time breaking about 90% of the game mods and barely improving performance issues.
It stands to this day that I am still unable to get a consistent framerate with Half Life 2, compared to Left 4 Dead 2, which I can play seamlessly. The Source Engine was just buggy back when Half Life 2 was released, and it had never really been polished up to the standards of Valve's more recent games.
So, I don't hate the game. It is still fun to play from time to time. But in comparison to Valve's more recent work, it just doesn't hold up as well as it used to.
But retrospectively, they don't hold up quite as well as Valve's other games. A lot of this can be attributed to the Source Engine. When Half Life 2 was first released, Steam was almost unusable, Source required high end graphics cards, and the engine was not very optimized to run across multiple PC setups.
As time has gone on, Valve has become far more skilled with their use of the Source Engine, to the point where Portal 2 is still capable of providing very pretty looking environments on a seven year old engine. Valve has simply become more skilled at using the assets they have to create more polished gaming experiences.
Improvements to AI, as seen by the devilish Left 4 Dead director, optimized graphics settings for TF2, and innovative use of the HAVOC physics engine in Portal, Valve has continued to improve damn near everything regarding their products. With Team Fortress 2, they showed that they were capable of updating a game weekly, a practice that has gone on for the past four years and counting.
But despite all this, the Half Life series has sort of begun to stagnate. I'm not talking about the wait for Episode 3, but about how the series has been handled compared to Valve's other franchises. Patches and updates to the Half Life 2 games have been a little sketchy, and sometimes have actually done more harm than good. The MAC release update, for example, updated both Episode 1 and the Original to the Episode 2 engine, at the same time breaking about 90% of the game mods and barely improving performance issues.
It stands to this day that I am still unable to get a consistent framerate with Half Life 2, compared to Left 4 Dead 2, which I can play seamlessly. The Source Engine was just buggy back when Half Life 2 was released, and it had never really been polished up to the standards of Valve's more recent games.
So, I don't hate the game. It is still fun to play from time to time. But in comparison to Valve's more recent work, it just doesn't hold up as well as it used to.
