Half Life 2 is Valve's weakest game

[Caligulust]

The original Counter Strike was a mod yes, Counter Strike Source was a proper game, uses the source engine yes, but it is still a game.

Same with Team Fortress 2. Using the same engine and being a mod are different things.

Also Ricochet was free if you purchased Half Life, and mods aren't always free.

Still, I could just purchase Ricochet on it's own without Half Life and it wouldn't be any less of a game. Albeit a not very great one.

But, fair enough.

 

[Exocet]

Wait wait wait,the source engine needed a high end graphics card to run when it first came out?
I ran it on medium at over 30 fps with a crappy old 128mb ATI card.
Valve are about as good as Blizzard when it comes down to making their game accessible to every computer.
And personally,I've seen early versions(2005) of the engine run and all types of computer flawlessly,from cheap laptops to high end monsters,passing by mid end laptops with a 64bit OS.

Lastly,I see Valve's release timeframe as a positive thing,because it shows what good dev teams can do when not pushed around by publishers that want payoff.The only other studio out there that can do that is,surprise surprise,Blizzard and I hope they don't change any time soon.

 

[gunner1905]

What about L4D2?

That game didn't really change at all from the first. Hell I still think the first one's better.

What's wrong for L4D2?
I've enjoyed the hell out of that game (I've accumulated about 80 hours of play)
It's a blast playing VS with 7 of my friends
And I've played L4D1 for almost the same amount of time and for me
L4D2 > L4D1

 

[MercurySteam]

Well, it was advanced for 2004.

Yes back then it was something to marvel at, now however it seems to have most of its luster due to the fact that (now) everything in HL2 has been done before and better so HL3 is going to have get really creative to avoid being another shady FPS with just another physics engine and another unrelatable silent protagonist.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

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.

Source's contemporary competitors were Doom 3 and Farcry. Of the three, Source had the gentlest system requirements.

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.

This is due, in large part, to the fact that the engine being used today is not the same engine released with Half-Life 2. Sure, it has the same name but a great deal has been added on. No one, for example, accused Modern Warfare of running on the Quake 3 engine even though the Quake 3 engine, at one point in the CoD franchise, formed the technological basis. Years of tweaking and adding features have effectively made it something new. The same is true of Source.

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.

I'm not certain why people tend to believe the Director in L4D represents some grand achievement in AI. That it reacts dynamically to player action and capability is hardly a new feat.

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.

How, exactly, is Valve responsible for maintaining compatibility of third party modifications? More to the point, how does any of this imply stagnation?

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.

If your argument is truly that, because of technological differences between one game and another that is years newer, the newer game is clearly superior, then I'm afraid I simply will never agree. Even were I inclined to, you have not offered any information that indicates the problem you experience is the expected norm. My system, for example, runs every source engine game perfectly fine.

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.

I think I see the problem. You're doing it wrong, or at least in a way that is fundamentally useless. You see, that a new game is better in most ways than an old game is hardly unexpected. So much to the contrary that it is really only worth pointing out when a new game is substantially worse than an old game.

Take, for example, the game Doom and then compare it to Quake 2. In a great many respects, they are the same game and yet, were you to force dozens of people to play both games side by side and then state which they thought was the better game, I'd wager most people would claim Quake 2 is the clear winner. But such a comparison is ultimately meaningless because it tells us nothing about either game.

What I try to do when thinking about such problems is to consider the game's place in video game history. From there you can better identify what made the game special at the time rather than pointing out that games that came after this landmark game did similar things as Half-Life 2 but did it better.

 

[Nikolaz72]

So hey.. People whining that a 7 yearold game can no longer look as good as the games now?

And some people whining about Valve not patching their 7year old singleplayer game. . . Huh.

Seems 'people' are as stupid as ever.

 

[Vault101]

still an awsome game though

 

[Aphex Demon]

I was running HL2 on a Nvidia 7600GT, old as fuck. Ran it perfectly though, sometimes getting 200-300 FPS with everything on the highest.
Actually I think I had a 6K series Nvidia when it first came out, with an AMD Athlon 64, 1GB Ram. Wow.

 

[noble cookie]

What about L4D2?

That game didn't really change at all from the first. Hell I still think the first one's better.

What's wrong for L4D2?
I've enjoyed the hell out of that game (I've accumulated about 80 hours of play)
It's a blast playing VS with 7 of my friends
And I've played L4D1 for almost the same amount of time and for me
L4D2 > L4D1

Don't get me wrong L4D2 is a good game, it's just I much prefer the first game because the time I spent on that game when it was released is almost insane. I like the original survivors better, the maps etc. and it just felt good to be back when I played 'The Sacrifice' DLC for L4D2.