Half Life not that great?

[MrHide-Patten]

Its seems Generic because it was the game that set the Generic standard to meet. Masterfully paced, intriguing story and characters. Frankly its a shame that a lot of modern games can't keep up with the steps set by Half Life 2.

I still find myself coming back to play this gem of a game series, but I don't expect everyone to like it. But also I expect you to be mad and living with 10 cats.

The games are textbook definition of Classics.

 

[lithiumvocals]

It's interesting. I've been playing Half Life: Source, and I was thinking about making a thread about how I dislike it. Not because I think it's boring (although I kinda do) or because it has to load every five minutes, but because I've watched Freeman's Mind and that has ruined that game for me. Whenever I play it, all I can think about is Freeman's Mind and how much more enjoyment I get out of it. Same reason I can't play Silent Hill: Downpour. Two Best Friends did a Let's Play of it, and now everything about playing it pales in comparison.

HL2 is still fantastic, etc.

 

[piinyouri]

I had the Orange Box at one point. Got it for Portal. Played that, loved it.
Didn't bother with TF, moved on to the mystical Half-Life.

I was....very underwhelmed. It just seemed very boring, and not put together well and....well, how do so many people gush over this thing?

B'anyway, doesn't matter. Opinions and such.

 

[AdmiralMemo]

It's not great today for the same reason that Seinfeld isn't funny today: it was original and innovative for its time, and everyone since then has copied from it.

 

[Olas]

Things that made/make Half Life 2 awesome (feel free to add to my list anyone who thinks of more)

1. A fully fleshed out physics engine where every brick, and splinter of wood, and tireswing behaves realistically in the environment... ...in 2004.
2. A very creative and engaging storyline that never relies on cutscenes and rarely takes control away from the player.
3. Dog
4. Gman (keep an eye out)
5. Alyx Vance, heck all the characters
6. The gravity gun, turning everything in the entire world into a potential weapon, add this to the dynamic physics engine, and remember this is 2004.
7. Very well designed enemies, especially the fast and poison headcrab zombies, I nearly piss my pants whenever I play Ravenholm.
8. Great music.
9. You get to command an army of antlions against the combine (which have good AI amazingly)
10. The Dark Matter Gravity Gun. F**** beast weapon.
11. Oh, and the graphics weren't half bad for their time either.

I think I'm just gonna save this list as a word document so I can use whenever another one of these threads rears it's head.

 

[Zaik]

Eh, join the club. They have t-shirts.

Personally, I wasn't all that impressed by the first one. I'm sure it was great by the standards of 1998, but it hasn't aged well. Had some cool moments though.

HL2 and the episodes however are fantastic and supremely well designed games. I thoroughly enjoyed them despite not playing them until early 2010.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/view/I-hate-Half-Life-so-much-I-feel-the-need-to-open-the-5-billionth

We don't actually have t-shirts, that is a total lie.

I wish it hadn't cut off the full name though. Can't have everything, I guess.

 

[Windcaler]

I'm going to be honest, I've never really liked the Half Life series. I've tried to play it multiple times and I've never been able to force myself to finish. And before anyone accuses me of having bad taste in games, I've played many great games. System Shock series, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption, both Portal games, you get the idea. I've just never found it to be so good that it should receive the praise that it does. It just feels like a generic run and gun shooter. Is there something that I'm missing?

I played the original HL2 when the orange box came out and I didnt really care for it. By the standards I have for shooters today I felt like it was pretty lackluster with a story that was barely there and impenetrable at the same time. The physics puzzles were interesting but got boring quick when they just seemed to be see saw puzzles.

I guess I should stress that I never finished HL1 because I wasnt having fun with it and on that note I never went on to play either of the HL2 episodes. So I dont know what the big deal is with it and Im constantly looking at HL threads/talks as an outsider.

Being an outsider looking in Im constantly wondering if the delay of Episode 3 (or is it half life 3? as in the 2nd sequel?) isnt going to turn out like Duke nukem forever in the case that its long development builds so much hype that it cant possibly live up to and then fosters hate toward its latest iteration.

 

[rapidoud]

well by todays standards....yea its kinda run and gun. back when it was released (keep in mind HL2 was released...what..7 years ago?) it was the cutting edge of....well everything. And the graphics prevent it from aging poorly as it is not photorealistic (which age like liquid crap). Hell, HL2 created a benchmark that wouldnt be surpassed until Crysis 1.

Model T ford is a piece of crap compared to todays cars, doesnt diminish what it accomplished. A lot of the magic that was HL2 has been copied in other games after it was released, so quite honestly i dont hold it against anyone who played that games years after they have been released.

It is like our generation scoffing at black and white movies when, at the time, they were very profound.

Even for its time, it's pretty 'Oh you are such a GENIUS player that we blew open this wall for you so you could continue on, and everything in the plot is to make YOU, the player, feel super special! We even made our protagonist a mime and called it cool so you could fulfil the role further!'

 

[Nemesis729]

And before anyone accuses me of having bad taste in games, I've played many great games. System Shock series, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption, both Portal games, you get the idea.

Different strokes?

If you don't like Half Life don't play it, it's not like you're obligated.

 

[bafrali]

Oh my GOD!!! Another "Half Life is overrated" thread? If you think it is over-rated, why make an entire thread about it and advertise it even more. It became like the JB of gamimg. Let it go people. Even the actual fans of the series don't talk about the fucking games that much.

captcha: Kick your heels.....

Fucking Half Life 3!!!

 

[Tharwen]

First thing you've got to realise is that every game you listed -

System Shock series, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption, both Portal games, you get the idea

...owes something to Half Life.

System shock was released in 1994...

 

[Monsterfurby]

Half Life is one of those rare cases where I don't really like playing a game, but I acknowledge that just from a technical, design, concept standpoint, those are really good games. They are well-paced, offer a well-designed game world, challenging and offer just the right balance between new challenges and familiarity.

So yeah, while i agree that one doesn't have to like them, I also think that, objectively, the HL games are among the best out there.

 

[irishda]

First thing you've got to realise is that every game you listed -

System Shock series, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption, both Portal games, you get the idea

...owes something to Half Life. The concept of set pieces, the concept of walking into a room and being assaulted by a group of mercs who just abseiled into the room. The idea of walking into a camp in the texas wastes and suddenly being set upon by thugs bursting out of a cabin. The idea of pretty much everything in Bioshock short of the superpowers - philosophy included. It all came from what Half Life brought.

Specifically, you need to get some perspective on Half Life if you want to have any chance of appreciating it in this day and age.

Imagine Half Life was as new to us as Crysis was in 2007, Human revolution was at the end of last year. Imagine that nothing remotely like it had come before. You would have felt like you were in a real life scientific campus, with key cards and num pads, instead of pressure pads and large glowing consoles. With scientists walking around who responded to your presence and commented on what you were doing/had done, who walked up to you and healed you for god sake!

Imagine aliens that blew chunks - individual, seemingly deliberate chunks - out of the landscape, burrowing out of walls.

Above all, imagine perfect, crystal clear graphics, utterly attractive and the equivalent to today's HDR in terms of crisp'ness. And such style! That opening sequence alone, on the tram, must have been responsible for more soiled pants than any pornstar in the history of the internet.

It was everything new and exciting about Portal, but so much more in addition. A fantastic protagonist, an enthralling story of epic proportions, an utterly serious game, with amazing sound and visuals. And so solid, such a high level of polish!

Simply put, don't give me Bioshock and Assassin's Creed as examples of 'good' games, none of them came close to Half Life because none of them, and no game since with the exception of Deus Ex, had anywhere near the jaw-dropping impact on the genre and gaming in general.

We owe half life for killzone, we owe halflife for halo, we owe halflife for crysis, we owe halflife for doom3, we owe halflife for counter strike, we owe halflife for halife 2 and portal.

And you don't even need to change your perspective that much to see this - it's an amazingly fun game even today if you allow yourself to get into it.

ps. And the frights! Oh the shocks! Some of those headcrab set pieces were filthy-frightening! Half Life 2 dropped a lot of the horror elements - even in ravenholm - that gave half life that extra dimension.

What?

There's nothing new under the sun, and that includes Half-life. Even back in the day, it wasn't some pinnacle of originality except for the physics engine and scripted events.

The philosophy of Bioshock came from Half-life? Perfect, crystal clear graphics for the time? Amazing story? Classic protagonist?

First, the philosophy of Bioshock is Ayn Rand, so Gabe Newell lost out on inspiring that one by about 40 years. The story one is subjective. Aliens, conspiracy, mystery; I'm not really an X-files fan so it didn't really appeal to me. In fact, in 1998, if your game didn't have aliens of some kind or a fantasy setting, it was kind of a failure. And the graphics, when the PC version came out, Freespace had the best graphics bar-none. Hell Freespace 2 (which only came out a year later) still looks better than some things today.

The protagonist praise is always the weirdest to me, in that he's not one at all in any sort of sense. Gordon Freeman has no personality whatsoever. That's the drawback of a silent protagonist, especially one the player controls; they technically don't exist. If they don't talk or express any sort of thoughts/feelings they have, then they're more of a conduit to present the game-world to the player. He's a blank slant, a means of projecting oneself into the game. He's the video game world's Bella for god's sake. Kratos has more personality than him, and that guy's only got 1 emotion.

And fuck that tram intro. Ride that shit straight to hell. 10 unskippable fucking minutes of sitting in a goddamn box listening to unnecessary back story. It's a good thing Black Mesa went down that day, because I get the feeling the employees were gonna start committing mass suicide if that was their morning and evening commute every day.

Honestly, the real reason I think the internet loves Half-life so much is because it's not really an FPS, but more a puzzler where you shoot a gun every now and then.

 

[TrevHead]

I got into PC gaming a year after HL1 released and from my perpective it was a big game changer, Pretty much all your plot/ immersion based FPS games owe something to it.

HL2 maybe didn't reinvent the wheel but it certanly raised the bar in game production quality especially in graphics with the source engine,

Console generations is hardware, PC gens in the past have been games that blow everything else out of the water, like Crysis, Doom 3 and HL2. These game were big events where everybody upgraded their PC just to play it. Maybe because this generation has been 7-8 years now that most ppl have forgotten or just wern't around at that time.

HL2 was PS2 to XBOX 1 or even 360

 

[Scars Unseen]

For me, Half Life 2 is an amazing game that has the misfortune of being a FPS. I own it, plus episodes 1 & 2, but I haven't started the latter two because I just can't ever keep myself interested in a shooter long enough to finish the game, no matter how good its quality. I kind of wish I could, because I like the premise, and really enjoy that first escape sequence. I always start losing interest around the Lost Coast though.

 

[Ziame]

I don't get the point of this thread. So you played a 15 year old or so game and you didnt like it. what a shocker.


It's all about context man. They are not that great now, when their elements have been used over and over the place, mostly better done and shit.

HL1 was the first shooter with rich storyline, detailed background and things done purely for eyecandy. At the time it was pretty damn well the best shooter made.

HL2 introduced something every game nowadays has - physics. Havoc, physx everything that was inspired by the source engine.

The praise is mostly not about what it is now, but what it was then - a breakthrough in the gaming. Hell, I dont like HL anymore, but back then... good god was it awesome.