how come there's no half life clones?

[razormint21]

Why is notbody talking about how Half Life 1 was the grandaddy of the modern story driven FPS?

As far as im aware, Half Life was the first FPS to:

Have you start with no guns.

Have an interactive intro sequence.

(PS im aware this happened in its nearest release rival Unreal, however it was of a very different tone and in no way cinematic like Half Life)

Have Friendly NPC characters who you could direct to follow you or wait, and performed individual actions as well as simply chatted with each other...

Cinematic set piece scripted events.

Have NPC enemies who were often more interested in killing each other than you.

Have weapons that require MANUAL RELOADING.

Seamless environment (kind of).

Environmental puzzles with moveable objects dragable in real time.

Weapons held realistically in the hand, which was animated.

I dont remember a FPS having blood decals splatter on the wall either....


I could go on, and im sure im wrong on a few FINE details, but back in the day - Half Life blew me and everyone else away.

Nothing else was even close.... It was like playing a movie. It was the future.

QFT, My points exactly.

 

[Cyan.]

QFT, My points exactly.

I would also like to mention if was the first game id ever seen where peoples MOUTHES MOVED AS THEY SPOKE!!!

I fucking shit my pants.

ANIMATED FACES!!!

 

[Aura Guardian]

Why clone something that is already crap?
But then again...half-life isn't original

 

[Megacherv]

I will say one thing:-

Half-Life 2 is not original!

There was a Half-Life 1!

 

[Mrsoupcup]

Because Half Life is just boring...there I said it.

I'm entitled to my opinion.

but isn't your avatar.. wait... what

I, too, am confused.

Does not compute....

 

[hazabaza1]

Because it's not that great, to be honest.

What are you talking aboot? There are tons of games aboot power-armored non-characters fighting generically evil aliens with generic weapons.

Or this.

 

[captain wow]

Power suits. I can't say I remember anyone doing that before Half-Life. Now they're all over the place.

A lot of games did "power suits", again I mention Doom. And a power suit is basically just a simple "power armor" and again a lot of games did that before.

In the end I see how Half Life 2 was influential on games, but lets not make it more than it is. It was a game that did the best it could with the stables of the FPS and nothing more. Don't get me wrong, Half Life 2 is a well made game, but its not that original.

Super Metroid had power suits. And they were waaaaaaay cooler than the Hazard suit IMO

 

[Starke]

Power suits. I can't say I remember anyone doing that before Half-Life. Now they're all over the place.

A lot of games did "power suits", again I mention Doom. And a power suit is basically just a simple "power armor" and again a lot of games did that before.

In the end I see how Half Life 2 was influential on games, but lets not make it more than it is. It was a game that did the best it could with the stables of the FPS and nothing more. Don't get me wrong, Half Life 2 is a well made game, but its not that original.

Well, and at the risk of saying something someone else already did, Powered Armor goes all the way back to the 1950s. It predates Starship Troopers, but that's the first major example.

Technically speaking there isn't any real clones of any game. Because it would essentially be plagiarism, or just a poor sequel. There are just similarities (sometimes really strong ones) in narrative, characters, gameplay, design etc. That's it really.

At least that's what I think.

I'd dispute that with the Diablo clones.

Half Life 2 was just a tarted up Doom/Wolfenstein clone.

This right here. The FPS genre is referred to as "Doom Clones". (At least, to some of us old people.

You don't hear it so much anymore because Doom is a little antiquated.

And now I feel old.

 

[Starke]

so, why are there so many GTA/Halo clones but no half life 2 clones?

Because Half Life 2 didn't innovate anything, it pushed existing game features to the limit and put them to the best use. Plus, it took years to make Half Life 2, any game studio seeking a quick buck by making a clone of an existing game know better than to take that long.

Tell me, what exactly did Halo innovate?

Regenerating healthZerg, not being able to carry half an arsenal requiring planning for situationsDeus Ex, having grenadesMarathon and melee attacksDuke Nukem 3d be just a button press instead of having to equip a different weapon, dual wieldingMarathon, again, easy to control vehicles in FPSesSome Build Engine Game I can barely remember., stop me any time.

The Melee attacks may have been newEDIT: Whoops, mybad, and Bungie did innovate some of those things, just not in Halo. Still, at least you didn't suggest console FPSs or the actual control scheme, I've seen people argue those before, so kudos.

 

[Battenbergcake]

As much as i love half life 2, disregarding the story, it's just like any other source game, physics, fall damage and that bu-zzsh noise for health and that chu-kuk-kuk noise for ammo.

Still a good game thought, like how you sometimes had to use some common sense for the puzzles, like how instead of running off to restore the power to the generator to lower the bridge, you just stuck a couple of planks over the gap and ran across... the vehicles handled like shopping trolleys thought.

 

[Amnestic]

The Melee attacks may have been newEDIT: Whoops, mybad, and Bungie did innovate some of those things, just not in Halo. Still, at least you didn't suggest console FPSs or the actual control scheme, I've seen people argue those before, so kudos.

Regenerating Zerg health isn't really the same concept as applied in Halo. Would it be fair to say Halo was the first FPS to incorporate it?

 

[Useful Dave]

As much as i love half life 2, disregarding the story, it's just like any other source game, physics, fall damage and that bu-zzsh noise for health and that chu-kuk-kuk noise for ammo.

Maybe because it was the first release using the source engine, as such it is the 'default' for source?

 

[ben---neb]

Because Half Life is just boring...there I said it.

I'm entitled to my opinion.

My G-man avatar is better than yours. And I actually like Half Life.

OP: I agree, what we need is a Half Life clone called Half Life 2: Episode 3 for example.

 

[tadaaaaa]

Has anyone pointed out that you'd have to call a Half-Life clone "Whole-Life"?
...

 

[Diligent]

so, why are there so many GTA/Halo clones but no half life 2 clones?

Because Half Life 2 didn't innovate anything, it pushed existing game features to the limit and put them to the best use. Plus, it took years to make Half Life 2, any game studio seeking a quick buck by making a clone of an existing game know better than to take that long.

Tell me, what exactly did Halo innovate?

Regenerating health, not being able to carry half an arsenal requiring planning for situations, having grenades and melee attacks be just a button press instead of having to equip a different weapon, dual wielding, easy to control
vehicles in FPSes, stop me any time.

Halo did popularize the regenerating health in FPS, but it wasn't the first to use it. The wolverine game on Sega Genesis had it. I don't see a limited arsenal as a good step, but a necessary step for console FPS, since you don't have the space a keyboard does to map more weapons. Grenades maybe, but I'm pretty sure you didn't have to equip duke nukems leg in order to kick people. Bungees own game Marathon had dual wielding before Halo, and so did Blood. As for vehicles, Shadow Warrior had a tank, Tribes, Redline had vehicles.

Now, I'm not ragging on Halo, but it's not innovative. All it did was popularize a way that works very well to apply shooters to consoles.

 

[Jumpingbean3]

Half Life 2 was just a tarted up Doom/Wolfenstein clone.

How? I mean technically speaking ALL FPSs were called Doom clones and Half Life 2 was vastly different from both games. It had a different story, different controls, a couple of different guns, different settings, different enemies, more advanced puzzle solving, Original characters and creatures and a different story so how is it a Doom clone.

 

[Monshroud]

You realize there is no where for this discussion to go right? One of the problems that I have seen with people and any Half-Life discussion is somewhat based on when they played it. This is an issue of context.

If you played Half-Life and later Half-Life 2 on the PC when they came out, you understand that there really wasn't anything like it when they came out, the same could be said about Halo on the Xbox. Valve introduced ideas to the genre that are now commonplace. So if you get someone who is into FPS and they for instance only bought The Orange Box, by the time that came out they had seen so much of the same things in other FPS games that it didn't seem innovative to them.

Being a Valve Fanboy and someone who has the benefit of context here, Half-Life in its basic form is a Doom clone. Valve introduced a way of providing storytelling, pacing, and good level design that was not seen previously in other FPS games of the time. These elements are almost standards for the modern FPS. Also, if anyone made another FPS where you were a silent scientist caught in a lab where aliens invade they would just get flak for being called a Half-Life clone. It's just people improving a formula.

(Sorta OT Rant)
I never liked the concept of calling a game a clone anyway. There are only so many genre's and types of games to be made. These are all just games that are part of a similar genre. I hate when people say that 'game y' is just a clone of 'game x'. When does a game get to be its own thing? People say Dante's Inferno and Bayonetta are just God of War clones, except for the different story, weapons, characters, environments, pacing.... Oh, the control scheme and camera angles are the same that's right... Why don't we all just call every RTS game a Dune II, Command and Conquer, or a Civilization clone then? All you do is collect resources, create people and weapons then go kill the other guy right? Hell, let's just call every platformer a Mario clone (Mario wasn't the first either, just a popular choice) and then we can call every spaceship fighting game a Defender clone.... See this doesn't get us anywhere...

Depending on who you talk to there are only 3 - 12 different major themes for books / movies. Yet people keep reading them and seeing them. I mean really, how many Vampire movies have there been or movies about Boy meets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy gets Girl back? Can't we all just enjoy the games we have? I mean give innovation credit where it's due, but stop this pointless debating about what game is a clone of another...
(/Sorta OT Rant)

 

[Zulu-Echo14]

MY fucking God are people really calling Half-Life 2, a game where you start out with no weapons run through roof tops, hover boat race through canals, chop zombies in half with physics, race through the desert, create impromptu bridge through the sand to avoid giant bugs, use those same giants bugs as your allies and fuck knows what else in a series of fluid levels and uses and impressive observational method of storytelling... a Doom clone? Because it's in first person? It's barely a shooter.

 

[Callate]

Because the things that Half-Life and Half-Life 2 did that distinguish them most from the rest of the FPS market aren't easy to clone. HL2 may have created the model for gravity guns that subsequent FPS games tried to emulate, but the pacing, unity of vision, and use of scripted events are what make the Half-Life games distinctive. I'd venture that many game studios simply aren't organized in a way that makes such elements easy to achieve. This is not to say that other studios haven't created many, many good games, just that HL's brand of mojo is not easily distilled and reproduced.