starfox444 said:
From another perspective:
Half Life 2 is a revolutionary 2004 games which plays like an average 2010 game. I meant that in the nicest possible way.
I
honestly don't think it was revolutionary. Extraordinary in it's quality of iteration perhaps but that is as far as I'm going to go with it. If you step
way back and look at the governing principles of the game, you find that progress through the game is predicated upon a few principles:
1) Combat is a game of resource management. A player is expected to expend some portion of their available health and ammunition to proceed.
2) Players must solve minor puzzles in order to proceed.
3) Storytelling is largely done through gameplay and environmental design.
If we take the first 2 points and add a third, that players must navigate a maze, you have the basic working principles of any of the early FPS games (Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, etc). The last point was already seen in Half-Life and Unreal (notably) along with several games in the intervening years.
The specifics of physics system and gravity gun that people point to were also done elsewhere.
Where the game really does become notable is when you compare it to other titles of the moment. The major PC competition came in the form of Doom 3 and Farcry. The former was a technical marvel but was disliked by many for the simple fact that it discarded many of the fundamental design elements of the series in favor of a
really dark corridor and fighting small numbers of enemies in close quarters (The previous games never really succeeded at being scary in any respect and it focused on mazes, minor puzzle solving, and combat as a resource management element). If we do the same thing to Doom 3 we get:
1) Combat as a game of resource management
2) Story told through forced means (cutscenes) and discoverable recordings
3) Horror built through little more than forcing the player to choose between being able to see and being able to defend themselves (Forced vulnerability. This same idea is found in Resident Evil's refusal to let the player move and fire at the same time).
The other game, Farcry, Looks something like this:
1) Combat as a game of resource management (to a lesser extent than the previous two)
2) Story told through both forced means and through the environment
3) World presented as a "sandbox".
All three of these games were similar in that they eschewed the (even at the time) common system of regenerating health in favor of having a limited supply of health and, as such, combat in all three tends to be somewhat predictable. Progress in any of the games is relatively deliberate as players generally try to maximize their progress at a minimum cost of ammunition and health.
Combat does, however, differ between the three in specific cases. In Doom, there is little to speak of in terms of AI. Enemies appear at close range and attack relentlessly until they die having no instinct of self preservation. Farcry had fairly exceptional AI, even if it did tend to cheat but the nature of the game was such that, if the player could manage it, battles took place at extreme range and were little more than plinking fests. When forced in close quarters, enemies were not terribly clever and the reliance on real world weapons meant that there was little real variety between enemies (An enemy with a machine gun was basically like an enemy with a rifle except the guy with a rifle has to reload a hair more regularly). Half-Life 2 split the difference and had a variety of weapons which helped to break up the monotony of combat and gave the players battles in conditions from claustrophobic situations to open beaches ripe for sniping.
Both Doom and Farcry relied, for the most part, on artificial means to convey information to the player. In the case of Doom, this was done (mostly) in the form of recordings left scattered about meaning a player was entirely free to miss out on plot information simply because they didn't notice the item in the dark. Farcry often relied on cut scenes to do the same job. By contrast, the story of Half-Life 2, though strictly speaking no better than the other two, was told through the world and gameplay. It certainly goes to show that there is value in this technique. Even though the story of HL2 is full of plot holes and absurdities like it's peers, it is generally regarded as a triumph of storytelling simply because the player discovered these details themselves rather than being handed them on a silver platter. Few people would note the quality of the story in Doom 3 in spite of the fact it is largely the
same story as Half-Life (and is, all told, fairly interesting while playing at least) and fewer still would even recall the story of Far Cry (I played that game to the end and I only vaguely recall what happened because of all the loopy twists and turns the story took at every opportunity).
It is only in the last area that the three are truly different. Doom tried to be scary and it worked for a time but eventually you come to learn it's patterns and the gloom ceases being frightening and is little more than annoyance by the end. Farcry's open nature made for a beautiful game but the result was that there were few epic moments to remember. Having a linear game does offer some advantages in that the designer at least knows that a player is going to show up at some point and will have an idea of what they have at their disposal when they arrive. Half-Life 2, in keeping with the tradition of Half-Life, is an elaborate corridor designed such that it seems to be a maze that the player is remarkably adept at traversing. In most cases, every thing in the world has a purpose and the world actually looks like a place where people might live or work were it not for an alien invasion. The move to a physics based puzzle system rather than the more arbitrary ones common in older games helped reinforce immersion since, at least some of the time, things worked the way we thought they should. I'm sure I'm not the only one who smiled when they solved that very first physics puzzle in the most obvious way: I broke the chunk of wood holding the drawbridge up!
All told, Half-Life 2 is little more than an
iteration of Half-Life which, itself, only had a few notable departures from classic FPS. The first was grounding the story in something resembling reality and the second was that the maze, as a concept, was generally discarded in favor of the complex corridor system.
Indeed, if one wants to look at a
revolutionary game from a similar time frame, look no further than Halo. That was a game that discarded the notion of combat a resource management system almost entirely with regenerating health and a near endless supply of weapons and ammunition and eliminated the puzzle aspect entirely creating the modern basis for the FPS as a game built entirely upon pure action. You might not
like it, (and indeed Halo wasn't even the first game that did these things; it was just the game that, thanks to its runaway success, started the ball rolling inexorably in that direction) but then not every revolution is a success.
