Was Half-Life meant to be some kind of landmark?

[Atmos Duality]

HL1 was a milestone in presentation. It took a budding genre completely dominated by the likes of Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Hexen and twitch-gameplay violence, and turned it into an engine for more narrative and story.

Along with the original Unreal (which showcased the power of player perspective) they changed the direction of shooters, and arguably gaming itself...

Well they would have until Halo came along and uprooted everything 3-4 years later, but it launched Valve's meteoric rise in gaming, which is pretty fucking significant to say the least.

Is Half Life 1 a landmark for gameplay?
As someone who played those games when they were new: "Not really."
They did a few clever things to get around the limitations of the Quake 2 Engine (which the HL1 engine is directly based on), but it wasn't pushing the boundaries of tech or player interaction.

 

[oplinger]

It's been said already but these comments keep coming in so here it is again- This 'revolution' Half-Life supposedly brought in ending mindless deathmatch-style singleplayer FPSes had been done before, perhaps most notably by Goldeneye.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to diss Half-Life here- its seamless integration of every level in the game was truly mindblowing, and its attention to a well crafted lore drip fed to the player in a tantalising story still holds up today.

All I'm taking issue with here is people claiming Half Life heralded many 'firsts' for the FPS genre that it did not in fact introduce. The seamless levels and that particular tone in an FPS story was new- everything else was simply done well.

By goldeneye? You are really way off.

But you're good for the same time period. The game you're trying to think of is Marathon.

Also, Goldeneye only has a story because it was a movie first. it relied heavily on the movie to portray it's plot. The only time you'd get plot is the mission briefing, and the occasional moment that happened in the movie that they could recreate on the 64. Note that Perfect Dark would have been a better choice to compare if it had been earlier.

However because Marathon was mac only, it was barely heard of. However, it has an intricate plot. Half-Life just did it better, more mainstream, and other things. So we credit it as the first. Much like we do Halo with various things.

 

[Monster_user]

I personally have a bit of trouble with fans who constantly go on about how amazingly awesome Goldeneye's multi-player was, when the YouTube videos show a game slower and clunkier with less interesting level design than Doom.

Some people like faster paced shooters. Some people like slower paced shooters.
The fact that Goldeneye was slower paced made it much easier for me to be competitive, as a newcomer to the genre.

Goldeneye also had a nice back of tricks, from Proximity mines, sticky mines, laser trip mines, exploding barrels, and nice little corners and corridors to lay traps. Advanced options like strafing, leaning around corners, and precision aiming were also available.

I'm not sure what exactly your referring to being clunky. Goldeneye never felt clunky to me, especially not when using two joysticks, one to strafe and one to aim. I think Doom is just a different type of shooter.

 

[90sgamer]

It's easy to downplay innovation in the aftermath, but one would be wrong to do so. Every FPS you play today has borrowed something from Half-Life. It represented a paradigm shift. If I may ask, what was the first first person shooter you've ever played regularly, through what years, and how old were you?

I wasn't really into gaming at the time Half-Life came out, or at least the type of gaming that Half-Life falls into, so I wasn't able to anticipate or ascertain its effect on the gaming world. But whenever I see the game discussed anywhere today, it's always talked about, if implicitly, as something to be highly revered, something legendary, and Valve as some kind of Gods responsible for a monumental and holy Creation. Even Yahtzee hails it, and that's not something to be taken lightly.

I'd like to know why that is. I figure if everyone else sees Gordon Freeman's face as the Jesus of gaming then I might as well read the bible too.

Was it because it was innovative? When I first played the game around a year ago it just seemed to me like a regular first-person shooter. I'm not an expert on shooters being an adventure affectionado, but I've played a few pre-1998 shooters and they did not seem all that different from Half-Life.

Was it because it was outstanding in some way? Again, I don't have strong feelings for or against the game, but despite being a good game it didn't seem to excel in any particular department. It had good graphics, a strong story, as decent gameplay as a shooter can be, but nothing exceptional.

I don't know. As I said, shooters aren't my mainstay so don't shoot me down (ha) for this thread, I'm just genuinely curious why Half-Life is to be respected so much.

In penitence,
BBB.

Below is my understanding but I may be missing things, my memory being what it is.

Half-Life did things that no other FPS had done before it.
1. Puzzels. Most first person shooter puzzles involved finding keys to doors. Half-life didn't have a single key. It's puzzels were more like what you'd find on a platform game.
2. No levels. Half-Life was the first FPS to do away with individual levels (i.e. DOOM, Quake, etc.) Individual "maps" were linked together. The absence of a loading screen between maps made the world appear unbroken and undivided.
3. It had a narrative that did not use cut scenes that took control from the player. All narrative was done in the game, most of it wordlessly. That was a first for the genre.
4. It was exceptionally well done in all the areas where it did not pioneer a new concept.

But saying those things are innovative is like FPS players haven't played anything other than a FPS. There are tons of games before HL that have puzzles, no levels and non-cutscene narrative. So why is it so astonishing to insert things that other games have done before into a FPS?

It's like a rock band using a symphony orchestra for the first time and being hailed as something revolutionary. It's not.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

It's easy to downplay innovation in the aftermath, but one would be wrong to do so. Every FPS you play today has borrowed something from Half-Life. It represented a paradigm shift. If I may ask, what was the first first person shooter you've ever played regularly, through what years, and how old were you?

Regularly? I played Wolfenstein quite a lot, I would have been about 9-10 at the time. That was probably the first. When Doom came out I "played" (watched a friend play it) it too, but found it boring compared with Wolf.

 

[Netrigan]

I personally have a bit of trouble with fans who constantly go on about how amazingly awesome Goldeneye's multi-player was, when the YouTube videos show a game slower and clunkier with less interesting level design than Doom.

Some people like faster paced shooters. Some people like slower paced shooters.
The fact that Goldeneye was slower paced made it much easier for me to be competitive, as a newcomer to the genre.

Goldeneye also had a nice back of tricks, from Proximity mines, sticky mines, laser trip mines, exploding barrels, and nice little corners and corridors to lay traps. Advanced options like strafing, leaning around corners, and precision aiming were also available.

I'm not sure what exactly your referring to being clunky. Goldeneye never felt clunky to me, especially not when using two joysticks, one to strafe and one to aim. I think Doom is just a different type of shooter.

No doubt Goldeneye has some special flavor fans appreciate... but watching videos of people playing (I never owned a N64) I'm always struck at how little fluidity their is with people's movements. And hilarity ensues if someone is playing as Oddjob, since most players can't move and aim at the same time thanks to that awful, awful controller... which apparently you need two of to play the game properly. Every body just moves around in a hurky-jerky manner, while watching Quake videos (a game I hate BTW) is just a wonderful flow.

Most of the stuff you mention (strafing, proxy mines, sticky mines, exploding barrels) showed up well before Goldeneye... quite a bit of them in Doom. I think it introduced sniper-rifles to the FPS formula, maybe trip mines.

So, yeah, I always take the notion that Goldeneye is one of the greatest FPS of all-time with a grain of salt, much like console fans take the notion that Half-Life is the greatest FPS of all-time with a equally large grain of salt. Actually, I was there at launch and I take the notion of Half-Life being the greatest FPS of all-time with a grain of salt.

Since the medium is constantly improving the core mechanics of gameplay, so much depends on someone being in the right place at the right time with a certain type of experience to think such-and-such a game is the greatest of all time. I recently attempted to go back and play GTA III for the first time... and found it an incredibly frustrating experience because of the controls. I had a similar problem playing Shadow of the Colossus, which looks and feels like a wonderful game but the controls had me quitting after the first boss.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Anyway, I get that it was innovative back then. I get it was the milestone for modern FPSs. I get that at this point, it probably doesn't seem as awesome as it did back in the day (Yeah, I hated the story, the fact that the NPC see Gordon as freakin' Jesus for whatever reason and the many times I got lost/died because I wasn't sure where exactly to go next; probably my fault but still).

In the first game, Freeman was notable because he had a hazard suit and thus a slim chance to survive the perils of the world. When he actually managed to overcome many of them, placing some measure of trust in him seems fairly reasonable. By the time you become the "savior" (i.e. travel to the Zen worlds and kill space baby), you are literally the only person both capable and willing to do so. The only other individual capable was a marine and he had no particular cause to do so given he had no real idea what was going on.

And yet...even if someone says it hasn't aged well, which I actually disagree with, I still don't see what the big fuzz is about! Wasn't Super Mario bros a precursor to every single platformer out there?

It was not. There were hundreds of platformers that preceded Mario. Donkey Kong bears the same genetic markings for example as does Pitfall.

Mario is well remembered in the early iterations as being a high quality version of the formula. Mario 64 is the one best remembered because it more or less provided the framework for 3d third person adventure.

Honestly, I don't see people making a big fuzz about that game as much as I see people jumping off cliffs for Half-Life. Same with Zelda. Same with Final Fantasy.

This is because those other games you point to were not actually groundbreaking in any sense of the word. Final Fantasy was an extraordinary well executed version of a pre-existing formula. Zelda only truly became notable in the third installment (A link to the past) and much of the joy associated with Ocarina of Time is based upon the successful transition of the formula perfected in A Link to the Past to 3D. That transition from 2D to 3d is tricky and plenty of franchises did not make the jump.

It's like the holy grail for them.

It was an important game. It pushed boundaries technically, mechanically, and narritavely. It remains an important example of what can be done with the medium even when constrained by the narrow convention of the first person shooter.

But when it comes to people getting their panties in a bunch because someone said Half-Life is not awesome is what pisses me off.

This is going to be an important point you should remember forever: the perceived quality thing that is successful is diminished with the passage of time.

To say Half-Life sucks relative to modern games is easy to defend, in large part because modern games were informed by Half-Life and all the games that pushed boundaries in between. But just because it is easy to assert the game is bad with respect to the modern, it is incredibly difficult to understand why this was not the case in the past.

To set the scene, it was 1998. The first person shooter had notable titles to that point. You had Doom, not the first but the one that proved the platform (the PC) and the genre were viable. Later, you had Quake which moved the action from raster cast 2d sprites to full 3d. Later still, multi-player truly became a thing (I have no evidence to back the assertion but I don't really recall people discussing online gaming until Quakeworld). But fundamentally the games were all still the same.

You took a player and you put them in a maze full of guns and monsters. The player applied guns to monsters until victory. They all had flimsy pretexts of stories (alien or demonic invasion for the most part). The focus was on the action and on creating spaces for action to take place in.

In this setting, Half-Life emerged. The player was no longer a rat in a maze - they were a rat in a tunnel. This might not seem important but it had a huge impact. The other games were often plagued with long stretches where there was no combat because the player was simply trying to find the right corridor or door. Pacing was thus improved. To this day the trend lives: from Halo to Call of Duty, all have you walking down dressed up hallways in service to that goal of pacing.

With the advances in pacing allowed by changes in fundamental design philosophy, there came a new boon: tension. Without the ability to control pacing, it becomes difficult to control tension as the feeling is easily extinguished by tedium.

Allowed in part by better technology, there was another notable change: the game took place in a space that seemed like it had a purpose. In Doom you fight through a computer lab that looks no different than Waste Processing. In quake you battle through castles with no obvious purpose, no living spaces, no places things eat. In games past, you fought in spaces without meaning. Placing a frantic battle against invading aliens in an office complex is more immediate: we know about office complexes. It grounds the action in something we can relate to and makes it all the more visceral.

Better spaces, new design philosophy and better technology also allowed for the game to tell a story in a different way: as you play. Games before placed story in an utterly different compartment than the game. Half-Life chose to marry the two. You aren't simply told the Marines or bad - you're shown that they're here to kill you when they murder an unarmed scientist. You walk through spaces and see the final chapters of tales. The brunch interrupted, the valiant stand at the security station. The only story old games told as you played was "and then a monster appeared and I shot it" in a tale a thousand pages long.


It is notable to point out that other games executed on similar ideas - Quake 2 adopted a mission driven gameplay that kept the story going though it was threadbare at best. Unreal had spaces that told stories but it was overshadowed by Half-Life. The immediacy of an alien invasion of earth is more compelling it would seem than the tale of a prisoner who crashed on an alien planet.

This is getting out of hand. I'm probably gonna get stoned for this, which would kinda proof my point. Oh, maker...

Perhaps. I don't expect someone to think the thing is good without context. And even with the context the exercise is purely academic. Still, if you'd walk away realizing that it is possible to understand why something was loved and why it was important even if your own perspective is that it is not very good, you might avoid further tosses.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

However because Marathon was mac only, it was barely heard of. However, it has an intricate plot. Half-Life just did it better, more mainstream, and other things. So we credit it as the first. Much like we do Halo with various things.

In my view, it is perfectly acceptable to credit the game that made a thing popular rather than the game that did it first. Every thing Half-Life did well came from somewhere else. No other game brought those things together in a complete package and then went on to achieve enough commercial success to ensure imitation and therefore iteration.

 

[Squilookle]

Today you couldn't differentiate between console and PC games, but back then they weren't subject to the same scrutiny. It is no different then comic books and novels not being upheld to the same standards really. Half-Life was the defining game on the PC, just as Goldeneye was on consoles, but the two weren't compared at the time and that's part of the reason why Half-Life was lauded as such an innovator. Another part is probably that Half-Life wasn't a licensed game, had better level design (seriously, some of the levels in Goldeneye are atrocious), had much better AI and relied more on procedural storytelling.

Does it make sense that they were not compared? I can't say, I am only pointing out that that was how it went down way back in 1998.

I dunno where you were in '97 and '98 but wherever I went everyone was quite eagerly discussing the two shooters side by side, along with many others as well. It was an exciting time for FPS development, and whether or not a shooter was on a console or PC (or Mac) was completely irrelevant. They both had you moving around in 1st person, holding weapons, shooting at live targets that moved around and shot back. The fact they had different control layouts was next to insignificant, and in fact gave us more food for thought- wondering what each would be like with the other's controls etc.

I'd have to disagree with you about HL having better level design (or AI, really, come to think of it)- Really don't see what the problem is with GE's level design (unless you're talking about multiplayer, in which case yeah, there were more than a few too many dead ends in some of those levels for multiplayer matches).

By goldeneye? You are really way off.

But you're good for the same time period. The game you're trying to think of is Marathon.

Also, Goldeneye only has a story because it was a movie first. it relied heavily on the movie to portray it's plot. The only time you'd get plot is the mission briefing, and the occasional moment that happened in the movie that they could recreate on the 64. Note that Perfect Dark would have been a better choice to compare if it had been earlier.

However because Marathon was mac only, it was barely heard of. However, it has an intricate plot. Half-Life just did it better, more mainstream, and other things. So we credit it as the first. Much like we do Halo with various things.

I never said Goldeneye was the first. I just said it was one of the most notable, because it was well known. Goldeneye was also quite adept at moving completely away from the movie's story to have whole levels of its own that weren't in the movie. It also frequently added content that wasn't in the film but could have been, like building areas beyond what was visible in the movie, backstories and prior incidents with characters. It wasn't shakespeare, sure, but it did the job, and had more to the universe than what the movie showed, which I suppose is the mark of a proper movie tie-in game.

But really, it doesn't matter what example we use- Goldeneye, Marathon, whatever. The point is the game hailed for many 'firsts' didn't do those 'firsts' at all, a trait also shown by Halo, as you have mentioned. A more recent example would be GTA IV- fans of the game get furious when they see other games adopt the 'wanted circle' system of cop evasion GTA IV had because they think it was Rockstar's idea, when in reality they pinched it -and many other features of GTA- from elsewhere.

 

[Beautiful End]

Snipeth

I applaud your lengthy explanation and the time you took to word it out in such an eloquent way. But like I said before, it's a matter of opinion. Like I said, I'm not saying the game is crap. I think the game has aged...okay for the kind of game it is. and like I also said, I'm playing the game myself as we speak.

It might have been innovative, yes, but some of the games I mentioned (Perhaps I should have mentioned some games more specifically; too late for that now) were innovative. They were not groundbreaking but they certainly were the cornerstones to many of the games we play nowadays. As a matter of fact, the post above me kinda explains what I was about to explain, so no need for that.

Anyway, it all comes down to personal preferences. I understand everything that has been said and still...I don't see it. I give credit to the game fr everything it accomplished but...I'm not kidding when i say some people see it as the holy grail of games. And I think it's an exaggeration. I'm not sure I can explain this as eloquently as you did but...okay, I get that it was innovative and unique and all that. I give it credit. But people need to calm down about it. I guess my problem comes when I say *I* don't like the game that much. People get all angry and start listing all the things the game accomplished. I get it. That's awesome. But come on, it's just Half-Life. Like I said, I have games that I feel the same way about and when someone disses them, I can just let them have their opinion and walk away. Most HL fans can't. That is what bothers me the most. Just look at the size of this thread! If I had gone to, I don't know, a Final Fantasy 9 thread and said something similar, people would ignore me. But not here, no, sir.

This is not meant to someone in specific. Not all fans are the same but, like I also said before, most HL fans I've run into act like that. *Shrugs*

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Anyway, it all comes down to personal preferences. I understand everything that has been said and still...I don't see it. I give credit to the game fr everything it accomplished but...I'm not kidding when i say some people see it as the holy grail of games.

My favorite game of all time was Deus Ex and that was riddled with problems and shortfalls. That isn't to say it is the best game I've played - there have been better. It's the one that I loved the most.

Half-Life is that game for a lot of people I think. People, it would seem, tend to react poorly (in general) when you call the qualities of the things they love into question.

I guess my problem comes when I say *I* don't like the game that much.

If you didn't play it in 1998 or roughly thereabouts, there is nothing wrong with this position. It is possible to recognize quality without liking something. I don't care for the Godfather but I can recognize that it is a well made movie.

People get all angry and start listing all the things the game accomplished. I get it. That's awesome. But come on, it's just Half-Life. Like I said, I have games that I feel the same way about and when someone disses them, I can just let them have their opinion and walk away. Most HL fans can't. That is what bothers me the most. Just look at the size of this thread! If I had gone to, I don't know, a Final Fantasy 9 thread and said something similar, people would ignore me. But not here, no, sir.

It is a matter of target, certainly. Currently, Half-Life is in a largely unassailable position and there is much that contributes to that. The qualities discussed at length contribute, the success of the franchise, the good will the community has for the developer - all of these conspire to grant Half-Life its sacrosanct status.

This is not unique to Half-Life. Deus Ex is generally of the same stature as is Ocarina of Time and a dozen others. Nor is it unique to video games. The Godfather or Pulp Fiction have similar defenders. And, it should be noted, that that this quality can also be eroded. Star Wars charts this very path nicely.

Saying you don't like something is perfectly fine. Saying that about a thing that is expected to be universally loved, however, will lead to arguments and flames if you are not cautious.

 

[Triforceformer]

Half Life came out just two years after Quake 1. It was a big landmark at the time. But it's been so long since then that we can't truly appreciate how it changed everything. Because everything's already been changed.

 

[DarkTenka]

It's been said already but these comments keep coming in so here it is again- This 'revolution' Half-Life supposedly brought in ending mindless deathmatch-style singleplayer FPSes had been done before, perhaps most notably by Goldeneye.

Goldeneye certainly "moved" in the immersion direction, but the level design was still very non-linear much in the the vein of doom/quake level design. The only difference was the addition of in-game objectives. There are some linear levels like the Forest or the Train but if you look at levels such as the Facility, The Complex, The Archives there is still a very maze-like sense to them that involves a lot of topographical orientation to navigate.

With that said, without any VO and most of the story aspects portrayed in text boxes it simply wasnt as impactful as a genre-defining "innovation".

You can argue that it was there first the same way that Maze War was technically the first FPS, but everyone is going to say Doom or Wolf3D if you ask what the first FPS was.

It's not about who invented it.. its about what revolutionised it.

 

[Terramax]

Oh, right, it was the first to have a story. That's it? Personally, I'd prefer an FPS without any. I found games like Hexen and Quake to have more entertaining, imaginative levels and greater atmosphere. FPS with stories tend to be restricted by them.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Oh, right, it was the first to have a story. That's it? Personally, I'd prefer an FPS without any. I found games like Hexen and Quake to have more entertaining, imaginative levels and greater atmosphere. FPS with stories tend to be restricted by them.

Really? Four pages. 116 comments. And the only point you picked up was "It has a story"?

I can understand if you don't care for story and prefer multiplayer then you won't be fussed on Half-life, but it was one of the first to really revolutionise what a FPS campaign was.

Let's run with that and see how Half-life's improvements to the story helped games.

It has a story.
This story was not contained separately from the game but integrated into the gameplay in a way shooters had never done before to create set pieces and interesting situations.
This story was aided by more linear, better designed spaces that looked like practical, feasible areas that would exist in real life.
These practical, feasible areas improved the pacing of the game, led to proper map progression as the designers could estimate the player characters movements better, allowing for setpieces to happen in game.
These set pieces broke up standard gameplay, brought tension and deeper immersion into the storyline, which improved gameplay.
It also allowed better programming of enemy a.i., because if you know the player will come through a certain doorway and be travelling down a corridor in a certain direction, you can place cover for the enemies to use, program them to move down flanking positions, throw grenades etc. The map now had an exploitable linarity to it, instead of the open arena style previous games used that only allowed for run-at-player tactics.

There are several times in Half-life where you can see enemies attacking other people in inaccessible areas. This is a matter of pure pacing, pure tension building, pure immersion increasing that wasn't done before in FPSs, but can be seen in countless games since because it is such a good way of building atmosphere. Half-life brought these types of small things to the fore, proved that story could work in a genre previously as subtle as Borat's mankini.

Half-life really broke away from the idea that campaign missions should just resemble multiplayer with bots. It actually gave it a purpose and a reason. It showed how campaign level designs could be functionally built for better experiences, it improved A.I, brought out the idea of setpieces, the idea of creating plot through gameplay.

It's not a perfect game, not by a long shot, and today it can't really compare to most modern FPS campaigns. Again I can understand if you can't be bothered with campaigns then Half-life has very little importance to you, but its legacy is apparent in virtually every FPS out there today, and can't be handwaved so easily.

 

[Jason Rayes]

It's easy to downplay innovation in the aftermath, but one would be wrong to do so. Every FPS you play today has borrowed something from Half-Life. It represented a paradigm shift. If I may ask, what was the first first person shooter you've ever played regularly, through what years, and how old were you?

Regularly? I played Wolfenstein quite a lot, I would have been about 9-10 at the time. That was probably the first. When Doom came out I "played" (watched a friend play it) it too, but found it boring compared with Wolf.

Well Half Life was innovative compared to both those FPS titles. I don't think anyone in their right mind would try to tell you that Half Life invented story telling and explorable non level based worlds, and that no other game in the history of gaming had ever featured such things. Story telling had existed in early text adventures which predate Half Life by almost two decades (Counting Colossal Cave as the first). But it was a first for FPS games, HL attempted to have a narrative that actually featured during in the playing of the game itself, rather than some boring intro text at the start. There were beings in the world that were not enemies, other scientists and complex guards who would help you, and in the case of the guards, even be recruited. You saw the story unfold before you, portrayed in the game engine itself, and the story went beyond "Hey, this is trying to kill you". The whole intro section was something that had never been attempted in an FPS before. I should point out that I'm not an FPS fan, I prefer graphic adventures or RPG's, I've never even solved Half Life, but I have played it and have seen others solve it, and even as someone looking in at something outside their genre of preference, I could see it was different than the FPS that had preceded it. I wasn't a fan but I can respect it for breaking the narrow mold that was the FPS of the time, and opening that whole genre up to be more than it was.

 

[Terramax]

Oh, right, it was the first to have a story. That's it? Personally, I'd prefer an FPS without any. I found games like Hexen and Quake to have more entertaining, imaginative levels and greater atmosphere. FPS with stories tend to be restricted by them.

Really? Four pages. 116 comments. And the only point you picked up was "It has a story"?

No. I picked up everything else.

 

[Cyrus Hanley]

Was it because it was innovative? When I first played the game around a year ago it just seemed to me like a regular first-person shooter. I'm not an expert on shooters being an adventure affectionado, but I've played a few pre-1998 shooters and they did not seem all that different from Half-Life.

Was it because it was outstanding in some way? Again, I don't have strong feelings for or against the game, but despite being a good game it didn't seem to excel in any particular department. It had good graphics, a strong story, as decent gameplay as a shooter can be, but nothing exceptional.

I don't know. As I said, shooters aren't my mainstay so don't shoot me down (ha) for this thread, I'm just genuinely curious why Half-Life is to be respected so much.

In penitence,
BBB.

It's all about context.

What seems to you like a "regular first-person shooter" in 2012 was not in 1998. You have to consider the context in which it was produced.

It's like driving a Ford Model T in 2012 and scoffing, "Well, that hardly seems impressive!" You would be right, by 2012 standards, but then that would also be ignoring the context of its production and what came as a result of it.

 

[surg3n]

You have to compare Half Life with it's contemporaries at the time it was released. Which, boiled down to Thief, Duke Nukem3D, Quake2. These games were all good, and they all brought their own flavor of innovation, but what Half Life did was put the player in the starring role as a believable character, and turned their world inside out in front of them.

Other games did similar things, but the glue that holds it all together is the Half Life dynamics. No other FPS game would let the player play for 30 minutes before even showing them something remotely threatening, no other game would have the player call it a night after finding a gun, because they'd already been playing for so long. You feel as if you have a job to do, and you'll do it - even if all you have is a crowbar and a kick-ass goatee. It had elements of the movies we love, like Aliens, it had those gun turrets and tense stand off's and boss fights that you have to properly consider. It just stood out head and shoulders above the usual pixelated Doom clone. Quake2 looked relatively medieval in comparison to it. Half Life is not a first person shooter, it's a first person adventure - while other developers were trying to get more and more enemies on screen, Valve were busy making that 1 enemy on screen as awesome as it could possible be. No game ever made me jump, until Half Life. There was just so much to explore, experience, and it didn't feel so much that you were on a distinct path from A to B, it felt like you were making your own way there, and stuff just keeps happening. For all of us, back in the day playing it - it was a lot like Freemans Mind, we felt like we were in Gordon's shoes, and it was our own personal mission to sort that mess out.

To have that level of escapism, you need amazing gameplay dynamics, and that's what Half Life gave us - and that's why it's not exactly clear what was so good about it, because what was so good about it is now standard fare in FPS games. The only game that had similar dynamics back then was Duke Nukem 3D, and it's not even fair to compare that to Half Life, they are worlds apart.