Your thoughts on Half-life

[night_tiger9]

After all the rumors of Half life 2, Episode 3, I decided to play a run through the original half life again. I had heard that Half life had great story telling through gameplay, but My mongoloid console ruined brain cant grasp the concept around how it does this during the game.

I mean it's a great game that I love to play and defiantly one of my top ten games (though, for some reason I feel like I would get hate for saying otherwise) but can you guys please explain how Half Life revolutionized the medium?

Thanks

 

[craftomega]

Well to put it bluntly your a few years to late to the party.

It is difficult to judge a game as revolutionary when you have played games with infinitly better grafics and optionaility.

Think of it this way before Half-Life what full 3d FPS was there of comparative size, complexity, and fun?

The answer to no great suprise is 0.

 

[Sixcess]

I think I'd have liked it more if I'd played it in 1998 as opposed to in 2010, which is when I did play it.

It's an interesting prototype of the Valve storytelling method, but I don't think the actual gameplay is any better than other 90s FPSs - too much platforming and instant death by environment situations, unbalanced incoming damage leaving you having to do most of a level on 5% health, etc etc...

So, good game... perhaps revolutionary game for the era, but it has not aged well.

 

[endtherapture]

In 98 when HL came out you pretty much spawned in a room and ran through other rooms shooting people. It was just shooting from start to end.

HL introduced pacing to the genre. The first half an hour of a game doesn't have an enemy at all, pretty revolutionary in the 90s FPS genres. Many games STILL ape HL by having a calm first half an hour of the game followed by the action gradually ramping up.

Very few games don't have pacing now, HL introduced periods of calm in FPS's, which games ARE still doing now.

 

[ResonanceGames]

Fire up some of the other top-tier FPS games from that era and you'll see why it was so influential. Unreal, Jedi Knight, Sin, etc. Half-Life wasn't revolutionary because of its story (I honestly will never know why people say that), it was revolutionary because of how it integrated the narrative into the gameplay using a combination of scripted events and interactive cutscenes. It didn't hurt that it also had top-notch level design, art design, sound design and AI. Basically, Half-Life killed the idea of levels just being abstract mazes that you run around in until you find the red key.