The Valve and Steam Discussion Thread

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He became a teacher iirc.





I like how it's entitled "pre-XBOX", as if there's no need to go into specifics beyond that. May as well say "antediluvian"

That's fairly obvious given that the way you moved about the Citadel was obviously a result of some brainfart on part of the devs - climbing into restrictive "coffin" twice, only to get disarmed each time was hardly the highlight of HL2.

About the rest of stuff - unlike DX, Strife, even STALKERs, HL and HL2 were not just pure, but purist FPS games - no dialogue trees or such stuff. Deal with it. Given how many codexers bitch about genre hybrids I expected more appreciation for such purism, but I digress.

It couldn't. Because the devs made a decision to make it more involved and make it an important element of the narrative, even if not exactly interactive (though NPC reacting to what you were looking at was a very nice touch).

And, at the very least the "dialogue" in HL didn't make me facepalm, unlike, say FO Master not noticing his Übermenschen were sterile. It's often technobable, but the kind of technobable that doesn't make person with cursory understanding of the subject facepalm.

Except we've been over that - it's not dialogue nor cutscenes. It's NPCs talking and scripted stuff happening without any sort of dedicated mechanics distinct from normal gameplay. You can't really skip shit if the game doesn't know there is something to skip and yeah, if RPGs allowed me to handle conversation (involving dialogue trees or topic lists) seamlessly during gameplay I'd jizz myself unconscious even if the price was inability to press FFWD button.

STALKER and mil sims are much newer. Back when HL was new we were excited finding out that the Glock you could fire underwater in game can indeed fire underwater IRL (although as in without suffering catastrophic malfunction, rather than actually hitting anything), and were more than willing to forgive stuff like MP5 with 50 round bananas.

And DN3D didn't have all that interesting weapons. Apart from freezer and shrinker shit was forgettable and generic and I'd happily pick gauss cannon over both.
At least HL had reloading and altfire.

AI was often derpy and I didn't really get all the hype, but aliens were definitely NOT a minor thing.

Not only that, alien behaviour was cool and as massive incline over the usual stuff as STALKER animals were over the usual derpy kamikaze wolves.

No. Unreal used simplistic collision cylinders which sucked. Amusingly enough Source version of HL apparently cannot into innovative and novel 1998 technology of hitboxes made of different materials.

Well I was never enthusiastic about that, but it was conscious decision to remove as much as possible of non-player protagonist from Freeman. This included voice.

I can agree with that. OTOH HL is the first game I remember that had enemies you couldn't just hit hard repeatedly while strafing a lot, one of the rare games at that time trying to make genuine sense with enemy and level design (even if latter was usual industrial shit for most time), one of the very rare (at the time) FPS games trying to tell actual story rather than killkillkill and so on.

It was a big thing. Maybe if I knew in advance it would spawn call of derp and related shit I'd be more wary of it, but maybe not - I still like Diablo despite it infesting RPGs with derpy point and click H&S model.
And, while there was a lot of scripting in HL, it was hardly as overdone and in your face as in modern rail shooters.

I don't think I've ever had script breakage in Hexen. Maybe once in the last hub.

Other than factor of 3 or 4 increase in damage and possibly material factoring in?

I actually liked Xen. Not for the gameplay, obviously, but it was genuinely, overwhelmingly alien.

Actually, I think your analysis is spot on here.

Re Draq: agreed. A lot of folks either have poor memories, or weren't gaming at that time, becaues they've got their FPS progression all over the place. HL was a much earlier game than STALKER, CoD et al. The games that it was being compared to were Quakes, Hexen et al (yes it was later than Hexen and the other Doom engine games, but it was the first pure shooter to significantly move the genre along from the Doom concept).

The biggest giveaway is calling the marines generic enemies. TODAY they are generic. Back then every shooter had you fighting demons and aliens. The idea of having the marines unexpectedly storm the place, with AI that did something more than move slowly towards you shooting in a predetermined pattern, was mindblowingly innovative.

To restate that last part: pure shooters, at that point in time, were still using the Doom model of having enemies with a movement pattern (that they wouldn't break, and would not react to your actions) while randomly firing. The standard way of defeating ANY fps enemy pre-HL was to strafe while continuously firing into it. No reloading. No ducking behind a wall to avoid a salvo. Just strafe and hold fire.

You know what I remember everyone going 'omfg' over when HL came out? The fact that you couldn't just cheese past every enemy in the game by hiding behind a doorway and blasting all the enemies as they come blindly in one by one (as they would in shooters at that point). That was such an engrained tactic in shooters, because people just took it for granted that AI couldn't possibly know how to react to that. If all the AI can do is move at you and fire, then obviously the easiest way of dispatching them would be to fire a shot, then wait behind a wall/door and kill them all as they come through. Because they couldn't design AI to react intelligently to that, games would instead throw in bullet-soaks with strong melee attacks, forcing you to stay at distance (where you'd switch to the 'other' tactic of strafe and hold fire).

People fucking shat themselves when they tried the standard 'hide behind the door and wait' tactic in HL1 and the marines would react by just throwing a grenade in to kill you. It seems really fucking simple now, but that was actually a recent development. Pre 1998 that just wasn't what FPS games did.

Nevermind material based hitboxes and armour affecting damage. Where the fuck is that in the pure shooters pre HL. Sure, the SS games had it, but they were (a) hybrids and (b) criminally underpurchased, lauded by game critics but hardly known outside of small cult followings.

I'm actually not a big fan of HL, because I'm not a shooter fan (hate twitch games). But pretty much every comment I've read in this thread that says the marines were cliched, or HL wasn't a big jump for its time, is comparing it to games that came quite a while after HL, not what was standard at the time.

So would I, but the key difference between this and HL is: interactivity. Non-skippability is an obvious price to pay for interactive dialogs (I don't think I need to explain why), but the problem with HL's approach is that I just have to sit there being bored and waiting for the script to run its course. Not so bad when the script is a 10-second crumbling hallway, BIG problem when it's a 2-minute dialog. I don't really care that on a technicaly standpoint it's seamlessly integrated and so on - on a practical point I'm standing there being bored and waiting for the script.

Though reloading was pretty cool. Pretty sure it wasn't the first one, but it was probably the game that made everyone else implement it.

What, really? This sucks! I used to think there was no point to HL:Source, but apparently it's a decline over the original...

I actually like the style they went for with the aesthetics, and the enemies' hand placement is indeed superb and meshes excellently with the look of the room they're in. It's made pretty easy by the linear design obviously, but still, credit where credit's due. And while I do feel they abused the "marines in big room with crates" and especially the placement of those fucking ceiling horrors, the fact that I rage 13 years later at those things is probably the best praise I can give to this particular aspect of the game. Even if it annoyed the shit out of me as I played.

Yeah this one I'm not so sure about. The story itself was pretty much Doom all over again (and as I said before I don't buy the whole Freeman-as-a-PhD thing - from the way you play him he's pretty much identical to Doomguy) and while they tried to make a difference by adding detail, none of it is of good quality enough to matter IMO.

Of course not, but let's face it, it was the Black Ops of its time, because no one else had (ab)used scripts as much. In fact I had to restart Unreal several times before it caught me because the very first level, with its multiple scripts, was a constant reminder of HL and I kept abandoning the game with an "ugh, not again" feeling. Fortunately, Unreal gets much more reasonable once you get out of the starting spaceship.

The most infamous is with the citadel Heresiarch, which sometimes won't spawn, and for well over a decade nobody could figure out why or how, and the 1.1 patch (which supposedly fixed this) didn't fix anything. There were also several others you could break, mainly any "earthquake" script if you tried something funny like running too quickly through it, or using some exploit to enter the room from a direction the game doesn't expect, and so on. The only really major one is the Heresiarch, but that one's game-stopping so it's pretty bad.

I keep telling myself I should replay HL1. It's been so long, and after replaying some other shooters and liking them more than I remember I keep wondering if this'll happen with HL as well. But then I remember even the opening damn rail cart scene and lose the will.

That's what I said. It's a shit game.

HA HA HAHAHAH HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHHH. No, seriously. I had to leave the room and laugh in the kitchen because it's the morning and I didn't wanna wake up the girl. How in the fuck is HL2 a "purist" shooter? When you stand around for hours on listening to godawful dialogue or monologue as if it was some shitty RPG where someone to forgot to write and record the PC's lines? When you spend half the game traversing linear corridor levels in terribly handling vehicles? When the second half of the game is spent doing PHYSICS PUZZLES? How is this purist? Seriously, how DUMB do you get, DraQ? This was possibly the stupidest thing anyone said in this whole thread, even worse than the changing FPS landscape thing.

Yeah, what a nice touch. More like a half-assed attempt to make it seem at least a little bit interactive when it was not. It wasn't an important element of the narrative because there IS NO narrative. There's nothing you need to know outside of "you've been asleep for years, there was a war, go shoot dr. breen" - that's what your so-called PURIST FPS would do. HL2 is just an attempt at coming up with something that would make a bad FPS with boring gunplay seem at least a little interesting to braindead fanboys.

It made me facepalm through each and every dialogue ever after meeting Barney. Everything after that was pure retardo. "NO LAMARR NO GOOD GIRL" "OH NO TEH TELEPORTER IT IS TEH BROKENED" "WE MUST RESCUE ELI GORDON COME ON" wow so deep and thoughtful and not at all facepalm inducing

EXCEPT WE'VE BEEN OVER THAT. It doesn't matter what your definition is, it doesn't matter whether it's dialogue or cutscenes or whatever the fuck you decide to call it, you gronard. It needs to be skippable, just like any other part of any game that strips you of control entirely, ESPECIALLY if it's as boring and banal as HL2's dialogue scenes.

What? How about Outlaws that dealt with human enemies *exclusively* (with the exception of rare hostile wildlife), had authentic arsenal with reloading and alt fire implemented, and where on max difficulty 2-3 shots from the lowliest revolver could lead to death?

But did it have excellent dialogue like "WE DON'T GO TO RAVENHOLM"?

Hahaha, really?

half life 2 is pretty fucking serious, lets talk about it for 12 pages bros

Fix'd (and no, this is not a justification for the length of the conversation, quite the opposite)

well the thing is

this thread needs to be 12 pages long

because otherwise the hipsters will win, and skyway + crew can never let the hipsters win

keep fighting the good fight bros, can't let the hipsters take over the codex with their "half life is amazing" threads

And youre a dumbfuck retard.

And where in HL 1 or 2 did you listen for hours of dialogue or monologue standing around, shithead?

Thats only because your apparently so limited that you understand something like a narrative only if its told in one specific way.

Except the whole story and setting and its background and who is who in it... but you donrt need that, right?
Because...?

No it wasnt but youre descriptions surely are. Who gives a fuck about your mental incapacaty or shit taste anyway?

Why would it need to be skipable? Just because you didnt like it or are simply trying to hard to make it look so, now?
Because you wanted to play some other type of shooter and didnt get it?
Because youre a moron?

Those scripted scenes were simply necessary for the game to tell its narrative in the way it did. They were a minimal addition to its narrative style which you laughably fail to get anyways.

Half-Life: Dreamcast port released for PC

What is the context of that? I mean, "puro vicio 3d"? what the fuck? maybe it's something different if spanish
Tell us more, even if just for the inherent BTE value of the information, or is it just some sort of "funny" garrys mod related image?

[Perception]

MysteriousShadow Jan 18 2012, 12:52am says:

Huh..? He says 4 hours and you say longer than CoD MW3..? You kiddin me? I played MW3 for about 4 or 5 hours and I still cleared only about 35%!

+1 vote

reply to comment

Alpha_Man 16hours 14mins ago replied:

haha he is superman

Are they talking about the % of multiplayer achievements or something? What the fuck is wrong with these people?

"WHERE ARE YOU MARSHAL?" or "WERE GUNNA GET YA, MARSHAL"

Well, yeah. I bashed HL's AI a bit, because it wasn't nearly as awesome as many claim it to be, but the fact is that it was pretty shocking when the standard behaviour included basic navigation, moving in straight line towards the target, getting stuck in doorways, and, at best, strafing in predetermined zigzag pattern and crouching randomly in the middle of open spaces (Q2).

Sure, attempts at more complex behaviours were made - DN3D had jetpack aliens, SW had mooks capable of taking cover, Blood had cultists with hitscan weapons and dynamite, but all those enemies behaved very randomly and stupidly, without trying to do anything in particular. At best they could, like Blood's cultists, force mobility on player and prevent strafing at range with their hitscan weapons, but they still mostly just blew themselves up with badly thrown dynamite and cheesing it in the doorway was still working as charm.
Blood was admittedly also one of the few early games where weapon selection mattered a lot, but apart from cultists most enemies were pushovers easily killed using rote tactics. The only two exceptions were stone gargoyles and hellhounds.
Well, you had games like Hexen I and II too, but being fantasy really does make things easier as you add shields, relevant melee and magic, while removing hitscan, but Hexen I still didn't have much interesting enemies apart from bosses. II was more interesting in this regard, but had much less combat overall.

HL AI wasn't as good as the AI in contemporary Unreal, enemies in HL were overall rather derpy and could do stuff like running obliviously into lethal hazards, but they were way above usual shooter fare back then and worked towards some apparent goals. Flushing player out with grenade was an effective anti cheese tactics, AI also rarely blew itself up (usually it just looked like this when they attempted to place a 'nade and run, but got gunned down and fell on it). Now, if you watched out for grenades, you could still try to cheese it in the doorways - it took Unreal to develop AI capable of navigating level using alternative paths and realize that player camping behind the door with flak cannon is bad news - but the combat AI in HL was still definite improvement over Blood, and capable of outright inflicting not-so-tasteful rape on Q2 one.

Then you had enemies like AH-64, Gargantua and Tentacle requiring specific approach and usually specific weapons.

And SS didn't even have multiple hitboxes (though it did have armour).

Besides, I'd consider SS1 and Terra Nova a genre on their own, because of fairly different approach to controlling the character (aiming and turning independent, weapon either not shown, or not fixed relative to viewpoint) and more tactical, simulative approach.

Not necessarily - if you know the dialogue you can just rapidly click the right sequence of responses. If you don't, why the fuck would you skip it anyway, interactive or not? It would make sense if it was excessively long, but then it wouldn't be voiced.

But which script apart from the intro was so long and boring?

And I tend to not skip intros anyway, since they set up the mood, even on replays. I'm more concerned with unskippability on reloads than on replays.

Devastator had cool sprite, but, while cool, rapid-firing, miniature rocket launcher isn't exactly a novelty weapon in my book, especially if it's pretty JoAT as well.

Now a fucking gauss gun that can be overcharged to the point of firing through walls (with much recoil and extra spalling) and being capable of piercing the armour on AH-64 is definitely interesting in the gameplay, especially given that it isn't terribly powerful in most combat situations.

Sure it wasn't. I think System Shock 1 had this distinction, but reloading was quite an important part of HL gameplay and it was probably the first mainstream FPS to make it this way.

I think that barnacles were just not annoying enough. In most places they were far to easy to kill in advance and far to easy to kill safely when pulling you in.
Still, additional credit for secrets reachable only using barnacles.

I beg to differ. Sure "shit invades the Earth/Phobos" can hardly be made much different in principle, but there is still some difference between shit being "demons, cyborgs and demon-cyborgs", and shit being alien looking and well designed aliens, with stuff like homologous anatomy, different and somewhat sensible behaviour (running away when injured, not being always in berserk mode, especially on Xen, using healing stations on Xen) and alien looking world.

I have a lot of love for Xen despite all the jumping puzzles, because it's disorientingly alien which makes figuring shit out enjoyable and because if you don't just enter it in berserk mode you get to witness stuff like non-berserking aliens and some environmental storytelling. It feels more than a bit like something out of Lem's "Eden" at times. My main problem with Xen is that it's disjointed as you move around using teleporter network.

Sorry, but if we are comparing HL with doom 1 or 2 in particular, it's instant game over for id's brainchild.
The only advantage Doom has over HL is less railroading, but it's pretty flimsy advantage given that Doom is hardly open and everything else is just worse in it. If I give Doom credit it deserves (and it deserves huge amount of credit for obvious reasons) I have to venerate HL, even though it can be argued that it seeded the plague of shitty rail shooters.
Well, Diablo gave us RT iso clickfests that plagued the whole RPG genre, but I still love it.

I stopped playing Unreal for the first time in Chizra.
It felt too same-y in most locations, although, credit where credit is due, it's a fairly nonlinear level.

Terraniux was it's next not-so good moment, but that's mostly because of mercs and music - level itself was quite cool.

Ah, yes, now I remember this one. It's the first Heresiarch in game, right?

Eh, just make yourself some tea or coffee and relax. Trying to look around for various sorts of detail also helps.

Last time I checked "original" cRPGs didn't have much plot or dialogue. Are the more verbose ones some shitty RPG-something hybrids too? Since when does the amount of plot affect genre classification anyway?

Vehicles have always been an attractive gimmick for shooter devs. Is Shadow Warrior some FPS-sim hybrid, because you get to drive a tank?

Well, I could've settled it with stating that putting on your damn pants is probably a physics puzzle for you , but I will just settle for saying that puzzles have been permeating FPS games from the very beginning, same as they've done with RPGs.

Look up "interactive". You're misusing the term.

You shouldn't facepalm this hard. You've clearly damaged something.


The damage is evident from your claims that anyone here considers HL deep and thoughtful.

(Though it still beats Master - jelly much? )

The only time where HL stripped you of control was when Gordon was physically immobilized. Well, duh.

And the advantage of integrated scenes is that they can be broken up with something sudden and unexpected happening with no warning. Granted, HL2 doesn't use this capability to any significant extent, but unskippable scripts have this potential, while skippable cutscenes don't. They also can be made interactive with relatively little effort. I'd so prefer if DX:HR had iunskippable scripts instead of skippable cutscenes for the most part - if only because it would necessarily eliminate the problem of Jensen standing there like a lemon.

I dun geddit

What makes the first one good, and the second one bad? The only difference I see is that the second one has a button prompt, but in both cases the thing will play out and you cant do much other than watch (well, with the first one you can turn around and stare at the wall if you feel like it, but if the good thing about something is that you can ignore it, it's probably not good to begin with)

In the second one you as a player must do something instead of just watching - thus it's bad.

Infinitron stop trying too hard.

Are you serious? One of them is optional scenery fluff that establishes character and mood. The other is a 3-minute long Hollywood abomination that takes over your controls and reduces the challenge of defeating the final boss of a game to a series of QTEs.

OR: you just watch a scientist getting mauled by headcrabs while you pick your nose. Compare to that cutscene where you just watch Sephiroth backstabbing Aeris while you pick your nose.

OR: the last scene of the game that happens after you already had the "final boss battle", that's just the wrap-up where you actually kill the old man in charge, with a button prompt to make it somewhat more interesting than a regular cutscene (it was the same in MW 1 and 2, by the way).

I other words, you happen to like the first one better so you exaggerate the qualities of the first one while making the second one sound worse than it is, and as you see I can do the same. Not very different from these discussions where one guy tries to make Morrowind sound like a super amazingly deep game and Daggerfall is a series of "Hey bro, get me some %QUEST_ITEM and I'll give you %REWARD" quests, while another guy insists Morrowind is a hiking simulator with furries and Daggerfall is a magical endless adventure.

Anyway, why is it a problem that the second one takes away your controls, while the first one really just lets you dick around the window without being able to save the scientist, or influence the even in any way? Would the MW scene execution be just better if you could run circles around the villain and throw rubble at him as you stay around to wathc him choked to death? Would the HL scene be just worse if you had to press a button to tap the window to try and tell the scientist dude to look behind him?

tl;dr: despite your colorful descriptions, they are practically the same thing, the difference is that one asks you to press X for awesome while the other lets you bunnyhop around the room.

Except it's the first one takes away your controls. Can you save the doc? No. You can't do shit.

So stop with ololo CoD but when HL does exactly the same it's DEEP.


A good scripted scene is the one that is well directed and has a skip button - or can be affected in some way by the player.

A bad scripted scene is the one which you can't skip and just have to watch and wait until it ends.

Saving the scientist isn't the point. That little vignette shows the player that horrible shit is going down in Black Mesa - but in a tongue-in-cheek way that establishes the game's quirky mood.