Half Life is shit

[Freedos]

I'm more about "Half-Life is awesome, but a lot of developers learned the wrong lessons and began to decline".

And yeah, RTCW was great, much better than the latest games (not exactly bad, but they relied too much in "cinematic experience").

 

[Ash]

Half-Life is responsible for:
CounterStrike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, Half-Life 2, Portal, Garry's Mod, probably something more I'm missing...I like and respect Half-life but even its direct descendants were bland decline.



and worst of all, it also spawned Gearbox

 

[Morenatsu.]

Decline of what? CS, the decline of... fast-paced deathmatch? TF2, the decline of... fast-paced deathmatch with flags? L4D, the decline of... co-op that only ever existed in last-minute after-thought form? Portal, the decline of... of... of... uh...

I like Quake deathmatch as much as any retard, but games that aren't just autistic turbonerds speed-running the scoreboard at over 9000 miles per second is only a good thing.

 

[Cassar]

Half-Life is responsible for:
CounterStrike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, Half-Life 2, Portal, Garry's Mod, probably something more I'm missing...I like and respect Half-life but even its direct descendants were bland decline.



and worst of all, it also spawned Gearbox

Half Life's impact is unquantifiable. It's influence is far and wide, on every platform and every genre. You can split the gaming world into before and after Half Life. You can see some indie dev today doing a platformer saying how he was inspired by the enviromental mark of story telling from HL. There would not be Resident Evil 4 as it was without HL. No Gears of War. No Uncharted. No Bioshock. No COD, no Medal of Honor, no Steam, no NOLF, no Avp2, FEAR. Half Life inspired development houses to shift their gamedesign, to follow a certain dirrection. Neil Druckman said it was the game that made him want to make games.

Half Life sits at the highest tier in videogame history. Very few can stand along side, absolutely none above. It would be a completely different world we live in today, top to bottom, on every platform without it

 

[ds]

If you don't think HL1 is the best then name one other game with fully automatic assault crowbars.



You can't.

 

[JarlFrank]

Yeah but maybe the gaming world would look better without it, rather than worse.

 

[Cassar]

Doubtfull it would look better. Shit and boring doom clones would have endured another several years. A shift to more sophisticated and layered worlds and design would have been muted and postponed. Complex ingame scripting who knows when or if another game would have made it in such spectacular fashion as to make the entire industry pause and take note. Without it there would be no Steam and the decline PC suffered going into the 2010s would not have recovered most likely. Half Life is responsible for too many things we have today to conclude that the gaming world would be anything other than a hundred times more shit if it would not have existed

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Even Build games were being actively dismissed as "meh, a Doom clone" before Half Life. "Doom clone" was the name of the FPS genre for a long while, even after Half Life... Half Life changed things but there was also an organic divide between the single player shooter and the multiplayer competitive one. Half Life is... a game, but nobody knew what the fuck to make of it. Sierra's marketing was all over the place and never hinted at anything concrete, and then the demo felt very, very different to most games in the market. At the time, it felt as exciting as Thief was for me. However, in the long run, what truly hurt FPS game development was the transition Halo got from an originally PC centric game into a console franchise.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Other games from the same time were already heading in that direction, though, and the direction that it all ended up heading actually doesn't copy all that much from what really made Half-Life what it was. It feels more like people saw the game and thought ‘cinematic = good’ and proceeded to learn nothing and do things exactly the way they would have anyway.

 

[JDR13]

Which only highlights the influence of Painkiller on the current landscape.

Serious Sam actually

Unlike Painkiller, Serious Sam is actually good or at least the first few games are.

 

[baba is you]

Serious Sam was good up until the first one, and then it kind of went downhill from there, and I think the last one was Serious Sam 4
Serious Sam 4 is... eh. I played to the ending, but I don't know... I think it's time to end the series.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Serious Sam was good up until the first one

 

[baba is you]

Serious Sam was good up until the first one

Well, I don't know why, but it was a time when I was really craving an arena shooter, and Serious Sam satisfied that thirst to a certain extent.
It was also a time when I found and played WADs like Plutonia's Go 2 It.

 

[octavius]

At a time when I had almost given up on FPS games, Serious Sam was a pleasant surprise to me. It captured some of the magic of Doom instead of trying to be cinematic or realistic. And it didn't induce motion sickness.

Before that, playing games chronologically, the last good "new" (to me) FPS game was Outlaws, with its glass cannons instead of the usual bullets sponges.

 

[Cassar]

Other games from the same time were already heading in that direction, though, and the direction that it all ended up heading actually doesn't copy all that much from what really made Half-Life what it was. It feels more like people saw the game and thought ‘cinematic = good’ and proceeded to learn nothing and do things exactly the way they would have anyway.

Other games were dabbling into that, sure, but without HL there would not have been a blueprint that all the industry looked at. Similar to the FPS genre - we had games using the perspective all the way to the 70s, but Doom was needed to offer a cohesion of mechanics and a whole that the rest followed.

Of course, others didnt carbon copy Half Life. They took various aspects from it or ideas. Monolith said HL convinced them that presentation and polish was most important. Ken Levine said they tried to insert HL's scripting in System Shock 2. Warren Spector had Half Life as one of 4 games that Deus Ex would "be like" in its design document. Neil Druckman played HL and it put him on track to start making games. Cory Barlog was working at his first job in the industry when his entire office stoped and played the Half Life demo and they were all traumatized by its quality. Medal of Honor Allied Assault is an extension of HL's style of scripted action, just transplanted into WW2. Which led to Call of Duty which led to everything else to this day. It led to Counter Strike due to moding. To Steam.

This is what influence means, not an exact copy of the source material, but numerous tentacles that go into every dirrection that would not have existed without the shock that HL gave. One of the most important aspects that it gave us and we have everywhere today is the ample scripting to evolve its story and ingame situations. Explosions, events, battles - the entire flow of the game. Whever we see a setpiece today in a game, something bombastic, like COD does, like Uncharted does, whatever game, we can trace it back to Half Life

 

[Morenatsu.]

It's precisely the fact that Half-Life was never ‘carbon copied’ that it can't be blamed for decline. What's interesting is that when developers are influenced by other shitty games, they have absolutely no trouble at all carbon-copying, but when it comes to Half-Life? Not even close. Makes you think.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

It's precisely the fact that Half-Life was never ‘carbon copied’ that it can't be blamed for decline. What's interesting is that when developers are influenced by other shitty games, they have absolutely no trouble at all carbon-copying, but when it comes to Half-Life? Not even close. Makes you think.

This is true as well. There's a lot of Portal clones but not a single Half Life clone out there.

 

[samuraigaiden]

Just beat RTCW. What a dumb game. The bosses are abysmal.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

CounterStrike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, Half-Life 2, Portal

In what world are Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal decline? Decline from what?

 

[LarryTyphoid]

If we're gonna use this logic where a game inspiring bad games makes that first game bad, then it really starts getting ridiculous. Ultima Underworld is the direct ancestor of Skyrim, so I guess Ultima Underworld was decline. System Shock inspired Doom 3 and Bioshock, so I guess System Shock was decline.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Other games from the same time were already heading in that direction, though, and the direction that it all ended up heading actually doesn't copy all that much from what really made Half-Life what it was. It feels more like people saw the game and thought ‘cinematic = good’ and proceeded to learn nothing and do things exactly the way they would have anyway.

Yes, how quick so many people forget that around that time you had people trying to make cinematic FPSes, with FMV. What, do Jedi Knight and Realms of the Haunting not count? Or the games that Half-Life basically destroyed all hopes of succeeding, like Sin? Half-Life just feels like an easy target.

 

[Ash]

CounterStrike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, Half-Life 2, Portal

In what world are Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal decline? Decline from what?

I am so glad you asked, Sir. None are bad games, but they are all decline from 90s game design standards, especially the absolute peak of this golden era (late 90s). Excluding the N64 anyway. Not a great deal of value there. A few greats, but doesn't compete with what was going on in the rest of the industry.

 

[Nutmeg]

CounterStrike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, Half-Life 2, Portal

In what world are Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal decline? Decline from what?

TF2 is arguably decline from QW:TF but CS and L4D were fresh.

 

[jebsmoker]

doom and half life caused design revolutions to occur for the fps genre. the greatest harbingers are decline are basically anything following modern warfare 2's multiplayer design - cosmetics and paid maps add nothing

 

[Ash]

CounterStrike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, Half-Life 2, Portal

In what world are Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal decline? Decline from what?

TF2 is arguably decline from QW:TF but CS and L4D were fresh.

Fresh turds. But they knew it though, e.g L4D was priced at 25 bucks on release, or something like that. They're not bad but the 90s was just a different time. You had to have been big into games at the time, across multiple platforms, to understand.