Honest Opinion on Half-Life 2

[Lemming42]

The atmosphere theft plot had two versions, I think - one where the Earth was being terraformed to make it a new world for Advisors (and toxic to humans as a side effect), and one where they were pulling Earth's atmosphere through a big teleporter to power some weird turbines on their own world.

The Combine do seem to have broadly made sense at some point in development - they're a collection of conquered alien worlds who take the genetic material of enslaved races across their empire and stitch them together into weird new shit, and they've come to add Earth to their empire. Their invasion of Earth is motivated by the aforementioned atmosphere-theft rationales, plus the potential to take humans and make them into Combine creatures, plus free labour (the cut child slave factories, for example). Then there's whatever's going on with The Consul, where he's voluntarily turning into a cybernetic sperm or whatever.

Very little of that's left in the final game of course which I think is what makes them feel so weird as antagonists - they don't appear to even be getting anything from the occupation of Earth in the released game, and yet they're still putting substantial resources into it. You could say that they just want human genetic material for its own sake, like how the Borg will assimilate just about anyone, but then they've put up a suppression field that actively prevents new humans being born. Which will leave them with a dead world in one generation, for which they seemingly have no future plans. The only thing they really do is take humans and modify them in rather unimpressive ways at Nova Prospekt, but then almost all of those humans seem to be tasked with guarding Earth itself.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Half-Life 2 is actually a realistic portrayal of current year idk what your complaining about

 

[Levenmouth]

they were pulling Earth's atmosphere through a big teleporter to power some weird turbines on their own world

When you have to destroy Earth to meet your emissions targets. Truly ESG has gone too far!

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Didn't we have this conversation a few times already?

Is it me getting older and jaded or Half-Life 2 is one of the worst shooters?​

Yet Another Half-Life 2 Discussion

Half life 2​

 

[SlamDunk]

I am currently playing it through again and on each sitting I have to force myself to stop because it's so addicting. Time flies by far too quickly when I'm in that universe.

Damn, this game is still FUN as fuck. Much better and varied than Half-Life, which is of course also fun, and which I finished again just a couple of weeks ago. The sights of HL2, the sounds, the gameplay, the pacing... oh my. What a masterpiece of game design.

 

[9ted6]

As much as I love it I wish it had more enemy variety. You also fight mostly the same enemies in HL1 but the few varied enemies you do get force you to change your strategy and play at least a little differently. In HL2 there's no playstyle variation between Combine or metrocops at all.

 

[SlamDunk]

This is the year when Half-Life 2 turns 20, by the way.

 

[AlwaysBrotoMen]

One of the greatest games of all time

 

[Semiurge]

One of the greatest games without proper closure. The story-arc is still unfinished, and only because Valve lost steam after 'Episode Two', no pun intended. Whoever thought up releasing 'Half-Life 3' instead of 'Episode Three' made a huge mistake. They set the bar too high.

 

[NecroLord]

Am I the only one who thinks Alyx shouldn't have existed in the first place?
Just let Eli send you on missions SOLO. After all, this is Gordon Fucking Freeman we are talking about! Man can take on nearly everything.
Enough of that "Don't forget to reload, Dr. Freeman!" and shitty squad mechanics.
Gameplay should've remained like the one in Half-Life. I have no problem with the Gravity Gun, but they definitely included it in order to showcase the engine and physics...
Episode Two is pretty good.
That ending though...

 

[Morenatsu.]

I have no problem with the Gravity Gun, but they definitely included it in order to showcase the engine and physics...

why do people say things like this
they put physics in their engine because they thought it was interesting
they put the gravity gun in their game because they thought it was fun
your moms a techdemo because she looks nice but is actually boaring

 

[SlamDunk]

Enough of that "Don't forget to reload, Dr. Freeman!" and shitty squad mechanics.

Yeah, the hand-holding is really annoying in Episode Two. Major disappointments in the episodes are the behaviour of the non-player charaters and the hand-holding.

 

[AdamReith]

Half Life 2 would have been more impressive if I hadn't played Bloodlines first which put their facial rendering to infinitely better use.

Other than that it was a very boring shooter with retarded physics puzzles.

 

[KD6-3.7]

Deathmatch was better than main game.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Half Life 2 would have been more impressive if I hadn't played Bloodlines first which put their facial rendering to infinitely better use.

Other than that it was a very boring shooter with retarded physics puzzles.

hl2 isn't impressive because it doesn't zoom in on the characters faces while giving you rpg dialogue choices?
but the physics which are also very impressive don't count because muh contrived seesaw 'puzzle'?

maybe UR retadred

 

[JDR13]

HL 2 was good for its time. I don't get the hate. Yes, HL 1 was better, but that's often the case with sequels.

 

[Stanislavsky]

Thread title.
What is your honest opinion on Half-Life 2? Is it better than the original? Is it guilty of opening the way for scripted cinematic bullshit in FPS games?

Personally, I find it pretty good, not better than the original, of course, but it has some cool moments. The Grav Gun is OK, I can see how using tools found in your environments can be used to kill enemies. The scripted scenes do get on my nerves however. Voice acting is great, facial animations are really good, as per Source Engine (VTMB as well).

Anyway, what do YOU think?

Depending on when you first played it, action games do not age well.
In 2004, it was mindblowing. The vehicle sections, the "scary" level, the gravity tools, the physics, and general audio effects. It was ahead of anything in this period. Of course, there were scary games and games with cars, but not in such a refined style.

 

[9ted6]

One of the greatest games without proper closure. The story-arc is still unfinished, and only because Valve lost steam after 'Episode Two', no pun intended. Whoever thought up releasing 'Half-Life 3' instead of 'Episode Three' made a huge mistake. They set the bar too high.

Maybe this is a hot take but I think the Gman is a dumb character and the circlejerk around him is annoying. Spooky unknowable cthulu alien shit does that to any story in my opinion.

He isn't interesting and framing the events of the games and everything Gordon does as him being led around like the Gman's pet drags down what little story the series has to begin with. You're supposed to self insert with Gordon and give him a personality but then the game decides he's just a mindless slave. It got really bad with Alyx's Episode 2 retcon where he truly became the star of the show and Gordon got benched entirely.

There's not really anywhere they could take the story at this point that isn't the Gman winning and all the previous story arcs being pointless.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

One of the greatest games without proper closure. The story-arc is still unfinished, and only because Valve lost steam after 'Episode Two', no pun intended. Whoever thought up releasing 'Half-Life 3' instead of 'Episode Three' made a huge mistake. They set the bar too high.

Valve was always structured poorly Even during HL1 they had a bunch of retards doing their own thing and they had to tard wrangle a game out of it in 6 months. Valve are lucky to have ever released a game with how they're structured. Steam's bottomless money pot lets them constantly fuck around and do nothing but office politics.

Half Life 2 would have been more impressive if I hadn't played Bloodlines first which put their facial rendering to infinitely better use.

Wasn't Bloodlines delayed because of HL2?

 

[Butter]

Wasn't Bloodlines delayed because of HL2?

Bloodlines wasn't allowed to release before HL2, as Valve wanted their own game to be Source's commercial debut. The production got repeatedly fucked when Valve pushed Source updates that broke Troika's code. This was compounded by White Wolf being indecisive about what content they would permit in the game. Activision then went full retard in the last year of development and demanded that Bloodlines release on the same day as HL2, ensuring that it would underperform. They also forbade Troika from continuing to work on it for the last several months prior to release, even though the game desperately needed more time.

 

[GloriousSoftHat]

I might be in the minority here but I always felt like Half Life 2 hasn't aged quite as well as its predecessor. It's a great game and I do enjoy it, but I find myself far more inclined to play the original, I think in part because I just find the setting of the original so much more engaging. There's this "mystique" around Black Mesa that I just absolutely adore. It's the feeling that this is some massive underground complex, and you're not even seeing all of it. It feels like a lived in and breathed in environment.

I did enjoy Half Life 2 but the setting, great as it is, just never really clicked for me in the same way, and as much as I enjoyed it, I was almost a little bit disappointed when I played it to find that it has very little to do with Black Mesa or the original setting at all. Ravenholm, for example, despite being one of my favourite sections of the game, also feels like they just wanted *some excuse* to throw that kind of setting in, rather than actually serving any kind of greater narrative.

We'll probably never get it but personally I'd love nothing more than to see another game set in some kind of Black Mesa-adjacent universe (though arguably Portal sort of does that).

Valve was always structured poorly Even during HL1 they had a bunch of retards doing their own thing and they had to tard wrangle a game out of it in 6 months. Valve are lucky to have ever released a game with how they're structured. Steam's bottomless money pot lets them constantly fuck around and do nothing but office politics.

To me it's always just felt like a large game developer that still tries to run itself like a small company. Admittedly as a developer myself it feels like an all too easy trap to fall into. To be fair though, I think when you're at Valve's scale, anything you do is going to get a lot of attention, and it's hard to shake the feeling that maybe they've realised it's easier to just ride the success of Steam than risk their reputation over a new game when there isn't a clear way for them to push boundaries in the ways that they have with previous titles. Then again, DoTA 2 exists...

 

[Morenatsu.]

One of the greatest games without proper closure. The story-arc is still unfinished, and only because Valve lost steam after 'Episode Two', no pun intended. Whoever thought up releasing 'Half-Life 3' instead of 'Episode Three' made a huge mistake. They set the bar too high.

Valve was always structured poorly Even during HL1 they had a bunch of retards doing their own thing and they had to tard wrangle a game out of it in 6 months. Valve are lucky to have ever released a game with how they're structured. Steam's bottomless money pot lets them constantly fuck around and do nothing but office politics.

Oh yes please tell us how much better structured X company is, who have released absolutely zero games on the level of any of the classics made by 'a bunch of retards'.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

Oh yes please tell us how much better structured X company is, who have released absolutely zero games on the level of any of the classics made by 'a bunch of retards'.

Don't make me count to 3 Valvedrone. I like Valve games but they've released 1 new game and a bunch of tech demos in the last decade. Considering how large they are, the desire to work at valve and how much money they have we should have had many many games from a company that size. But all they make is hats and graphics updates. https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless-industry-politics/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ3HzvFEto Source on having to tard wrangle HL1 into shape. Valve's own youtube channel.

 

[Stanislavsky]

Dude, game development is just a super small part of their business. They are a "platform" business, from a software and hardware perspective.

 

[sser]

After seeing virtually every war movie under the sun, I went into Saving Private Ryan and almost folded into my seat at how visceral and violent it was. It was a revelation in style and presentation, bringing in a lot of things that war movies were pretty much entirely lacking up until that point (some Vietnam flicks got close, but nothing like SPR). Nowadays, you often see people harping on SPR for x-and-y reasons, but I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that its 'realistic' elements are taken for granted at this point which allows for closer -- and perhaps then extra-critical -- examinations of its other facets.

For me, HL-2 seems to be aging the same way. I don't know how anyone who played it in 2004 can say it was outright bad. The physics elements and the use of it with the gravity gun were totally crazy for that time period, opening up a huge box of things to do and how to interact with the content, and inviting a lot of creativity on the part of the devs. I rarely have the feeling of 'revelation' in FPS games. Off-hand, all I can really think of is Doom, Rainbow Six, and then HL-1/HL-2 where things were beyond anything else that was available. It had some low points, particularly the boat segment, but "on its game" it was S+ tier stuff. The art style and art direction were also lightyears ahead of everything else at that time, notably its competitors in Far Cry and Doom 3. It really did execute this feeling of being in some totalitarian shithole dominated by a foreign power, and there was a sincerity to the voice acting just as well that was amiss in a lot of other games (also the facial animations were ahead of their time).

When you've already played through it and have 20-years of games leeching from it since, you've now seen a million other games with physics effects now, facial animations are normalized, gameplay/narrative-intersecting is old hat, etc., you can then see things like how the boat section is boring crap, that some of the game design insists a little too hard on itself, that the sound-effects for the guns almost seem like placeholders they're so bad, and how much of the aesthetic doesn't work as well the x-time around and the gunbattles are not nearly as punchy enough to warrant a playthrough, how in general the experience isn't nearly as tight as HL-1 which I guarantee is replayed far more often. I think that's all well and fair, but ignoring its 2004 impact and judging it like it just came out yesterday is getting a little too lost in the weeds for me.