Half-Life Beats Half-Life 2 Over Time?

Anonymous Coward writes "Tom's Hardware has an editorial up entitled 'Half-Life vs Half-Life 2: No comparison?' It explores the two games, and how they're holding up over time. He states that while the score of HL1 may have depreciated from 'a spectacular 95% to around about an average 70%' over the past couple of years, the score of HL2 'I'd now rate it in the low to mid 80's, or a full five to ten percent drop in a fraction of the time that the original has been around. Why is this?' The reason, he goes on to elaborate, is a lack of characterization. Half-Life was a blank slate modders could use to fill in their own worlds. HL2, on the other hand, has a definite story that ages less gracefully."

Re:huh?

[BAILOPAN]

Are you an HL2 mod developer? If so, link to your HL2 mod.

I am one (our project burned out for a while), and I'm far more satisfied with the HL1 modding environment. I don't feel like repeating all of the reasons why, but amongst the developers I know, it's a well shared sentiment. Valve is nowhere near as friendly to developers anymore, especially to us open source ones.

The HL2SDK is astoundingly disorganized, barely compiles properly on GCC, is poorly supported, not ported to AMD64, and known serious bugs have gone unfixed for over a year.

Look at the game stats [steampowered.com]. The most popular third party Source mod is a tinker toy called "Garry's Mod". The next highest used Source mod has users that can be counted in one server screen. Not only is independent modding for HL2 a failure, but Valve is directly impeding it.

Half-life

[ledow]

As someone who owns several original versions of each of Half life, Opposing Force, Counterstrike, Blue Shift, Team Fortress, Gunman Chronicles and Condition Zero (as well as Half-life 2, CS:Source as Steam purchases) my reasons would include:

A P233 with a Voodoo card could run all of the HL1-based games at a very decent speed when they first came out. Even now my 1GHz laptop can still perform more than good enough TODAY on all the above HL1 games without needing a brute of an AGP/PCI-Express card. CS:Source kills it stone dead, as does HL2.

Each HL1 game provided many hours of play and something completely different each time (even CZ was quite different to CS). Most were designed for offline play for the most part and therefore the single player game was the primary focus. In a time when the Internet WAS 56K modems or less this was a big plus.

Mods were very prevelant and didn't require extreme 3D graphic skills to get a basic mod running. For HL2 serious physics, enormous maps, complicated AI, professional-level 3D graphics and level design all mean that a casual mod will be next-to-impossible for the average small team to produce on their own.

http://steampowered.com/status/game_stats.html [steampowered.com]

That page shows you that I'm not on my own with this. The sum total of all source-based games doesn't come NEAR the sum total of all HL based games. CS alone has 4 times the number of player-minutes compared to CS:S. Then include the fact that even the serious competitions are skipping CS:Source completely because it's been dumbed down.

Re:My Opinion

[Mishotaki]

sadly, HL:Source is half-life 1 with the water of Half-life 2.... the textures seems the same... the physics are the same... you need higher system requirements for no reason... you need Steam AND internet on while playing... i just don't see why i would want to play it again like that... i got it.. i tried it... i hated it...

Re:Don't bother with TFA.

[Proud like a god]

Er, last time I checked there is an option to disable Steam starting when you boot Windows, look in the Settings menu...