Half-Life Beats Half-Life 2 Over Time? 139
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."
Half-Life 2: The FPS for people who hate FPSes (Score:2, Interesting)
My Opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
Fast forward to HL2. I get it on release day and install it, and I've instantly got Steam issues. I won't dwell on them here, but it did leave me in a mood where I was prepared to not enjoy the game which is why I mention it. Anyway, I played through almost to the end over the next day or so, and I did enjoy it. But I was left feeling like the game was a wasted opportunity. For me, it didn't live up to the promise it started with. Most of the game sections seemed to go on for too long, especially the boat and car sections. Many puzzles seemed to be an excuse to show off the physics engine rather than to be there for their own sake (buoyant barrels, seesaws). A lot of it is probably personal taste, I just felt like it wasn't all that good when viewed next to the original. I certainly have no urge to replay it, despite not having reached the end, since I reinstalled it on a new hard disk.
I'd really like to try HL:Source, the original Half-Life in the new engine, but I don't feel like paying for the privilege. I'll keep an eye on the Black Mesa mod which seems to be a more ambitious project anyway...
The Difference...IMO (Score:2, Interesting)
Look at www.planethalflife.com once in a while. The majority of the mods listed on that site are for HalfLife 2 and look great. When all those mods get finished and people start playing them, there will be a revival of the HalfLife 2 game.
Lack of Imagination (Score:4, Interesting)
HL1: Main character is average-joe (well, scientist, but certainly a bit out of his element here). HL2: Main character is exhaulted hero praised by everyone (same guy as before, but people worship him now)
HL1: Scary sequences where you know monsters are slowly picking off people and annihilating the base. HL2: Less scary open outdoor sequences, more of a serious-sam game than before. (except ravenwood)
HL1: Fighting for survival, and little else. HL2: Fighting for an ideal and grand-purpose of saving humanity.
See the difference? HL1 had much of a more noir, dark atmosphere. HL2 had more of a "lets shoot stuff and be heroes" kind of atmosphere. The first one tends to draw players in and keep them interested and thinking about the complex story, the second is just too streightforward to keep people playing.
p.s. (completely unrelated to above comments) Hl 2 multiplayer is woefully poor. I would rather play HL 1 multiplayer. Granted, the physics engine is nice, but you see people dance up ladders (they fall, catch themselves, fall, catch themselves, ect.), see huge lag times even on direct connections, and the physics engine degrades severely in multiplayer play.
Re:huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Half life was a fundamental change in game philosophy which said that telling a story was important, interacting with your environment and other characters made a difference, you would hope that Valve could carry that through to their new titles but they do seem to have gone down the eye candy road. I can't explain how fucked off I was at the end of HL2, I can imagine 99% of us were waiting for some, any explanation of g-man, of what is really going on. Did we get it, did we hell.
More telling to me though is the amount of events I can remember in half life versus those in HL2. I simply remember more of HL, I had more fun playing it. I remember hearing soldiers scream as I lobbed a grenade down a stairwell, a barney walking around a corner straight into sentry gun, the sound of headcrabs as I crawled down air vents, torch off. I was hoping for so much with HL2 and it did not deliver. It was a great game, it was beautiful, but it lacked the one thing that made HL great, a story.
Re:The Difference...IMO (Score:3, Interesting)
It kept selling very well with addons such as Opposing Forces, Counter Strike and a few others. Half Life 2 however puts the modding capabilities into the hands of the common man. ... For HalfLife 1, you could make maps and what not, but modding wasn't as popular is it is now.
I'm afraid that I think you're entirely incorrect. First off, one of your examples of an 'add on,' Counter-Strike, was initially a user created mod that went through many iterations (7 major public beta versions, for example) before it was picked up and distributed commercially by Valve. Day of Defeat went through a similar process. Much of what's available commercially for Half-Life 2 also started as a free mod (e.g. Red Orchestra).
Looking at www.planethalflife.com's hosted sites, I see a total of four mods hosted for Half-Life 2 and well over twenty for Half-Life 1. Most of the announcements on the front page relate to mods that were already released for Half-Life 1 which are now producing sequels that run on the Half-Life 2 engine. I also remember playing many Half-Life 1 mods, including Wizard Wars, Science and Industry, Holy Wars, The Wastes, Snark Wars, Sven Co-op... the list goes on and on.
I would like to take a moment to make it clear that I'm not denigrating the modding capabilities that Valve has provided with Half-Life 2. Indeed, although they took their time in releasing the tools, they seem to be comparable if not better than what was released for working with Half-Life 1. You might think that Half-Life 2 mod development is phenomenally more popular than Half-Life 1 development looking at the current development numbers, but who expects people to create new mods for a game that's more than six years old, particularly one whose sequel has been out for more than a year? Also, bear in mind that many of the mods that are announced, set up websites, etc., never get past the "posting nice concept art and renders to the front page" phase, whereas all the mods I mentioned for Half-Life 1 were released and playable at some point.
I agree with you that the mod scene for Half-Life 2 looks promising, but Half-Life 1's mod community was definitely more than you're giving it credit for. Or, to quote a friend, "Modding wasn't popular back in Half-Life 1? I wonder what the fuck I was playing for 6 years."
Re:Don't bother with TFA. (Score:2, Interesting)
The writer basically played HL1 Source and got completely wistful about the past and then wrote a snotty article.
Content-wise, HL2 will not live up to the original because it is a sequel. To continue the plot of the first requires a suspension of disbelief and I commend Valve for trying to do this without just making another HL like Quake 2 + 3, or Duke Nukem 2 + 3, or Doom 2 + 3. And, keep in mind, in HL2, the human race is being shipped off into containers for genocide - it's hard for players to identify with people/characters whose lives are completely broken and destroyed.
The first time I played "Follow Freeman", I tried like HELL to keep all my guys alive. And yes, the human-NPC interaction could be improved in the sense that the followers need to be more "character" driven. However, in the Lost Coast demo, the old guy at the bottom delivered. So it can be done.
Honestly, at times I believed that HL2 was an advertisement of "Look at our ####ing cool engine", but mostly I had goosebumps and grins through it. I've played both HL1 and HL2 several times: I usually quit HL1 as soon as I get to the alien worlds (boring), but HL2 I go all the way. I wish there was much more and I plan to shell out $20 for the next installment.
(Hey VALVE! I do so wish Steam didn't load with computer startup. Stardock does need to, why should Steam?)
Re:huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
A few months ago I tried to start mod development by making the player jump higher when sprinting. Seemed like a simple enough mod. This took weeks to figure out because of 1. the poor design (the code that moves the player up is hidden like 20 methods deep, and fragments are all over the place) and 2. synch problems between the 'client' and 'server' code, which was also badly implemented.
For comparison, after installing the Doom3 SDK it took me less than 20 minutes to implement a similar mod for D3. Including getting it to compile and run within D3.
My humble take on it all... (Score:5, Interesting)
HL2 was also a bit short. Aside from that I had a great time.
But now, my complaint is CSS. What are they thinking or am I the only one who doesn't get it: The new lighting SUCKS. Very much. It doesn't take my eyes 5 seconds to fully adjust from the dimness of looking at the shadow of a building to the sunlit street 25 degrees to my right. It's nearly as effective as a flashbang in some cases when leaving the middle structure in Dust to going into the open.
Also, they need to have more secondary attack modes. Aside from silenced and scoped weapons there is next to nothing. The reality is that when you swing an AK safty arm the entire way down it goes into semi-automatic mode and not full auto. I'd like to have this option as semi and burst seems to produce better results in accuracy. The Clarion rifle has burst, why can't the AK have semi? Or how about 3 round burst on the MP5 since there is no secondary mode on the weapon?
Also, the nades are WAY under powered. I'm sorry guys, but if a half a pound of explosives encased in a thin metal canister goes off at your feet you're probably going to die. But on the HE nades in CSS you might take 40% damage... what's up with that? And there is no secondary effect such as loss of hearing or even a minor "shell shock" effect like in COD.
I recently seen a posting on a message board addressing the lack of nade power and it was laughable that the best responce to it all was that they were under powered because it would make it easy to kill an entire team on some unknown custom map.
There is probably a way to mod this on some server settings but that should be in the server options and not some obscure
It's great that they keep bringing out new skins, now if they could just make a bot that can actually get a nade through a window and not have it bounce back on a rushing team mate...
I could probably go on for days. The sad things is this is still just as good as 90% of all FPS multiplayers, but I still find myself playing MOH objective matches 3 or 4 years after the fact because the game seems better than what CS has turned into with CSS.
ooookayyyyyy (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally I think HL2 was too far ahead of its time for a good chunk of gamers to get it. Or that it's a genre all its own that players don't yet know how to enjoy. The ass-backwards criticisms are a testament to that. The PC gaming community has become so obsessed with mod-ability (which HL2 actually is first-class in, only beaten by Unreal) that many can't enjoy a linear, non-sandbox masterpiece of a game because you're not allowed to go off in any direction and do whatever you want, GTA-style. Games don't HAVE to be open-ended.
Re:huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly, the biggest reason in my opinion that HL2 isn't aging nearly as gracefully as HL1 is because it's much easier to renew HL1's value even if it does lack a fancy physics engine and good graphics right out of the box. A steady influx of mods, maps, and good development tools for HL2 would've certainly kept my attention on the game, but that didn't happen. The same goes for HL2DM and CSS - the biggest reasons I still play CS 1.5 on WON2 is because of the lack of Steam, the better power balance, and above all else, the sheer abundance of good maps and fun/funny mods and the ease with which you can mess with it. HL2DM and CSS lack all of those - Or in the case of Steam, they have it, and it sucks ass.
That aside, if HL2 were published five years earlier, it would've seemed dramatically more impressive to gamers regardless. Pretty graphics and good physics have already been done before, and Valve really missed the boat on that one. The graphics and physics of HL2 were its biggest selling points, and the only reason that the Source engine exists - to say that pretty graphics and physics are all that HL2 really has wouldn't be too terribly far off. However, similarly attractive games - especially generic but good looking first person shooters - are in abundance today, and HL2 just didn't have what it takes to remain in the limelight for too terribly long. HL2 was built around an entertaining visual experience, not a challenging and enjoyable gameplay experience. If you do that to a game and make visuals its focus while taking a shit on the level design and gameplay, you make a game that's briefly entertaining, but not enjoyable or satisfying by any stretch of the imagination.
Not to worry, though. WON2 is reasonably functional, and when CS 1.5 does get old, there are plenty of good freeware games out there to fiddle with...
I disagree (Score:4, Interesting)