First, some background: I first became aware of PC gaming in 2012 (15yrs after HL1, 7yrs after HL2). I played both games back-to-back and then later replayed both separately.
There’s so much to be said about these two games, but I’ll sum up my feelings in a few bullet points:
- HL1 is more thematically unified. It plays true to its Sci-Fi & Die Hard roots up to the point of campiness, but that fits rather well for a game whose protagonist is effectively a nerdy Doom Marine – more a force-of-nature embodiment of survival than traditional hero.
- HL2, on the other hand, feels weighed-down by this legacy. It wants to tell a serious story about a charismatic freedom-fighter. That’s an aesthetic which clashes terribly with HL1’s mute, stoic survivalist.
- HL1 has a better core gameplay loop. It plays to its strengths: gunplay & level exploration. Exposition & puzzling are almost always delivered through these mediums wherever possible. Those few chapters which depart from this philosophy (On a Rail, Xen) are the weakest in the whole game as a result.
- HL2, by contrast, seems almost insecure. It only trusts the player to stick with the core gameplay-loop for a few chapters at most before pivoting into yet another gimmick – almost all of which (barring the gravity gun sequence) feel painfully drawn out:
- Water Hazard: Boating
- Highway 17: Driving
- Sandtraps: Physics “Puzzling” + “Platforming”
- Nova Prospekt: Wave-Based Point Defense
What do you guys think? There’s a lot worth unpacking here which I couldn’t quite articulate. What are your takeaways?
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I think Valve learned a ton about game design between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Half-Life 1 pulls a lot of “gotcha” moments that you just have to reload your save to get through, whereas Half-Life 2 actually make sure to have teachable moments so you know what to look out for, and here’s my favorite example. Half-Life 2 introduces you to a sniper enemy right after Ravenholm by having a traceable laser pointer that’s shooting escaped headcrab zombies. The sniper is concerned with them, not you, so you have time to be aware of the threat and know what it looks like. Half-Life 1 introduces the sniper enemy by having you round an ordinary looking corner and get shot in the back. After reloading your save, you can squint at the hole in the wall in that alley, knowing it’s there this time, and say to yourself, “Yeah, I guess that kind of looks like a sniper’s nest.”
The gimmicks that you refer to in Half-Life 2 are, I think, phenomenal examples of how to properly pace a video game and make the game memorable. While Gordon Freeman is a nothing character and more of a focal point for everyone else in the game to talk about, those characters are good, well-written characters.
Solid point. One of the things that Valve really nailed down during the Orange Box era was playtesting. According to internal reports, they actually do more playtesting than anyone else in the industry by a considerable margin.
With that being said… I think I’ll stick to my guns about those vehicle segments. I dislike novelty as a solution to monotony because it only really works on the 1st playthrough. Even then, these segments feel as if they were stretched to the limit of what their playtesters found tolerable. That’s the opposite of what I would have preferred: compressing pacebreaker sequences to the limit of what players found refreshing.
Half-Life 1 introduces the sniper enemy by having you round an ordinary looking corner and get shot in ⁃ the back. After reloading your save, you can squint at the hole in the wallin that alley, knowing it’s there this time, and say to yourself, “Yeah, I guess that kind of looks like a sniper’s nest.”
In defense of that segment: it telegraphs the sniper’s presence to the genre-savvy player by recreating the memorable “sniper traps” shown in films like Full Metal Jacket: https://youtu.be/Zz4uppst-7I?t=498. Yes… I’ll concede that this is quite obviously the kind of obtuse sequence that would have gotten thrown out during playtesting if it were developed by the Valve of 2008. I’m not sure how I feel about that, though – it’s sacrificing a cohesive part of the game’s tone in service of polish, but polish for whose sake? Is the player really better off having a less colorful experience if it means avoiding a weird yet brief gameplay wrinkle?
Personally I never understood the hate for hl2 vehicle sequences. I love them, particularly the boat one. They aren’t so fun if you’re a completionist, but if you’ve played them before… Just ram the throttle and enjoy the velocity, and.they don’t take very long at all
It was one of many wrinkles, and it’s something we’d for sure consider to be dated today. Enough of those wrinkles will cause frustration, and it’s why when I’ve seen friends pick up Half-Life 1 in the post-Half-Life-2 era, they never see it as fondly as HL2. I still think Half-Life 1 is really good, but Half-Life 2 just stands head and shoulders above it. You’re not the first person to complain about the vehicle sequences in Half-Life 2, but I always loved them.
Eh. I don’t really agree. I agree that they’re both excellent games and that they differ in the ways you’ve listed, but I just replayed both and I have to say, hl1 drags. There are long chunks that consist of seemingly endless corridor crouching jumping puzzles with headcrabs lurking predictably for jumpscares.
The things you call “gimmicks” in hl2 to me broke up that loop. They are still parts of the game and use the same mechanics, but they shake the loop up just enough that you don’t get sick of doing the same jumping puzzle–>crouch through narrow tunnel and hit headcrab with crowbars–>fight pattern, and it still includes enough of those to feel like an extension of the same game.
I do think it was a mistake to keep Gordon mute for hl2. He had a reason to not talk in hl1, there wasn’t really anyone to talk to. It makes way less sense in 2, and hamstrings them on further story aspects as they try to get serious with the plot.
It’s another thing that’s also become widely adopted by the industry as well: games that give the player different types of gameplay loops and don’t get stuck in an endless-enemies-all-the-time Serious Sam scenario. There’s a lot of reasons to hold Half-Life 2 up as a great game, especially with how widely influential literally every aspect of it became. It was doing a lot of things that were firsts at the time, and just because they don’t hold up well against a modern standard is an imperfect argument. It laid influential groundwork that other games these days follow because they were shown to be effective in Half-Life 2, especially in respect to less-repetitive gameplay loops.
I just love the sounds. They remind me of all the time I’ve spent playing CS 1.6 zombie modes.
never played HL1 tbh, only HL2. maybe its time …
Definitely give it a shot sometime next time a Steam sale comes around (it almost always goes on steep discount). It holds up remarkably well and has a very accessible time-to-beat (12hrs).
would you go for the remake (Black Mesa) or the original?
I think both are worth playing, but I’d say that it’s a better experience to play the original HL1 first. Black Mesa doesn’t obsolete the original at all IMO – they have very different level designs and aesthetics.
alright, thanks for the guidance!
Having played both, Black Mesa for an easily more modern and more cohesively told story with actual re-occuring characters. Original Half-Life for the sheer chaos and being able to kill characters in a game-breaking way.
I think this is an astute take-down. Half-Life 2 was very concerned with showing off all the “advancements” it made. While those advancements were certainly novel at the time, they seem less novel and less cohesive now that the entire industry has followed suit.
The physics in Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom make the physics in the Source engine look like a fucking joke. So it’s really hard to go back to a game like Half-Life 2 and have it stand on those merits because they’ve been overshadowed for so long. The character design and facial physics have similarly been left in the dust. Once again, it’s overshadowed by the entire industry following suit on these technological changes, and the story lacks the depth to make up for it, years down the line.
Half-Life had far fewer gimmicks and in many ways was a more traditional first-person shooter with an excellently put together story. The writing in Half-Life 2 was still strong, but Half-Life was much stronger (this is common for sequels, because you’re having to extend a story you already wrote an end for).
In fact, I think that’s part of why we never got a Half-Life 2: Part 3. They were entering a phase of what you might call “fiction-debt” where the past choices in the story were beginning to slow down the story and make it less intriguing. Sometimes the more you reveal about the mystery, the less interesting it is. Half-Life left years of mystique behind it because so many parts of the story were still open ended and unexplained. It can also be argued that this “fiction-debt” is why they had to go into the past and do a pre-sequel with Half-Life: Alyx.
Also, the choice to make it so you can’t kill major characters in a game breaking way is a loss, in my personal opinion. I don’t like games that prevent me from doing dumb things. Like at the beginning of Halo: Combat Evolved, I can shoot Captain Keyes right in the face, and every space marine around me will lose his shit and attack me until death. It’s actual consequences for negative actions instead of just making a character an unkillable bullet sponge. Similarly in Half-Life you can accidentally kill scientists and security guards that you need to be able to open certain doors.
They were entering a phase of what you might call “fiction-debt” where the past choices in the story were beginning to slow down the story and make it less intriguing. […] It can also be argued that this “fiction-debt” is why they had to go into the past and do a pre-sequel with Half-Life: Alyx.
That’s an interesting idea. I agree… though, I think that the choice to switch lead characters was more instrumental than the choice to go with a prequel. I wonder if Valve internally ever seriously considered ditching Gordon when they were making HL2? It’s funny to imagine what the fan reception to that might have looked like!
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Oh, especially at the time. At least society had grown a little by the time they decided to make Alyx the main character of a game, and so criticisms on changing the main character were more subdued than they likely would have been in 2004. I can hardly imagine the screeds of text that would have been written online about “BUT WHAT ABOUT GORDON?”
Also, its interesting to think, with a new main character, they could have revealed a lot less about what was going on in the story and kept a little bit more of the mystique that infected the original.
Honestly, it’s the same thing with Portal. Part of the reason the original works so well isn’t just the unexpected dark comedy tropes, but also that there’s still a lot of mystery about the place you’re in and why it is the way it is. Leads to lots of fan speculation, which is people thinking about and talking about your game and getting other people to buy it and play it. After the introduction of Cave Johnson in Portal 2, we know a lot more about the place, and it begins to lose the intrigue that made it such an interesting place to explore. It’s probably a good idea that Portal 2 is the end of that story, because I don’t think there’s a whole lot more interesting to explore there.
Good response, HL2 was originally done to show the new capabilities of their “new” source engine. (They eventually gave up cause steam is more profitable.) So when you take that into consideration, most of the game design decision and choice make sense.
I also don’t like HL2 that much because it’s also one of the early games trying that episodic approach, which at the time is really not fulfilling as you don’t feel the game has a proper closure so you anticipate the next one more. It felt more like you left and playing next game while in middle of a Uncharted chapter and later came back and forget about the plot. That’s how I feel when I played ep2.
Oh yeah, episodic gaming definitely wasn’t working for anyone. It’s clear why Valve instead leaned into Team Fortress 2 and CounterStrike and DOTA 2 after their failures with episodic gaming. Those kept people engaged, and it’s why Valve hired an actual economist[1] to help them organize their virtual economies, where they could take a small cut of each small transaction, which along with taking a cut from gaming publishers is obviously much more profitable.
Sorry for paywalled link. Unable to find free version of link at the moment. Wikipedia article section which references link in question. ↩︎
I think episodic gaming could have worked if they’d developed a full arc and stuck to it. Probably the right way to go would have been to make at least a base version of all the episodes first, so they could have released on a steady, regular schedule instead of “whenever it’s done, then never”.
