Re: Half-Life 2 three years on.


As I said, I never played SS1 only SS2 but at that time, I was amazed by
Half-Life 1 because I was not _again_ isolated like in almost any shooter
before, but had NPCs with me who could fight for themselves. What is so
special about being isolated and kept on your toes? You are that in all
version of Doom e.g. and hundreds of other FPS! HL1, HL2 and the Halos are
famous because they were different. Bloodlines with all the NPCs anyway.

I'm talking about the atmosphere that was well done, as well as a story
which is extremely well presented and which makes a lot of sense within the
context of the game. I'm not telling you to enjoy an isolated setting, I'm
simply saying that no game ever did that particular setting so well before,
in my opinion.

Maybe it was isolated, but you were almost completely free to explore the
entire station in the order you saw fit, whilst in Half Life you were just
pushed from one action set piece to the next completely on rails.

Half Life was a series of scripted events with hardly any story at all. Halo
is famous because it was one of the first competent shooters on any console,
and it was technically well done. The story was extremely thin, though.

Bloodlines is not at all a shooter in the traditional sense, and is utterly
bug-ridden and clumsily executed, which is why there are still fan patches
being made trying to fix it up to something half-way decent.

Half Life was not unique in terms of having non-isolated levels, and you'd
only have to look at something like Unreal to watch what massive levels
meant at the time. Unreal utterly destroys Half Life in that regard, and
though the actual shooter gameplay was a bit weak, it had some incredibly
impressive levels like "The Sunspire".

Also since when is an AI a great antagonist? Because it teases you along?
That may have been great in SS1 but I can't remember anything much of SS2
regarding this, compared to e.g the HL1 Gman which does the same or the
wicked storyline of Bloodlines which you understand not until the end.

G-Man hardly interacts with the player at all, and is mostly an amusing set
piece.

I was talking about System Shock 1, so I don't know why you bring SS2 into
this.

Maybe you don't think an AI is a great antagonist, but I thought it was
brilliant considering the novelty of it at the time, for a game. I loved how
it started out basically polite (but coldly distant) and slowly descended
into madness as it grew more and more furious with the player.

The logs found around the station told a story from the recent past, and as
you explored the station and found bodies you could almost feel what had
happened, because you heard people talking about events just prior to their
deaths etc. That was some fantastic story telling.

Half Life had some cute scripted events, but they had no story to go along
with it. Basically, there was no story at all in Half Life (apart from the
introductory premise of the "machine"), merely suggestions that the player
could interpret as he saw fit. Sure, the introduction sequence was
brilliantly done, and I originally thought we had a new System Shock
contender on our hands, but after the first 45 minutes, it became just
another "on-rails" shooter, albeit a very well done one.

BTW, I recently tried to play the Marathon in Unreal remake and while the
game itself was so bad regarding level design and gameplay that I stopped
soon, the story reminded me very much of that of SS2. Now who was first,
SS1 or Marathon? Last not least, I agree with you regarding HL2. It did
not bring much new to the table that HL1 didn't, except for the physics.

System Shock had very sophisticated physics for its time, and is probably
the very first 3D game to even use it to such an extent. I remember you
could set timers for mine detonation and throw them in some gravity
elevators and watch the lighting (yeah, it had a very impressive lighting
engine for the time as well) from the resulting explosion when it detonated
near a monster at the top of the room.

I believe System Shock was released first, but since I never played Marathon
I can't really comment. It was released for Macintosh only, so it doesn't
really enter into this discussion.


.

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