Re: Half-Life 2 three years on.

On Tue, 14 Aug 2007, Michael Albertsen wrote:

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

Maybe I have missed something with SS1 as I only know SS2 but in the latter case I found the atmosphere severly lacking after it repeated itself with each new crew member that you didn't found alive. Was SS1 different there, e.g. no stupid hopes raised you might meet someone?

Half Life was a series of scripted events with hardly any story at all.

That is not exactly true. There is a story behind HL but you have to think about it ;). It's not written down in logs but evolves with the game. Of course it is nothing compared to Bloodlines and maybe to SS1, but again I only know SS2 and I can't remember much of that besides everyone is dead.

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.

Yeah, I'm doing them :)!

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

I wasn't talking about massive levels, clearly Unreal is superior there but I found it boring especially because the levels are large and empty.

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

I bring SS2 into it because I never played SS1 and you said SS2 was the second best. Which means that we either have a very different taste or SS1 was much much better than SS2.

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

This sounds indeed promising. Was it actually talking to you or did you need to read endless messages like in Marathon?

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.

It's exactly the same story telling mechanism done in SS2 and Doom 3 so it must have been better on several acounts because I can't remember people praising Doom 3 for the logs of the dead people and found it bad in SS2.

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

Again you might be mistaken. I guess I could sum up the story of HL1 in a similar way that you could sum up that of SS1 only with HL1 I liked that I actually could experience parts of the story instead of just reading about it like in SS2. Seeing people die makes me feel more than log reading...

--
Werner Spahl (spahl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) Freedom for
"The meaning of my life is to make me crazy" Vorlonships
.

Relevant Pages

  • 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. ... 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. ... 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. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action)
  • Re: Half-Life 2 three years on.
    ... It's not written down in logs but evolves with the game. ... course it is nothing compared to Bloodlines and maybe to SS1, ... only know SS2 and I can't remember much of that besides everyone is dead. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action)
  • Re: Half-Life 2 three years on.
    ... As I already said I never played SS1 but found the concept as well as ... were inexplicably removed from SS2. ... Full blown cinematic experiences were first with HL and done very well in ... NOLF and other games. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action)
  • Re: Half-Life 2 three years on.
    ... Maybe I have missed something with SS1 as I only know SS2 but in the ... The sense of isolation was there in the original System Shock as well. ... However, I found SS2 to be a fairly average game, especially in level ... System Shock 1 had a lot more believable levels. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action)
  • Re: Half-Life 2 three years on.
    ... As I said, I never played SS1 only SS2 but at that time, I was amazed ... Or play SS1. ... First of all, SS2 was the worse game, compared to the storyline of SS1. ... compare. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action)