this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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25 Years On, Half-Life Still Feels Like It’s From the Future (www.ign.com)
submitted 1 year ago by nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This article has a strange vibe that I can’t quite place my finger on. It almost feels like there were SEO mandates that had to be written in with as much as it talks about Call Of Duty.

While it’s certainly possible to draw lines from Half-Life to COD, I think the connections are very tenuous. Contrary to modern popular belief, Half-Life did not introduce the concept of plots to shooters. There were already numerous takes on military shooters, and Call Of Duty draws a more direct linage from the Medal Of Honor games. The first Medal Of Honor was being developed right when Half-Life released.

While it’s possible Half-Life influences seeped in, I don’t think they were particularly strong. Medal Of Honor and then COD games had very different goals than Half-Life.

Half-Life is and was fantastic. The enemy AI is tuned in a way that feels deceptively intelligent while not actually outthinking the player. The transitions between levels feel nearly seamless, making the game a single frantic adventure. The puzzles are just the right amount of brain teasing not to be frustrating.

I know it’s common to frame Half-Life as an elevated DOOM or Quake, but I think of it as a more accessible and streamlined Marathon or System Shock. It took the feel of an immersive sim, and then took the environmental reactivity of, for example, Build Engine games and put all of it into a fully 3D world with a lot of care.

Comparing it specifically to Call Of Duty is very, very strange. I know I already mentioned that, but I just can’t get past it. Call Of Duty campaigns are much more linear shooting galleries full of exciting setpieces, the old games wanted immersion by way of overwhelming you. They weren’t asking the player to think, just act.

It’s not a condemnation of other games not to try and perfectly copy Half-Life. There are tons of immersive sims, open world games, survival shooters, tactical shooters, ego shooters, and shooters that bridge into being RPGs in ways that would be held back by trying to be Half-Life.

[–] addie 13 points 1 year ago

Well; setting aside the small reference pool of modern gaming journalism, I'm not sure that it is such a big step from HL to CoD, just a bit of a step down. HL is as much of a 'corridor shooter' as you could ever hope to find - there's one path through it, and I doubt that many people deviate from it all that much on a playthrough. The difference is, that HL is super imaginatively dressed up on that one path. The levels have a real sense of place. Like you say, the puzzles are never all that difficult, but they're extremely well-integrated into the design; they feel like the kind of obstacles that you might have to overcome in a top-secret research facility when disaster has struck. And they're mainly new puzzles; nothing hackneyed or tropey here.

From the article:

In many ways, Half-Life can be seen as an indictment of the video game industry: how can a 25 year-old game be better than almost every shooter that has followed it? Why has its ambition only ever been exceeded only by its own sequel? It paints a picture of a stagnated industry still playing with toys from the 1990s.

I think there's two problems here; one is that it's safer to play follow-the-leader, and one is learning the wrong lesson from the leader. Kind of hard to believe now, but HL was considered a graphic powerhouse when it came out, requiring some of the top class machines of the day. But I think that the kind of 'immersive feeling of wonder' that HL has via its design conjuring up a real place is mostly due to its environmental storytelling and the novelty of not knowing what to expect around each corner. The imitators saw the twisty-but-linear game, and decided that the most important thing to copy was to have as much graphics as possible. Can't copy the imaginativeness and the care, so yeah, perpetually taking control away from you for a shooting gallery setpiece, when in fact that only draws you in in a superficial way.

I wouldn't mind other games copying HL if what they wanted to copy was inventiveness, experimentation, and non-stop gameplay. Copying the things that were new about HL is the complete wrong thing to copy, though.