pomegranate
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- Sep 30, 2004
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I have been wanting to post my feelings for days now, and haven't made any comment on either here or on PHL (where I've also posted this response) before now. This is what I have to say. It's quite a lot, but I think I've expressed myself in a way that might help people understand why others some people feel the way they do about HL2.
Starting note: Half Life is still, by some considerable margin, my favourite game. Nothing since has created the same feeling of atmosphere, tension, fear and drama. No other FPS had such a marvelously clever (and cleverly told) storyline. To me, only Allied Assault, Call Of Duty and AvP 2have come close to matching the atmosphere of HL, and none matched it for the distance it advanced the genre.
Half-Life 2 should have been the follow-up to Half-Life in every aspect. From what I'd read of interviews after HL, I felt that Valve were a different kind of developer, one who knew exactly how to make a perfect game. Gabe and the other guy knew that, ultimately, the best-selling games are generally the ones that are most fun (Sims aside). Marc Laidlaw knew how to write a story that would yank you into the world you were interacting with, and manipulate your emotions they were pizza dough. like a The artists knew how to design a world and its inhabitants that did the most with the technology available, and made fantastic events and creatures seem completely believeable and not hokey in the slightest. In my eyes, Valve WERE IT when it came to making FPSs. No-one could touch them. They had a unique magic touch. They had made one game, that stood alone from all other computer games.
So when I saw, in the shop, a magazine with "PC Zone" written in a telling shade of orange, and underneath a certain Ancient Greek symbol in the same colour, you could understand if my heart raced a little. The second coming WOULD happen. There was no need to worry if it would be any good. This was VALVE. It was a law of the universe that everything they made would be gold - perfect, impeccible, without flaw. I cared only a little when I heard of the delay. After all, I was only 20 at the time, so (baring fatal accident) I would very likely play the game at some point in the next 50-60 years. I would die having played the perfect sequel to the perfect FPS.
But, within about 10 minutes of playing, I felt something was amiss. Where was the atmosphere? Where was the sense of place, of fear, of danger? Where were the surprises? Where was the suspense? Nothing shocked me or made my jaw drop. I thought, ah it's okay, I'm just tired from work, it'll pick up soon. And so I left my first session just before I got to the hoverboat.
And yet, it didn't really ever pick up. I never felt into the game. I never felt I was fighting to survive. I didn't really know what I was fighting for - no-one ever actually said what the aim of the resistance was. I didn't know WHAT I was fighting for. In HL, you were first fighting to stay alive, and then to stop the destruction of the Earth. In HL2, that's kind of already happened. You don't know what you're meant to be able to achieve, or how you're going to do it, besides killing Breen and destroying the Citadel (which you can guess from watching the trailers).
To quantify my feelings, I think I found the game maybe one quarter as much fun as I expected it to be. I find it hard to express why, so below are a few arbitray reasons.
-No Hyrda, Prowler or Combine Assassin (all in trailers/concept art)
-Limited music made action sequences far less compelling.
-Strider's not impaling people on their legs (in trailers)
-Shit AI, on Combine and NPCs
-No majorly significant plot points (besides Eli being kidnapped, and Mossman's betrayal) that couldn't be GUESSED BY WATCHING THE TRAILERS!
-The Story in General. People defend it as subtle and clever, but I think that's just another way of saying non-existant. I get really really pissed off at people saying, in response to such complaints, "Ah you're too dumb to understand the story, Valve tells it in a clever way, you need cutscenes to understand what's going, you retards." NO. NO. **** Off. Half-Life worked in the same way, and that storyline was absolutely awesome. Do you people (HL2 story defenders) think that no-one else played HL1? I did. I knew what was going on, noticed out all the nuances and what they meant (e.g. dead scientists on Xen). Yes, the same method was used in HL2. But the story it delivered was very boring, without much drama and so not compelling. This is the point people like myself are making.
I wanted to know:
-Why were the Vortigaunts working with the resistance?
-What happened between HL1 and the 7-hour war?
-What happened on Xen after HL2?
-How did the Xen aliens get to the rest of Earth?
-Who does the G-Man work for? What is with his teleportation/omnipresence?
-Did Breen actually die at the end?
-What happened to C17 when the Citadel blew?
-Who are the Combine? What do they want with Earth?
In a interview with Gamespy last year, Doug Lombard said, regarding the story, "Sort of learning more, getting deeper into the universe, and learning more about what happened at Black Mesa and about the events.... we debrief Gordon on what's happened since then and why he is needed now." Pretty much false.
It's no use saying "Oh, all this will be wrapped up in HL3." I don't care. I want at least SOME answers now, or rather on Sunday when I finished the game. Besides which, I really doubt HL3 will answer all the questions from HL1 and 2. I'm sure whatever the scenario, it's still gonna be a FPS and so there will be limited opportunity and suitable ways of exploring the backstory and past events to people's satisfaction.
- Lombardi also said "At first it seems like you're still fighting against a military-police faction, as well as the aliens, but throughout the game we allow the player to make allegiances with certain subsets of both sides." Er, is this referring to when you meet and fight with different cells of the resistance? Hardly as dramatic as it sounds.
-Stupid plot mechanisms (a mischevious headcrab stuffs up the teleport = Breen knows you are in C17, so you have to flee. Not quite the same as "a mysterious sample of crystal from another dimension is exposed (at the direction of the Administrator) to exotic radiation, causing Xen and Earth to temporarily merge and transport hundreds of bizarre aliens into Black Mesa."
-I think the combine pursuit should've been more intense. Woulda liked to have seen more choppers and some tanks/APC chasing through the countryside.
-Frequent aimlessness
-Lack of motivation (what am I supposed to be doing) = lack of drama = hard to feel immersed = boredom, quit game
-Shortness. This game was meant to be twice as long as HL1. Bullshit, it's shorter. Very, very aggravated by this.
- Alyx. She didn't seem believable as a character. The familiarity with Gordon seemed forced, her voice acting seemed at times very unexpressive (e.g. when they find Eli at Nova Prospekt).
-Limited explorability of locales (that is, being stuck to a generally narrow path, without interesting features outside of the intended path)
-Missing "Zombies at dawn" section from trailers
-Striders far wimpier than I expected
-More time spent in C17 at the start would have been cool
-Limited effectiveness of using Grav Gun to carry a shield
-Missed opportunities for implementation of physics to combat enemy (a la Traptown) - almost as bad as the use of GeoMod in Red Faction.
-Some dumb chapter titles. Might sound petty but it was a little touch I really appreciated about the original game, e.g. "Surface Tension", "Interloper", "Questionable Ethics" - "We Don't Go There..." - ooh, tenseness! "Follow Freeman" -- please. That's just lazy.
-None of the welding-shit-together-to-make-tools that was suggested back last year
-No OICW-style gun
-Someone noted this elsewhere and I agree: the NPCs seem a bit emotionless, characterless. Also, Barney and also Eli seem far too jovial most of the time given the circumstances. Only Kleiner really resonated for me.
I didn't *get* the Scanners - what difference did it make if they snapped you? None.
-Father Gregori. Just a boring, "kooky" nutter. What's his story? Why is he there? Never mind, let's blast some zombies.
-The slow teleport - utterly, utterly pointless! Everything that happened (the uprising, Eli being taken to Citadel) in that week could have reasonably happened in the time Gordon was away from the city anyway. It's needlesness jarred badly, a severe case of unnecessary deux ex machina IMO.
-Getting into the Citadel wasn't the interesting challenge it could have been. "Let's see, how about a massive assault on the gates, using the huge caches of RPGs we've got, and dog." "Actually, no, that would be too much fun, how about Gordon just slips in through the basement instead."
For the sake of balance, good stuff:
All of last two chapters up to the end
The Combine super-rifle
The enhanced Gravity Gun
Scripted sequences weren't irritating - seemed natural progress of events considering the circumstances. But scripted behaviour in place of true AI was annoying (e.g. enemies only using environment to attack by being scripted)
Blowing up the chimney during the Hoverboat section. Pretty odd but cool.
DOG. Could've been irritating, but used well in scripted sequences. Might've been nice to see more of it.
The section in the trainyard just after the mine was cool, nicely paced combat.
Combine-versus-Xen fights looked cool
The whole of Nova Prospekt was a blast
The fight in and on top of the "Museum or whatever" was good
The Mossman twist, and countertwist, were surprising, quite mature
Some of Breen's speechs were clever, made me think.
Combine Soldiers sending up flares during attacks. A cool little touch I only understood what it was the second time I saw it.
Fighting alongside Barney (again) was fun.
Fighting the big Ant Lions was a enjoyable genuine challenge.
The uprising was nicely done
The ascent to the top of the Citadel, with the view of the city, was stunning.
The first on-rail section of the Citadel was a great homage to the start of HL1
The bridge on the buggy section, good sense of place (as in, holy shit I'm a mile from the ground)
The flight from the Combine at the start was cool, very nice extended set piece.
I know these are all small points, and I might seem petty. But to me it's all the tiny things that made HL1 so superb. Unfortunately, a lot of the small things in HL2 were annoying and reduced my enjoyment considerably.
That is what it comes down to: It wasn't much fun for me. Sigh.
Time for a new hobby.
Thanks for reading.
Starting note: Half Life is still, by some considerable margin, my favourite game. Nothing since has created the same feeling of atmosphere, tension, fear and drama. No other FPS had such a marvelously clever (and cleverly told) storyline. To me, only Allied Assault, Call Of Duty and AvP 2have come close to matching the atmosphere of HL, and none matched it for the distance it advanced the genre.
Half-Life 2 should have been the follow-up to Half-Life in every aspect. From what I'd read of interviews after HL, I felt that Valve were a different kind of developer, one who knew exactly how to make a perfect game. Gabe and the other guy knew that, ultimately, the best-selling games are generally the ones that are most fun (Sims aside). Marc Laidlaw knew how to write a story that would yank you into the world you were interacting with, and manipulate your emotions they were pizza dough. like a The artists knew how to design a world and its inhabitants that did the most with the technology available, and made fantastic events and creatures seem completely believeable and not hokey in the slightest. In my eyes, Valve WERE IT when it came to making FPSs. No-one could touch them. They had a unique magic touch. They had made one game, that stood alone from all other computer games.
So when I saw, in the shop, a magazine with "PC Zone" written in a telling shade of orange, and underneath a certain Ancient Greek symbol in the same colour, you could understand if my heart raced a little. The second coming WOULD happen. There was no need to worry if it would be any good. This was VALVE. It was a law of the universe that everything they made would be gold - perfect, impeccible, without flaw. I cared only a little when I heard of the delay. After all, I was only 20 at the time, so (baring fatal accident) I would very likely play the game at some point in the next 50-60 years. I would die having played the perfect sequel to the perfect FPS.
But, within about 10 minutes of playing, I felt something was amiss. Where was the atmosphere? Where was the sense of place, of fear, of danger? Where were the surprises? Where was the suspense? Nothing shocked me or made my jaw drop. I thought, ah it's okay, I'm just tired from work, it'll pick up soon. And so I left my first session just before I got to the hoverboat.
And yet, it didn't really ever pick up. I never felt into the game. I never felt I was fighting to survive. I didn't really know what I was fighting for - no-one ever actually said what the aim of the resistance was. I didn't know WHAT I was fighting for. In HL, you were first fighting to stay alive, and then to stop the destruction of the Earth. In HL2, that's kind of already happened. You don't know what you're meant to be able to achieve, or how you're going to do it, besides killing Breen and destroying the Citadel (which you can guess from watching the trailers).
To quantify my feelings, I think I found the game maybe one quarter as much fun as I expected it to be. I find it hard to express why, so below are a few arbitray reasons.
-No Hyrda, Prowler or Combine Assassin (all in trailers/concept art)
-Limited music made action sequences far less compelling.
-Strider's not impaling people on their legs (in trailers)
-Shit AI, on Combine and NPCs
-No majorly significant plot points (besides Eli being kidnapped, and Mossman's betrayal) that couldn't be GUESSED BY WATCHING THE TRAILERS!
-The Story in General. People defend it as subtle and clever, but I think that's just another way of saying non-existant. I get really really pissed off at people saying, in response to such complaints, "Ah you're too dumb to understand the story, Valve tells it in a clever way, you need cutscenes to understand what's going, you retards." NO. NO. **** Off. Half-Life worked in the same way, and that storyline was absolutely awesome. Do you people (HL2 story defenders) think that no-one else played HL1? I did. I knew what was going on, noticed out all the nuances and what they meant (e.g. dead scientists on Xen). Yes, the same method was used in HL2. But the story it delivered was very boring, without much drama and so not compelling. This is the point people like myself are making.
I wanted to know:
-Why were the Vortigaunts working with the resistance?
-What happened between HL1 and the 7-hour war?
-What happened on Xen after HL2?
-How did the Xen aliens get to the rest of Earth?
-Who does the G-Man work for? What is with his teleportation/omnipresence?
-Did Breen actually die at the end?
-What happened to C17 when the Citadel blew?
-Who are the Combine? What do they want with Earth?
In a interview with Gamespy last year, Doug Lombard said, regarding the story, "Sort of learning more, getting deeper into the universe, and learning more about what happened at Black Mesa and about the events.... we debrief Gordon on what's happened since then and why he is needed now." Pretty much false.
It's no use saying "Oh, all this will be wrapped up in HL3." I don't care. I want at least SOME answers now, or rather on Sunday when I finished the game. Besides which, I really doubt HL3 will answer all the questions from HL1 and 2. I'm sure whatever the scenario, it's still gonna be a FPS and so there will be limited opportunity and suitable ways of exploring the backstory and past events to people's satisfaction.
- Lombardi also said "At first it seems like you're still fighting against a military-police faction, as well as the aliens, but throughout the game we allow the player to make allegiances with certain subsets of both sides." Er, is this referring to when you meet and fight with different cells of the resistance? Hardly as dramatic as it sounds.
-Stupid plot mechanisms (a mischevious headcrab stuffs up the teleport = Breen knows you are in C17, so you have to flee. Not quite the same as "a mysterious sample of crystal from another dimension is exposed (at the direction of the Administrator) to exotic radiation, causing Xen and Earth to temporarily merge and transport hundreds of bizarre aliens into Black Mesa."
-I think the combine pursuit should've been more intense. Woulda liked to have seen more choppers and some tanks/APC chasing through the countryside.
-Frequent aimlessness
-Lack of motivation (what am I supposed to be doing) = lack of drama = hard to feel immersed = boredom, quit game
-Shortness. This game was meant to be twice as long as HL1. Bullshit, it's shorter. Very, very aggravated by this.
- Alyx. She didn't seem believable as a character. The familiarity with Gordon seemed forced, her voice acting seemed at times very unexpressive (e.g. when they find Eli at Nova Prospekt).
-Limited explorability of locales (that is, being stuck to a generally narrow path, without interesting features outside of the intended path)
-Missing "Zombies at dawn" section from trailers
-Striders far wimpier than I expected
-More time spent in C17 at the start would have been cool
-Limited effectiveness of using Grav Gun to carry a shield
-Missed opportunities for implementation of physics to combat enemy (a la Traptown) - almost as bad as the use of GeoMod in Red Faction.
-Some dumb chapter titles. Might sound petty but it was a little touch I really appreciated about the original game, e.g. "Surface Tension", "Interloper", "Questionable Ethics" - "We Don't Go There..." - ooh, tenseness! "Follow Freeman" -- please. That's just lazy.
-None of the welding-shit-together-to-make-tools that was suggested back last year
-No OICW-style gun
-Someone noted this elsewhere and I agree: the NPCs seem a bit emotionless, characterless. Also, Barney and also Eli seem far too jovial most of the time given the circumstances. Only Kleiner really resonated for me.
I didn't *get* the Scanners - what difference did it make if they snapped you? None.
-Father Gregori. Just a boring, "kooky" nutter. What's his story? Why is he there? Never mind, let's blast some zombies.
-The slow teleport - utterly, utterly pointless! Everything that happened (the uprising, Eli being taken to Citadel) in that week could have reasonably happened in the time Gordon was away from the city anyway. It's needlesness jarred badly, a severe case of unnecessary deux ex machina IMO.
-Getting into the Citadel wasn't the interesting challenge it could have been. "Let's see, how about a massive assault on the gates, using the huge caches of RPGs we've got, and dog." "Actually, no, that would be too much fun, how about Gordon just slips in through the basement instead."
For the sake of balance, good stuff:
All of last two chapters up to the end
The Combine super-rifle
The enhanced Gravity Gun
Scripted sequences weren't irritating - seemed natural progress of events considering the circumstances. But scripted behaviour in place of true AI was annoying (e.g. enemies only using environment to attack by being scripted)
Blowing up the chimney during the Hoverboat section. Pretty odd but cool.
DOG. Could've been irritating, but used well in scripted sequences. Might've been nice to see more of it.
The section in the trainyard just after the mine was cool, nicely paced combat.
Combine-versus-Xen fights looked cool
The whole of Nova Prospekt was a blast
The fight in and on top of the "Museum or whatever" was good
The Mossman twist, and countertwist, were surprising, quite mature
Some of Breen's speechs were clever, made me think.
Combine Soldiers sending up flares during attacks. A cool little touch I only understood what it was the second time I saw it.
Fighting alongside Barney (again) was fun.
Fighting the big Ant Lions was a enjoyable genuine challenge.
The uprising was nicely done
The ascent to the top of the Citadel, with the view of the city, was stunning.
The first on-rail section of the Citadel was a great homage to the start of HL1
The bridge on the buggy section, good sense of place (as in, holy shit I'm a mile from the ground)
The flight from the Combine at the start was cool, very nice extended set piece.
I know these are all small points, and I might seem petty. But to me it's all the tiny things that made HL1 so superb. Unfortunately, a lot of the small things in HL2 were annoying and reduced my enjoyment considerably.
That is what it comes down to: It wasn't much fun for me. Sigh.
Time for a new hobby.
Thanks for reading.
Personally I would have found the challenge of dealing with such dangers entertaining....similar to dealing with the tentacle in the first game, perhaps.
