Jump to: Before City 17 :: Reasons For the Hate :: Conclusion
If I were a bit more like the rest of the universe and a bit less like myself, two things would be true: One: I’d begin this article with a definition of the scientific meaning of “half-life,” or Two: This article would simply never be written. Unfortunately I can neither start this article with a definition of “half-life” which would lead into the witty observation that, by all means, Half-Life 2 by definition is only half as good as the original Half-Life, nor can I ignore my burning necessity to inform the gaming masses that Half-Life 2 is not the end-all, be-all hallmark of gaming ecstasy and bliss. Do keep in mind that this is entirely an analysis of the game from a game developer’s and a gamer’s perspective; in short, this is not a review, but I heard you can get one of those things from other sites.
As an after-the-fact edit to this article, let me say a few things that I’ve taken flak for from this article. First of all, I’m going pretty all-out with nitpicking and finding flaws, that I normally wouldn’t do with a game; however, I honestly feel that Half-Life 2 is not a “Best Game Ever” or even “Game of the Year” contender, and as such, I’m going all-out on reasons for this not to be the case. My personal opinion is that I was absolutely disappointed by the game, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a “bad” game, but I don’t consider it a good one either. I’d much rather see games like Resident Evil 4 or Psychonauts (or, yes, the upcoming Dungeon Siege 2) net these kinds of rewards, because in each case the developer really wanted to “try something different” with a game outside of adding sexy graphics or a nifty physics engine. I absolutely love games like Resident Evil 4, and felt mildly attracted to DOOM 3, but in both of these cases, these games are bad sequels. I would never tell a huge fan of Resident Evil 1-3 to pick up RE4, because it’s a different type of game entirely, and I feel it should be named as such a game. DOOM 3 is still an FPS like DOOM 1 and 2, but it’s an entirely different kind of game. The same is true of Half-Life 2. Keep this in mind while reading through the rest of this editorial.
Before City 17
Let me say that I loved the original Half-Life. I played through it, and then I played through the Opposing Force expansion pack, and I do regard the game as one of the most fun and influential games to ever be released. With that game’s excellence branded into my squishy brain’s core by means of a combination of stamp plus hot metal, it was only natural for me to get unnaturally excited for the release of Half-Life 2. The first videos released of the Source engine tech demo (along with a few gameplay bits) from E3 2003 made me almost weep with a sense of superfluous joy and excitement. On Monday, November 15th, 2004 I did nothing except read up on Half-Life 2 articles and threads across a number of forums, the excitement for the imminent release building up inside my body until I began pissing little lambda symbols on frequent trips to the bathroom from the heavy caffeine intake required to keep me up well beyond the November 16th, 2004 3:00am unlock time. It was late at night, and I was just refreshing The Shack constantly. Twenty minutes until unlock. Fifteen. Ten. Five. One minute remaining. Ten seconds… And it’s Live. I was one of the lucky few to get the game unlocked fairly fast. And then, the time had come:
Until finally…
And I played for two hours at that point, got a few hours of sleep, and then skipped class the next day so I could continue playing all day. And the day after that, at roughly 1:00pm, I had the game beaten. And I walked away from my computer at that point and said aloud to myself: “What a waste.”
Reasons For the Hate
Half-Life 2’s introduction, the first twenty-thirty minutes of the game (which I just replayed through before writing this), is probably the sole reason for my not bashing the game as a complete failure as a sequel to the legendary Half-Life. The game opens up with the mysterious G-Man from the first game, spewing such foreshadowing statements like “The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world,” and the screen doing a whole bunch of special screen-ops that make the feeling conveyed to the player all the more ominous (inverse color filters are obviously a sign of pure, unadulterated evil). The player is let out of a train station, and instantly is shown a big television-like billboard with an old man speaking about City 17 and talking about “our benefactors.” Oh, 1984 please hold me and don’t let go. What follows is a very immersive, and incredibly well-done series of exploration and action sequences culminating in a rooftop chase from the visually and motivationally ambiguous guards that appear to be abusing all the citizens of City 17.
The first tinge of disappointment I felt with Half-Life 2 came when I was first given a gun, replacing my trusty crowbar, which let me face the combine in a toe-to-toe battle. And this gun… is a little shiny silver thing that makes a pea-shooting 9mm baretta in Resident Evil look like a damn rocket launcher. This little gun neither had a deadly feel nor a deadly sound to it, and was the first instance in the game that brought me out of City 17 and back to reality with a “What the hell was Valve thinking?” exclamation to the empty room I was playing the game in. Being given a gun was fairly disappointing on its own, because actually being able to dispatch the combine with a few bullets really made them far less scary and intimidating, ruining the excitement that had been building and building up to that point.
And the rest of the game just went downhill from there for me (sans one moment, but I’ll return to that). My feeling while I was playing through the game and even now as I write this is that Half-Life 2 never had a consistent “vision” in what it really wanted to be. One of the most important aspects of a game is that all the elements combine to form one thing: a brilliant, cohesive gaming experience. The introduction to Half-Life 2 was fantastic, perhaps one of the best times I’ve ever had in my history of gaming, but after that, it felt like there was another “director” in charge while I was trying escape Kleiner’s lab. Another “director” while I went through the incredibly repetitive Ravenholm sequence. Another for the ant-lion sequence, the prison sequence, and so on and so forth. Every hour of gameplay was like Valve was trying a different experiment with gameplay, and while this would work if Half-Life 2 were split into a variety of “episodes” or releases, it does not work when playing through a single, continuous adventure experienced through a single character in the timespan of a single day (the TV show 24 suffers a similar fate when trying to watch through all twenty-four episodes in a row, but is more acceptable when you watch all twenty-four episodes in a week-by-week progression).
It may be that Valve intended to build these various types of gameplay on top of each other in an effort to ease the player into the game, and eventually make the player take all this knowledge at one point and use it for the rest of the game, but this never happens. Each segment of the game does not teach the player any of the necessities for the rest of the game (other than the bit where the player got to play fetch with Dog having just gotten the gravity gun). A new segment occurs, it may be fun for a few minutes, but the game simply drags on and on until the player is tired of the segment, and then Half-Life 2 takes a completely new direction turning a blind eye to the previous one for the rest of the game. There is no better example of this than the ant-lion “weapon” that you can use to focus a small group of ant-lions on an opponent, buying time for the player to run away or do something. This technique was only usable for a brief forty-five minutes of play, and then it could never be used again. Similarly with the cool environmental physics tricks in Ravenholm; sure, you could use the gravity gun for the rest of the game, but you never got to use features of the environment (like an enemy standing on a wooden platform) again quite like you could in Ravenholm.
The original Half-Life worked because it actually felt like I was Gordon Freeman in a desperate attempt to both escape from Black Mesa and save the scientists while trying to do so. The gameplay never really got repetitive because it was kept varied through a wide variety of enemies and bosses that were constantly keeping me, as a player, trying to refine my strategy for dealing with them. Half-Life 2 had very little variety in the actual enemies, so it tried keeping the gameplay varied through far more obvious means: throwing the player into very, very different situations, and never actually letting the player decide how to do things. I was never told how to best kill enemies in Half-Life, I just had to figure things out for myself, but in Half-Life 2, certain areas could only be “passed” by using certain features of the game. I could summon ant-lions to help me get past guard towers, but I could never summon them after that to help me in a situation I thought they could be used for. I could only, really, get rid of striders by using a rocket launcher (I would’ve preferred a “sweet spot” where I could use the weapon of my choice and had the rocket launcher as a “fire anytime” weapon that I had to conserve ammo with). There was very little room for my input as a player in Half-Life 2, I just had to play through the game as Valve wanted me to.
And speaking of enemies, where were all of my favorite Half-Life monsters? The only enemies I ever got to see were headcrabs (plus headcrab variation #2), three differently uniformed combine, ant-lions, and striders. The original Half-Life had everything from mutated dogs, to giant fish, a big alien plant, ninjas, mercenaries, and more. And there was only one instance in Half-Life 2 where these things actually fought each other (ant-lions vs. combine). What the hell happened to all the monsters from Black Mesa? We know it was nuked, and we obviously a number of aliens and such escaped (there was a war that the Combine won), so there has to be more of them somewhere, or else things like the ant-lions simply wouldn’t exist at all.
Which leads me directly into my next point: the game’s story, which I felt was handled perfectly within the first half-hour of the game through detailed character interactions, random conversations heard by the player, and a really cool way to handle part of the back-story (part of the back-story; I still wanted to know more). The story that’s actually presented to the player is fairly weak, and lacks the kind of “intrigue” that the first game had, such as the government forces coming in to Black Mesa to cover-up the entire event, when the player was thinking they were coming to actually help Gordon and the scientists. Instead we get a weak plot twist where one of the characters, whom Alyx disliked (wow, that wasn’t a big enough of a hint), is a traitor to the rest of the good characters. I was really looking forward to a more complex and more “visible” storyline in the game, but that may just be a personal preference, so I won’t belabor the idea too much. Also, I don’t buy that it had a really deep storyline that I had to “pay attention closely” to understand; I’m a big fan of the “show don’t tell” writing mantra, but Half-Life 2’s “deeper story” simply wasn’t present. I’ll understand if Valve wanted the player to create their own ideas about the story, but that does not mean Valve had something specific in mind while creating the game.
Finally in this laundry list of hatred, I wanted to comment on one very sorely lacking feature of the engine that I felt Valve should have done anything to improve: the level-loading. While replaying the game’s introduction, my immersion into the game simply kept getting broken up with every level load. To this day, I wonder why Valve didn’t do everything in their power to try and suppress the level loads into as small a number as possible. It seems to me that this feature would’ve improved the overall flow of game better than the inclusion of a pretty pixel shader effect thrown in somewhere.
Conclusion
Basically, it just comes down to one statement: Half-Life 2 is a good experience at times, but it fails in its attempt at being a good game. It takes a lot of steps in the right direction, but the jumbled mess of gameplay ideas just isn’t nearly cohesive or tight enough to form a solid gaming experience. Valve simply did not show enough restraint in the use of their technology to form an efficient game, but rather was too aroused by their own work, and threw in an entire level of only being able to use the gravity gun, an hour-long segment of nothing but strider fighting (every strider I killed after the first did nothing except diminish the accomplishment I felt the first time), “puzzles” consisting only of “clever” usage of physics, and so on. If nothing else, the one thing I want people to take away from this article is this: clever usage of barrel or crate physics does not make a game more immersive or more unique
Half-Life 2 had the potential to be an amazing game, but it just squandered it so many ways that I can only point to very specific things in particular and say “Yeah, that’s cool, I hope people continue that,” rather than hold up a box of the game and say “We need more of this.”
28 Comments
I don’t have time to do a full response now but did you really beat the game 13 hours after it was released despite fitting a partial nights sleep in there? Half-Life 2 wasn’t superlong but it wasn’t nearly that short either. I didn’t skip class at all and didn’t go to bed super late but even still I was playing pretty much every free moment I had and it wasn’t until late on the second day of release that I finished it.
I actually said that I beat it at 1pm the next day, as in the next day after I skipped class to play it.
so you rushed through the game and then OMG WTF LOL 11!!! it sux0rs?
would you use a beer bong to guzzle Dom perignon? or eat a filet mignon sandwich in 5 seconds?
It took me about 2 weeks to finish HL2, but I have a job, a wife and a newborn baby, so i was playing maybe 90mins to 2 hours a nite if I was lucky , I thought it was a great game, and 3 of my coworkers who are NOT gamers got talked into getting it by me and they all thought it was GREAT
I am just curious what you thought was a good game?
surely not Dungeon siege or doom 3?
I understand a lot of people think Half-Life 2 is good; did you read the first paragraph? And I personally can’t see what they see in the game. Certainly it is a good display of a few technical feats (the lip-synching system is absolutely amazing), but I just do not see it to be a good game. I lost my personal immersion in the world after the introductory sequence, but I still wanted to see the game through, I was hoping for a glimmer of the excellence I saw in the first half-hour of play. And I got that excellence when it came time to taking down my first strider. I ran from bunker to bunker avoiding it, and eventually I took it down, and I felt good.
That good feeling vanished after I had to take down another 5-6 with the “LOL UNLIMITED ROCKET SUPPLY” box. Wow, it takes a real gamer to be able to take down something with an unlimited supply of rockets.
DOOM 3 would’ve been good if it was condensed. And yes, I do feel Dungeon Siege is a good game. The designers for both DOOM 3 and Dungeon Siege had a clear vision for the game they wanted to play, and I enjoyed that game. Half-Life 2 felt like a mish-mash of “oh, this would be cool in a game” ideas that should’ve gotten the cut from the game when they felt “out of place,” but Valve was too into their physics engine (I really, really hated the gravity gun after an hour or so of play; how many times can they possibly force me to rely on it or use it?) and just wanted to pimp it in the game as often as they could.
You want a good example of an absolutely fantastic game which manages to keep a consistent “mood” and keep the player immersed throughout a long gameplay period? Take a look at Resident Evil 4. Throughout the game, I never felt any sort of repetition, but there was never a point where I noticed a change in how I was supposed to play the game, I never felt forced into using a certain strategy, etc. I felt like I was playing a well-organized, well-designed, and very tightly-made game with a clear vision.
As I said, I loved Half-Life, and I was hoping for that same feeling of immersion in Half-Life 2, but it was broken by Valve wanting “too much cool stuff.” Instead, Half-Life 2 ended up being a warioware of FPS gaming ideas.
I just completed HL2 myself. I was impressed with the graphics, the flow of the game and how it felt like a thrill ride, and the physics. The story was very hit and miss, and the gameplay on the whole was a bit repetitive. There were about five or six hours there when I was wishing for some more weapons.
The biggest disappointment was that the gravity gun got upgraded for the last level. The very first thing I tried with the Gravity Gun when I got it was to test and see if I could pick up Dog or Alyx. I think I’m not the only person who was disappointed when that couldn’t be done. Ripping enemies off of catawalks, chunking guys six stories into the air into their buds, *that* is what I wanted from the start, not all the way at the end.
It was good. I’m glad I didn’t pay fifty for it (birthday present), as I would have felt ripped off.
I also hate Steam. So blasted pokey.
Well I’m glad I’m not the only one who was thoroughly disapointed with the game.
My major complaint was that it wasn’t so much a game as it was a gigantic tech demo for their havok implementation.
Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 both suffered from delayed releases which made the previously claimed “revolutionary advancements” nothing but a thing of the past by the time they came out. By the time Doom 3 finally came out, every rendering engine and its mother had per pixel lighting. The physics in Splinter Cell put Half-Life 2 to shame, unfortunately few people realized how common rigid body physics have become because most developers don’t use it as a gimmick to design their entire game around.
The first Half-Life game was amazing because it was very much a first-person survival horror game in a time where FPS games were fast-paced action oriented shooters. It seems like the designers at Valve are actually moving backward through the industry.
I bought the special edition HL2 box and I get more enjoyment wearing the shirt than I did playing the game.
You wore the T-Shirt? And you wonder why you dont get women trent?
Sina, learn to read. I didn’t write that. You know how I know? The only video-game related t-shirt I’ve ever had is the Cloud Strife one from the FF7 pre-order.
That’s how I know.
Ok I admit. I bet that guy isnt getting any!
*me goes back to the shadows awaiting another chance*
I don’t wear it in public. Only my EverQuest shirt.
Grow the fuck up.
Grow the fuck up.
Clever, I really understand your reasons for disagreeing with me, and I absolutely will never attempt to look at flaws in Half-Life 2 again. They simply don’t exist anymore. I have thrown my previous life into the past and have commenced “growing up.” I can honestly say that Half-Life 2 is the greatest game ever, because I am grown up, and have a brand new opinion to go with this newfound knowledge and experience.
And with this “growing up” has come the personal sense of knowledge I have that allows me to simply retort well, thought-out responses to an article that cannot possibly be reasonable since Half-Life 2 is the epitome of human accomplishment. Now, instead of writing such editorials on a piece of art which surpasses the art created by the likes of Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, I will simply say things such as “Half-Life 2 rox, fuk u dood.”
My point is now proven through a mere seven words, and people will love me for such well articulated sentiments. Thank you V, you have helped me find a new reason to life and breathe with your moving speech.
I bet you hate Apple Pie, also!
You HL2 hating, commie bastard!
You poor, poor man. Was there really nothing in it for you past the pistol? Not dodging mines dropped from a roving helicopter? Not screaming as zombies burst through the roof when you least expected it? Not a single spark of entertainment as you drove through antlion hordes to get to that thumper and safety, only to find the Combine had had the same idea? Did you not at least smile as you controlled your swarm of antlions across a twilight beach with the monolithic Combine defences lying dormant? Could you not sense the atmosphere as Dr. Breen addressed the Overwatch soldiers on their failure to capture you while you fought against them?
I could go on but that would labour the point. It isn’t unthinkable for someone not to be entertained by the game: there are people who don’t like sex for heaven’s sake. But for me to not only miss out on the entertainment, but not even show any signs that I recognised where the missing out had gone on? And then put that across to the public?
Perhaps it is the way I was taught, but one of the founding principles of reviewing anything for me is marking clearly the difference between what is actually bad, and what I simply cannot appreciate.
That’s nice.
I don’t recall ever reviewing anything in the article though, just analyzing it from a single gamer/game developer’s point of view.
Right. So what would be the difference between those two?
You’re treating it like I think it’s a horrible game with absolutely no redeeming value, when I say nothing of the sort. In fact, and I’m too lazy to re-read this to see if my original intent actually ended up in the final article, but I never even say it’s a bad game.
Though none of that matters anyway, as my main goal was to simply analyze the game from a gamer’s a game designer’s (namely the latter) point of view. The game had the potential to be fantastic, but the end product was just too gimmicky, and showed more of Valve’s erection for their physics engine than the well-designed, cohesive gaming experience that the original Half-Life was. Some people dug the new approach that Valve took with Half-Life 2, I absolutely hated it.
And people need to quit taking the article like it’s a personal attack against their own character. The game’s developers don’t go across the internet looking for any negative words about their beloved creation and then try and refute the people that write such pieces (at least, I would hope they didn’t), because it’s their creation, and they’re probably happy with the way it turned out. If gamers are happy with the way it turned out, there’s no reason to take it so closely to heart when a person didn’t love their game like they did. I can say that I didn’t enjoy Half-Life 2 as a whole, but I can acknowledge the technical achievements of it (the body motion and realism which characters possess during the few “group dialog” scenes are fantastic, in particular) while still thinking that the game didn’t take advantage of such technology like it could have.
Instead of using the incredible technology to make a truly immersive story with great character-to-character dialog sequences, Valve thought it more important to show off their physics engine throughout the game. And the ant-lion thing, while cool, was only usable for forty-five minutes of gameplay. All the cool tricks you learn while you go through that segment are completely useless for the rest of the game, and I thought that was a poor way of introducing something and then continuing without it. And the final level, people thought the uber gravity gun was awesome, but instead of being faced with a challenge that made me (as a player) rely on everything the game had taught me up to that point, I’m given a big uber-powerful gravity gun and ample health and armor (that can almost never drop below 100, with the copious number of regeneration consoles), and breeze through the end. Sure, you feel like a superhero, but it was just so anticlimatic and simplistic that it ruined the end-game challenge and accomplishment.
There are just a few examples of things that annoyed me within the game from both a gamer and designer’s point of view, and a few of the “design tactics” I would absolutely never like to see again. The game just felt like a gimmicky “adventure” throughout loosely connected “levels.” And that’s the sole point, and there were far better examples of great games that came out in 2004 that deserved more attention than Half-Life 2.
Sorry if this is incoherent, caffeine and lunch are still on my to-do list at this point in the day. And, by the way Varsity, I wasn’t sure if you were actually capable of making a comment that didn’t include a taunt at the beginning. If you want to be taken seriously, try not sound like a jaded Half-Life 2 fanboy. That’s the only reason I wrote this fairly lengthy response: because I was proud of your miraculous achievement. You’re growing up so fast.
“You’re treating it like I think it’s a horrible game with absolutely no redeeming value, when I say nothing of the sort. In fact, and I’m too lazy to re-read this to see if my original intent actually ended up in the final article, but I never even say it’s a bad game.”
Half-Life 2 - It’s Not a Good Game; Reasons For the Hate; “What a wasteâ€; fails in its attempt at being a good game; etc. To sum up my complaint, the entire article focuses almost exclusively on what you personally didn’t like, then goes on to apply an overall label.
Why, for instance, is it factually bad to have command antlions for only two chapters? It would be awful having them in Anticitizen One, or even Entanglement, plus they only have a limited lifetime before the novelty wears off (how long can you go on using the same weapon?). That you felt unhappy for them to be taken away doesn’t make it a bad decision. Similarly, why is it factually bad to give the player free reign over the last few maps? Just because other games choose to make the finale a quickload-fest cliche, doesn’t mean this one has to.
There’s nothing wrong with not liking something, as you are at pains to point out, but going on to proclaim it “bad” and “a waste” based on those mere opinions is not sound. “I never managed to like it” would perhaps be the fairest conclusion. I hate RPGs but I can at least recognise why others don’t.
You’ve not explained the difference between a review and an ‘analsis from a single gamer/game developer’s view’ yet, either.
I get tired of going in circles with HL2 fanboys. If you can’t acknowledge the validity of any of the things I’ve said thus far, I can already tell that this is going to be a fruitless waste of my time. I acknowledge that other people liked it, but I’m not a game reviewer, I’m not writing pieces for the consumer masses, I don’t need to apply an overall label for what other people thought about the game. This is an editorial, which means it’s my opinion.
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=335821
Just read that if you care that much.
“This is an editorial, which means it’s my opinion.”
Then please do not label it as fact.
I never did.
I could never get past the rubble in the first part on Half-Life! But I was still like “0mgZ Half-Lief 2!!1″ and after the bit with the baddies behind the 2 doors below the stairs which I thought was quite clever, it was all so repetitive that I got bored and never even bothered to complete it
I may be abnormal but atleast I am not alone!
“I never did.”
Half-Life 2 - It’s Not a Good Game; “What a wasteâ€; fails in its attempt at being a good game; Half-Life 2 had the potential to be an amazing game, but it just squandered it so many ways; etc.
I still never said it was bad (if you want to be technical about it), nor did I ever say something along the lines of: “This isn’t just my opinion, this is the stone-cold truth, if you disagree, go kill yourself.”
“Then please do not label it as fact.”
Like the guy said, It’s an editorial and therefore *his personal opinion*! I don’t mean to be rude but if you’re too stupid to understand what an editorial is without having the author write “this is only my opinion so don’t get offended” every couple of sentences then i’d suggest getting an education.
If *you* like the game then good for you! Surely you don’t need other peoples approval for you to like a game?
Yeah, I agree man, Half Life 2 was good in some aspects, but failed in others. It was a giant tech demo, with levels that lasted WAAAAAAY too long. Which is really saying alot, since usually they are too slow. But yeah, No hate or bashing from me.
The opening scene renewed my love in videogames.
I totally agree with everything in this post. I felt the same way. Especially about the lack of varied aliens. …huge letdown in every way but graphics.
I beat it in about the same amount of time too. ….total waste of time and money.
They should remake the first game with the new graphics engine and better audio. The old multiplayer rocked! I would have loved to set some trip-mines for the combine in Half-Life 2.
Dude, I understand you dont like the game. But its not a single day of puzzles. You go from the Airboat (beginning,day) to Raven holm (NighT) next day, you get out to antlions (day) and then Nova Prospekt (Prison, night) If you noticed the night and day showed. Gordon never slept in that game. Cause he has his life wanted by a overdue army of soldiers/aliens. If you were him, would you sleep? You have a world to save cause some guy in Black Mesa made a incident. Also, you have to figure out who is this stalking creepy “G-Man”