out in the Black Mesa thread, Tommy offered this up:
I loved HL when I played it a decade or so ago but HL2 and other recent games make it seem very linear and old-fashioned by comparison. The graphics don't look radically different from Source and I don't really understand why people would replay HL again when presumably everyone out there has probably played it through several times over the last ten years.
And I found that I disagreed with it in a number of ways, and he stated his preference to keep the thread on topic, so I moved it here. This will be a long post.
The merits of Half-Life versus its sequel have already been discussed at some length here and I don't have any particular interest in reviving that topic of debate. What I find most peculiar about Tommy's stated opinion is that he seems to be of the mind that HL and HL2 are fundamentally different in some way, such that when you play the more recent of the two the elder seems "old fashioned". Not "old", mind you, Half-Life certainly looks and feels old, but "old fashioned", as in, they don't make games like that anymore.
I don't see how one could come to that conclusion. It would seem to me that HL1 and HL2 are very much cut from the same cloth - some things are touched up in HL2 but the central core of the game remains the same. They're both linear travelogues in which the narrative is pushed forward by elaborate scripted sequences, most of which take place in-game, unlike most other story-heavy games that rely on cutscenes in which the player is removed from control of the character. Both have some puzzle elements but are more or less all about shooting things with guns.
So I don't think HL2 makes HL1 look worse than simple age already does. In some ways I think in time HL1 will be looked upon in relation to FPSes the same way
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is looked upon in relation to horror films. Watching
Dr. Caligari you might think it ridiculous because of all the horror cliches contained therein, but what you have to realize is that in many cases it's the font from which those cliches sprung in the first place. It's hard to overstate how HL1 shifted the paradigm of first-person shooters and popular gaming in general when it came out. It's the FPSes that came out before HL1 that really feel old-fashioned. You know the ones, the Quakes and the Dooms, where the character you play is generally unimportant, there was no narrative at all, level design was often archaic and inelegant. At the end of every level you'd see what was really important within the game - how many things you killed.
What HL1 did that only a notable few games did before it (System Shock comes to mind) was take the game out of that arcade mentality, and remove scores entirely, and introduce a cohesive vision into the gameworld. Levels were not arbitrarily designed, there were no secret sliding walls leading to secret treasures, levels loaded seamlessly and were quite large (one of the things I remember about those old PC Gaming mags was how the developers talked about how if there was an enemy following you in one level and you moved into the next level, how the enemy would follow you, and how you could throw a grenade from one level to the other and kill the enemy. It sounded crazy impressive then, but we take that sort of thing for granted now), the main character had a name! More than that, the main character had an actual purpose, an identifiable purpose, beyond "kill shit".
The point is, none of those elements were relatively common in games before HL1 came out. The story in Half-Life was pretty spare but it was more than Quake or Marathon or Duke Nukem or Twisted Metal had. It was alike all those games in some very fundamental ways but also different in other fundamental ways. It changed the basic makeup of what a game was supposed to be. When you play a game like CoD4, does it remind you more of Half-Life or Wolfenstein 3D? Aside from Serious Sam or Painkiller, do you see a lot of mindless shoot-em-ups on the market these days? I see more shooters trying and failing to offer compelling narratives and atmosphere (Haze, Doom 3) than focusing on the simplest, most basic things that make a shooter fun. I don't think that change happened by itself.
So yeah, that got me thinking. When I play ambitious games with a focus on action they all seem familiar, and I think that's because they're all following the example of that one specific game.
