i don't understand,what does people find so interesting about half life ?
i mean it's a good game and i had fun with it,but what people find so groundbreaking about it ?
to be honest i had way more fun with portal,the portal gimmick was awesome and the tests really had to make you think
so really,what's so awesome about half life ?
It's like Citizen Kane or Casablanca, you may not get what's so great about them now, but that's because the genre changed because of those.
Interesting set pieces, the game really feels like one cohesive adventure. It's also cool the story people have built up around Gordon freeman
physics and grafix, it was the Crysis of its time
I don't really agree that the second one feels cohesive. Individual levels do, but the game itself feels like a quilt of different genres and ideas stitched together through some pretty boring unskippable story segments.
there are no real characters, a lot of the segments like the boat and the ant bullshit aren't fun, and the story is pretty generic and paper thin.
I get that it created these little spheres (the opening of the game being a good example) where atmosphere and world building were on occasion nearly perfect, but it was always onto the next set piece with more priority on having you see / play that stuff than why you're doing it.
I'm not OP and I don't think it's a bad game, but it's hard to see how it's upheld as one of the best games of all time outside of influence and timing
Episode 2 was intense as fuck
Lots of variety. Every level has some kind of unique gimmick.
At the time it came out Ravenholm was considered as good as most games that were actual horror games. There's very little filler that's purely there because the player needs to be moved from A to B
>play a game from 2004 in 2016
>why is this not revolutionary like everyone said?!
Strongly disagreed. I think each individual segment of Half Life 2 is why it's so good. Oh no I'm dodging copters, oh no I'm in Racenholme, oh my I get to spend the whole sunset calmly trying not to hit the ground with the antlions.
Every hour or so the mood, objective and set changes pretty dramatically and it didn't break the game up as much as make it feel more like a journey to me.
Also want to point out really phenomenal level design. If the goal of good level design is to gently shepherd the player towards their objective, half life 2 is as exploration friendly as a shooter should be.
I don't even agree with that. Half Life 2 does shit that most games still don't do, and honestly, from a story telling and world building perspective, I can't really think of an FPS released since Half Life 2 that out does it.
>Seinfeld isn't funny
The game is 12 years old. Let that fucking sink in. It's as old as Doom was in 2005 or Super Mario 64 in 2008. In other words it's ancient as fuck for video game standards and everything has done what it has done since.
You should have played the game back in the day for the full effect of understanding it. One of the most amazing features is that the game never leaves the first person view. It never takes jump cuts in the story either.
Everything from the beginning of the train station up to the top of the citadel was in Gordon's eyes in real time. You actually had to witness realistic things like driving around endlessly to travel across the world.
>what does people
Nice grammar, you've answered your own question by announcing you're fifteen years old, certain things (experienced at the time of their release) had a huge impact on games of their time and the present as well. You see nothing special in a game you were never around to experience, shocking
Why does it still look this good?
It has this weird art style where you can tell it's an older game but somehow doesn't look worse than current games.
Great story
Great design
Interesting levels
Varied gameplay styles and elements
Fun weapons
Cool physics
At the time it was released it was probably the most immersive game made.
Well, to be fair, the game did receive several post launch updates that greatly enhanced the look. If you want to see what it looked like back when it was first launched you'd have to strip away some of these features like the HDR.
Still though, Half-Life 2 was a massive milestone in FPS gaming, has aged beautifully, and anyone who says otherwise is either just dumb or trying to be a contrarian faggot.
>Why does it still look this good?
1. It was the non-Crysis graphical benchmark for its time
2. Graphics never really improved dramatically since the level achievable on PC in 2004 (or consoles circa 2006). Graphical improvements these days are slight at best and are usually only present in bullshots or are negligible shit like Drake's dumb ear transprency in Uncharted 4 and Geralt's Nvidia™ Hairworks® in Witcher 3.
Play any modern game. What will you see?
Filler, fetchquests, grinding and climb something to unlock something.
In the other hand, a playthrough of HL2 won't have almost any filler, the player will be doing something different in a different place almost anytime.
you know there certainly was a time when effort was actually placed into making video games
Half the posts in any PC forum around 2004 were something like
"Will this PC be able to run Far Cry, Doom3 and Half Life2?"
Gotta miss those times. 3 AAA FPS based around M&K input. But things changed, for worse.