Why is the original half life regarded as one of the best first person shooters, and if you've played it...

Why is the original half life regarded as one of the best first person shooters, and if you've played it, why do you like it?
I'm not baiting, I've just never played it, wondering if I should.

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sven coop server when

fuck you fuckwad ass

It's a great series. Action up the butt with a deep narrative.

If you haven't played through HL1 upside-down I don't want to hear you say you're a fan

It was fun. The ai is actually notbad compared to a lot

It had really good visuals for its time and did a lot of things that nobody else had done before. Much like Halo and Half-Life 2, it was a sort of pioneer in its field - again, at the time.

I'm not saying I'm a fan. I might become one after I decide to buy and play it.

I've played it sideways. that's gotta count for something.

youtube.com/watch?v=6Iu4GXUHfU0
The narrative was way ahead of its time. It's fit for a novel if the plotline was polished

This
Also when your done playing it solo

Superb level design and gameplay a.k.a It's FUN.

Really neat setup, atmosphere and world building with solid level design.

OP, ALL serious gamers should have the HL 1, 2 and it's episodes under their belts.

It is THE masterclass in storytelling, atmosphere and gameplay and is what all games should strive to be. Truly the caviar of vidya.

This comes with a caveat tho. Gordon Freeman's story is sorely unfinished and will leave a hole in your heart that may never be filled.

Should you play it? There's no game on Earth you should play before it.

>games
>story

Carmack shouldn't be allowed an opinion on anything but game engines.

What Half Life does extremely well is create the sense of traversing an extremely dangerous environment where almost everything will kill you if you aren't careful. It's why the powered suit Gordon wears is called the Hazardous Environment Suit. Really the game feels more similar to a survival horror game than does to its FPS peers from that period. You MUST play the game on hard mode to get the full experience.

Half-Life is proof he was wrong

lmao but user [JRPG #85316789] is better in every conceivable way.

Half Life 2 is proof he was right.

It basically pioneered the concept of action and narrative unfolding around you, creating an insane feeling of immersion.

Something like pic related was crazy in 1998. In any other game it would have been a cutscene

Actually i would suggest to play it on normal, hard makes enemies bullet sponges and healing stuff gives less health.
Play it normal first, then hard several times, and then back to normal so you can break the game and speedrun it without worrying too much

Half-Life set the bar REALLY high, so of course the sequel wasn't as good

They're pretty much the same as cutscenes, except you can change the camera angle.

Basically inspired every shooter after it with its structure. I'd still say it's the best one though.

You should never have to think about playing any classic

Any game today would take away the control from the player and make it watch while the camera shakes a little to simulate a head bobbing

>Actually i would suggest to play it on normal
Fuck off, hard is the way the game was designed to be played.
>hard makes enemies bullet sponges
Wrong, that's Half Life 2

having control over your character makes all the difference in the world

Half-Life was just the next step in the right direction for the fps genre. Incredibly influential and important as an entry in that way; the series itself is superb.
But it did for the genre the same thing that Wolfenstein and DOOM did; which was be a solid building block for the future.

Unfortunately, that future was hundreds of shitty CoD clones and whatnot, stepping us back in favor of "cinematics". The cinematics of Half-Life are long and drawn out, over the game. Not punctuated by big moments such as a helicopter crash, but more like the mounting vibe of that feeling of getting deeper and deeper into the shit that was Half-Life's signature.

Basic escalation in storytelling, setting and theme, but that minute ideal is lost in modern games since the escalation is more like singular beats on a drum every so often. As opposed to the steady build up in the other games I've mentioned.

TL;Dr - Half-Life, along with Doom and Wolfenstein, is the grandpappy of the genre.

Not when you're still locked in a room waiting for exposition to happen.

This is an autistic gripe mate, go on home

Okay, enjoy your genesis to cutscene cancer.

Nigga, i finished it for the 10th time yesterday, i know what i'm talking about. I found myself several times wanting to do something reckless but i was low on hp, and the wall medipack only gives 25.
You can't do lots of skips without taking fall or explosive damage, soldiers have hitscan weapons and on hard the m4 feels like a nerf gun.
You obviously have to play it on hard several times to appreciate it as you were saying, survival, but normal is just best to fuck around and exploit the game best glitches

that must mean doom is the ultimate grandfather of games since both half life and wolfenstein were mods of it

>normal is just best to fuck around and exploit the game best glitches
Pretty sure OP is more interested in playing the game properly

I may be wrong but I believe Wolfenstein came first. But Doom still perfected that formula.

So, yes.

But you're not locked in the room, you can easily get past it if you're good enough

Before HL, story was either a small text before each map, or cutscenes that took you away from the game.
HL made the world alive, and events unfold all around you. It wasn't just a text saying "alarmas sound, scientists are dead, you are alone", or some bullshit cheese cutscene. You saw first hand people dying all around, the same shit that killed them could kill you if you were careless.

It's also important to mention it's mods. TF2 and Counter strike are big names that live to this day.

hl1 is the best quake mod ever

I was a quake 2 total conversion. Or at least that's what we called shit like that back then.

If it was designed to be played on Hard, they woulda called Normal not Hard.

I think Sup Forums has a s/v/en coop server up at all times

There was a thread the other day that got 2 repIies then died. I dont think sven coop would be a good way to experience half life but still really fun.

While Half-Life is great it can be hard to realise its greatness going back and playing it today, thats because Half-Life was the game that created the blueprint for every first person shooter since. To many people who don't understand that it just seems like any old shooter, and in many ways it is, even if it is done really well, but it was the first of its kind.

It's similar to Mario64 in that its not considered great only because of what it is, but that at the time it set the standard for an entire dimension of movement, in the same way that Half-Life set the standard for the fps genre, a standard still used today.

Should I replay HL1 or grab Black Mesa?

>designed to be a continuous experience, there's no level structure, cutscenes or loading screens, just one 10 hour long segment of gameplay
>cinematic storytelling with events being shown to the player during gameplay
>very vulnerable player character who can and will die a lot
>constant atmosphere of tension and fear
All this stuff was very original in its time and I think still makes for a fun game today.

its built on Quake 1 engine, not much left of it tho, calling it total conversion doesnt do it justice, thats like saying bioshock infinite is unreal tournament TC just because its on similar engine

Just checked, there's a s/v/en coop server up now with 3 people

both are different, play HL1 first it still holds up great, you will appreciate Black Mesa more this way, also you will get some eastereggs they added

It was built off the Quake 1 engine dumbass. Too young to even be around during the mid-nineties, let alone old enough to make up a fact-checked lie

Also it's spelled "it", no "I"

This is like those FF7 threads.

Look, it was a time where there was no social media, so no fucking memes and let's plays to cancer everything up.

It was different time when you could actually look up a fucking walkthrough on the internet without hearing an annoying autistic retarded youtuber voice making retarded noises from the first 1 second of the video asking you to subscribe and fund his furry patreon.

It was fun, it was great graphics for it's time. It wasn't hyped to death, it was just good.

There was no fucking updates or DLCs. You bought the game as is. You liked it. It was great.

The developers got their feedback from sales, not twitter followers demanding more otherkin genderfluid NPCs.

Unfortunately, you'll never know this time period and how great it was.

I loved playing through hl1 a while back, but hl2 hasn't aged any near as well. I'd say hl2 ism ore of what you described

You managed to write a 8 line post an the only thing you said about the game was "it was just good."

You just don't get it, do you?

This tbqh senpai.

HL2 and it's episodes are a lot better IMO but as a series you can't do better for all the reasons above anons have stated.

Playing video games is for evil so bad people hate them so I hate them so bad boys end up hurting. Please play Mario's video game instead of Mario and video games are angry. Mario video games are not bad guys are not angry.

Unlike hl2 which is a glorified tech demo, half life 1 has a extremely immersive story, with everything against you and puts you on a restrictive environment full of aliens with constant, uninterrupted amazing gameplay.

I also prefer HL1, its a more pure fps experience, no physics puzzles, no driving, just exploring a science base uncovering the mystery, also it had an end.

However I disagree that I was describing HL2, HL2 still comes after other contemporary shooters like Halo, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor etc, Half-Life 1 was the very first, before Half Life shooters were Quake, Unreal, Doom and not much else.

Wasn't half life 1 a tech demo too? Did you forget that 5 minute intro showing everything off?

Not much I can say that hasn't been said already. The level design and pacing is really good, gameplay that holds up today, and for its time it looked great. The weapons all felt pretty good to use, nothing really comes to mind as being useless or a outright bad weapon. Enemies reacted to being hit, have decent enough AI, are fun to fight and shoot at. Also there's all the mods such as counter-strike, team fortress classic, sven co-op, etc.

There was a level of care put into the world and subsystems layered into the atmosphere that you don't typically find in other games.

At least not in any that I've played.
Half-Life 2 isn't quite up to par with it either because Source engine is dogshit and was actually a downgrade in some aspects--It isn't quite as robust as Goldsrc imo.

Even today with blown up budgets and increased fidelity in AAA titles the focus is mainly on the gameplay and driven narrative while the atmosphere and fine details of the game world are really half-assed or scripted to high hell.

Thats the mistake Half-Life 2 made that lead to this mess. Half-Life 1 had a world driven through the interaction of several event based dynamic systems that got dropped in favor of Half-Life 2's ~cinematic~ approach with something to gawk at, and everybody else followed. It's also why Black Mesa's gameplay feels like shit compared to the game it's meant to be based on--being built on Source and using Half-Life 2's approach.

There's a good video on YouTube going through the game design shit in Half Life that's pretty good. Don't have the link handy right now but goes into detail about enemy placements, A.I, level design etc

Goldsrc is fucking awesome to work with by comparison and it's a shame it'll probably never be open source. Best we could do was make a really good counterfeit (Xash).

I mean usually you just can't find that type of attention to detail in games anymore.

Instead of putting an immense amount of care and fine tuning into the behaviors and AI of npcs and their interactions with the world around them, everything is drawn up and scripted to an EXACT formula.

youtube.com/watch?v=6Iu4GXUHfU0
Will there ever be a more kino game than Half-Life 1 and its expansions?

I can't really put into words why I like the "Three people just trying to survive the disaster" story so much.

Sometimes, you had to be there.

We were used to corridor shooters and just destroying things up to that point. It gave us, as a PC audience something different.

I miss the old days. Fuck if I don;t.

The best single player shooter of all time dude

You could argue there was a general regression and things went back to the way they were after Half-Life 2 though.
AI and dynamic interaction took a backseat for gimmicks and drawn out exposition in a finely crafted set piece.

Agreed. One ordinary scientist, one ordinary security guard, one ordinary soldier getting deployed. All getting sucked in the catastrophe.

Also that announcement broadcast voice is ominous as fuck and I love it. It overloads itself with messages on how every single sector is contaminated, one after another. All while the main three are trying to figure out what to do.

If I ever see the maker of the video, I wanna shake his hand and say good job, but that's unlikely since he's Russian.

Fucking reddit.

Well, people got lazy.

Scripting actions became a thing, then things went to ragdoll. A HUGE mistake as far as I'm concerned. Random interactions weren't random anymore. Timesplitter and the like were masterpieces. They actually chose to correct that as a development decision.

Having tons of dead bodies, or enemies to kill is inferior to very few enemies, that take a lot of skill and ideas to take down. A human isn't some sort of static, plastic thing. When you make them like one in any sort of game you've lost the point of a hero adventure.

All games, that have a story are the adventure of a hero whether you like it or not.

and then there's this faggot

Remember how his last few game projects turned out? He was a flash in the pan.

And the few good games he helped make were masterpieces.

it took the doom/quake formula (down to the story) and brought it to a realistic, believable setting while still remaining fun

>Half-Life 2 isn't quite up to par with it either because Source engine is dogshit and was actually a downgrade in some aspects--It isn't quite as robust as Goldsrc imo.
Explain.

Or maybe standards just dropped way, way lower and people were none the wiser because the environments are pretty to look at.

You have to examine the differences in HL1 and 2's design and then consider that most people ran with Half-Life 2's refinement of the concept going forward into the next generation as gaming became more popular in general.

Scripted sequences are basically still cutscenes, but Half-Life 1 doesnt use them as a vehicle for literal exposition and storytelling while explicitly designing the spaces to hold the player and force them to watch until the sequence finishes. HL1's design was way more "show don't tell", with the rest being supplemented by world building through the environment itself (BM announcement system).

The story just wasn't as big of a deal in HL1 and that's where Valve fucked up.

To the above I want to correct myself that HL1 doesn't usually use them for lengthy exposition. There are like 2-5 points in the whole game where the game gives you absolutely no option but to watch the sequence play out whereas it happens constantly whenever you're chained to Alyx in HL2.

>his

He just works on the engines. He's never been the "ideas guy" of any game he's worked on or been much of a creative force for them.

You have to have people that don't particularly like each other, but have amazing talent to make a great game.

This idea of introducing "diversity" (more women) to the dev house is a bad move. If you love games and you're a woman, you're more than welcome.

Instead, we get women that don't give a fuck at all about it. That's not fair to anyone. You're welcome if you share the passion. If not, you have no fucking business being anywhere near the creation of games.

Women, and I know; if they're shit at their job will just spend all day attacking people (especially other women) who are good at their job.