Why is Half Life so much better than Half Life 2? It's almost not fair

Why is Half Life so much better than Half Life 2? It's almost not fair.

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Closer to its Quake engine roots, has weapons that don't feel like fucking pea-shooters.

For me it was the better monster desgin and horror atmosphere

Always was scared back then being lonely in a chemical underground lab filled with monster and poison

Fewer cutscenes
The guns feel a lot better
You don't have to hold a key to sprint

Less of the "cinematic experience" philosophy (e.g. story above all else), and more actual gameplay.

In my opinion, HL2 was one of the first games to herald the era of set pieces and walking simulators that we have now.

Made as a game instead of a tech demo

What's with plebs shitting on HL2 having a weak starter pistol and starter SMG? You realize these guns are intentionally weak to create contrast with the later weapons? This is a time-tested idea for weapon balance, it's just that for HL2 they made the weapons feedback match their actual strength. You look at the AR2, Shotgun, Crossbow, Rocket Launcher, Gravity Gun, and Magnum and they're all appropriately hefty and damaging. You are MEANT TO gravitate toward these weapons over the rest. That's why the Pistol and SMG are so frantic and fast. They fit great with panicky moments of spraying and praying. Even on hard mode, I find the balance and feedback are well-tuned and make for a very interesting toolbox.

Another World came out in 1991, jackass.

HL1
>you are trapped in an underground facility during a mysterious alien attack, trying to survive Die Hard style

HL2
>you are the Chosen One™ come to fight evil and save the world

You can't gravitate towards the AR2 because they intentionally gave it a pitiful ammo supply to force you back into the SMG. Crossbow and Magnum also have really small ammo supplies to balance out their high damage. You use them for a little bit and then switch back to the SMG because it's the only long range weapon you get a reliable amount of ammo to use.

The HL1 pistol and SMG were stronger and more accurate than their HL2 counterparts; they didn't just feel like they were.

The zombie town in HF2 was great.

You might be playing the game wrong, as on hard I was able to get through by primarily using the Shotgun and approaching encounters in a way that I would be in close range. I never was forced to use the pistol or smg, though I did ocassionally use them when I wanted to harass an enemy but didn't feel comfortable using the more valuable ammo, but by no means were they primary. At all. You're blaming the game for your failure. If you don't like certain guns, you don't have to use them.

Yes but not by much. The HL1 SMG is a real peashooter as well, and the HL2 Pistol has a higher rate of fire making the actual DPS not that different from the HL1 Pistol.

You want a rehash?

>Another World came out in 1991, jackass.
And Prince of Persia came out in 89, so what?
The point is that HL2 made setpiece-driven storytelling and forced "interactive" cutscenes more viable in shooters and AAA action games in general.

Look at the current state of FPS and tell me you don't see the HL2 influence.

So it's not "one of the first" if there's a shit ton of cinematic platformers the decade before. Don't pretend like HL2 is some kind of mythical boogieman that jumper-cable kickstarted Everything You Hate about games you haven't played, because HL1 was doing pseudo-cutscenes before, setpieces before, environmental storytelling before. HL2 just did it better.
Though if you really want to blame something, blame Ico. You probably ~hate!~ that game too.

Rehash?
You realize there's millions more possible stories than "escape facility" and "save the world", right?
I just hate the obvious Mary Sue design of a special chosen hero meant to save the world. I'd rather Gordon be an actual human with depth, and the conflict be more complicated than good rebels vs evil government.

You realize that Gordon was intentionally as shallow as possible? He was mute so you could project your own personality onto him.

He's an unkillable omnipotent save scumming God-king no matter which way the narrative spins it, so you might be taking it a little too personally. I think it's pretty great that the character goes from pure anonymity to celebrity. It fits with the shift from isolated facility to the living breathing natural world of HL2. The game knows when to cut it out, too. There are prolonged sections of solitude. There are sections where the people who meet you treat you as just a dude.
As for the last point about the morality, well you should just gaze upon and healthy HL2 thread to see people clamoring to defend Breen. It's not as muddy as HL1, but it is definitely more interesting than the empty "heh everyone's bad/flawed >:)" cynicality of the first game.

It's one of the first FPSs, and one of the first big budget games to do it. Sorry, I didn't think you were so autistic that I had to lay that out for you.

>cinematic platformers
Why did you even bring that up?

Just about every FPS, from Call of Duty to Bioshock, owes a lot to HL2. Even third person shooters like TLOU and Gears share the same gameplay-setpiece-gameplay-setpiece game flow. Walking simulators are the logical conclusion of this philosophy.

Sure, HL1 was setpiece heavy, but those were merely additional to the gameplay. HL2 makes story the main focus, at the detriment to gameplay. Once Valve popularized this in the previously action-heavy genre, other devs followed. Again, just look at the shooters we have now.

Ico is pretty irrelevant. It was a niche game with niche ideas and doesn't have much of an influence on modern AAA game design. Don't know why you would bring that up.

>HL2 just did it better.
HL2 did it way worse. At least in HL1 there weren't so many of them.

>approaching encounters in a way that I would be in close range
Every level is pretty much hallways except certain points where you actually have to use ranged weapons.

HL1 has more weapon choice, and also enemy variety; to this day I still don't understand why there are so few aliens in HL2 (bullsquid, alien grunts, houndeyes etc)

also the combine are much slower and stupider compared to HL1's grunts, so they were much more boring to fight

HL2 SMG is much more useful than HL1 SMG. It has less grenades, though.

It wasn't made as a ploy to force everyone to download Steam

>You realize that Gordon was intentionally as shallow as possible? He was mute so you could project your own personality onto him.
In HL1, sure. In HL2 they added a whole other layer of "chosen one" and "saving the world". In HL1 he was just a scientist trying to survive.

>He's an unkillable omnipotent save scumming God-king
Uh, by that logic all games with quicksave have a shit story.
HL1 also had quicksave, and a minimalistic story, but had an overall better narrative. It was more cohesive and let the player make their mind up. HL2's way of spoonfeeding you the story was hamfisted and generic. Don't even bring up Breen; Sup Forums likes to defend the most 1-dimensional of anime villains.

>o this day I still don't understand why there are so few aliens in HL2
Because story is more important than gunplay lol

>Don't even bring up Breen; Sup Forums likes to defend the most 1-dimensional of anime villains.
episode 3 story confirmed that breen was right all along.

>In HL1, sure. In HL2 they added a whole other layer of "chosen one" and "saving the world". In HL1 he was just a scientist trying to survive.
And in what way is that bad? Sounds to me like an opinion.
I pretty much agree with Nobody said a game with quicksaves has a bad story.
>more cohesive
What does that even mean in your mind?
>let the player make their mind up
>spoonfeeding you the story
So you prefer games that give the player the freedom of imagining his own story? So go play with LEGOs or lie in bed daydreaming instead of playing video games.

>And in what way is that bad?
It doesn't make sense considering anything that happened in the first game. Most of the people who knew him died or lost contact with him after he killed Nihilanth.

Vortigaunts might have spread the word.
Barney, Kleiner and Vance are still alive.
For all you know G-Man might have advertised his newest associate's achievements.

Weird you don't connect the dots between cinematic platformers and HL1 and 2. If you made Another World first person (it already has a gun), maybe threw in a health bar and reloading and other tacky mechanics, you have a right fit. Anyway, the crux of these semantics is this
>HL2 makes story the main focus, at the detriment to gameplay.
The burden of proof is on you. Go on. Prove you stance. heck I'll even accept something written by someone else.
(also lol about the non-sequitor walking sim reference, that's as much of a genre as character action games-- just as "character action game" is a codeword for "great beat em up", "walking simulator" is a codeword for "bad adventure game". to be more truthful and terse, just say "I HATE THESE KIND OF GAMES" instead of some grunge blabbering about how it's the 'endgame.' (because I guess you couldn't use the obvious answer that Actual Movies are the endgame, as that wasn't epicly negative enough to *zing* the thread.))

>be a terminator that kills hundreds of aliens soldiers and zombies and literally saves the world and also frees an entire race of aliens
>omnipotent elder god hires you to work for him since you're that good
>not get aknowledgement at all
That would be retarded user

If you have to bring up an unreleased sequel to defend HL2's story, it failed.

>And in what way is that bad?
It takes Die Hard and turns it into Battlefield Earth.

>Nobody said a game with quicksaves has a bad story.
Save-scumming was brought up as a reason why Gordon is invincible. Which is ridiculous. If we're looking at the story as intended, though, Gordon is meant to be a just a guy with a suit in HL1. Several times he almost dies from just drowning. It's not until HL2 where Gordon is the leader of a resistance against an alien invasion AND a tyrannical government, single-handedly makes his way to the control centre of said government, commandeers Ant-lions, etc.

>So you prefer games that give the player the freedom of imagining his own story?
No, I prefer games that use the medium to it's fullest, and tell their story through gameplay.
Rather than games that design themselves around the story first and try to ape the film industry with increasingly non-interactive elements where you literally just stand and watch what's happening for 5-10 minutes.

FPS these days are a joke.

>the 'it's a games fault that other games try to copy something it did and fuck it up' meme

>In HL1 he was just a scientist trying to survive.
People don't get recognition based on what they were TRYING to do, but on what they ACTUALLY DID. This is one of the problems of a society in which you get rewards purely for putting in moderate effort, people don't recognize this fact anymore.
Take Hitler, the man only tried to secure living space for his peoples. He kills a bunch of Jews, so suddenly he's the bad guy.

So he does the same thing he did in HL1, but there are other people on his side now?

Because HL2 was a tech demo for Source, which is why it constantly rubbed its Source nuts on your face with rudimentary physics puzzles fucking everywhere.

It was also the killer app for Steam to take hold, which was a DRM worse than Denuvo and Uplay combined. Once Valve found the winning formula of selling crate keys to retards by vivisecting TF2 mangled corpse, they stopped giving a shit about game development altogether, the end game of Steam.

>single-handedly
>commandeers Ant-lions
uhhh

>Save-scumming was brought up as a reason why Gordon is invincible. Which is ridiculous. If we're looking at the story as intended--
"lol"

>Because HL2 was a tech demo for Source
that would only be applicable if other people actually used the source engine

>Weird you don't connect the dots between cinematic platformers and HL1 and 2.
Sure they are vaguely connected. Kind of irrelevant to a discussion about modern AAA FPSs, no? Pong was the first sports game, but I don't bring it up every time we talk about FIFA.

If you are seriously denying the influence of HL2 on the genre, I don't know what to say.

>The burden of proof is on you.
That's a whole other subject. But if you play HL1 and HL2 side-by-side, surely you would notice the amount of time you are made to stand and listen to NPCs having conversations. If you timed the gameplay sections vs the story sections, the ratios would be wildly different.
Then there's the pissweak gunplay that was brought up, etc.

>(also lol about the non-sequitor walking sim reference,
How is it a non-sequitor in a discussion about HL2's influence? The idea of cinematic storytelling (aka story over gameplay) has become a dominant force in gaming. Obviously HL2 didn't created it, but popularized it in the same way FF7, Uncharted, and The Last of Us did. Walking Sims (and you know exactly what I mean) wouldn't have existed without these games. Look at any AAA game today and you will be flooded by scripted setpieces and glorified cutscenes in which you just stand and watch without being able to influence anything. The cinematic experience philosophy isn't restricted to one genre, it never was.

Gordon is invincible because it's a fucking video game
I swear there's nothing more autistic than people trying to take game stories seriously

>it's just a game bro
Not an argument

games have non-sensical stories for the sake of making a game that's fun to play
how about we try to explain how completely impossible the architecture of black mesa is
or the fact that there's always exactly one path to go and it's always to where you need to be going

Half-Life was made with Japanese game design principles.
Half-Life 2 was made with western "game" design principles.

Because HL1 was designed as a game firstly, this doesn't mean the meme about HL2 being a tech demo is true, its just a lot of work for HL2 was put into physics and the AI but these things were underutilized in gameplay, I'd say once they realized compromises needed to be made to work on the average 2004 computer and the X-Box which released a year later, as a result they had to limit the gameplay possibilites, if you've ever played any other source engine Half Life like the episodes or stuff like Minerva you'd realize that the engine could make fun gameplay utilizing the advanced physics and AI and such but the tech just didn't allow the full potential.

>Half-Life was made with Japanese game design principles.
lmao

>weeb trying to claim a masterpiece

embarrassing

>Half-Life was made with Japanese game design principles.
Jesus Christ Sup Forums

>Half-Life was made with Japanese game design principles.
You've gone too far this time weebs

I'm tired of people saying the whole Freeman messiah thing.
For the first two(three if you count red letter day) levels, barely anyone recognized you outside of your black mesa co-workers and vortigaunts(who have good reason to)
Only towards the end of route canal and the one bit of water hazard do people even recognize you. And that's only after alyx tells people about you over the radio. They don't really view you as a messiah guy until after (a week after, where you were presumably a martyr along with alyx and eli) nova prospekt, which exploded.
Then people actually have a reason to view you as a savior.

>So he does the same thing he did in HL1, but there are other people on his side now?
Huh? How is trying to escape a military complex the same as trying to avenge your resistance buddies by chasing the President of Earth and invading his base?

How many soldiers does Alyx kill, realistically? Most of the time, Gordon is the one taking down the armies of Combine. Doesn't he even infiltrate Breen's HQ alone?

Come on, quicksaving barely applies to gameplay. If you are being serious, does this retroactively affect the story of every NES/SNES/Genesis/etc games since now you can quicksave in them all? Oh and better add rewind/fastforward to the stories too!
That's fucking retarded.

>invade Nihilanths base
>kill him
>save Earth

>invade Citadel
>kill Breen
>save Earth

hmmmm

Kill yourself with Japanese principles.

>Another World came out in 1991, jackass.
And? Cinematic platformers were never wildly popular. They were mainstream enough because of their realism and mechanics, but they didn't dominate the entire platformer genre. In fact, they were quite the opposite.

Half-Life 2 arrived in an FPS market that had already fully moved to the conventions that Half-Life 1 brought to the genre, and Half-Life 2 pushed FPS games even MORE toward story-driven experiences with incidental FPS gameplay instead of FPS games with a companion story.

HL1's weapons were ass, don't kid yourself. They all felt floaty and clumsy as shit, and the sound quality was overly primitive and distorted as hell. Only the pistol was superior to its HL2 counterpart. The rest?
>shotgun with literally no kick whatsoever; the OpForce version having a garbled square wave as a "gunshot"
>assault rifle sounds like an aluminum can being tossed around and the "recoil" feels like waggling a Wiimote
>grenades have the physics of hallowed out foam
>rest are a bit better since they don't have superior equivalents but they're so poorly balanced you hardly ever use them anyway

>But if you play HL1 and HL2 side-by-side, surely you would notice the amount of time you are made to stand and listen to NPCs having conversations. If you timed the gameplay sections vs the story sections, the ratios would be wildly different.
I'd say HL2 has maybe 40 minutes more of cutscenes? Red Letter Day is ~12 minutes of cutscene. Black Mesa East is ~10 minutes of cutscene. These are taken from quick glances at Youtube videos. According to HowLongToBeat.com, Half-Life 2 is about an hour longer than HL1. So ultimately you're not losing any gameplay and the cutscenes are just for flavor. If you don't have ADHD you should be fine. Plus none of the cutscenes are as uninteresting as HL1's tram ri[LOADING]de which sorta drag[LOADING]ged on.

>Half-Life was made with Japanese game design principles.
ZugZug

The weapons feel better in HL2

Must say, even tho I've started with hl2 and was a big fan of it, hl1 has really got me more. Atmosphere in Black Mesa was perfect, never gets dull. You can play as Shepard, Barney or even a bloody vortigaunt and it's still a pleasure to see familiar walls. Can't even remember how many mods I've tried just to make this experience longer.
That said, remastered version of hl1 that is "Black Mesa" didn't had this kind of heart in it and I cannot say that it's better than hl2 with Xen or without it.

Nope, HL2 already fucked it up in the first place.

I don't really understand your point, mate

I'm not taking the story seriously; everyone who's telling me how amazing HL2's story is. Part of HL1's greatness is it doesn't burden you with it's story.
Also, maybe try to get better standards.

>how about we try to explain how completely impossible the architecture of black mesa is or the fact that there's always exactly one path to go and it's always to where you need to be going
See, this is the exact bullshit that HL2 started. In HL1 it DOESN'T MATTER. You are just trying to get out. In HL2, they shove it down your throat every 5 minutes, so these plotholes and bad writing become obvious as fuck.

Replaying HL1 on a pacifist run on hard at the moment and this game is hard as FUCK.

Surely there's some killing required

This gun is the best gun.
>that smooth reload
>that bassy 'kablam'
>deletes most enemies in one or 2 shots
Sold me the moment I started OpFor.

There's litteraly no gameplay changes between HL1 and 2

>sperging out about walking sims
?????
You already looks retarded enough

How many hands do antlions have? Check mate, atheists.

I just made it to the part where you run past the guards complaining about "All I know is that hes been killing all of my buddies" and the area right before the rocket launch is damn near impossible, but so far I haven't shot a single bullet or hit an enemy with the crowbar.

It's extremely doable, just required a lot of reloading and tight situations where you are surrounded by 8 enemies and have to find a way to finesse running through all of them at the same time without dying.

>There's litteraly no gameplay changes between HL1 and 2
weapons in HL2 are shit
they force you to use the gravity gun by giving you 1/4 the ammo
tons of brainless gimmicks which make every level feel like 'that level' instead of just straight up FPSing

not to mention the shoehorned boat/buggy sequences

>being an invincible killing machine in first game
>second game setting is Ibiza holidays because after all players wants Gordon to be an human with depth

Don't ever make videogames
Don't ever talk about videogames again

At least ABH was fun?

>tfw preferred weapon was gravity gun with a saw blade
Its just so hood

Doesn't change the fact that the aim of the game is to save the world. For the second time. And Gordon, a single man, manages to take on the Combine army and infiltrate the HQ of the most powerful man in the world.

Kind of different from random scientist hiding in air vents from strange Lovecraftian creatures.

Except that wasn't the aim of the game. That wasn't Gordon's motivation. Your motivation was simply to survive and escape, the rest of the story takes a backseat to that gameplay.

And having the protagonist save the world twice is way more ridiculous.

They do eat a lot of people, probably a hand or two in their stomachs.

HL1 has a stronger focus on gameplay and level design. Basically Quake with a story.

HL2 expanded on that story, creating a more linear, atmospheric experience. Which it succeeded at.

People seem to like to dismiss HL2 pretty quickly, but forget it has some great segments like the antlion assault on Nova Prospekt or the bridge.

>youtube.com/watch?v=AcDyJBjvcc8

Why don't you like the vehicles, sempai?

Good point.

Come on, man, good chunk of weapons are pretty half-assed in both games. At least shotgun has a better feel in hl2 (still far from perfection that is Doom's shotgun, but non the less).

Those parts were either too linear or killed the flow. The fact that majority of the game takes place on surface doesn't help either, or maybe that's just me because I'm sucker for esthethic underground facilities with acid pools and other hazards.

>quicksaving is the reason why HL2 story suck
Deep into the autism spectrum
This guy just litteraly took a game mechanic and is justifying something that has nothing at all to do with it
It's like saying the sound design is shit because you have to crouchjump

This. I don't understand what the fuck you underage niggers are talking about, HL1 weapons have always been shit.
>Pistol sounds like ass and takes half a second to fire, yet this equivalent of the wimpy Doom pistol somehow manages to be one of the best weapons in this game for lack of competition
>SMG is only good for the grenade launcher, using the primary fire only tickles the enemy and is suicide against anything faster than a headcrab zombie
>Shotgun is only effective with point blank secondary fire head shots and fires so slowly it's only good against single enemies
>Grenade takes a year to throw
HL2 does all of these better

Damn, I really have forgot the ambient of hl2, good stuff.

But it isn't.

>Those parts were either too linear
Just as linear as every other part.
>or killed the flow
They're meant to change the pace. You might want to explain further.

>>that bassy 'kablam'
What I find weird is that Doom 3 pistol uses the same sound but it sounds like shit in D3.

It's a stock sound I've heard randomly before, must've been enhanced a little for HL.

HL2 jerks off Gordon just a little too much at times but it's always moderated by how it openly mocks your lack of any real choice and how you're not a free man at all.
It's the difference between what the civilian NPCs think of him and the reality that nobody except the player has accepted.

>HL1's weapons were ass, don't kid yourself.
Even if that's true (and it's not, HL2's main weapon felt like a pea-shooter), gunplay isn't just about gun feel.
Another big issue with HL2 that we haven't brought up is the AI. As primitive as they seem now, the soldiers in HL1 were actually quite advanced and could adapt to different situations, all while communicating with each other. It really felt like fighting a soldier. Compare that to the dumber HL2 Combine.
Add to this the lack of enemy variety compared to HL1, and gimmick segments (e.g. boat sections), and the gameplay seems obviously inferior. Much of those design decisions being due to story, of course.

>the soldiers in HL1 were actually quite advanced

Anything that's scripted can be advanced.

>Hurr, HL1 was good because of the shooting, the most mediocre aspect of the game
I'm too old for this place

>Except that wasn't the aim of the game.
The aim of the game changes from simply running away, trying to escape Black Mesa to getting told you need to get to Xen and kill Nihilanth to save the world.
The same way in HL2 in the beginning you're just trying to get away from the cops and not die, later helping some reistance and saving Alyx/Eli from the Citade.

Character agency is a stupid point of controversy for a linear game.

>It's extremely doable
only thing i can think of is just bhopping around everything, i assume you do that?

No your just too sensible.

>I'd say HL2 has maybe 40 minutes more of cutscenes?
I'll take your word for it.
40 minutes EXTRA is a fucking lot of time to be doing NOTHING. Considering all the down-time already inherent in the real gameplay, adding even more to that starts detsroying the gameplay flow. And all of this time is sacrificed for a pretty mediocre story.
What if you want to play the actual game? Well, you can't. At least the tram parts of HL1 had a function, in that they allowed for loading while also giving the player a spatial awareness of the environment.

At least we got a conclusion to the story

>youtube.com/watch?v=zLyJP_nH5Cs

can't argue with that, sailing over the entire map as someone is telling you to get in the buggy is fun as fuck, surviving the massive drops by landing on the edge of the sea

>There's litteraly no gameplay changes between HL1 and 2
Yeah, except for
>cutscenes every 5 minutes
>inferior AI
>inferior weaponry
>forced tech demo sections
>less enemy types

How many fucking walking simulators are you playing dipshit? Calm the fuck down.

don't forget about the long empty airboat/car sections.

Driving killed HL2 for me.
Loved HL1 just run and gun all game.

>the soldiers in HL1 were actually quite advanced and could adapt to different situations, all while communicating with each other
The soldiers were literally only scripted to attack you two at a time while the rest barked dialogue like 'Flanking!' and ran to a random destination.