Slashdot Mirror
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast, Antlion Troopers
Ant writes "Antlion Troopers is a series of Half-Life 2 modifications where it puts you on the squad of a combine expeditionary force to fight off the antlion population. Just think of Starship Troopers movies. The sequel, Deuce, lets you interact with the squad members, set up sentry guns, etc."Additionally, Gamespot has a first look at the Lost Coast add-on for the main campaign. From the article: " You fight your way up a sheer cliff face, trading fire with those pesky Combine soldiers every step of the way. You'll occasionally have to deal with some of the more vicious sorts of headcrabs, and at the end you'll have to bring down a Combine gunship with Gordon Freeman's trusty rocket launcher. You'll have to solve a couple of light physics puzzles as well, which we won't detail for the sake of preserving at least a little of the surprise."
Otherwise, HL2 is little more than Yet Another Generic Shooter. It's completely linear, almost as bad as those early rail shooters. "Go this way, now this way. Oh look, a scripted event trigger."
The story is fine, but gameplay-wise it's just boring. For godsakes, it has ubiquitous exploding barrels and crates with ammo! It's a dull, cliche shooter.
I thought it started off brilliantly and was immediately very immersive, but it really failed to sustain that interest and the story seemed to fall by the wayside, turning it into a mediocre by-the-numbers shoot em up (albeit one with a great 3rd party physics engine). I found it pretty repetative and formulaic with very linear level design with few 'milestone' points (unlike the origional). I'm fine with 'repetative' in the sense of 'shooting things' over and over (ala Doom 1/2, Unreal 2, etc), but when the environment repeats itself for large sections (as with Doom 3) it gets very tedious. 'Ravenholm' was certainly a nice departure, but they failed to really take enough advantage of it, and they had some dodgy elements to the level design in that section.
Dispite being heavily critisized by some of the gaming press, I loved Unreal 2 because of the varied gameplay. It had many different weapons, multiple types of deployable equipment, several completely different types of enemy and unique envrionments. It also had a consistant story to move things along (between every 'level', there was an additional 'level' set aboard your ship, where you could wander amoung your shipmates and interact with them to play out the story). This was actually a lot more 'interactive' than HL2 (and area in which HL2 is very much overrated IMO), in which it was almost entirely scripted and you just happened to be able to move around - though it was possible to 'trigger' a small number of additional scripted routines by looking or clicking on various things, it was noticeably quite limited.
With regard to HL2 feeling 'linear' IMO, I felt quite artificially constricted in by the outside environment. After playing titles like Ghost Recon, PlanetSide, Soldner, Joint Operations, BattleField (etc), when I'm outdoors I want to have freedom to explore and find my own way from A to B, over a reasonably large map (all of these support maps up to several kilometers in size). I hate getting to the top of a hill or mound - or worse, facing an invisible barrier - and discovering I've reached "the end of the world" just because I've gone a few feet off the beaten track. Far Cry did much better in this respect, and gave the player genuine flexibility and what felt like inteligent AI. There are even open source tools which can seemlessly stick together large outdoor maps into one envrionment (e.g. in whatever map format the Ureal engine uses). HL2 did particularly poorly in this regard, one of my most enduring memories of it is the frequent loading screens.
At the exteme end: You can drive for miles in Solder, for example, and the world just keeps being drawn - without repating the map over and over (forests, lakes, hills, mountains, grassland), because it seems a tool has been used to auto generate a huge amount of terrain and they have simply placed special interest points (i.e. basis, buildings) on top. As a bonus, the terrain in Soldner is dynamically deformable too (as well as buildings, you can fell trees and forests, even create new rivers, or destroy a whole mountain). The descruction models for buldings were a bit linear (several 'impact points' which could be struck and blown up/off/open), but at least they were there. The origional PlanetSide team used real world map data and adapted it to build the continents of Auxaris. I imagine something like an adapted version of the terrain builder from Sim City 4K would be ideal for this sort of work. Certainly after playing larger 16-46 multiplayer games and MMO's (and even the likes of GTA3/VC) I have no desire to back to out door maps that feel like they have been rendered according to the limitations of something like the Q3 engine.
In summary, I think I just felt that HL2 lacked imagination and vision - it did not really bring anything new to the table nor did it alternatively execute it all that well (with regard to the comments above, but also to the much maligned AI of the supposedly more intelligent opponents). For that reason I felt it wasn't as good as some other rec