Slashdot Mirror
Half-Life Beats Half-Life 2 Over Time?
Anonymous Coward writes "Tom's Hardware has an editorial up entitled 'Half-Life vs Half-Life 2: No comparison?' It explores the two games, and how they're holding up over time. He states that while the score of HL1 may have depreciated from 'a spectacular 95% to around about an average 70%' over the past couple of years, the score of HL2 'I'd now rate it in the low to mid 80's, or a full five to ten percent drop in a fraction of the time that the original has been around. Why is this?' The reason, he goes on to elaborate, is a lack of characterization. Half-Life was a blank slate modders could use to fill in their own worlds. HL2, on the other hand, has a definite story that ages less gracefully."
Is he even aware of how many more modding features HL2 has? Maybe he's just pissed that most of the mods are coming out via steam and being charged for, but I say good for the small independent developers who are actually making money off all their hard work.
You'll just wish you had your two minutes back, like me.
The second half of the article talks about why the author thinks that the fun factor of HL2 isn't nearly as high as in HL1, but as you'd expect this whole "rating" and "depreciation" score thing is completely subjective and made up. I really have no idea why this thing made Slashdot...
I loved the original. Just before HL2 was released, I reinstalled and played through it again to refresh my memory (and truth be told polish my FPS skills, it had been a while). I still liked it just as much - as much as anything else, it has character: the NPCs do things or not for reasons, the game seems to have a logical flow to it which takes you from place to place without seeming hugely contrived (although I didn't like Zen much, or the end boss). And it has that indefinable something that just makes it fun to play, even in the crappier bits, you still keep going to see what happens next.
:)
Fast forward to HL2. I get it on release day and install it, and I've instantly got Steam issues. I won't dwell on them here, but it did leave me in a mood where I was prepared to not enjoy the game which is why I mention it. Anyway, I played through almost to the end over the next day or so, and I did enjoy it. But I was left feeling like the game was a wasted opportunity. For me, it didn't live up to the promise it started with. Most of the game sections seemed to go on for too long, especially the boat and car sections. Many puzzles seemed to be an excuse to show off the physics engine rather than to be there for their own sake (buoyant barrels, seesaws). A lot of it is probably personal taste, I just felt like it wasn't all that good when viewed next to the original. I certainly have no urge to replay it, despite not having reached the end, since I reinstalled it on a new hard disk.
I'd really like to try HL:Source, the original Half-Life in the new engine, but I don't feel like paying for the privilege. I'll keep an eye on the Black Mesa mod which seems to be a more ambitious project anyway...
Game dev and music blog
Half-Life 2 decays twice as fast as half-life 1!
My blog
HL1: Main character is average-joe (well, scientist, but certainly a bit out of his element here). HL2: Main character is exhaulted hero praised by everyone (same guy as before, but people worship him now)
HL1: Scary sequences where you know monsters are slowly picking off people and annihilating the base. HL2: Less scary open outdoor sequences, more of a serious-sam game than before. (except ravenwood)
HL1: Fighting for survival, and little else. HL2: Fighting for an ideal and grand-purpose of saving humanity.
See the difference? HL1 had much of a more noir, dark atmosphere. HL2 had more of a "lets shoot stuff and be heroes" kind of atmosphere. The first one tends to draw players in and keep them interested and thinking about the complex story, the second is just too streightforward to keep people playing.
p.s. (completely unrelated to above comments) Hl 2 multiplayer is woefully poor. I would rather play HL 1 multiplayer. Granted, the physics engine is nice, but you see people dance up ladders (they fall, catch themselves, fall, catch themselves, ect.), see huge lag times even on direct connections, and the physics engine degrades severely in multiplayer play.
As someone who owns several original versions of each of Half life, Opposing Force, Counterstrike, Blue Shift, Team Fortress, Gunman Chronicles and Condition Zero (as well as Half-life 2, CS:Source as Steam purchases) my reasons would include:
A P233 with a Voodoo card could run all of the HL1-based games at a very decent speed when they first came out. Even now my 1GHz laptop can still perform more than good enough TODAY on all the above HL1 games without needing a brute of an AGP/PCI-Express card. CS:Source kills it stone dead, as does HL2.
Each HL1 game provided many hours of play and something completely different each time (even CZ was quite different to CS). Most were designed for offline play for the most part and therefore the single player game was the primary focus. In a time when the Internet WAS 56K modems or less this was a big plus.
Mods were very prevelant and didn't require extreme 3D graphic skills to get a basic mod running. For HL2 serious physics, enormous maps, complicated AI, professional-level 3D graphics and level design all mean that a casual mod will be next-to-impossible for the average small team to produce on their own.
http://steampowered.com/status/game_stats.html
That page shows you that I'm not on my own with this. The sum total of all source-based games doesn't come NEAR the sum total of all HL based games. CS alone has 4 times the number of player-minutes compared to CS:S. Then include the fact that even the serious competitions are skipping CS:Source completely because it's been dumbed down.
While I do enjoy HL2 there was just far too much vehicle crap, this also killed the single player MOH games too, IMHO, but the MOH multiplayer just rocked.
.ini file hidden somewhere deep in the valve directory. Make customization of the server more user friendly to give the game better dynamics without having to go through file after file and make adjustments. It also makes it much easier to restore default settings.
HL2 was also a bit short. Aside from that I had a great time.
But now, my complaint is CSS. What are they thinking or am I the only one who doesn't get it: The new lighting SUCKS. Very much. It doesn't take my eyes 5 seconds to fully adjust from the dimness of looking at the shadow of a building to the sunlit street 25 degrees to my right. It's nearly as effective as a flashbang in some cases when leaving the middle structure in Dust to going into the open.
Also, they need to have more secondary attack modes. Aside from silenced and scoped weapons there is next to nothing. The reality is that when you swing an AK safty arm the entire way down it goes into semi-automatic mode and not full auto. I'd like to have this option as semi and burst seems to produce better results in accuracy. The Clarion rifle has burst, why can't the AK have semi? Or how about 3 round burst on the MP5 since there is no secondary mode on the weapon?
Also, the nades are WAY under powered. I'm sorry guys, but if a half a pound of explosives encased in a thin metal canister goes off at your feet you're probably going to die. But on the HE nades in CSS you might take 40% damage... what's up with that? And there is no secondary effect such as loss of hearing or even a minor "shell shock" effect like in COD.
I recently seen a posting on a message board addressing the lack of nade power and it was laughable that the best responce to it all was that they were under powered because it would make it easy to kill an entire team on some unknown custom map.
There is probably a way to mod this on some server settings but that should be in the server options and not some obscure
It's great that they keep bringing out new skins, now if they could just make a bot that can actually get a nade through a window and not have it bounce back on a rushing team mate...
I could probably go on for days. The sad things is this is still just as good as 90% of all FPS multiplayers, but I still find myself playing MOH objective matches 3 or 4 years after the fact because the game seems better than what CS has turned into with CSS.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
"Lack of characterization"? Then he says he likes HL1 for being a "blank slate" for modders to work with, and HL2 has a too well-defined story? How in the hell does that make any sense?
Personally I think HL2 was too far ahead of its time for a good chunk of gamers to get it. Or that it's a genre all its own that players don't yet know how to enjoy. The ass-backwards criticisms are a testament to that. The PC gaming community has become so obsessed with mod-ability (which HL2 actually is first-class in, only beaten by Unreal) that many can't enjoy a linear, non-sandbox masterpiece of a game because you're not allowed to go off in any direction and do whatever you want, GTA-style. Games don't HAVE to be open-ended.
The most exciting thing in my mind right now is the project Black Mesa:Source. Playing through the original half life with updated graphics? Kick ass.
I dunno man, I've got quite abit of experience following girls. It gets more fun once they ask you to stop and you have to go all steath commando. /* looks around nervously */
Half life 2 already down to the low 80's, what? This was the best single player FPS I've ever played. For their time they were both excellent games, but you go back and play HL1 now and it's just awful... I tried maybe 6 months ago and just couldn't get through more than a few hours, the graphics are abysmal and the play control makes you want to die. I'd give it 3 or 4 out of 10. On the contrary I've played through HL2 three times, and I absolutely love it every time, I dont think you could make a better game. There's still nothing that even comes close to competing with it in my opinion. It was 10/10 in November 2004 and it still is today. Just because there aren't as many MOD's for it doesn't make it horrible.
Joseph?