10 Years of Half-Life

intenscia writes "After 10 years of Half-Life and dealing with its silent protagonist Gordon Freeman, ModDB looks back at everything that Valve made possible with the release of its first game. The freedom and flexibility the Gldsource platform gave modders resulted in a plethora of user-generated content such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. In this article they take a brief look at the mods that made the jump to retail as well as the top non-commercial mods that have become perennial classics." Planet Half-Life used the occasion to look back at the history of Valve. Valve is celebrating by offering the original Half-Life for less than a dollar on Steam.

Comments

Open up the engine

[Enderandrew]

When a new Quake comes out, they open up the old engine. The original Half Life was OpenGL if I recall, and could be ported by the community to Mac, Linux, etc. etc. etc. Selling the game for $1 is a nice move. Opening the engine (a decade old engine that won't hurt Valve in the least) would be a better move.

Re:That's awesome but...

[Physicser]

I never bought it or played it. I'm thinking about plunking down the dollar to see what the hype was about.

I would highly suggest it. I bought it on Steam within the past year and never regretted it.

A true innovator

[StreetStealth]

A lot of people forget how generally unprecedented it was at the time for an action game to begin with half an hour of context and tone establishment instead of throwing you right into the fire.

Traveling through the massive subterranean tram network, checking in at the desk and grabbing your equipment to start what would have been a normal day's work... As the tension is slowly built, something goes wrong, and then aliens show up out of that, the effect is something vastly more profound than jumping into Quake and shooting stroggs straight off the bat.

Re:That's awesome but...

[MindlessAutomata]

It was most notably how the story was told--first person, no cut scenes--that partially made the game so revolutionary. The atmosphere, AI, and sheer size of the game (it's pretty damn long for most people) are also pretty large points; for many situations you also had to develop a plan on how you were going to advance, rather than just figure out the best way to kill everyone in sight. The game isn't actually that similar to DOOM (which still is a great game to play that for some inexplicable reason has aged incredibly well, in my opinion) as DOOM is more oriented over killing the demons. In fact, to compare this game with DOOM seems to me that you either didn't play DOOM very much or you didn't play HL very much. Both are pretty different FPSes.

In addition, the game's friendliness to modifications leading to Counter-Strike and a host of other free mods has pretty much solidified its position as one of the greatest FPSes to come out.

Re:That's awesome but...

[slaker]

The original Half Life was sold on a CD.

The second game was as well, but the disc was encrypted or something and needed to download gigabytes of crap from Steam before it could be played. Basically the copy of the game that one could purchase in the store was a giant trojan that put Steam on your PC.

Gigabytes of downloads aren't exactly compatible with dialup internet connections. There was no way to just put in the physical disc that I bought and play the game.

Steam has an off line mode. It makes you check in every couple weeks. That's not offline enough. Offline means "this works perfectly well on a computer with no network connection at all." Which is something that I expect of a single player game.

Yes, today I have six different ways to get on the internet from my apartment, but that doesn't mean all those methods will always be available. I've been the tech guy at LAN parties where a network issue with Steam has killed the evening for some or most of the people attending.

I can also rant about the fact that Steam delivers advertising and an unwanted startup processes on a PC.

I really think it's a tragedy that a lot of great games are locked up in Steam. I played through all the Half-Life add-on packs, but I resent the way Steam operates so much I've never seen more than the opening screens of Half-Life 2.