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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.
I was newly married and this game kept me up to all hours. My wife would come into the basement at 3 am and reprimand me.
I've notices hl2 for original xbox used at gamestop and I hesitate to buy it. It may take over my nights again - and i have three kids now.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Half-Life wasn't the first FPS game to capture my attention but it was the first to enthrall me to such a degree that I went out and bought the damn thing. Years of Counter-Strike, Natural Selection, Rocket Crowbar and other various interesting mods later, I'm damn glad I did. I garnered a metric fuckton of fun from that game and it feels like it's been a lot longer than 10 years since its release.
/salute
But then I guess that's what one can expect from a Valve game. Blizzard has a nice attitude: "when it's ready". Valve goes one further: "when it ready and only if it's fun". When HL2 was delayed by a year or so there was a lot of complaining... but nobody was complaining when that thing was released.
Here's to one of the best games ever released!
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
User-generated? I don't think so. The original TF mod for Quake was made by TFS, which was just a group of players at the outset, but they were hired by Valve. Team Fortress Classic was a Valve product.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
Quake 1 gave us Team Fortress, not Valve, not Half Life. (yes, Valve hired the dev team behind TF, but that doesn't mean they gave it to us originally)
I would highly suggest it. I bought it on Steam within the past year and never regretted it.
Half Life was great. My first name is Gordon so when characters in the game would talk to me and use my real name it added more immersion than modern day fancy full screen anti-aliasing and 1080p every could have!
Trolling is a art,
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.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
I've been waiting for and watching Black Mesa since it's inception, and with it's history of set backs and (relatively) slow progress I'll keep my original plan of recommending the original to my friend. If BM is even half as good as the original HL it'll be worth another go through anyways when it's released. I the BM team luck and mean them no offense, it's just they're no where near close enough to justify waiting for the original any longer.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
I'm not a go-to guy on FPSs or games in general by any means, but my impression is that "I didn't see it as much more than DOOM with puzzles and a more detailed story" was pretty revolutionary for a FPS.
(Disclaimer: I haven't finished the original HL (I'm not that good at FPSs and actually stopped playing for a while when I first hit the marines and didn't get past them after about a dozen attempts), but I think HL2 and Episodes are great.)
The only problem is, then the grandparent will have to play it through Steam. I will resent until my dying day the idea that my computer should have to connect to the internet even occasionally so that I can play a single player game, and even moreso that even when I bought Half Life 2, I couldn't play the copy I paid for until I got a non-dialup internet connection.
Valve should at least give people the option of not dealing with their content distribution shit. Let people permanently opt out of multiplayer. Whatever.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
...former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, instrumental minds behind nearly three generations of the Windows operating system.
And I have nearly three eyes.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Wait a minute. You buy a game through Steam...an on-line marketplace...then bitch about having to connect to it every now and then? Seriously?
There is an off-line mode for playing Steam games for those times when your Internet connection is down/missing-in-action.
Wow. A virgin Orange Boxer. Hope you have a blast exploring PC games. This is a great year to become a PC gamer. FarCry2, Crysis:Warhead, STALKER:ClearSky, Fallout3, and CoD:4 are just a few of the games you should check out.
I bought Half-Life "Game of the Year Edition" on sale at CompUSA for $9.99 in the spring of 1999. It has spoiled me. When I think of all the fun I've gotten out of that $10 over the past nine years (I still play CS and DoD) it is just staggering. I'll venture out on a limb and say that was the best $10 I have ever spent.
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.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
If you install a Valve game from a CD it does not download the game. It will download updates, but those are a good thing.
Other PC games require you to insert the disc every time you boot the game. This could be considered equally atrocious as what Steam does. If you don't have a network connection no game for you versus no disc no game for you.
Steam only delivers ads for other Steam games. Not for Coca Cola or some crap. While it may install a startup agent(I don't remember honestly) it can easily be turned off. No steam code on startup on my system.
I hate DRM as much as the next guy, but Steam doesn't piss me off. It's acceptable to me. My biggest problem is that the Steam client itself performs like it was written in QuickBASIC.
Carbon 14 appears to have a less flighty fanbase.
It downloads the final chunk needed to play the game, you simply cannot play HL2 without downloading a lot of stuff first even if you have the CD. On dialup even those megabytes can take too long and I've been on an uni connection once (student dorm) where Steam simply wouldn't work (nothing except HTTP and a few other things worked).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
If you haven't played it already, take a look at Minerva. You can get it from its own website or even as featured mod on Steam.
yea but that requires an internet connection, which is obviously beyond the GP's grasp...
I dare say. But aren't you selling yourself a bit short? :)
Well, that's nice, but adventure games had told a story in game, without cut scenes for years. I don't think that, say, any of the 2d King's Quest games or old Lucas adventures stopped to give you a pre-rendered movie to advance the plot.
In 3D? Well, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 managed to advance the plot just fine without cut-scenes, and if first person 3D.
So let's not go pretending that HL invented it all. HL just brought to FPS what every other game had already been doing for a decade.
Which is mildly ironic, because the rise of the FPS and the near-extinction of adventure games was merely because most publishers had discovered they can get away with not having much scripting in a FPS. The deluge of Doom clones wasn't because nobody had invented storytelling yet, but because they discovered they can get away with skipping that in these newangled FPS games. (Newfangled for that time, anyway.) Scripting and animating for such in-game story telling were rising, but it looked like people will buy a FPS even if you don't bothered with any of that, so publishers gave us just that then. The deluge of such plain arcade shooters was just because they were _cheap_.
HL did do us the service of (A) setting the gamers' expectations high for the new genre too, and (B) proving that you can still make money even so, but otherwise there was nothing revolutionary about it. It just brought back some things that Adventure games had had for years. Yes, some of them in 3D and/or first person.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
When you do play it, it may see somewhat unspectacular now (but you should still find it plenty interesting)...you have to remember what FPSs of that time were like:
Kill monsters with mediore to bad AI, find blue key, open door, go to next level. Next level involed the same thing, except there is also a red key.
Half-Life had a continual story, no real level breaks, talking characters, and some of the AI (Marines) was particularly intelligent and worked together. It laid the groundwork for the modern FPS. Many of the things we consider standard in FPSs now are because of Half-Life.
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Completely different class, IMO.
If I'm in the mood for Doom, a Quake or Unreal (or Serious Sam, or Wolfenstein, or even Painkiller) session will do just as well. Half Life won't.
Same works the other way. If I'm in the mood for Half Life but don't have it around, I'm probably going to go for a replay of Deus Ex, Thief 1/2/3, Max Payne 2, System Shock 2, Bioshock, or even an RPG (Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 1/2/3, Arcanum, The Witcher), rather than Doom, Quake, etc.
I think what makes the second category different from the first are things like pacing, atmosphere (not necessarily better, but certainly different), and the style and depth of storytelling.
I know, I know, it sounds silly to throw storytelling in there when, after all, isn't Half Life just another "OMG aliens shoot them!" game? But if that's the case, where are the elaborate scripted events involving NPCs in the games I've placed in the other category? How about someone like the G-Man? Anything like that in those other games?
Pacing: generally slower and/or more varied in the second category.
As for atmosphere, in Half Life 2 there were: straight-up horror levels; lonely levels with a strange, Hitchcock feel; "leading the revolution" levels; levels following a sad underground railroad, full of determined but beaten individuals; etc.
In Doom 3 there was Mars Base and Hell. I guess the lab section kind of stood out, a little.
You know what though? Sometimes I do like to fire up Quake or RTCW and blast some bad guys. Sometimes I just want to slice some people up with a lightsaber, so I plug in one of the later Dark Forces games, never mind that the level design is generally sub-par and the storytelling is lame. *whisper* sometimes I play CS:Source with all bots and restrict my purchases to armor and handguns (incidentally, I really wish there were more options for setting up bots-only games--I'd love to play 6-on-12 with Normal bots on my side and Easy bots on the other).
I don't dislike games like that, but to say that the average ID game is comparable to the Half Life series strikes me as highly inaccurate. To be completely honest, I believe that making a successful game of the second class requires something like craftsmanship while the first requires only a 3D engine, moderate talent, and some time. I think the second is more artful. Depending on my mood, however, I can enjoy both.