If you haven't already I recommend Thief 2 and System Shock 2. Add No One Lives Forever and you have the top 5 FP single-player games in my experience and good variety between them.
It seems to me that Valve is going after the FP engine market. The dominant current competitors are Id's Quake/Doom iterations and Unreal. Now with Half-Life 2 Valve have their own proprietary engine being showcased by the sequel to the most popular game of recent times (and therefore arguably already guaranteed to extremely popular) with a history and future of committed and proven mod/community support. The Half-Life 2 engine will be tested by millions of users and then perfected by Valve. An FP game developer will now be able to choose the Half-Life 2 engine for their new game and it would probably make a compelling choice. Note the alleged lenience on system specs required by Half-Life 2 being sought by Valve - whereas the Doom 3 and others admittedly demand a high-end system to do the engine justice.
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If you haven't already I recommend Thief 2 and System Shock 2. Add No One Lives Forever and you have the top 5 FP single-player games in my experience and good variety between them.
It seems to me that Valve is going after the FP engine market. The dominant current competitors are Id's Quake/Doom iterations and Unreal. Now with Half-Life 2 Valve have their own proprietary engine being showcased by the sequel to the most popular game of recent times (and therefore arguably already guaranteed to extremely popular) with a history and future of committed and proven mod/community support. The Half-Life 2 engine will be tested by millions of users and then perfected by Valve. An FP game developer will now be able to choose the Half-Life 2 engine for their new game and it would probably make a compelling choice. Note the alleged lenience on system specs required by Half-Life 2 being sought by Valve - whereas the Doom 3 and others admittedly demand a high-end system to do the engine justice.