Back then every shooter had you fighting demons and aliens. The idea of having the marines unexpectedly storm the place, with AI that did something more than move slowly towards you shooting in a predetermined pattern, was mindblowingly innovative.
To restate that last part: pure shooters, at that point in time, were still using the Doom model of having enemies with a movement pattern (that they wouldn't break, and would not react to your actions) while randomly firing. The standard way of defeating ANY fps enemy pre-HL was to strafe while continuously firing into it. No reloading. No ducking behind a wall to avoid a salvo. Just strafe and hold fire.
You know what I remember everyone going 'omfg' over when HL came out? The fact that you couldn't just cheese past every enemy in the game by hiding behind a doorway and blasting all the enemies as they come blindly in one by one (as they would in shooters at that point). That was such an engrained tactic in shooters, because people just took it for granted that AI couldn't possibly know how to react to that. If all the AI can do is move at you and fire, then obviously the easiest way of dispatching them would be to fire a shot, then wait behind a wall/door and kill them all as they come through. Because they couldn't design AI to react intelligently to that, games would instead throw in bullet-soaks with strong melee attacks, forcing you to stay at distance (where you'd switch to the 'other' tactic of strafe and hold fire).
People fucking shat themselves when they tried the standard 'hide behind the door and wait' tactic in HL1 and the marines would react by just throwing a grenade in to kill you. It seems really fucking simple now, but that was actually a recent development. Pre 1998 that just wasn't what FPS games did.
Well, yeah. I bashed HL's AI a bit, because it wasn't nearly as awesome as many claim it to be, but the fact is that it was pretty shocking when the standard behaviour included basic navigation, moving in straight line towards the target, getting stuck in doorways, and, at best, strafing in predetermined zigzag pattern and crouching randomly in the middle of open spaces (Q2).
Sure, attempts at more complex behaviours were made - DN3D had jetpack aliens, SW had mooks capable of taking cover, Blood had cultists with hitscan weapons and dynamite, but all those enemies behaved very randomly and stupidly, without trying to do anything in particular. At best they could, like Blood's cultists, force mobility on player and prevent strafing at range with their hitscan weapons, but they still mostly just blew themselves up with badly thrown dynamite and cheesing it in the doorway was still working as charm.
Blood was admittedly also one of the few early games where weapon selection mattered a lot, but apart from cultists most enemies were pushovers easily killed using rote tactics. The only two exceptions were stone gargoyles and hellhounds.
Well, you had games like Hexen I and II too, but being fantasy really does make things easier as you add shields, relevant melee and magic, while removing hitscan, but Hexen I still didn't have much interesting enemies apart from bosses. II was more interesting in this regard, but had much less combat overall.
HL AI wasn't as good as the AI in contemporary Unreal, enemies in HL were overall rather derpy and could do stuff like running obliviously into lethal hazards, but they were way above usual shooter fare back then and worked towards some apparent goals. Flushing player out with grenade was an effective anti cheese tactics, AI also rarely blew itself up (usually it just looked like this when they attempted to place a 'nade and run, but got gunned down and fell on it). Now, if you watched out for grenades, you could still try to cheese it in the doorways - it took Unreal to develop AI capable of navigating level using alternative paths and realize that player camping behind the door with flak cannon is bad news - but the combat AI in HL was still definite improvement over Blood, and capable of outright inflicting not-so-tasteful rape on Q2 one.
Then you had enemies like AH-64, Gargantua and Tentacle requiring specific approach and usually specific weapons.
Nevermind material based hitboxes and armour affecting damage. Where the fuck is that in the pure shooters pre HL. Sure, the SS games had it, but they were (a) hybrids and (b) criminally underpurchased, lauded by game critics but hardly known outside of small cult followings.
And SS didn't even have multiple hitboxes (though it did have armour).
Besides, I'd consider SS1 and Terra Nova a genre on their own, because of fairly different approach to controlling the character (aiming and turning independent, weapon either not shown, or not fixed relative to viewpoint) and more tactical, simulative approach.
So would I, but the key difference between this and HL is: interactivity. Non-skippability is an obvious price to pay for interactive dialogs (I don't think I need to explain why)
Not necessarily - if you know the dialogue you can just rapidly click the right sequence of responses. If you don't, why the fuck would you skip it anyway, interactive or not? It would make sense if it was excessively long, but then it wouldn't be voiced.
but the problem with HL's approach is that I just have to sit there being bored and waiting for the script to run its course. Not so bad when the script is a 10-second crumbling hallway, BIG problem when it's a 2-minute dialog. I don't really care that on a technicaly standpoint it's seamlessly integrated and so on - on a practical point I'm standing there being bored and waiting for the script.
But which script apart from the intro was so long and boring?
And I tend to not skip intros anyway, since they set up the mood, even on replays. I'm more concerned with unskippability on reloads than on replays.
Devastator had cool sprite, but, while cool, rapid-firing, miniature rocket launcher isn't exactly a novelty weapon in my book, especially if it's pretty JoAT as well.
Now a fucking gauss gun that can be overcharged to the point of firing through walls (with much recoil and extra spalling) and being capable of piercing the armour on AH-64 is definitely interesting in the gameplay, especially given that it isn't terribly powerful in most combat situations.
Though reloading was pretty cool. Pretty sure it wasn't the first one
Sure it wasn't. I think System Shock 1 had this distinction, but reloading was quite an important part of HL gameplay and it was probably the first mainstream FPS to make it this way.
one of the rare games at that time trying to make genuine sense with enemy and level design (even if latter was usual industrial shit for most time)
I actually like the style they went for with the aesthetics, and the enemies' hand placement is indeed superb and meshes excellently with the look of the room they're in. It's made pretty easy by the linear design obviously, but still, credit where credit's due. And while I do feel they abused the "marines in big room with crates" and especially the placement of those fucking ceiling horrors, the fact that I rage 13 years later at those things is probably the best praise I can give to this particular aspect of the game. Even if it annoyed the shit out of me as I played.
I think that barnacles were just not annoying enough. In most places they were far to easy to kill in advance and far to easy to kill safely when pulling you in.
Still, additional credit for secrets reachable only using barnacles.
one of the very rare (at the time) FPS games trying to tell actual story rather than killkillkill and so on.
Yeah this one I'm not so sure about. The story itself was pretty much Doom all over again (and as I said before I don't buy the whole Freeman-as-a-PhD thing - from the way you play him he's pretty much identical to Doomguy) and while they tried to make a difference by adding detail, none of it is of good quality enough to matter IMO.
I beg to differ. Sure "shit invades the Earth/Phobos" can hardly be made much different in principle, but there is still some difference between shit being "demons, cyborgs and demon-cyborgs", and shit being alien looking and well designed aliens, with stuff like homologous anatomy, different and somewhat sensible behaviour (running away when injured, not being always in berserk mode, especially on Xen, using healing stations on Xen) and alien looking world.
I have a lot of love for Xen despite all the jumping puzzles, because it's disorientingly alien which makes figuring shit out enjoyable and because if you don't just enter it in berserk mode you get to witness stuff like non-berserking aliens and some environmental storytelling. It feels more than a bit like something out of Lem's "Eden" at times. My main problem with Xen is that it's disjointed as you move around using teleporter network.
Sorry, but if we are comparing HL with doom 1 or 2 in particular, it's instant game over for id's brainchild.
The only advantage Doom has over HL is less railroading, but it's pretty flimsy advantage given that Doom is hardly open and everything else is just worse in it. If I give Doom credit it deserves (and it deserves huge amount of credit for obvious reasons) I have to venerate HL, even though it can be argued that it seeded the plague of shitty rail shooters.
Well, Diablo gave us RT iso clickfests that plagued the whole RPG genre, but I still love it.
Of course not, but let's face it, it was the Black Ops of its time, because no one else had (ab)used scripts as much. In fact I had to restart Unreal several times before it caught me because the very first level, with its multiple scripts, was a constant reminder of HL and I kept abandoning the game with an "ugh, not again" feeling. Fortunately, Unreal gets much more reasonable once you get out of the starting spaceship.
I stopped playing Unreal for the first time in Chizra.
It felt too same-y in most locations, although, credit where credit is due, it's a fairly nonlinear level.
Terraniux was it's next not-so good moment, but that's mostly because of mercs and music - level itself was quite cool.
The most infamous is with the citadel Heresiarch, which sometimes won't spawn
Ah, yes, now I remember this one. It's the first Heresiarch in game, right?
I keep telling myself I should replay HL1. It's been so long, and after replaying some other shooters and liking them more than I remember I keep wondering if this'll happen with HL as well. But then I remember even the opening damn rail cart scene and lose the will.
Eh, just make yourself some tea or coffee and relax. Trying to look around for various sorts of detail also helps.
HA HA HAHAHAH HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHHH. No, seriously. I had to leave the room and laugh in the kitchen because it's the morning and I didn't wanna wake up the girl. How in the fuck is HL2 a "purist" shooter? When you stand around for hours on listening to godawful dialogue or monologue as if it was some shitty RPG where someone to forgot to write and record the PC's lines?
Last time I checked "original" cRPGs didn't have much plot or dialogue. Are the more verbose ones some shitty RPG-something hybrids too? Since when does the amount of plot affect genre classification anyway?
When you spend half the game traversing linear corridor levels in terribly handling vehicles?
Vehicles have always been an attractive gimmick for shooter devs. Is Shadow Warrior some FPS-sim hybrid, because you get to drive a tank?
When the second half of the game is spent doing PHYSICS PUZZLES?
Well, I could've settled it with stating that putting on your damn pants is probably a physics puzzle for you
, but I will just settle for saying that puzzles have been permeating FPS games from the very beginning, same as they've done with RPGs.
Yeah, what a nice touch. More like a half-assed attempt to make it seem at least a little bit interactive when it was not.
Look up "interactive". You're misusing the term.
It made me facepalm through each and every dialogue ever after meeting Barney.
Everything after that was pure retardo. "NO LAMARR NO GOOD GIRL" "OH NO TEH TELEPORTER IT IS TEH BROKENED" "WE MUST RESCUE ELI GORDON COME ON" wow so deep and thoughtful and not at all facepalm inducing
You shouldn't facepalm this hard. You've clearly damaged something.
The damage is evident from your claims that anyone here considers HL deep and thoughtful.
(Though it still beats Master - jelly much?
)
EXCEPT WE'VE BEEN OVER THAT. It doesn't matter what your definition is, it doesn't matter whether it's dialogue or cutscenes or whatever the fuck you decide to call it, you gronard. It needs to be skippable, just like any other part of any game that strips you of control entirely
The only time where HL stripped you of control was when Gordon was physically immobilized. Well, duh.
And the advantage of integrated scenes is that they can be broken up with something sudden and unexpected happening with no warning. Granted, HL2 doesn't use this capability to any significant extent, but unskippable scripts have this potential, while skippable cutscenes don't. They also can be made interactive with relatively little effort. I'd so prefer if DX:HR had iunskippable scripts instead of skippable cutscenes for the most part - if only because it would necessarily eliminate the problem of Jensen standing there like a lemon.
