Marek

Half Life 2 First Impressions

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Today I started the game and played four hours straight, now I'm in chapter 6 and if I'm correct, the game has about 12 chapters?

I think it has 14 or 15 chapters (see previous post).

And if memory servers correctly, the first 3 chapters are a lot shorter than the others.

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Anyone else feel bummed in the gob by HL: Source? Perhaps it was a bit much to expect a complete graphical update, but seriously! Barney now has a reflective helmet - I think that's about the sum total of the improvements, almost. Worth paying $10 more for? Hmm. No.

HL2 remains great though, even if there are too many

creepy-crawlies around right now.

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That was merely an illusion, my friend. Now it is fully reflective, utilising the unique Source™ Rendering Engine, and Per-Pixel Reflective, Refractive Lighting Technology! Clearly more than worth the extra cost.

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Man, I must be the slowest player ever. It has taken me about 7-8 hours to get from where you

meet up with Alyx in Nova Prospekt

to that museum-looking place. Managed to get my whole team through that hell in the front yard of the building though...

I very often reload though, want to do everything near-perfectly. And I suck too. I think I died 6-8 times in the place where Alyx was hacking some thing to open a gate.

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Those squad members are the dumbest fucks I've ever had to deal with in a game. They won't even follow orders. And I don't really see why Valve made them go "let's follow freeman" only 10-15 seconds after I've ordered them to go somewhere else. It's more of a trouble to keep them alive than it would be playing solo.

I'm currently trying to keep them alive while running from striders and we have no rockets.

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I think the point of their Ai isto not be controlled really. They take cover suprisingly well, its just that their health is the equivalant of a regular enemy soldier.

My advice to you is when you get in combat situations (especially Striders--they all die no matter what) forget about them. They're useless in that situation anyway.

Right now I'd say its probably the best squad Ai I've ever seen in an FPS, even though they still bunch up in doorways.

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Well yeah, mostly they're not that bad, but when it comes to attacking Striders with weak weapons and standing in front of traps/setting off traps while I try to disarm them, they could act better. And failing to hide behind cover when being sniped etc.

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If you're trying to disarm something, just move your squad to a save position with the C key.

:yawn:

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If you're trying to disarm something, just move your squad to a save position with the C key.

As I was saying before, that doesn't always last very long. I'm talking about those turrets that come out of the floor. And especially when Barney is also with me. Had to time it very well for them not getting hit by thems turretses.

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Ah okay. I never had trouble with that, though I was thinking you were talking about disabling the little jumping mines. Confusion!

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Just finished it. It's definitely the best shooter I've played. Doom 3, FarCry etc. have nothing to hold against all the greatness of Half-Life 2. I could also talk a whole lot of time about how great it is.

But I also think GameSpot is kind of right about it being too much like Half-Life 1 still (or how did they put it? not innovating enough?). I mean -- they had things here that were completely different from Half-Life 1 and awesome, but it seems like they didn't have the guts to take that one extra step or something...

But that's my subjective opinion and mostly because I'm not that big a shooter player and I was having a hard time with and got bored by the combat occasionally. HL2 actually never pretended to be more than a shooter but I'm wishing it was less of a shooter and more like an action/adventure so I could enjoy it more. :)

-- good, now I finally figured out what was bugging me about it. Posting here is therapeutic...

And also the load times... and sound issues... (but they're working on fixing that). But everything else about it was bloody marvelous.

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I agree with your wishes for a more adventurey game, the world was very fleshed out, it would be fun to have a larger story aand the ability to talk with everyone in depth. Its not often that a world is developed enough to create that desire, and usually when it is, its already an adventure game.

But I can't really seem to understand the too-much-like Hl1 criticsm. Here you have a game with lots of outside and large inviornments with a gameplay system based around physics. I mean, the weapons are similar...uh, and it has some of the same enemies. I think it innovates in the strictly shooter aspect as much as any other game since HL1.

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I saw HL2 in stores today on display, and it looked damn sexy. I had to work so I couldn't take a closer look, but I'll definitely pick this up in a year or two.

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Didn't actually read the GS review, only watched the video, and yeah they seemed too nitpicking. But what I said above don't look at as critisism but actually praise :) -- the whole game world and characters were just so well done that it was more than just levels in a shooter -- not even Half-Life 1 really achieved that in my opinion.

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Erkki's sig is seriously devaluing the mighty :tup: through overuse, man.

Meanwhile, my sig is inflating :tdown:, if anything.

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There's a video that is quite similar to the stutter experiences I had with Half-Life 2:

http://home.broadpark.no/~krhagen/

I didn't notice it that much, so I guess in my case it was not quite as bad... But that problem was present throughout the game.

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Any signs of a patch coming before I get my copy of the game this week? :grin:

Valve has posted news that they are looking into that problem.

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My opinion of the game is now finalizing. Here's what I think:

If Valve truly wanted to create the best PC game ever, they failed. But does "best game ever" even exist? I don't think there are ultimate categories like that when it comes to any medium. Best movie ever? Come on...

But it probably does make into most people's Top5-Top10 lists. I'm actually not sure yet if it makes into mine... I started replaying it again, this time on the easy difficulty.

I was slightly disappointed by it, but the disappointment didn't come from pre-playing hype but I formed certain expectations in the beginning of the game, which was really story-packed compared to the rest of the game.

All the game elements are absolutely brilliant, well, except the story. But they are not "perfect" (to emphasise the quotes -- I don't mean literally perfect). Making a game of a smaller scope may mean you can do each element near-perfectly. But Valve tried to do so much that doing everything perfectly was not even a possibility. It's actually amazing how much they did do really really well.

The game was kind of weirdly structured. On one hand the amazing atmosphere suggested things beyond those levels you play and the interactions possible, but the game's overall structure was extremely level-oriented -- with many of the gameplay elements being specific to the chapters they appeared in. I think they should have spread them out a bit more.

I mean like only driving the car once, only seeing traps like in ravenholm once, only riding the boat once. Getting to command a squad only near the end of the game. Seeing loads of hopper mines to disarm, hearing NPCs comments about not wasting them, but only one or two places where they are worth using against the Combine. etc.

Short summary -- great individual elements, less great overall structure.

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One thing my generally console-gaming friend pointed out is that while the game world is incredibly designed and construcuted, he felt that at many points the game sort of felt like a tech demo. Since for a large part of the game, the player doesn't actually learn anything, Gordon's journeys feel kind of pointless--the G-Man says go here, you go here, not knowing what to do, something goes wrong, you go somewhere else, you meet people who tell you to go here, so you do it, something goes wrong, you go somewhere else, someone says what to do, you do it, etc., but you have no idea WHY--and to him it was kind of like the designers were saying "Now go to THIS location, do these wacky things with physics, kill these monsters, why? I have no idea, ok now go HERE!" It's not an opinion I agree with necessarily, and we had a lot of interesting discussion about it, but I think it speaks about a small negative side effect of the "cabal" approach for which Valve was split up into small design teams to work on various areas of the game. It's understandable that Gordon doesn't REALLY know what's going on, but to my friend that reached a ludicrous extreme. He didn't play HL1 (and Newell stated you shouldn't have had to), and he quite literally did not have the slightest foggiest idea what was going on during his whole experience until I explained some things and offered some educated guesses of my own.

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