Marek

Half Life 2 First Impressions

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Your friend sounds kind of dumb.

I'm sure current console games have created an expectancy for bulleted mission objectives and handy color-coordinated compasses among many people, but Half-Life benifits greatly for just assuming the player is competent and doesn't need to have their hand held. Valve went to great lengths to make the gameplay intuitive while leaving the story implied and characters developed within the game's actions; similarly the reasons for your actions can be gained if you're paying attention to the world, they are not being rammed down your throat, and I am quite happy about that.

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Your friend sounds kind of dumb.

LOL!! Sometimes being succint is all you need. :grin:

In other words, Chris's friend is, unwittingly, saying that HL2 is doing exactly what it's supposed to. It's linear and yet there are variables within that linearity. I mean, hell, I felt the same way about KoTOR, and that one also allowed for variables, but more so, understandably.

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Well, you sound kind of dumb for dismissing that opinion as dumb :P (just kidding)

But it's true in part. I don't agree with it to that extreme, but why did

I need to go to the beach? Why could Alyx take a different route to Nova Prospekt? And in "Follow Freeman" everyone was talking about some Horse. Head for the Horse... what f**king horse? (umm.. actually I might have skipped a sentence in the "cut-scene" there because there was either combat or Breen was talking louder).

etc. those were just examples but the general feel was always the same. Every NPC seemed to know what I was supposed to do, but I was like William Blake (in Dead Man) moving through the world doing what Xebeche told me to do, never questioning it. I loved that movie, but that same concept doesn't fit in HL2 so well. That's also part of what I meant by the overall structure of the game not being that great.

[edit]Umm... didn't someone here say (or maybe it was TTLG) that in Half-Life 1 this style works well because you are in a closed space and seemingly there is no other choice to go where you go and do what you do. But in Half-Life 2 it doesn't apply that well.

Even though the areas are closed (by the combine), they'll never make me believe I have to leave a big city and come back to it in a very roundabout way because a small passage collapsed somewhere (umm.. sorry if that wasn't the case exactly, I have a skill for forgetting details faster than the speed of light :))

edit2: added spoiler tags

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Sorry... though they aren't any big spoilers and you'll forget everything when you start to play because

Trep :pan:;)

edit: what... no frying pan?

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I guess I got the positive side of that approach. I knew what was going on and my understanding was complicit with Valve's level design. I expected what they wanted me to expect. I loved the "digital actors" enough to pay attention to everything they said, so to me everything I did made sense.

It was indeed Valve's intention that "the player's brain is Gordon's brain", or some such. Notice that except when holding weapons Freeman has no presence in the world - no hands holding objects, no legs in vehicles, no shadow, no reflection (and of course no voice). This is because the designers want you to be Freeman - you, outside the monitor. They seem to be trying to break down the barrier of the monitor screen, between the player and character.

As for the lack of control:

Astute players may have noticed that Gordon Freeman no longer has free will. Having given himself up to the G-man, he is now his pawn. Although more difficult to spot than in HL1, the gman does crop up repeatedly in HL2, managing your future progress. Talking to the vortigons lots, one eventually says "we are both being guided by something secret from afar. We shall not name it".

Like Maud'dib in Dune, Freeman is a prisoner of destiny (and I'm not making this up, I really do think it's the rationale the writers intend). In the end sequence the g-man even says that "I will not offer you the illusion of free will this time. Instead, I will choose for you..."

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Your friend sounds kind of dumb.

I'm sure current console games have created an expectancy for bulleted mission objectives and handy color-coordinated compasses among many people, but Half-Life benifits greatly for just assuming the player is competent and doesn't need to have their hand held. Valve went to great lengths to make the gameplay intuitive while leaving the story implied and characters developed within the game's actions; similarly the reasons for your actions can be gained if you're paying attention to the world, they are not being rammed down your throat, and I am quite happy about that.

First off: he's not dumb. Secondly: while I said I don't fully agree with him, your response is ludicrous. You seem to essentially be saying that any game in which the story is presented outright is "ramming it down your throat". This applies to, hmm, well just about any great adventure game. Full Throttle, for example, is one of the great examples of storytelling in games, and yet your character's motivations and the story arc are quite clear and obvious the whole way through. The same is true in Grim Fandango; sure, there are things to speculate about, but you certainly never lack knowledge of what's going on. "Valve went to great lengths to make the gameplay intuitive while leaving the story implied and characters developed within the game's actions" does not in fact say anything at all. It's a very wishy-washy response that could be applied to any number of situations, including crappy games which simply don't know how to tell a story. Your response sounds like a typical PC gamer elitist who hates to consider for even a second that an idiot console gamer (UGH, consoles) might have a valid point about your precious savior of PC gaming.

Please explain to me how someone who is not familiar with the first Half-Life should know just what is going on, up until at least halfway through the game. You get off a train after a completely uninformative sequence involving this old guy, you're in this City 17 place, you meet this guy who was dressed up as one of those mask guys but apparently you know him, you sort of escape, you meet some other people, they keep telling you to go places. The whole Ravensburg (sp?) area doesn't seem to have any significance other than that people generally don't go there, then you eventually end up in Nova Prospekt, where you could have gotten if you'd just stayed on the train at the beginning. Remember when Barney (at least I think it was Barney, maybe it was Eli) says "Wow, good thing you got off the train here, you could have ended up in Nova Prospekt!" I mean, clearly you had to take a detour due to various events occurring, but if you already haven't the faintest idea what's going on, it's completely understandable why this might be a bit frustrating. I'm completely fucking loving the game so far, but I have a slightly different perspective on it. I can certainly admit that HL2 doesn't do as good a job as HL1 as setting up the circumstances, since in HL1 you definitely need no prior knowledge about any other events. It's clear that you're a research scientist, you participate in an experiment which goes wrong, and from that point you're mainly trying to escape with your life. It's very different. HL2 makes you feel like you're supposed to be saving these people from the get go, but they clearly know way more about it than you do so it seems like they should be saving themselves if they actually know everywhere you're supposed to go. HL1 put you in your position as a matter of necessity, whereas HL2 puts you there because of some ill-defined expectation.

Again: I love this game, I think it's great. However, I definitely thing the main innovation in this game is its environments and physics, and is not quite up to par with HL1's revolutionary storytelling. That said, I haven't beat the game yet and I've heard it does get a lot better in the later portions.

Also bear in mind I am playing extreme devil's advocate here. I wouldn't have bothered typing all this shit if it weren't for manny's initial insult of my friend, followed by a typically idiotic brushing aside of console gaming, followed by a rote and non-specific defense of HL2.

EDIT: Treesus' explanation is one I agree with and is in fact almost precisely how I responded to my friend the other day. However, I still can't expect him to have gleaned this rather esoteric explanation out of thin air, not knowing who the G-Man is, Gordon's association with him, or any of the events of HL1. It's worth noting that my friend is enjoying the game a lot more after I filled him on in the previous game.

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My first play through I thought the game wanted me to race through the "Water Hazard" chapter and especially in the beginning of it I didn't really pay any attention to my surroundings because I thought all the scenery was butaforic... now I actually found some secret rooms and other cool stuff and getting off the boat to fight the combine instead of racing past them.

This time it doesn't actually seem overly long and is even more fun, but I haven't gotten to the helicopter yet.

I'm loving it more and more and paying more attention to the details.

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Another thing I'd like to point out is that character development and possible story hints aren't exactly bursting at the seams in this game. You spend a REALLY long amount of time in sequences like the hoverboat thing. I mean, that's a really good chunk of the gameplay, and there aren't any characters there or any sort of clues as to what's going on. Sequences like that are punctuated by moments in which you must solve a bunch of generally physics-based puzzles, which add even more time and are also definitely not filled with any kind of storytelling. AGAIN, I think Valve was successful, but I'm not going to suggest that there are in fact always little clues and hints you can pick up that all contribute to the overall tapestry of "what the hell am I doing here".

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I agree completely Chris, you put it better than I could have. And you may take over my job as devils advocate now :)

BTW. <nitpick mode> What Barney said was more like "He was about to board the express to Nova Prospekt" so I guess that would have been if Gordon had went through the other gate instead of following Barney, not if he had stayed on the train. City 17 was the final destination for that particular train :)...

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I agree completely Chris, you put it better than I could have. And you may take over my job as devils advocate now :)

Argh, no, please no. I have a feeling I'm never going to want to post on this subject again once the responses start coming in...

BTW. <nitpick mode> What Barney said was more like "He was about to board the express to Nova Prospekt" so I guess that would have been if Gordon had went through the other gate instead of following Barney, not if he had stayed on the train. City 17 was the final destination for that particular train :)...

Ah ok, thanks. That does sound more familiar. Either way, too bad he didn't just get on that other train...

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Correct Erkki, in fact that gate is even labelled "Nova Prospekt" and there is a train on the other side. A big, black, no-escape kind of train.

And the water hazard - dammit the woman who gives you the boat tells you where to go and to look out for a barn with a red roof. Granted that you forget that fairly quickly once gunships start spraying you, but it's there. Same goes for the Highway 17 explanation - it's there, but easy to miss or forget.

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And the water hazard - dammit the woman who gives you the boat tells you where to go and to look out for a barn with a red roof. Granted that you forget that fairly quickly once gunships start spraying you, but it's there. Same goes for the Highway 17 explanation - it's there, but easy to miss or forget.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

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HL1 for General Fuzzy :)

You meet Dr Kliener, who takes you to the main portal and tells you that he has detected a large entity in the other dimension that seems to be responsible for most of the aliens teleporting in, instructing you to destroy it.

Once in Xen (the first sight of which is one of my favourite moments in gaming history) you make your way through, past the local wildlife and eventually to the alien factories. Along the way you find the remains of several human explorers, making it clear that humans have been exploring xen for some time (in case you miss the hints earlier in the game), and fight the big mommy-headcrab, Gonarch.

In the factories you see the alien soldiers being "processed" in some mysterious way. Eventually you end up in the chamber of the Nihilanth, the gigantic psychic foetus entity that generates teleportals and whispers disturbingly inside your head.

-as an aside, the Nihilanth draws life from three crystals around the roof of its chamber. These crystals are same substance as the sample that you placed in the mass spectrometer at the beginning of the game - causing the Resonance Cascade that ripped open the barrier between the worlds.

After one of the toughest boss fights in any PC game, you blow up the Nihilanth's head from the inside and the chamber collapses. a stray portal teleports you out at the last moment, and you find yourself in some kind of limbo dimension. Here the G-man approaches you, congratulates you and says that he has need of resourceful "survivor" types such as yourself. You get a choice - turn down his offer and you end up on a Xen island fighting an infinite wave of aliens until you die. Accept, and he leaves you to wait it out in Limbo.

Until you find youself on the train to City 17 :)

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Wait, Dr Kleiner is the fellow in the Lambda lab in Black Mesa?

I could've sworn that guy was killed once the portal opened and the hell broke loose? Also, some of the revealing H-L2 previews mentioned some administrator fellow that was allegedly mentioned in the first Half-Life, but I don't remember any such figure in the original... mentioned or implied...

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Yeah, Breen was Black Mesa's administrator, although he was never mentioned in the original. What do you want, a list of black mesa employees? Although that wouldn't be all that hard, seeing that there were 3 scientist models, and 1 guard.

For those that critisize the game for not giving a clear understanding of what is happening, keep in mind that this is a sequel, and if you are big into story, you should really play the first. Otherwise, just about anyone can jump into the game and have a great time.

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Right at the start, before you go into the test chamber and push the shopping cart into the laser beam, the two scientists sort of brief you, and they make repeated mentions to "the administrator wanting this test in particular to go off without a hitch" and the like.

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Right at the start, before you go into the test chamber and push the shopping cart into the laser beam, the two scientists sort of brief you, and they make repeated mentions to "the administrator wanting this test in particular to go off without a hitch" and the like.
That is it? One of them early previews made it seem like he was more mentioned than that; they sortof took it for granted that not only no one reading the preview missed that little sentence while playing the game, but that it was unmissable. I just figured I missed a lot of the story by ignoring all the jibba-jabba that the scientsitsitist and Barnies showered me with...
Yeah, Breen was Black Mesa's administrator, although he was never mentioned in the original. What do you want, a list of black mesa employees? Although that wouldn't be all that hard, seeing that there were 3 scientist models, and 1 guard.
Fuck you.

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Ah ok, thanks. That does sound more familiar. Either way, too bad he didn't just get on that other train...
In my mind this made sense because

if Gordon had taken the other gate, he wouldn't have had any weapons upon his arrival at Nova Prospekt, and would have been "processed" just like any other citizen. Because he took the same route by boat/foot/buggy he arrived fully armed, with the pheromone thing, and just after a huge antlion attack that apparently dealt with most of the Combine.

I think the fact that we're discussing the story so much is a sign of HL2 just being different. HL1 did a lot of storytelling, but it was mostly a sort of style that was later copied by a lot of other FPS games. HL2 offers a lot more dialog than HL1, but because you have such convincing characters and immersive locations, it automatically ups your story expectations even further. And, as it was pointed out earlier, the style doesn't fit HL2 quite as well, because the world of HL2 is less self-contained.

I am hoping that HL3, or any of the HL2 expansions, will further change the story-to-action ratio. The non-action "cutscenes" were super fun, and I would have mind twice the amount of slower-paced story bits that were in HL2.

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Thanks for the reminder. :)

On the issue of the train:

Had Gordon gotten on the train he surely would have been recognized, arrested, and sumarily exicuted.

Here's another question:

The combine obviously aren't from Xen, as they shoot at the head crabs and zombies. Where did they come from. I know there's news paper clippings in the teleport lab in HL2, but I would have liked a bit more from G-Man at the beginning. but then, I'm still in Nova Prospect, trying to get past some guns. (no hints needed)

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