What exactly did Half Life do that was so ground breaking?

[Oscar Wilde]

Recently beat Half Life 2, only played the first level of the first one. Discussing it, I said it wasn't the godly shooter people make it out to be, whereupon the hordes of the internet collectively shit a chicken, proclaiming that I just "didn't understand why Half Life is as well known as it is." And that Half Life "did it all first."

I don't necessarily trust the board I posted it on, as there's no rule on being smart about things, whereas this board seems a better place to ask. So I ask if anyone can educate me: Why is the half life series as well known as it is? Did it do it all first? I suppose it could be that I played many other shooters before I did HL2, but it could be that Half life is good, but not "OMG LOL GODLY," but doesn't the truly good game remain good despite anything you might have played before it?

[DesertFly]

Half-Life was pretty ground-breaking, at the time. The graphics weren't amazingly better than everything that had come before (although they did stack up well with anything else that was out at the time, and they were fairly scalable), but the real innovation came from the way that the story was presented to the player. I can't categorically say that no other game had the conceit of just showing all action through ubiquitous scripted events, but Half-Life was definitely the game that brought that idea to the masses. The popular FPSs of the previous few years (Quake, Doom, Rise of the Triad) had minimal story, and that was presented through a few scattered cut scenes, or at worst walls of text. Half-Life didn't have a great story, but the way you lived through it was fun and new.

The AI was another selling point, with enemies like the marines using rudimentary tactics to flank and outmaneuver the player, throwing grenades to flush you out of cover and using a single marine to distract you while another would come creeping around behind you.

[weemadando]

In addition to the story telling methods and the AI, another big point was the "seamless experience", where it's not "LEVEL COMPLETED!" at the end of each zone. Plus the scripted events like enemies roping in rather than monster closets (though they still existed) were big points.

[The_Saint]

I never got into Half Life 1 until well after it was "big" (some issues with Barney and Quake 2 being the main reasons) and I never really got they hype from just playing it. As far as I can tell it's not that some things were done brilliantly (surprisingly few) or there were a lack of flaws (there were many) but that they did so much that was just plain, solid, good. For the time the AI was good, the graphics were good, the gameplay was good, the modding was excellent and that made the replayability... nothing was stellar but the sum of the parts made something that is great.

On a sidenote I have an old games magazine that dedicates several pages to the next biggest thing "QUAKE II" and there's a little paragraph in "In Development" about this odd garage game being made called Half Life.

[salm]

Never played HL and can only comment on HL2. Valve had some brilliant graphics artists. They managed to create a very atmospheric world which still looks better than a lot of new games, even though the graphics are out dated.

[Stark]

Wow, I'm sure glad someone who never played Halflife shared his thoughts on what made Halflife 'groundbreaking', lol.

I agree with Ando that the game's different 'feel' came from the way it was presented; at the time, it was a very 'cinematic' game, and marketed as such. Of course, the back of a Halflife box is like a black hole of lies and deception, but hey. HL had a narrative and ambience that wasn't communicated 'out of game', which was remarkably immersive at the time.

[salm]

Wow, I´m sure glad someone who never read the OP tries to make a witty comment.

[Grif]

The multitude of mods spawned from the Halflife itself probably contributed a lot to it's godly aura of "Father of all modern FPSes". Notably Counter-Strike and Team Fortress.

[CaptHawkeye]

Wow, I´m sure glad someone who never read the OP tries to make a witty comment.

The OP has nothing to do with it. Stark's annoyed that you're answering the question with "Oh never played it but it sure looked cool." Hint: You have contributed nothing to this thread. Go the fuck away.

I played Half Life years after it came out, I think the momentum it gained as a result of its "uniquely cinematic" presentation had mostly worn off by then. Because I considered it pretty boring and bog standard. I remember being so bored playing it I went back to Dark Forces and Goldeneye.

I think what also indirectly attributed to Half Life's success was that it was the first truly successful grounding for community built mods and add ons. One of the most successful shooters of all time, Counter Strike, was none other than a mod for Half Life. As was Team Fortress, Blue Shift, Opposing Forces etc. All the mods came out after-the-fact yes, but when people looked back on Half Life just a year later, it was impossible NOT to associate with the first hugely successful mod community it had spawned.

EDIT:Drat, Grif beat me to it!

[Covenant]

Furthermore, as someone who played it when it came out, all those minor elements basically made it the most fluid and gameworld-immersive FPS I'd experienced to that point. Pound for pound versus another shooter it was going to provide a more seamless, less broken-up play style--and while people may prefer games like Doom and Dark Forces, I can't say I'd ever want to go back and play one of those again, but I would happily play through a graphically updated version of Halflife... which is all HL2 really was. HL really set the modern stage for games similar to it--which used relatively more realistic weapons that handled a bit closer to how you'd expect them to, enemies didn't just respawn or sit waiting for you in a series of rooms, you might be able to pick up allies who would temporarily make life easier, and storyline would be given to while you're actually playing the game--and it would be a half-decent one.

Really, the best description I can give is the ye olde review of the game, which states all these "revolutionary" things that we consider normal today. That's why HL is a big deal, it's basically rewrote the average FPS game.

That's the groundbreaking element. It gave FPS games the option of going for a more seamless, cinematic feel, with less loading and text walls but still an engaging story and a more diverse combat game. It's nowhere near as good as the games that came after it, but that doesn't diminish it's value to the community.

It's biggest failing is that it's a great storytelling mechanism but that the action itself is pretty normal compared to other things nowadays. But being so heavily copied isn't really the best grounds for saying it was 'just good, not great.' You can't just chalk this up to fat nerds and walk away, it really was a bridge between Quake's faceless no-name hero and the multitude of similar games that'd come after it. There were a few games that had broken the DOOM mold, like Duke Nukem, but generally only by doing one or another thing--Nukem gave your character an actual personality, but really, all I'm doing is going over the same ground. Just read the review from the perspective of someone reading that about a new game and think about how strangely dull the rest of the market was for a concept like basic integrated puzzles or non-floating spinning healthpacks to seem like a real step towards reality.

[Mr Bean]

Covenant pretty much covered it. Those who look back after playing a thousand FPS will today look back at Half-Life and see nothing interesting about it's features forgetting that Half-Life was the first game to do so many of the things that people consider standard in FPS today. Scripted events. In game cinematic(Via that scripting), mixed game play types. Atmospheric effects. And the AI, something games still fuck up. I'm willing to stack Half-Life 1 Marines against a good 90% of the enemy AI out there in FPS's and they will still win. They used grenades to flush you from cover, they worked together to flank you(One shooting at the box you might be hiding behind and the other running along side), they use cover and they pursue you. Basic compared to things later like say FEAR's AI but this was 1998 after all.

Half-Life in the end chalked up a whole lot of firsts, which is why it was ground-breaking. After all, doing something first IS ground breaking.

[General Zod]

Are moderators just deleting posts they don't like carte blanche now? Because I'm pretty sure I made a post in this thread yesterday.

[Mr Bean]

Are moderators just deleting posts they don't like carte blanche now? Because I'm pretty sure I made a post in this thread yesterday.

Check the Hall of Shame Zod

[Drooling Iguana]

I played the game relatively soon after it came out, and the reason I liked it as much as I did was because it wasn't groundbreaking. There was really nothing that Half Life did that hadn't been done before in one form or another, but Half Life did it with more polish and attention to detail than anything else at the time. Instead of forcing some ill-conceived, half-implemented gimmick on you to try to stand out from the crowd, Half Life was just a generally well-executed entry in its genre that had a lot of small touches that make it still fun to play now*.

Then the sequels came out and threw all that out the window in favour of a constant stream of annoying grabbity gun puzzles and vehicle sections, but let's not talk about that.

* Well, except for the last few levels; they kinda suck.

[Stark]

That's interesting really; HL had 'gimmicks' but they were low-key and integral to the game (the ridiculous box-pushing for instance). In HL2 all the gimmicks are giant marketing bullet-points (with Valve's trademark Lying(tm) technology) that aren't any fun at all.

[DPDarkPrimus]

The game I played before I went into Half-Life was Deus Ex, so I was understandably underwhelmed.

But on subsequent replays, the game has grown on me.

[salm]

Wow, I´m sure glad someone who never read the OP tries to make a witty comment.

The OP has nothing to do with it. Stark's annoyed that you're answering the question with "Oh never played it but it sure looked cool." Hint: You have contributed nothing to this thread. Go the fuck away.

Apparently this isn´t clear. I didn´t play HL but i played HL2 and the add ons, hence i can only comment on HL2 but not HL. Since the OP asks a question about the entire series as opposed to only about HL i´m very well qualified to give an answer in this thread.

[Stark]

The game I played before I went into Half-Life was Deus Ex, so I was understandably underwhelmed.

But on subsequent replays, the game has grown on me.

OK this needs a thread too. Deus Ex is the most overrated game of whatever year it came out. People keep talking about it like people should go play it, and they should - to learn what a fucking horrible game that people obsess over looks like. Just thinking about the weapon balance and stupid 'modification' system makes my teeth itch.

[Vendetta]

Just thinking about the weapon balance and stupid 'modification' system makes my teeth itch.

There wasn't any weapon balance in Deus Ex. There were a couple of all conquering god-weapons and a few which were simply not worth your inventory space. The modifications served to make the god-weapons even more godly.

[Axiomatic]

Why would Deus Ex need weapon balance anyway? The original, unmodified game didn't even have a multiplayer mode - why would you need to balance the weapons against each other?

[Vendetta]

Why would Deus Ex need weapon balance anyway? The original, unmodified game didn't even have a multiplayer mode - why would you need to balance the weapons against each other?

A good designer makes sure that choices offered to the player are all evenly worth taking.

A videogame designer makes sure that there are lots of choices, in the knowledge that the player will be distracted by having lots of choices and won't realise that there are actually very few choices because most of them are worthless.

Deus Ex ded need to balance the weapons against each other, it needed to make sure that there was a good argument to be made for using all of them, rather than, for instance, having two entire weapon classes and their associated skills be all but useless due to the restricted ammo. You could happily play the game only with pistols, but you'd never do it only with heavy weapons, because the targets you can't deal with with pistols are almost always able to be dealt with in other ways, but there are nowhere near enough heavy weapons or ammo for them to make focusing on them worthwhile, even before taking into account the amount of inventory space they take up. Likewise, there was utterly no point spending any skill points on explosives, because you could still disarm and plant grenades without it and they were so fiddly and crap otherwise that you never bothered actually throwing them with any intent to damage in mind

It's like giving someone a microwave and a ready meal and telling them to make whatever they like.

[Zixinus]

Yes, but to be fair, there were some things that the game did more-or-less right: atmosphere, a greater sense of immersion, semi-linearity (as in, you have to move between fixed points but you can move to them in various ways), weapon variety and modification (and yes, they were pretty broken), a plot that made effort to make sense (more so than most video games before and since anyway), etc.

[Nephtys]

I think we forget lots of small things Halflife did.

I remember fighting the damn soldiers, and freaking out when I took cover, and they actually threw grenades after me, instead of waddling around like a moron in every other FPS. Then when I pop out, they've taken cover behind a half dozen other places, so I can't easily take them all, while they all can fire at me...

There's better atmosphere and level design, with at least SOME VAGUE (if hilariously impractical) attempt to make the floors look sort of functional. Stuff like freezer rooms, cubicle farms, etc. Instead of hallways and random rooms like Quake.

The weapons were generally more 'grounded', with a normal-styled handgun, shotgun, submachine gun, etc instead of being silly chainguns and such. Oh, and you had to RELOAD them. For most games of the time, weapons just magically drained out of an ammo pool.

Also, there were decent 'puzzles' that weren't too obnoxious. No keycard finding, but rather 'turn on the power'.

Oh. And scripting.

[Steel]

Compared to what was around at the time HL was Jesus in a sea of shit. I didn't play quake 2 at the time it came out, but attempting to play it 2 or so years ago I only got 5 minutes in before I couldn't play any more it was so crap. That was apparently the best FPS ever at that point too...

[Jade Falcon]

One thing I remember was playing Half Life when it came out, and playing another 'big' game that came out at the same time.

Half Life had the presentation of course even with the big opening with you in Black Mesa's monorail complex which gave you an idea of the size of the place. Granted, it was a gimmick. The storyline that was lauded over in some magazines was rather thin, but you were kept pretty active throughout, though I did find head crabs irritating though I suppose that was the point behind them. There's the already mentioned AI for the marines and later the ninja types which was pretty good for the time.

In contrast, the other game I played was Sin. A game that seemed okay, but built on the even then aging Quake 2 engine. The game was bug ridden and tried to go way over the top. In contrast, Half Life did seem to be fairly stable.

Now I'm saying this from memory, it's been a long time since I played either game, and I haven't played Sin Episodes, the modern remake.