| Mazty said: Ech, thought it was okay at best. What really kills it is the voiceless protagonist - a cheap, easy cop pout of making a like-able character. No this does not make the experience more unique as the game is completely linear. Plus it's more of the one man army nonsense which is hard to break through with FPS', and has been for almost every FPS bar a rare few (Quake 4 for example). I feel like HL2 receives a lot of praise for just being a well polished run-and-gunner from the mid 90's. |
Half Life took the classic FPS genre with all its trappings (one man army and everything) and gave new life to it through an original way to tell a story. It didn't try to create new gameplay modes, like true branching or open world. It didn't care about things like carrying 7 or 8 big weapons being unrealistic. Its mission statement was "let us show you what can _really_ be done with a single man taking on an alien invasion first person shooter".
The silent protagonist is not a cop-out. It's a necessary device for a series of games that never moves the point of view away from Gordon's eyes, that never uses cutscenes and that reluctantly ever limits your control. Gordon can't have a personality of his own, if all his actions are really yours. He voicing something on his own would just be a lie. Every feeling he expresses would be coming out of nowhere.
