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Mazty on 11 October 2009
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WereKitten said:
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.

This is the usual response I get when I post my view on HL2.

You say it gave new life to the FPS story. How?
You say it is showing what really can be done with a single man taking on an alien inversion FPS style...Dind't Halo: CE do that 3 years before Half-Life 2? Other than a pretty physics engine, it didn't do anything new to the FPS genre that had not been done before. And actually, considiering it was released near enough the Halo 2 release date, it's actual run-and-gun style was pretty damn dated.

As for saying the silent protaginsist is needed so that it feels like you are in his shoes, then why doesn't he talk? If he was to talk, surely that would really make you believe you were in another persons shoes.
All you are are a floating camera being talked at the entire game. You have no room to make a single choice in the game, meaning that it is you in his shoes, just you watching through the eyes of a mute. You have essentialy no free will in the game, it seems completely pointless to then have the main character character-less. 

Imagine in Killzone, or any other FPS, where you were being talked at the entire time with the main character showing no reaction to his surroundings. All you are playing as is a voicless shooting machine, yet you are apparently human....A total cop out of trying to make a likeable character. If you actually had some free will, then not voicing your character e.g. Morrowind, is a good idea. But as you have to play exactly as "gordon" wants you to, he may was well be given a character.