Scoobes said:
1. The players get out what they put in. If you don't want to go heavy into the story, you can just play through the game and shoot stuff. Want to pay attention to the story? Then you listen out during conversations (something I can't convey during screenshots but a lot of the stuff I mention above is also said or implied in conversations throughout the game), look for clues and read stuff around the safer areas. You effectively are Gordon Freeman (and he knows as much as you), so if you miss details, then Gordon misses details. 2. Half-Life 2 also ran on the original X-box and even for the time, only needed a very weak PC to run (I had a horrible single core AMD Athlon, 512Mb RAM and a cheap budget GeForce GPU and that ran it perfectly, physics n' all). It had nothing to do with how powerful the PC was at the time as a 3-4 year old PC could run the game. The implementation is actually very selective and efficient. Only the most pertinent items that relate to gameplay display useful physics. Like I said, look at Havok implementations in other games before and even some after. There are games that use a lot more computer power but don't implement physics as an integral part of the gameplay. It's literally for show, unlike Half-Life 2. 3. Good stories rarely tell you everything and often leave elements of mystery to keep the narrative going. The G-man is the Half-Life series' mysterious figure. For large sections of the game you're not even sure if he's just a figment of Gordon's imagination (he's not, Eli talking about him tells you that much). Stories that hand everything to you on a platter are usually the most generic. The stories that stick with you tend to be the ones you ask questions about later. 4. It's neither lazy or pretentious. The devs have worked hard to make the storytelling an integral part of the gameplay/campaign but have gone to great lengths to make it seem effortless. All those NPC conversations, broadcasts and in-game clues take time, thought and good game design to implement. They take advantage of the video game medium to tell a story in a way that's only possible in a video game; through exploration and traversal of the gameworld (or as you call it moving from point a > b > c). It's not going to gel with everyone, especially as it's a different way to tell a story that hasn't and can't be done in other mediums. 5. Like I said, you get as much of the story as your attention allows. This might not be great for everyone with such a long game (for an FPS) which is probably why they started to go the episodic route with Eps 1 & 2. Oh and give ME3 a go, you'll probably like most of the game and maybe even the ending |
.Even with what you have said, the story is still incredibly thin. Aliens have invaded earth. Gordon is there to start a resistance. Woop woop. Not quite Mass Effect is it?
Rave over the physics all you wish, but I don't see why it's relevant. Frankly the vehicles handled like shit and it seemed more of a gimmick then anything vital or ground breaking. Want physics thats pertinent to games? Red Faction Guerilla.
Leaving blanks is not good story telling if the story is already thin. If it was a mystery or thriller, okay fair enough, but what we have at the moment is a thin cliche story and a few blanks. It's like someone took nothing but the bullet points from a napkin mindstorm and never got further then that.
I heard about the ME3 ending. It's atrocious, both before and even after the patch.
This HL2 worship is just a knee jerk reaction to Halo, the console game that shaped almost all other FPS' in the next decade. Having played many of the FPS' out at that time, HL2 is nothing special, nothing memorable, and is just the "cool" thing to like.
