| Mazty said: 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. |
Funny you mention Mass Effect. If I took your description of Half-Life 2 I could equally apply it to Mass Effect. The only difference is the scale (Mass Effect = galaxy, HL2 = Earth... actually, the scale in story terms is similar, just not during each game). I mean, if you actually think about ME2, very little actually happens in story terms; Shephard teams up with the guys that save his life, builds a team and sends them on a suicide mission to defeat the Collectors. The storyline is actually fairly generic and normal space odyssey fare (and I absolutely loved the game, so don't think I'm hating on the game).
In HL2, the guy that imprisoned Gordon wakes him up and throws him into a situation that he has to figure out for himself. In attempting to survive he discovers old friends and helps them to sabotage the Combine which sparks a revolution. During the revolution an old friend gets kidnapped/imprisoned and attempting to save him gives Gordon the opportunity to strike a fatal blow to the Combine on Earth.
The difference is in how they tell the story. Mass Effect uses a classic and direct RPG approach. HL2 tries to passively tell the story through the game world. And as I mentioned before, part of the reason you think the story is simply bullet points is because of this passive storytelling and not realising the details of the story are being revealed as you play. That doesn't make it any less valid a storytelling method, just different, and one that obviously doesn't gel with you.
As for the physics, you realise that RF Guerrilla was released 5 years after HL2? Like I said, the Havok physics implementation in HL2 was revolutionary at the time, made all the more astounding for the fact it was both integral to gameplay and was possible on such low-end hardware. To be honest, I don't see how the vehicles were much worse in handling then most other FPS' of the time, Halo included. Nearly every FPS I play with vehicles from back then has fairly crap handling.
And I don't know why you think love of HL2 is simply a knee jerk reaction to Halo. HL2 was the sequel to what is probably the second most influential FPS of the 90s (first being Wolfenstein 3D/Doom for creating the genre). All the elements HL2 introduced into the genre have influenced numerous FPS' even today (see my previous posts). That's not to say Halo wasn't influential; it found a way of bringing/popularising the FPS genre on consoles and added regenerating health. It did what both Half-Life games did in combining a lot of elements from other games along with a few of their own innovations and combined them into a single, impressive package.
Is it that difficult to accept that people genuinely liked Half-Life 2 for what I've described above and in previous posts? I don't like Halo for instance, but I can completely understand why people love it and fully accept the influence/innovations it brought to the genre.
