First, some background: I first became aware of PC gaming in 2012 (15yrs after HL1, 7yrs after HL2). I played both games back-to-back and then later replayed both separately.
There’s so much to be said about these two games, but I’ll sum up my feelings in a few bullet points:
- HL1 is more thematically unified. It plays true to its Sci-Fi & Die Hard roots up to the point of campiness, but that fits rather well for a game whose protagonist is effectively a nerdy Doom Marine – more a force-of-nature embodiment of survival than traditional hero.
- HL2, on the other hand, feels weighed-down by this legacy. It wants to tell a serious story about a charismatic freedom-fighter. That’s an aesthetic which clashes terribly with HL1’s mute, stoic survivalist.
- HL1 has a better core gameplay loop. It plays to its strengths: gunplay & level exploration. Exposition & puzzling are almost always delivered through these mediums wherever possible. Those few chapters which depart from this philosophy (On a Rail, Xen) are the weakest in the whole game as a result.
- HL2, by contrast, seems almost insecure. It only trusts the player to stick with the core gameplay-loop for a few chapters at most before pivoting into yet another gimmick – almost all of which (barring the gravity gun sequence) feel painfully drawn out:
- Water Hazard: Boating
- Highway 17: Driving
- Sandtraps: Physics “Puzzling” + “Platforming”
- Nova Prospekt: Wave-Based Point Defense
What do you guys think? There’s a lot worth unpacking here which I couldn’t quite articulate. What are your takeaways?
I think Valve learned a ton about game design between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Half-Life 1 pulls a lot of “gotcha” moments that you just have to reload your save to get through, whereas Half-Life 2 actually make sure to have teachable moments so you know what to look out for, and here’s my favorite example. Half-Life 2 introduces you to a sniper enemy right after Ravenholm by having a traceable laser pointer that’s shooting escaped headcrab zombies. The sniper is concerned with them, not you, so you have time to be aware of the threat and know what it looks like. Half-Life 1 introduces the sniper enemy by having you round an ordinary looking corner and get shot in the back. After reloading your save, you can squint at the hole in the wall in that alley, knowing it’s there this time, and say to yourself, “Yeah, I guess that kind of looks like a sniper’s nest.”
The gimmicks that you refer to in Half-Life 2 are, I think, phenomenal examples of how to properly pace a video game and make the game memorable. While Gordon Freeman is a nothing character and more of a focal point for everyone else in the game to talk about, those characters are good, well-written characters.
Solid point. One of the things that Valve really nailed down during the Orange Box era was playtesting. According to internal reports, they actually do more playtesting than anyone else in the industry by a considerable margin.
With that being said… I think I’ll stick to my guns about those vehicle segments. I dislike novelty as a solution to monotony because it only really works on the 1st playthrough. Even then, these segments feel as if they were stretched to the limit of what their playtesters found tolerable. That’s the opposite of what I would have preferred: compressing pacebreaker sequences to the limit of what players found refreshing.
In defense of that segment: it telegraphs the sniper’s presence to the genre-savvy player by recreating the memorable “sniper traps” shown in films like Full Metal Jacket: https://youtu.be/Zz4uppst-7I?t=498. Yes… I’ll concede that this is quite obviously the kind of obtuse sequence that would have gotten thrown out during playtesting if it were developed by the Valve of 2008. I’m not sure how I feel about that, though – it’s sacrificing a cohesive part of the game’s tone in service of polish, but polish for whose sake? Is the player really better off having a less colorful experience if it means avoiding a weird yet brief gameplay wrinkle?
Personally I never understood the hate for hl2 vehicle sequences. I love them, particularly the boat one. They aren’t so fun if you’re a completionist, but if you’ve played them before… Just ram the throttle and enjoy the velocity, and.they don’t take very long at all
It was one of many wrinkles, and it’s something we’d for sure consider to be dated today. Enough of those wrinkles will cause frustration, and it’s why when I’ve seen friends pick up Half-Life 1 in the post-Half-Life-2 era, they never see it as fondly as HL2. I still think Half-Life 1 is really good, but Half-Life 2 just stands head and shoulders above it. You’re not the first person to complain about the vehicle sequences in Half-Life 2, but I always loved them.