What exactly makes this game ''amazing'', and one of the ''best of all times''? you just go around shooting boring humanoids with shitty weapons and solving elementary school tier physics puzzles
What exactly makes this game ''amazing'', and one of the ''best of all times''?
revolutionary physics for its time please understand
I have no fucking clue.
>look mom, I'm a contrarian on Ganker!
excellent worldbuilding and level design, extremely atmospheric, cool concept and its fun to shoot shit in the game
>excellent worldbuilding
>ARE YOU LE HECKING MORGAN FREEMAN????????? HERE TAKE THIS CROWBAR XD
worldbuilding
combine and city 17 are excellent.
>conquered Earth in 7 hours
>kept Earth in an iron fist for 20 years
>lost to a bunch of goatfuckers armed with SMGs and shiet
Bad story, bad worldbuilding. The combine could easily suppress the uprising.
acshually, you only "win" against occupation collaboration force in hl2, and in a single city, not actual combine
For some reason the Combine didn't send troops from other cities to suppress the uprising in City-17. Also, City-17 is the "capital" city of Combine regime, and destroying the City-17 citadel was enough to start liberating Earth.
>and destroying the City-17 citadel was enough to start liberating Earth.
hl3 is out?
Closing the portal in Episode 2 trapped the remaining Combine forces on Earth.
The combine you fight on Earth are basically an occupying force after the populace was subjugated. Why would they just keep their entire conquering force hanging around after they're implemented the no-breeding fields, new leadership, disarmed the populace, etc. etc? They got dimensions to conquer
There's no way goatfuckers armed with SMGs would successfully rebel against an army that has heavy weapons, striders, helicopters, dropships, APC vehicles, etc.
Also, Dr. Kleiner has a lab almost in the middle of City-17 and nobody ever catched him. This is so stupid.
>There's no way goatfuckers armed with SMGs would successfully rebel against an army that has heavy weapons, striders, helicopters, dropships, APC vehicles, etc.
kek, someone hasn't been paying attention to a single guerrilla war in the past 80 years
>Also, Dr. Kleiner has a lab almost in the middle of City-17
a lab with a hidden entrance that very few know about in some abandoned industrial part of the city next to a cargo railroad
> kek, someone hasn't been paying attention to a single guerrilla war in the past 80 years
The United States of AMERICA would have won in Vietnam if not for the dumb politicians. The United States of AMERICA won in Iraq. The United States of AMERICA would have won in Afghanistan if not for the dumb politicians. Cope, seethe and kys, thirdworlder.
> abandoned industrial part of the city
Even in China or the USSR there were no abandoned building (i.e. places for criminals and lowlives to live in). Half-Life 2 worldbuilding is just dumb. They tried to portray an oppressive regime without trying to understand how oppressive regimes work. It's just surface-level understanding and therefore portrayal.
Earths population is constantly going down due to the no breeding fields. there also doesn't appear to be really any industry so it makes sense that the city would be full of empty buildings.
Just like how America lost to the taliban
I do not think you understand the combine and how powerful they are. Earth is just a wet napkin that they just want to suck the resources from and move onto the next rock to rape. Earth was only important to them because of the teleportation tech humanity developed, but even then they did not care too much. This is a given since you are mostly shooting other "humans" the whole game. The rebellion is fighting a skeleton crew and managed to shut down their portal before they could get reinforcements.
It's shit. One of the worst games of all time and killed pc games single handedly.
Backflip into oncoming traffic please
He’s right though. Half life 2 killed pc gaming by making it more accessible to third worlders, morons and women via steam.
The real question for the merchants is how to trick more people into purchasing shitteir goods, not procuring quality goods.
Cope, white people love eating shit.
have a nice day
It was cool tech demo game for its time. Half Life 1 is a better game though.
so you'd rather we have complex, multi-faceted puzzles that stop the pacing dead in its track? play some of the mods and see how unpleasant that is
It's got a unique texture. It combines the freeform jank of a PC only title with the grandiosity and polish of a big AAA tentpole release. imitators that followed never really got Valve's formula.
it's not particularly "jank" in any regard.
I use jank very lightly, the tendency to forego heavy handed animation and streamlining you saw in console stuff of the time. Just basic crouch jumping itself would be non grata for its imitators.
there's barely any jank in this game, the european aesthetics must have fooled you into thinking this is some type of euro-jank game
>uuum actually Half-Life 2 was never goo-
*blocks your path*
Did he rap him?
That's so racist just because he is black doesn't mean he is going to rap.
>Gary Buster Holmes enters the arena
backflip off the combine citadel please
>What exactly makes this game ''amazing'', and one of the ''best of all times''?
The strategy behind its storytelling keeping its community alive at a length and degree not copied by any other game to date, let alone any other singleplayer game with one campaign.
>Half Life 1 ends, you killed the big bad and for all you know you just saved humanity
>Half Life 2 starts and humanity is near extinction
>What the fuck happened?
>Only get bits and pieces of what happened inbetween the games. Get a general idea but the interesting details are left vague and up to speculation.
>Wanna know more, go to the forums
>Autists speculating with eachother keeps talk about the game going for years
>Also the game is extremely moddable so eventually the autists get around to making their own campaigns to show their interpretation of the gaps Valve left in the story
>Cut to 18 years later. The year is 2022 and several game-sized Half Life mods come out eeach year.
>steamcucks really believe this
good morning sir
Graphically great for the time
Groundbreaking physics engine
"no" cutscenes
Good characters, engaging story
Top fucking tier worldbuilding and atmosphere
all that said, I cannot play Half-Life 2 today. The gunplay is so awful by modern standards and those vehicle segments make me want to cry I'm so bored. And the in-gameplay totally-not-cutscenes-but-you're-locked-in-the-room-for-5-minutes-while-NPCs-babble-so-you-can't-even-press-esc-to-skip were fun the first few times but by now I know those segments by heart I just wish I could get on with the fucking game already
Episode 2 is still fun though
>totally-not-cutscenes-but-you're-locked-in-the-room-for-5-minutes-while-NPCs-babble-so-you-can't-even-press-esc-to-skip
shut up cry baby, game puts those out at 1-2 long intervals more often than not. only an issue if you play hl2 multiple times a year.
I know, they space them out well enough.
I would still skip them if I could
just noclip bro
GORDON
FUCK MY DAUGHTER
>Half Life 2 is good game
>NPC_wojak_meme[1].png
>NPC_wojak_meme[1].png
>NPC_wojak_meme[1].png
Play with SMOD.
Cleaning up in the starting area (trainstation) is fun. Turning on notarget and noclip, spawning NPCs and monsters and watching them fight is fun. Also, the map design is better than in Half-Life 1: not even once I didn't know where to go or how to open that one door. The game gives you something new every chapter. The only two bad chapters are 3 "Route Kanal" and 9 "Nova Prospekt / Entanglement".
The coast levels where you drive around.
I played through this last month, the vanilla game and its two expansions, no mods. Coming back to it after 15 years or so, the game made a good first impression on me. The railway station is richly atmospheric, and the slums of City 17 are like a time-capsule of early-2000s sci-fi concerns, with The Matrix and Minority Report as visible influences. What follows is a mostly an enjoyable journey, and the only complaints I can offer are those that have been repeated to the point of redundancy. The boat and buggy levels are too long and are visually bland. This is not a problem of the game being dated, because I remember being bored by these vehicular longueurs back when the game was recent. In some of the later areas you are given teammates to lead into battle, often in narrow, confined spaces, and the AI for these fuckers is infuriating. They are ALWAYS in your way.
It's often said that the expansions are better. Personally I think they're about same quality, even a little disappointing since they don't give you any new weapons.
I miss him so much bros
As a mechanical, functional video game, Half-Life 2 isn't even better than Half-Life 1 and updates to the Source engine have made it significantly worse over time. It has a lot of tedious, drawn out sections and really unsatisfying combat, along with popularising and exemplifying the negative trends of the sixth generation that carried onto the seventh.
>Turret sections
>Long cutscenes where the player is given "control" but can only jump around on desks bored out of their mind
>Brown 'n' bloom
It's not a bad game but going back to play it, after all the hype around it, leaves it feeling quite unremarkable. TimeShift is better and is basically a flat ripoff of Half-Life 2.
>TimeShift
>tfw going WRYYY with timestop and crossbow
Should you really post here if you can’t understand the importance of HL2? I really do mean this. You should consider your.m current mental state and where you get your “opinions” from if you think it’s bad in anyway.
Has anything more about half life 2's development been uncovered from that Valve giga-leak or whatever?
all pre 2008 files are deleted from repo thanks to mcmoron
HL2 story sucks. It treats all the characters and lore as if they already existed in the previous games when they fucking didn't.
The only way to make it good is when/if HL3 ever comes out we find out that Gordon has no fucking idea who these people are either and he has literally been retconned into another universe/dimension without being made aware of it himself.
It isn't.
Viral marketing caused it to be super successful.
Go ahead, explain to me how HL2 is better than almost any of its peers.
it's in the same boat as morrowind.
dated games shilled by boomers who can't let go of their youth.
It's fun, varied, well-paced, visually interesting, has good characters, good music and encounters that are precisely engineered to be as memorable and unique as possible. Just an all-round good game.
There is no mystery to it.
Every few years we get the same retarded contrarians who insist on disagreeing with this.
Somehow they never list any better FPSs.
Is it me or has no other game ever felt "real" as Half-Life 2?
I'm not talking about realistic graphics or anything like that. But something about the art style just makes everything so authentic.
it's the perspective, and audio too. bunch of other things going as well that we haven't noticed consciously. they did an amazing job.
Just you.
Speak for yourself gay
That's because of the sublime art direction and world building.
Valve knew better than to do the "just go 100% for sci-fi with everything" shit that most other sci-fi games were doing.
The way the Combine are presented on how they rule over earth is very much believable, and the haunting reality of the fact that the Combine are a foe that humanity can't possibly defeat makes it all the more intriguing too.
To quote Laidlaw's original draft for the end of Episode 3:
"I was left alone, riding the weaponized research vessel into the heart of a Combine world. An immense light blazed.
I caught a cosmic view of a brilliantly glittering Dyson sphere.
The vastness of the Combine's power, the futility of our struggle, blossomed briefly in my awareness.
I saw everything.
Mainly I saw how the Borealis, our most powerful weapon, would register as less than a fizzling matchhead as it blew itself apart.
And what remained of me would be even less than that."
Mirror's Edge imho
the only game where falling off a building feels real
a big part of this feeling for me is the facial animation tech valve implemented. a lot of modern AAA games still have very "gamey" character and facial animation while everyone in half life 2 feels very authentic and interacts with the world in ways that are consistent and immersive.
overhyped tech demo, it was good for the time it was released, but just by playing half life 1 you can already see that as a game, half life 2 falls flat
read "rising the bar"
HL2 did in 2004 what many games couldn't, or could do only part of
it set standard for AAA to follow
a good chunk of it can be credited to gmod too. gmod videos were a big part of early youtube and at the time there were no other sandbox games like it so people ended up experiencing the hl2 world a lot outside the game itself.
hl2 and the episodes would still be remembered fondly if the games were never modded but it woldn't have been the titan of mid-late 00s internet that it ended up becoming
making models hump each other in early gmod is a weird memory
Its just a reminder that the young of the previous generation are just as insane and retarded as the next. Just in a new flavor.
I don't know, I stopped at the part with the bugs on the ground.
Valve screwed over the Artifact fanbase by cancelling the Artifact 2.0 beta without even allowing users to invite friends like they said they would in January 2021 and does not deserve your financial support for these gross consumer-unfriendly practices.
The same thing elder scrolls games have that retards like you don't understand, a good engine and fun gameplay.
Parts of it were imitated countless times since then so nothing about it seems that amazing for a zoomer almost 20 years later.
Every aspect of the game is at least decent and it's one of those "more than the sum of its parts" thing.
Also, as weird as it seems for an FPS series, many people were interested above all by the continuation of the story. There's a reason there is still hype for HL3 and it's not gameplay-related for most people.
Riddick escape from butcher bay was the better game and came out that same year
the shooting is fun
the physics were damn incredible for their time
it's a good and fun game, and when it was released, a damn impressive one too.
The fact that they keep everything as immersive as possible where you never lose control of the character unless an in game event causes such a situation, where even then you still have camera control. They also have their characters fleshed out enough to where you have a reason to care and know them. They do not over stay their welcome, either. The games premise is interesting because its a cool take on aliens that is pretty unique. In short, they know how to show and not tell all while not raping the player of his control over the game.
It's an overrated meme. A great game for it's time but looking back on it it's really just a tech demo. Half Life 1 on the other hand still holds up.
>What exactly makes this game ''amazing'', and one of the ''best of all times''?
You wasn't born at the time and didn't witness when HL2 destroyed the Doom3
Gameplay design, level design, visual design, pacing, story, atmosphere. Unironically one of the few games worthy of a 10/10.
>show-not-tell in-engine storytelling methods that were basically unheard of at its time
>graphics that, while slightly dated, still hold up to this day
>one of the first complex physics engines for videogames
HL2's gameplay is pretty boring and has always been boring, even people at the time were crapping on how many long stints of nothing in particular happening in the game but people like to pretend otherwise for some reason. As a game it's a bit dull, but as a stepping stone for other games, it was innovative and revolutionary. EP2 also fixes a lot of HL2's problems by not being a fucking snoozefest, though I was pretty disappointed by the final sequence in the game.
half-life's gunplay has always been average on its own
I really hate that the best segment for gunplay ends so briefly. Nova Prospekt was probably my favorite area in the game since it was just close-quarters shootouts. Later entries in the series definitely improve on that.
I think what you call boring is what made part of half life great in the first place. Its dull in comparison to say COD, but it gives the player a chance to have a rest and take in the environment and atmosphere/tone of the game. The start of Ravenholm is one of my favorite parts of the game because it was spooky and you could play with pants on a rope and see the little horror house the devs made. They have a bunch of sections like that throughout the game.
>long driving segments where you occasionally stop for a brief moment of action, followed by more driving
>the airboat segment was just not very good. the best parts about it were when you got out of the boat to clear a path for the boat
>long intermediary areas where little to nothing happens, not enough enemies to keep you alert and not enough puzzles to keep your brain active
>the first half of the rebellion in city 17 sucked since you needed to guide a bunch of retarded NPCs around
There are good segments mixed in there, sure. Ravenholm was pure kino and the fight with the gunship under the bridge was cool, and the citadel had some cool shit in it (though I never really cared for the segment where you beat Breen to the top of a slow-moving elevator). Those highs are paired with a lot of low, dull segments that I feel can't really be justified by anything other than the fact that they were still finding their footing with the new engine. Those problems were minimized greatly in EP1 and EP2, but we're (presumably) just talking about HL2 and not the sequels.
Its up to personal taste as I like things to be open since it makes things feel bigger/more expansive. Those open areas were also where a bunch of those hidden supply caches would be found. Episodes 1&2 are much more compact and decorated giving a higher quality, yet cramped/linear experience. In comparison to Half life 1. Think the map designers were still trying to figure out how to hide how square the sky boxes are and used view distance as a solution. Episodes 1&2 are much more indoor/underground.
I can respect that. The way you put it is pretty apt. HL2's experience was not compact enough for me, while I feel EP1 and especially EP2 compacted it just enough to suit my tastes.
atmosphere
it was 2004 you dirty sandmoron.
i actually skipped school when this was released because the graphics were top notch.
How does it feel going from the claustrophobic facility in HL1 to this game's dystopian European outskirts? I play this first so I have no frame of reference.
i dunno dude. im just kinda sad that they never finished the story. its a huge cliffhanger.
every few years they would be like "yes we are developing hl3" and then silence for 10+ years.
its very frustrating but valve isnt in the business of making games anymore. they are in the business of printing money now lmao.
I actually started playing it as a kid in the early 2000s and stopped a bit through.
I went back and played the whole series a few years back and loved it. It sounds gay as fuck, but the first game gave me the same feeling as finishing a long, good book. A journey. Moving from level to level never really felt like that. It felt like a seamless trek through this world. One of the problems I had with trying to get into triple A games was that so many felt like dog shit movies with perfunctory gaming sequences between cut scenes. This didn't. It felt like it's own medium. It was also fine as a shooter and platformer.
Sorry. Redact that. I thought ops pic was HL1.
It's no HL1 but I had a good time playing it.
It's better than HL1, HL1 is still too busy being a 90s shooter
variety and gameplay. The journey.
its good
Sex with Alyx
It was unironically a game you had to be there for. Honestly the modding community is what actually made it what it was, on its own it doesn't hold up as well as you'd like, but most of the physics and graphical stuff was a first at the time.
Only the engine tbqh.
Half-Life 2 has a LOT of explosive barrels for you to shoot and throw and play with. Does it have the most explosive barrels of any fully-3D FPS? I would like to exclude things like Doom 2's Barrels o' Fun or similar gimmick levels. I mean barrels that are scattered throughout the campaign. I'm not aware of any attempts to tally these like people sometimes do with # of enemies.
>Half-Life 2 has a LOT of explosive barrels for you to shoot and throw and play with
That's only true for Route Canal and parts of Water Hazard. After you reach Black Mesa East explosive barrels are a rarity.