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/vr/ - Retro Games

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7127121 No.7127121 [Reply] [Original]

I just played this for the first time in 2020.

What was it like playing it when it came out?
I think heard it was revolutionary when it came out, what exactly was that blew peoples mind?
I would say it looks and plays pretty nice for such an old game, probably would have guessed it's from around 2002 but not 98, so was it the graphics?

>> No.7127134

>>7127121
I also played the first time this year. My guess was that it was the immersiveness. I was impressed as hell by the unbroken 30 minute intro sequence that really gets the player into the world.

>> No.7127185

>>7127121
One of the first games to have the entire story told in a first person perspective with no cutscenes. Added a whole new dimension of story immersion back in it's time. Influential to the point where it looks basic by today's standards because of the entire industry aping and refining on it ever since.

>> No.7127212

>>7127121
>heard it was revolutionary when it came out
I mean, back then genres and technologies took massive leaps forward every few months, so groundbreaking as it was (with its detailed, real time scripted events) it was still just tuesday in away.

>> No.7127214

>>7127134
For me, it was the first FPS that gave me some sense of immersion, I think this is owed mostly to the "playable cutscenes" that progress the story, and how interactive the environments were (yes, this includes breaking everything up with the crowbar). The chapters transition very smoothly into one another. The game sort of loses its edge in the later parts when youre heavily armed and the threats arent that menacing anymore, but nothing too serious.

>> No.7127849

In Doom, once the enemies saw you, they would run towards you in a straight line until they died. Enemies in Half-Life, especially the marines, actually used some rudimentary tactics, and would run away if they were losing.

>> No.7127875

>>7127121

I felt it was an amazing experience, because until then most games were just mindless run around and shoot everything in nonsensical maps.
then suddenly Half-Life was giving me the adventure/fps treatment, it was extremely refreshing at the time.

People like to say that cinematic gaming killed everything and blablabla, but after 11 years of mindless pew pew pew it was nice to see people doing more with the genre in 98.

Really enjoyed Blue Shift for that reason too.

>> No.7127892

It wasn't good enough to even finish. Tier 2 game.

>> No.7128392

>>7127849
Yeah, honestly better than most new games.

>> No.7128412
File: 300 KB, 643x480, 1606254724808.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7128412

>>7127892
What is a good fps in your opinion zoomer anon.

>> No.7128472

>>7128412
Halo XD

>> No.7128771

>>7128412
I prefer bi-plane dog fighting. Fifteen years ago I did enjoy a Wolfenstein game. Um, What was the one where he ended up in a deserted Russian industrial estate, Massive Gun War something? That was good. Left for Dead 2, really enjoyed that, the group always stiffs me at the safe house but I love the game. Not Quake, Not Unreal.

Left for Dead 2 and the WWI shoot em up I can't remember what it was called. Cabal.

>> No.7128860

>>7127121
just play other fps games from 96-99 and pretend they are your only options, reflect on half life.

>> No.7128865

>>7127121
It wasn't Dues Ex but it wasn't bad either

>> No.7129261

>>7127121
Terrible game and a waste of time.

>> No.7129275

>>7129261
Terrible post and a waste of time.

>> No.7129342

>>7127121
The level of interactivity and enemy AI was unusually high.
As
>>7127212
said, it wasn't really mindblowing and the main reason the game stuck around for a very long time was that amazing mods were still coming out for it into the early 2000s.

>> No.7129358

>>7127121
You were sold on marketing. HL was not ground breaking in any way. Quake was better.

>> No.7129367

>>7129358
>Quake
Boring brown corridors.
Mods are inferior too.

>> No.7129378

>>7128865
It was better

>> No.7129383

>>7127121
I played this when it first came out and can confirm that it blew everyone away.
I never finished it but the story was amazing, and that part where you're heading to the surface and you can hear military communication about how they have snipers in place is great.
Story, graphics, and the control system were perfect for the time

>> No.7129387

>>7127121
>What was it like playing it when it came out?
I wouldn't say revolutionary. It really more just came off to me as someone wanting to mix platforming and metroid puzzle elements into a shooter.
I liked it. I thought it was great. Didn't think it would take off like it did, though.

>> No.7129591

Deus X is and was better. Half life kudos is mainly lazy journalism.

>> No.7129595

>>7128412

to be fair Unreal is a better FPS when talking about combat, but HL has a better single player campaign

>> No.7129604

>>7129591
Day Sex sucked

>> No.7129607

>>7129595
>Unreal
No

>> No.7129624

>>7129358
Quake is shit singleplayer and basic multiplayer. Half-Life supercedes it in every way.

>> No.7129628 [DELETED] 

>>7129604
HAHAHAHAHA.

>> No.7129634

>>7129628
It's true.

>> No.7129650

It felt like the first survival focused FPS game. Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, it was all about smashing the enemy with the best weapon you had. Half-Life was about taking your time and understanding the area before making your move. Fall damage meant you actually had to judge distances rather than just jump off the roof to get to the ground quickly. Enemies didn't blindly walk towards you while shooting, they would actually make an effort to flank you and flush you out of hiding with grenades. You didn't beat a level, you survived to the next area, hopefully with enough health, armor, and ammo to get you through whatever was next.

That was compared to everything else around at the time. These days the AI is retardedly easy and destroyed by bumrushing it, enemies are bullet sponges that give little if any indication of taking damage, and large sections of the game are gimmicky, or completely defined by their gimmick. Blast Pit, On A Rail, that building full of missiles and laser mines, Xen, etc. Other sections are generic enough to be completely forgettable. The second half of the game loses the tense survival feeling of the first half, instead giving you OP weapons to unleash on the same weak Marines and monsters you were dropping with a shotgun. The dangers go from deadly but fair to surprise BS. In Blast Pit you can avoid attracting attention by crouching and moving slowly, and making noise elsewhere with grenades to lure the monsters away. In Surface Tension, there is no indication where the mines are placed exactly, all you can really do is trial and error your way through.

Was a 10/10 when it released, and still good to this day. Just not quite as amazing for anyone who's played a modern FPS since it set the standard.

>> No.7129889

i want to add what made me hyped for it that wasn't necessarily revolutionary: it was set in part in recognizable, contemporary environments. call me autistic or whatever but i just cannot give a FUCK about shooting monsters in hell
>Lab
>Carpark
>Shipping container yard etc
Most importantly, offices. A fucking 20th century office corridor. I think duke was the only major fps with this before hl and you know that engine is kinda half-2D

>> No.7129929

>>7127121
Did you play it, or play through and beat it?

All of the stuff I would post to answer your question has already been mentioned by other people in this thread, but I'm curious what you thought about the game.

I played Half Life in 1998 when it released, but I'm wondering what it would have been like to have played the game in 2020 when all of the things that it pioneered 20 years previous had all become either extremely commonplace or even blase at this point.

I often feel like it would be beneficial for zoomers to play classic games so they could get an idea of how gaming has changed over time, but I have no idea what it's like to be in that position.

>> No.7130008

>>7128860
>just play other fps games from 96-99
I mean I played the Turok games back then which I found pretty nice as well, but no one remembers those apparently.

>> No.7130018

>>7127121
I hated it when I was 10. I liked games and this started with half an hour of standing around doing fuck all. Then when things finally start, it still goes pretty slow.

>> No.7130021

>>7127121
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiQaUdPqfdE
Just replayed hl2 and hl1 and I gotta say that half-life one is much more rewarding in its combat especially on hard mode. You die a lot and if you play your cards right you can never take damage which is useful for sequences where you mess up and have only 10 hp.

The music is fantastic and they even recycled the ending theme to be put in at the end of Hl2 because of how great it is. Have a listen if you are so inclined.

>> No.7130029

>>7127121
It was the AI. AI was pretty good for single player back then.

>> No.7130037

>>7127121

I never actually played Half-Life, I only played mods.

Half-Life the engine was revolutionary for the time. The game itself has a few stand out moments, but it's incredibly generic and you mostly just run forward to beat the game.

>> No.7130039

>>7127121
It along with Halo was responsible for FPS decline

>> No.7130065

>>7129929
>Did you play it, or play through and beat it?
I finished it.

>but I'm curious what you thought about the game.
Well it was pretty good overall and most stuff still holds up today, especially what >>7127849 said.

However there were also a few things that left a bad taste in my mouth.
One problem was that I had to reload the game several times to understand some dialog ingame, the background noises were too loud with no setting to fix it, sounds like a minor thing but ruined the immersion a lot.
And generally the game had a little too much crawling through tubes and sewers and shit, I mean it does make sense of course as you are trying to find a way to escape but it's just not that fun.
Also had crashes and some bugs unfortunately, one teleporter in Xen broke so I had to reload an old save for example.

It's hard to judge such an old game, like I said it does still hold up mostly, graphics are fine, AI is awesome and surprised me many times, gameplay is okay, level design was interesting they tried a lot of things but not all parts were fun.
The story telling was pretty good at the start, kinda felt like a scientist myself lol, but I feel like it shit the bed really fast, I mean suddenly there is an army trying to kill everyone associated with the project and most scientist I met ingame are rather indifferent to the whole situation for some reason.
I mean there are aliens running amok and the military is after your head as well and the scientists are like "oh a fellow scientist whats up bro"

>> No.7130831

>>7127121
>what exactly was that blew peoples mind?
That you were going to work in a tram

>> No.7130842

>>7130039
muh doomkerino

>> No.7130876

>>7127121

You can thank Half Life for Counterstrike, which started as a free mod.

Black Mesa, the remake using the source engine, is very good as well, and does a much better job at depicting Xen, which seemed lazy and tacked on in the original.

>> No.7130884

>>7129358

>Be Id software
>design Wolf3D
>Amazing RPG like idea about hiding bodies from the guards
>Scrap it and just turn it into mindless shooter.
>design DOOM
>Amazing RPG like experience mimicking Aliens, with blocking off coridors and CPU soldiers helping you and a story where you-
>Scrap it and just turn it into mindless shooter.
>design Quake
>Okay so its gonna be this RPG like experience right, with leveling up and NPCs and quests and traveling through a world with a purpos-
>*Carmack starts to foam from the mouth*
>PURPOSE? STORY? RPG?
>TURN. IT. INTO. DOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!

>> No.7130894
File: 92 KB, 655x351, MTS_Esmeralda-1005912-JCcloseupinDX-1.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7130894

>>7129634
Why do you think this?

>> No.7131001

>>7130884
>RPG
Yawn.
Turning Quake into what it is now was the correct choice. RPGs are for nerdy faggots.

>> No.7131259

>>7127134
>>7127185
>>7127214
>>7127849
>>7127875
Fundamentally this: "first person real-time cutscenes" and the AI. Compare it to Unreal, SiN and Blood II that all came out the same year and you'll understand. Hearing the marines shouting about you being in the air duct and "fire in the hole", then seeing a grenade flying was mind-blowing for the time.

>> No.7131317
File: 28 KB, 640x330, the-mist-screenshot-1[1].jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7131317

One thing that Half Life did that wasn't standard was including the tools they used to build the game on the retail disc. Making sure that every player who bought the game also got a free copy of Worldcraft (which later became Hammer) was one of the things that led to the first Half Life having such an incredible amount of levels and mods made for it, which was a major factor in increasing the game's longevity on store shelves.

Games had shipped with level editors before (Duke Nukem 3D coming with the Build editor was an example), but I can't think of a single game that came with an entire developer solution included for free in the game box before Half Life.

On a side note, Half Life takes a lot of inspiration from the Steven King story The Mist, going so far as to have an original working title of "Quiver" (based on the "Arrowhead Project" from King's short story).

>> No.7132370

>>7131317
>The Mist

I wish there was a Half-Life mod that recreated that story into the HL engine. hiding from terrible monsters in a thick fog, moving from building to building.. meeting people and discovering that it all came from the nearby military base. so you eventually go there and work your way inside, killing the smaller monsters and avoiding the big ones. then you find the rift and try to close it.

>> No.7132593

>>7127121
>probably would have guessed it's from around 2002 but not 98, so was it the graphics?

I think half life looked average for 98, though I never saw it in its era. The best looking console games looked better than PC games, the catch was they ran at low resolution or frame rates. Half life is a cartoonish style so I think it's a fair comparison.

>> No.7132601

>>7127849
the marine AI till this day is still fun to play against

It's not that they are smart and use good tactics, I think it's that it's fun to exploit their mistakes

>> No.7132606

>>7129358
Half life resonated because it wasn't some weird alien planet or dark fantasy setting. It's like a die hard scenario except about science black projects

>> No.7132610

>>7132370
Kind of weird that we don't have a horror fps about fog like we have an extremely famous and critically and commercially successful survival horror about fog

>> No.7132625

>>7127121
First person shooters were mostly load into mission 1, kill bad guys, find the exit. But Half-Life was one unbroken, mostly seamless journey that started putting in more context into the "why" which also meant a lot of world building and environmental storytelling. It helped that the story wasn't some kind of elaborate novel plot, it was just a simple backdrop about reaching the surface. You could believe that you were inside Black Mesa and your brain could stitch together all the different maps into one giant believable complex, where you knew your goal was to escape the horror was without needing a wall of text explaining the story. It was basically FPS evolved.

>> No.7132664

>>7127121
It was my fir ssd t experience with wasd and mouse as the default controls. I think I played quake with arrow keys and mouse.

The small levels loaded really quickly and looked really good, even on low end pc.

They used some tricks to really good effect, like having lots of destructible objects, and having vents and tiles break when you walk on them.

Most games felt like quake where every wall and bush and block was made of neutronium and couldnt be damaged and stopped all bullets.

Then you get the gauss gun in HL and found out you can shoot through walls.

>> No.7132984

>>7132610
its like the hardest thing to do in 3d graphics

>> No.7133965

>>7127121
Half life has 1 "sin":
>gave way to more cinematic duck and cover games that are so linear they have no challenge, not even healthpacks or limited ammo (most times you feel like you can spray and win)

This is NOT it's fault. Half-Life itself is very fun, it requires you to actually learn to use weapons (if you only use the mp5 and shotgun then complain about every encounter being dumb, boring, unfair, something then you are retarded). If you play it like some sort of survival horror game, trying to learn enemy patterns, conserving ammo, using grenades and explosives to trick enemies into always moving and shit, or better yet, let enemies duke themselves out, you will have lots of fun.
Half life should've been the evolution to doom/quake type games, the shift from fast paced combat where the enemies are your bitch (be honest, when's the last time you had trouble fighting anything in doom?) to a more "im fucked and i gotta play it smart" shooter...But saddly the rest of the industry didnt learn the lesson

>> No.7133992

Half Life 2 is a bad game.

>> No.7133994

>>7128412
Half life is zoomer core

>> No.7133997

>>7133994
cope harder

>> No.7134043

>>7127121
It just had a shitload of detail. It was, unironically, one of the first FPSes to get some level of good storytelling put together with actual enjoyable gameplay.

>> No.7134082

It was the first FPS game to provide a genuinely classic action-adventure experience, mostly because it didn't just take place in a fucking ugly dungeon, had an actual story, and AI displaying behaviours other than raw violence.

But to be honest, all of that was kinda overshadowed by the ARPG experience of Deus Ex. It wasnt until Halo: Combat Evolved that you had a true action-adventure that went further in that genre than the immsims already indirectly achieved, and even topped the old dungeon shooters in raw action.

I didn't play it at the time but I confirmed all this by playing the Black Mesa remake and imagined I was back in '98.

>> No.7134087

This games reputation is secured by lazy journalism.

>> No.7134097

Prior to Half Life, FPS games like Doom & Duke Nukem 3D I would feel like I'm just playing levels and the levels just loosely have a connection to one another (if that makes sense). When Half Life came around I actually felt like I was in a giant secret laboratory, not individual levels. The transitions between each section of the lab & game world were done very well, the sense of progress made it very fun to play because you never knew what was coming next.

>> No.7134149
File: 502 KB, 1280x960, ASuRHWg[1].png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7134149

>>7132625
>You could believe that you were inside Black Mesa and your brain could stitch together all the different maps into one giant believable complex
Because all the maps (or most of them, excluding Xen) already do line up and you subconsciously realize it while playing.

>> No.7134217

>>7127121
Its the first fps where you didnt pick levels like in goldeneye. It was like a continuous thing with a big narrative story.

>> No.7134242

>>7134097
It introduced seamless progression. Before that, all those "doom/quake clones" indeed had maps that had little to do with one another, there also wasn't really a storyline to it. Valve made clever use of the shortened loading times in between the segments, instead of loading a whole big segment at once which would've taken away the feeling of being sucked in. Unreal also had maps following eachother up, but the progression was less seamless (longer loading times, each level had different aesthetics). Because of this seamless storyline progression, Half-Life kinda killed off old arena shooters as we knew it (although Quake3 and UT99 still came afterwards, but were online focused)

>> No.7134269

>>7134242
>, Half-Life kinda killed off old arena shooters as we knew it (a
I dispute this. Half Life is the dead end.

>> No.7134343

>>7132984

We had a lot of fog in games in the 90s tho :p

>> No.7134573

>>7134269
Counter-Strike "killed" AFPS games by being more novel than "spawn, walk over weapons and click on enemy players". I'll admit I used to have a rage boner against Counter-Strike because of having ended the sub-genre, but then i realized just how barebones and painfully simplistic AFPS games are. No wonder they can't get off the ground in 2020 when they're so simple they can't attract new players and if they add new mechanics the old players will feel alienated.

>> No.7134593

>>7134269
Dead end? It showed there is a happy medium between mindless dungeon-shooters like Quake/Unreal and complex ARPG sims like Shock/Deus Ex. Which led to the most influential FPS of all time, Halo: Combat Evolved.

>> No.7134598

Half-Life was the perfect mix between shooting and adventure, before HL it was pretty much a solo deathmatch experience, after HL it became a cinematic clusterfuck.
so lets not pretend that Half-Life killed the FPS genre, it made a good attempt at improving it.
its just that humans can't help but drive shit into the ground? hah le bane meme, aaaaaand BANEBANEBANEBANEBANE
aah le sneed meme SNEEDSNEEDSNEEDSNEED

That's what happened, devs figured "Hey HL did that cinematic thing quite well, lets eh.. lets increase that by 9000%"

And again, its not like mindless Doom clones were fun anymore by 1998 anyway.

>> No.7134603

>>7134573
Counter-strike also killed fun movement. I'd be okay with the death of AFPS if it didn't also spell the end of actual momentum-based movement that isn't full of airbrushed shit and behavioral exceptions to keep the player from doing fun shit.

>> No.7134671

>>7134603
This is also true. What's weird is that CS:S did have fun movement, but that was removed completely in CS:GO. Shame.

>> No.7134674

Was there another FPS with a reloading mechanic before Half Life, outside of tactical stuff like Rainbow 6?

>> No.7134679

>>7134671
CS:S had fun movement at its core, but without ways to give yourself a ton of momentum in an average game, and with maps being designed for a slower pace of movement, I can kinda see why they didn't transfer anything fun over to CS:GO. The niche of maps that made use of CSS's mechanics was filled by, if nothing else, gmod.
But at the same time, removing those features just because there's technically no chance they'll be used is scummy.

>> No.7134698

>>7134674
Duke Nukem 3D had primitive reloading where you can't decide *when* to reload your pistol, it would just reload on its own once you emptied the magazine. There's probably more examples, but that's the earliest example I can think of.

>> No.7134745

>>7134698
Thinking back, Outlaw did it a year before.

>> No.7134752

>>7129358
Quake is only like $2 in steam autumn sale right now.

>> No.7134757

>>7134752
Quake is free.