Half-Life was the same. The game doesn’t spoon feed you a narrative, the same way real life doesn’t have a narrator (at least one outside of your head).
You need to pay attention to your surroundings, listen in to NPCs talking, read posters on the wall, etc to piece together the story.
It was and is one of the cooler ways to do storytelling in my opinion. Cutscenes etc are fine but for a first person game, I love the immersion of the story happening around you rather then being loredumped on you while your agency is taken away from you.
Agreed. And in this line of more subtle storytelling, from the games I played from the franchise, if anything, it took all the way to Portal 2 for some things to start making sense.
Yeah gameplay wise the game basically leaned a lot on novelty. But they are wrong to say that it lacks world building and lore because it’s scant on narrative. That’s like saying “the Quiet Place lacks world building because there is barely any narrative”. The game is excellent in using game mechanics to tell a story. Instead of relying on the storytelling mechanics of film.
Its world building and such is visual story telling.
This makes me think that the guy ran through the game instead of playing it. Just because what happened isn’t spoonfed it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Reminds me of all the haters of Dear Esther.
It’s much more rare nowadays in new video games that have this style of physics or visual storytelling. It’s a game that will always be a fresh experience to me anytime I replay it.
I have yet to play half life 2 (waiting on my son to get the motivation to help me beat decay, I’ve beat the other expansions)
But I can’t imagine that half life 2 doesn’t hold up when the first game is a masterpiece that holds up better than pretty much any FPS released after it
Unfortunately several parts do not hold up when you remove the novelty and temporal context. The whole game was mind blowing when it was new; I very much enjoyed it then. On a subsequent playthrough years later, there were definitely parts that just did not hold up. I used the console liberally at times because I couldn’t be bothered to do them for real.
I think it’s the consequence of bringing a truly revolutionary game to market with limited resources. There are clearly portions that exist to showcase the cool shit they could do rather than to drive the narrative or be genuinely fun.
I fucking love Highway 17 - it’s an atmospheric and enjoyable road trip and I will die on this hill.
Idk, of all the ways you could criticize Ubisoft, dragging this random guy just because he didn’t care too much for HL2 (and then took the time to write down his thoughts instead just going “game bad 👎”) feels silly.
They make some good points about how we view “classic” games too.
A lot of 16-bit games are remembered fondly because of things like “look at how many colors are on the screen at once! Look at how big the sprites are- they’re almost as big as the arcade version! Hear how there are 4 separate audio tracks that kind of almost sound like real instruments sometimes!”.
Mario 64 is a great example for me. I hear other people was nostalgic about how incredible it was to be able to move in 3D space at the time, and how they spent hours just wandering around levels and marveling at the technology. For me, I did that with Crash Bandicoot (which came out a few months earlier in the US). And shortly after Spyro blew them both out of the water with its incredibly smooth controls and, imo, better graphics and sound. When I’ve tried to go back and play Mario 64 I find it a clunky mess of a game, more of a tech demo than anything else.
On the one hand I can respect the pioneers. The original thinkers who push the frontiers of what art can be. On the other hand, those games that rely so heavily on being “revolutionary for their time” often don’t hold up well decades later when tons of games have done what they did better. I think it’s possible to appreciate those games for what they did without enjoying going back and playing them.
When I look back at what I’ve played the past couple years, games like Control and Horizon: Zero Dawn stick out. I don’t think either one of them had anything particularly innovative or new. I see any games coming out today where I say “wow that’s a Control-like” game. But what they did do was execute on a high level, with a lot of polish and very few flaws. I think that’s the biggest strength of AAA games: execution, not innovation.
Bro spent hours playing HL 2 and then had to turn on godmode? Does he only have 1 hand or something? What happened?
0.2 hours to be exact.
Ah good catch, that means they lied as well.
He said that he played through it in PS3 back in the day
Can Godmode be toggled in PS3?
I don’t know that, I would guess not, probably
Using MMOD doesn’t track playtime for the man game
I did that for Control when I played that, I was just ready to be done. Im guessing by every other part of the review the person was also just ready for the game to end
I suppose people who don’t enjoy overcoming challenges or figuring out strategies wouldn’t enjoy a lot of videogames in general.
What does that have to do with anything? If someone’s mentally checked out of the game so much that continuing to play through it becomes a slog, I can’t blame them for cheating just to get it over with.
If you’re not going to enjoy playing the game then you’re better off not finishing it, because by finishing it that way you’ve robbed yourself of the joy of overcoming the challenge.
What challenge? HL2 is not a particularly difficult game. And there isn’t going to be any joy in overcoming whatever challenge you’re talking about if they’re hating every second of the game. Its not like we’re talking about a souls-like where they cheated because they couldn’t defeat a boss. No, they cheated because they got bored, not because of some imaginary skill issue.
And they’re not better off quitting if they still want to know how the game ends.
The bridge crossing level and using the crossbow to crucify combine soldiers were about the best parts of the game as I remember it.
I expected a really bad take, but this is not it. HL2 has strength, but the story is not it. It’s okay, but I want you to remember that the ending of HL2 is just not good - neither to ‘boss fight’ nor the deus ex machina ending.
Even the gameplay gets boring when you have the “op” gravity gun.
I prefer HL1 to HL2. The physics riddles are not hard either and I think Stratholm is only “horror” for people with no xp in Survival Horror games.
Not to play the devils advocate but they do have an argument. Not in the physics point because physics haven’t been done to death so that part of Half-life 2 IMO is still fresh. But the rest of Half-life 2 can be dull and boring and nonsensical if played today. Half-life 2 was such a cultural shift that everything great about it has been dissected, analyzed and improved upon wherever possible.
Much like Half-life 1 the things that made the game great are industry standard now. You’re used to the greatness so all you see are the flaws. The boat section is too long, the car section is poorly paced, the story is too cryptic, the list probably goes on. But anyone who played it at launch knows how fucking sick the game is because there was nothing else like it.
Friends of mine who played at two different points far after launch still found it to be just as great, even if the physics and facial animations were no longer best in class.
I still like its facial animation more than most Danes. They had tools that even set up random NPCs to have full lipsync and expressions for minor lines, without a mocap studio. Most AAA work these days doesn’t have that, or they dedicate such animation to when you’re in a zoomed in view to receive quests.
I don’t care much about the Danes either.
Autocorrect has been extremely vicious today about anything that’s not in a 20-year-old dictionary.
I personally played it some time after Portal 2, probably 2015 or so. I found it great, particularly as far as lore and pacing are concerned. Sure, there are bits that drag, characters that aren’t well written, and plot/lore details that are too ambiguous, but I’d much rather that than hand-holdy, surface-level plot of most similar shooters, or plot told through YouTube videos and flavor text like many modern shooters. IMO, its still one of the best at what it does, and its still a personal favorite for that reason.
I tend to agree with this. I had given up on PC gaming by 2004 so did not play HL2 until the Orange Box on Xbox in 2007 and my reaction was “Jesus this is boring!”
I’ve tried to replay it a couple of times since then, most recently on Steam Deck, but it just doesn’t click with me and I give up around the Canals.
That’s an insane claim to me. HL2 set the bar for worldbuilding. From the guy muttering “don’t drink the water” in the train station, to the people and vortigaunts building homes in the sewers, to the stick legged stalkers waddling around the citadel, HL2 took “show don’t tell” to heart. It was the most immersive experience anyone had played in a video game up to that point, or for years after.
I’ll grant you that other games have learned a lot from it, but I would say the vast majority haven’t. Games still come out today where everything needs to be spoonfed to the player literally for them to stop and process what they’re looking at, instead of just running and gunning mindlessly.
When you say HL2 can be boring and nonsensical if played today, the first thing that comes to mind are all the people who turn movie subtitles on, and then for 75% of the runtime their eyes are in the bottom 1/3 of the screen, not taking in any of the visual information the filmmaker is putting in front of them. Like, yeah, HL2 is quite boring when you’re not looking at it.
truly dull sections - yes I’m looking at you the vehicle sections … makes playing through HL2 a slog. Just a few hours in, I didn’t want to play any more. I was done.
Totally agree with this. HL1 is one of my favorite games ever but HL2 was just boring. I tried it a few times and never finished. Opposing Force and Blue Shift are my Half Life 2 and Half Life 3.
Half-Life 2 would be a mediocre game if you lacked empathy for people in conditions where the protagonist (the player) starts.
Okay but like, Half Life 2 is similar to Citizen Kane.
A revolutionary piece of media for its time that brought the medium as a whole forward.
And kind of a slog to get through now because we learned a lot of lessons about the medium since then.
Like I’m sorry, but you’re not going to convince me that the strider fights on your way to the citadel were actually good and definitely not a painful chapter that soured a lot of people ln the game. And Water Hazard is infamous for being very uninteresting to the point that people that play half life now joke about it.
is the time shown on steam reviews accurate? cause i’d guess that it takes more than 12 minutes for a casual player to finish half-life 2
in fact i checked and the world record in speedrunning is around 36 minutes lol
I have some similar reviews with 0 hours because I usually play a cracked version of the game and then buy it if i like it just to support the dev. Maybe that’s what was going on here.
that makes sense. maybe the mod they installed causes steam to not count the hours.
If you launch the game outside steam the time isn’t accounted for. I know this because I love playing Timespinner with a randomizer. Inside steam I have 40h of played time. If the timer counted my randomizer sessions I’d have at least 4x that
Lots of mods for older games circumvent steam, so steam does not know about the game running. Famous example was Skyrim and Skyrim script extender. If this is the case with mmod idk
If you play in offline mode (Steam Deck) Steam doesn‘t clock your playtime IIRC
Afaik it does if it resyncs. Just takes a while to update
Tbh, that’s just the difference between someone who has nostalgia for a game and someone who doesn’t.
I played Pokemon Red as a kid. I replayed it dozens of times since and it’s always really fun. Just feels good.
I didn’t play Pokemon Gold as a kid. I tried to play it quite a few times and never got throught it. Objectively, Gold is a much better game than Red in every regard. But I don’t have nostalgia for it, so it’s just an old game with bad UX, outdated gameplay and weak graphics to me. Can’t get through it without getting bored and quitting.
HL2 was revolutionary, 22 years ago. Nowadays it’s just woefully outdated in every respect including gameplay.
As OOP says e.g. about physics: That stuff was amazing in 2004, but it really isn’t in 2026. Almost every shooter includes physics and in many cases better physics than HL2 did. In part because game designers have learned from HL2 and other games and improved upon it.
If you have nostalgia for HL2 because you played it as a kid, it’s still going to be amazing to play. If you don’t, then it won’t.
I’m with you on principle, and the airboat section sucks ass (sorry Valve).
However, the rest of the game is great, and still holds up.
Some of the complaint is “the game spends too much time jerking off its physics engine”. Yes. It does. That’s the core appeal my dude.
The way the physics interact with the level design is great, allow me to jog everyone’s memory.
Ravenholm is amazing, using the gravity gun and sawblades is great, as is the use of environmental traps. The ragdolls are hilarious.
Playing ‘the floor is lava’ with the antlions is great, and the moments where you realise you may need to touch sand for a second too long is thrilling.
Storming the prison with the pheromones is great, and having endless minions to throw at turrets satisfies my latent psychopathy.
Supercharging the gravity gun is great, and pulling those energy orbs out and richochetting them off the walls to disintegrate the combine is unique and fun.
And of course, the crème de la creme, playing basketball with Dog.
The question is: Did you play the game for the first time when it came out? Then you are judging the game through the lens of that time instead of with your current knowledge and expectations.
We all know it was revolutionary back then, but that’s not the question. The question is is it still good when compared with modern games?
Put it next to some really good modern games and compare it with them. Obviously graphics are far worse on older games, so I’d ignore that point. But in regards to gameplay and story telling, does it hold up to a modern game? I don’t think so.
I first played half life 2 seven years after release (2011).
It absolutely holds up compared to modern games, and is superior to many modern games in some aspects.
I really enjoy shooters which don’t rely on ADS, its like a fusion of arcade shooters and COD clones.
The storytelling is completely fine, it’s very standard for scripted scenes to play out as you have free movement.
I think whether you think the gameplay is good compared to modern games is what you value.
I think what half-life 2 gets right is the the uniqueness. Think of all the different types of enemies, the different guns, the different levels.
What does it lack? Not much honestly. What more could you want from it? Maybe improve the movement mechanics to make climbing a bit easier?
Apart from that, it’s just missing “features”. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want half-life 2 to feature weapon mods, crafting, open world exploration, bloat…
I would agree with you in theory, however I am the same age as Half-Life 2. I never got around to playing it until it was already an old game (11-12? MAYBE 13). I played other shooters before, like various CoD games, Bioshock Infinite, etc., but they never clicked with Me. They obviously took great influence from it, every shooter did, but I could tell even as a kid that they didn’t do it as well
I played this game twice, and tried to get to the end twice, and in both times I just WALKED AWAY. The original was actually playable and beatable in comparison.
One moment it’s a shooter, then it becomes a driving game, then it becomes one of the earliest walking sims with long stretches of nothing, then a horror game, then a tactical shooter, and it wasn’t good at any of them - it was all just cobbled together. Valve would have had a much better game if they sold just Ravenholm, the only part that actually evoked strong feelings in me.
And by this point in time I can’t help but think the funny letter G guy is just a Mary Sue to glue the game together with very little character or substance besides “man in black”.
I firmly believe the only reason this game is “beloved” is the same reason that iPhones sell just because of the logo of the company that made them. (And also because of this game every fucking company that breathes has an online DRM launcher)
Fear by Monolith and its expansions on the other hand, they were so much better despite the aiming system being unintuitive in comparison to HL the 2. Everything just clicks. I just loved Fear. But I’m sure this won’t save me from “Ubisoft target audience” allegations.
I firmly believe the only reason this game is “beloved” is the same reason that iPhones sell just because of the logo of the company that made them.
It’s more nostalgia than branding. I’ll entirely agree that half life hasn’t aged great, but what’s important is the historical context. The games were groundbreaking for the time, especially HL2 with its physics engine and gravity gun. I remember playing it just days after release then being shocked and amazed at those different systems. There just weren’t many games with that level of polish tackling such a wide scope.
Just like with watershed TV/movie/music, it seems quaint and overhyped as their innovations become the norm.
Just like with watershed TV/movie/music, it seems quaint and overhyped as their innovations become the norm.
There is even a trope that describes that
I once saw someone somewhere comment that HL2 is actually a tech demo meant to show off the physics stuff. Which I wholeheartedly agree with, and even that didn’t win me over. The game doesn’t feel like a shooter meant to be enjoyed, rather it feels like Valve flexing its muscles only because they can.
