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This was exactly my experience. The story they were telling in HL2 was extremely poorly suited to the technology they were trying to use to tell it. You can't

This was exactly my experience. The story they were telling in HL2 was extremely poorly suited to the technology they were trying to use to tell it. You can't tell a story about being an insurgency in a huge city or running from your life from a totalitarian state while never letting the character deviate more than 10 feet to either side along a fixed path. It just doesn't work, and it never felt like more than a game. I often felt like I was playing a rail shooter like the old light-gun games at an arcade that moved the character for you.

greggman2 7y ago
The story in HL2 is a mess. You go from city controlled by invaders to zombie town to "They" town to nonsense alien citadel. They all have absolutely nothing to do with each other, they're just glued together because some designers/artists thought it would be cool to have them. Players fill in the rest with their own imagination, not by any smart writing or design by Valve.
simonsarris 7y ago
It's weird, isn't it? It's not like I think the game was total trash, its got high points, but its always baffled me that Metacritic has had it for more than a decade as the highest rated PC game of all time. Was everyone drunk? Paid off? https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/pc?sort=desc https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/...
- filoleg 7y ago
  I doubt that was the case. Looking at HL2 now, with all those other FPS games that built up upon what HL2 introduced, of course it doesn't look that impressive. But at the time, it felt like it came from the future. The whole physics gameplay aspect was pretty much unprecedented at that time, especially with how seamless and integral it felt. It didn't feel forced or bolted-on at all. A good analogy in other media would be Citizen Kane (movies), NWA (music), or Akira (japanese animation). Neither of those would garner mass praise if they were released today, but they were first of a kind and paved the way for moving their respective medium forward.

greggman2 7y ago

The story in HL2 is a mess. You go from city controlled by invaders to zombie town to "They" town to nonsense alien citadel. They all have absolutely nothing to do with each other, they're just glued together because some designers/artists thought it would be cool to have them. Players fill in the rest with their own imagination, not by any smart writing or design by Valve.

simonsarris 7y ago

It's weird, isn't it? It's not like I think the game was total trash, its got high points, but its always baffled me that Metacritic has had it for more than a decade as the highest rated PC game of all time. Was everyone drunk? Paid off? https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/pc?sort=desc https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/...

filoleg 7y ago
I doubt that was the case. Looking at HL2 now, with all those other FPS games that built up upon what HL2 introduced, of course it doesn't look that impressive. But at the time, it felt like it came from the future. The whole physics gameplay aspect was pretty much unprecedented at that time, especially with how seamless and integral it felt. It didn't feel forced or bolted-on at all. A good analogy in other media would be Citizen Kane (movies), NWA (music), or Akira (japanese animation). Neither of those would garner mass praise if they were released today, but they were first of a kind and paved the way for moving their respective medium forward.