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FPS NIGHTMARES

Started by Lemming, November 17, 2019, 12:23:16 PM

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Ferris


H-O-W-L


H-O-W-L



Quote from: Lemming on September 29, 2020, 01:43:45 AMThe ending credits theme is pretty fantastic too, there's something weirdly appropriate about it despite it being a breezy upbeat note to end a relatively dark, tense game on.

That's actually because it's a reused track from Prospero, an upbeat dimension-hopping game Valve wanted to parallel-dev with HL1 starring a chirpy woman with bunches. Never got made sadly.

Lemming

Shit, I fucked up by posting my boring Half-Life essay right as we were about to go to a new page. SHIT

Quote from: madhair60 on September 29, 2020, 02:01:39 AM
An extremely boring game and the game that killed fun shooters.

But they're back, in the form of Ion Fury, DUSK, AMID EVIL, etc. Now we just have to wait for the throwback-shooter equivalent of Half-Life to kill the genre all over again.

evilcommiedictator

Quote from: madhair60 on September 29, 2020, 02:01:39 AM
An extremely boring game and the game that killed fun shooters.

Painkiller and Serious Sam exist though

popcorn

Half-Life definitely killed the FPS genre assuming all you want FPSs to be are incoherent mazes that make no fucking sense at all that you only play with all the cheats on because you are 10 years old and it's 1995 and your chips are ready now boys come down for tea.

Certainly HL created the template for the linear action game we still see today but I think the sudden emergence of Medal of Honor et al was also facilitated by the ability to make environments, weapons and enemies that looked more or less realistic, or real-ish. It was all quite abstract before then, by necessity.

ASFTSN

Quote from: popcorn on September 29, 2020, 11:41:01 AM
Half-Life definitely killed the FPS genre assuming all you want FPSs to be are incoherent mazes that make no fucking sense at all that you only play with all the cheats on because you are 10 years old and it's 1995 and your chips are ready now boys come down for tea.

Take off the cheats and this is simply all I want from my life, thanks.

I don't mind Half Life though. Can never be bothered to finish it.

Lemming

Quote from: popcorn on September 29, 2020, 11:41:01 AM
Half-Life definitely killed the FPS genre assuming all you want FPSs to be are incoherent mazes that make no fucking sense at all that you only play with all the cheats on because you are 10 years old and it's 1995 and your chips are ready now boys come down for tea.

Ahh, but that's the thing - the genre was already moving away from abstract mazes as early as 1994. By 1998, quite a lot of games are largely linear and opt for realistic locations, both in visuals and layout. I'm starting to think Half-Life gets both credited and blamed for things that it's not really responsible for. There's nothing in Half-Life's design philosophy that doesn't already exist in, say, Unreal, SiN, Shogo, Trespasser or even Klingon Honor Guard. Half-Life is just way better and was impressive enough to fuck the industry sideways, leaving everyone scrambling to catch up (usually by pilfering random individual aspects of its design without understand what made it work).

What I'm interested to see going forwards is how many games actually are Half-Life knockoffs. A quick look ahead to 1999 doesn't really reveal anything that I'd immediately think of as a Half-Life clone. I agree about Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Call of Duty being future leaders of the genre - for better or worse - but they both seem like they're following a very different mold to Half-Life (CoD moreso given the whole focus on AI teammates who get in the way and stall your progress). I'd be tempted to suggest that Half-Life's influence might actually be a little overstated - it clearly sent a shockwave through the FPS genre and devs were looking to see what they could learn from it, but there seem to be very few direct Half-Life clones in the way that there are Doom clones, Mario clones, and so on. The only one that immediately springs to mind is Red Faction, and it still tries pretty hard to distinguish itself from Half-Life.

popcorn

NO HALF-LIFE IS THE BEST

I think Half-Life's influence was not specifically on FPSs but on the modern concept of the AAA game. It morphed into Naughty Dog's Uncharted stuff, and from there stuff like God of War.

I think even by 1998 we had left an industry model where you had clones in the sense of Doom clones or Mario clones. It just wasn't as straightforward to "clone" things in the same way it had been, for a start.

Lemming

Maybe not "clones" as such, but there were still a lot of games that were very close copies of successful games - Forsaken could reasonably be described as a "Descent clone", and of course the late 90s and early 2000s were rife with "Diablo clones", many of which hardly changed Diablo's formula at all. Same for Command & Conquer/WarCraft clones. For Half-Life, though, it's hard to point at any games that are trying to copy it directly.

If we were to lay out Half-Life's core design philosophies, it might look like:
- ultra-linear levels based around introducing a mechanic and then gradually scaling up the challenge, teaching the player along the way
- story-heavy with a focus on "style over substance" so to speak, in the form of heavily-scripted events and scenes, with gameplay mechanics being used to enhance the story and setting rather than existing for their own sake
- setpiece-based design where every room is a memorable moment, usually with some kind of gimmick to it (using sound to distract the tentacles, using the big fan to fly up to the roof, etc.)
- never taking control away from the player, and a focus on "phenomenological" (thanks Gabe) experiences

It's easy to point out ways that some of these seeped into future FPS games but it's hard to think of another game that tied all these elements together like Half-Life does. Even Blue Shift, Opposing Force and Half-Life 2 don't really get it. It feels like the only thing a lot of future devs took away from Half-Life was "make the entire game a long corridor with enemies running at you", which isn't even what Half-Life did.

I can kind of see how it sets a framework up for AAA games, in the sense that it's focused on production values and spectacle over gameplay (not a bad thing), is very preoccupied with offering the player a tailored and hand-crafted experience rather than leaving the player to make their own (also not a bad thing), and is also relatively short, in true summer blockbuster style. It's hyper-polished in a way that makes it clear why it dominated the sales charts so quickly and left competitors like SiN in the dust.

HALF-LIFE IS THE BEST, though, it's true. I was slightly worried that playing through the genre chronologically like this would change my opinion of it, but nope, it's still easily one of the best games I've played since starting this thread, possibly the best.

purlieu

I played Half-Life because I was going to play the second one (having watched some friends play it in the past) and thought it'd make sense to give the original a go first. Wasn't expecting it to be quite that good. Super enjoyment, good review, top game hurray good.

Ferris

^Red Faction is a good shout actually, it feels similarly linear with lots of set pieces and more than a few gimmicks.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

I have fond memories of Red Faction, but it is indeed a pretty blatant copy.

popcorn

#643
Regarding Xen, I'm in the "it sucks" camp. I'll never forget how captivated I was by HL, and then when I got to the Xen parts, my interest just went off a cliff. It seemed to turn into the sort of vague 90s FPS mush the game until then had made obsolete - confusing, samey alien worlds. I generally think the final part of a game should be the culmination of everything you've seen and done, and this felt like a completely disconnected, rambling epilogue. I don't even think I played it entirely and just used the console to skip to the final boss, or something.

In fact I don't think I've played any of Xen since 1998. So this opinion is less received wisdom and more vague recollection. Now I'm curious.

Lemming

Red Faction is great, very underrated, I'm excited to get around to it. You can really feel the devs trying to figure out exactly what made Half-Life work and then replicate it. With varying success, obviously, but it's the only game I can think of that comes close structurally, even if it's nowhere near as tightly-made as Half-Life.

Quote from: popcorn on September 29, 2020, 03:57:36 PM
Regarding Xen, I'm in the "it sucks" camp. I'll never forget how captivated I was by HL, and then when I got to the Xen parts, my interest just went off a cliff. It seemed to turn into the sort of vague 90s FPS mush the game until then had made obsolete - confusing, samey alien worlds. I generally think the final part of a game should be the culmination of everything you've seen and done, and this felt like a completely disconnected, rambling epilogue. I don't even think I played it entirely and just used the console to skip to the final boss, or something.

In fact I don't think I've played any of Xen since 1998. So this opinion is less received wisdom and more vague recollection. Now I'm curious.

Don't expect to be amazed by it on a replay, but I do think it's a lot better than it's given credit for. Thematically and visually it's great, but the Gonarch battle is absurd (you can only hurt it in specific areas of the map after it's played an animation cycle, for some reason???) and the alien factory is just straight-up awful. Most of "Xen" (as in, the chapter named "Xen") is interesting and even pretty good, then Gonarch's Lair is what it is, and Interloper is all over the place, but still with some good ideas and moments. I like Nihilanth quite a bit too, FPS final bosses are never great so it deserves a little leeway, and at least they tried to make it interesting with the teleport attack.

Inspector Norse

Great review Lemming. To this day it's still probably my favourite game of all time and you sum up a lot of what made it stand out and touch upon some things I'd not really considered.

Even my 14-year-old self who'd hardly played any FPS before thought Xen was pants, though. Not badly done, it's just that the magic didn't make it through the portal with Gordon. I think it's mainly because Black Mesa is such a fantastic setting, a living, breathing, believable location (albeit populated by cloned scientists and guards) then suddenly you reach this big climactic moment and then oh, four more levels of uninspired alien blob.

Mister Six

It doesn't help that the game is continuously building momentum from the moment you step off the tram at the start, everything snowballing into a massive chase/clusterfuck, and then all of that just disappears to be replaced with... aimlessly wandering around some blobby levels looking for the final boss to kill. The stakes are high, but kind of abstract, compared with trying to escape a crumbling lab/fighting off the US Army.

They should probably have had something like an area of the Black Mesa lab that's being transformed into Xen - with you either jumping into a portal to be immediately confronted by the boss on Xen at the end (so there's some aesthetic continuity between the two areas and not too much time spent outside Black Mesa) or just finishing off the boss in the partially converted Black Mesa lab in order to shut down the portal. Instead, as mentioned, if feels like an unnecessary epilogue.

popcorn

Quote from: Mister Six on September 29, 2020, 07:29:37 PM
They should probably have had something like an area of the Black Mesa lab that's being transformed into Xen - with you either jumping into a portal to be immediately confronted by the boss on Xen at the end (so there's some aesthetic continuity between the two areas and not too much time spent outside Black Mesa) or just finishing off the boss in the partially converted Black Mesa lab in order to shut down the portal.

Both much better ideas. The "alien/zombie infestation of normal area" thing is a bit of a cliche by now (I think it's even in Alyx by the looks of things, still not played that though) but it would have just been far more sensible...

purlieu

My issue with Xen was feeling like it was near the end and then it kind of wasn't. It felt like there should have just been one level there, with the opening floating section to prep you with alien physics and then the final boss, rather than feeling like a whole different mini-game attached to the end. I like the Xen levels, but they do spoil the pacing somewhat.

madhair60

Based on Popcorn's posts on this page I'd like to revise my opinion from "Half-Life ruined shooters" to "Half-Life ruined gaming"

Quote from: evilcommiedictator on September 29, 2020, 09:52:58 AM
Painkiller and Serious Sam exist though

which are literally nothing like Doom, Quake, Duke or Blood

The Crumb

'Fun' shooters just evolved into arena shooters didn't they?

Ferris

Is Half Life on PS Now or anything?

Basically how can I, a lazy man with a PlayStation, play this without getting up from my sofa.

Lemming

I'd argue that "fun" shooters (ie pre-Half-Life shooters) don't really form any kind of coherent category of FPS anyway. Blood feels closer to Unreal and Half-Life than it does to Doom in some ways, and Quake doesn't really resemble pre-Quake games in much of its design. You can already see the shift to more "cinematic" and linear games emerging in the likes of Outlaws, Blood, Shadow Warrior and Dark Forces, and by the time of Quake 2, the direction of travel for the genre is pretty much set in stone.

Blood, Outlaws and Shadow Warrior in particular have a lot of big "cool" moments based around setpieces and gimmicky areas, Half-Life's only innovation is saying "hey what if the whole game was gimmicks, with smaller maps".

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on September 29, 2020, 09:13:32 PM
Is Half Life on PS Now or anything?

Basically how can I, a lazy man with a PlayStation, play this without getting up from my sofa.

It's got to be PC, really - there was a PS2 port but it was kind of naff. You might be able to arrange some kind of demonic keyboard and mouse setup from the sofa, using your leg as a table.

Ferris


Jerzy Bondov

Half-Life only about three hours long?! I remember it being really long. To be fair I probably spent three hours psyching myself up to get in the shark cage. Scariest shit in games.

Polymorphia

Always seems to last at least 5 hours whenever I play it, "3 hours" shocked me. I'm sure it took me over 9 hours on my first playthrough as well

Brigadier Pompous

Quote from: Lemming on September 30, 2020, 01:04:50 AM
It's got to be PC, really - there was a PS2 port but it was kind of naff.

The dreamcast version was pretty good!

Lemming

Quote from: Jerzy Bondov on September 30, 2020, 10:38:52 AM
Half-Life only about three hours long?! I remember it being really long. To be fair I probably spent three hours psyching myself up to get in the shark cage. Scariest shit in games.
Quote from: Polymorphia on September 30, 2020, 10:41:51 AM
Always seems to last at least 5 hours whenever I play it, "3 hours" shocked me. I'm sure it took me over 9 hours on my first playthrough as well

Here's a full playthrough, no glitches or speedrun stuff or anything like that, done in 3 hours 11 minutes.

I seem to remember it taking days when I was a kid, too. I'd come home from school and play it for hours, and getting a chapter finished seemed like a big milestone accomplishment. But I've started including Half-Life in the list of games I play mindlessly when I'm listening to the radio or podcasts or whatever, and often the game will be over before the thing I'm listening to.

When I was little I'd play Doom, Heretic and the Build games constantly, but a BIG HALF-LIFE PLAYTHROUGH was a major undertaking, for which a lot of time had to be set aside. No idea how that was the case when Doom and Heretic are much longer games.

Quote from: Brigadier Pompous on September 30, 2020, 10:49:22 AM
The dreamcast version was pretty good!

It's right up there with the Soldier of Fortune Dreamcast port!

evilcommiedictator

Hats off to Half Life and their engine for making crouch jumping a thing for the next 15 years

Mister Six

Quote from: Polymorphia on September 30, 2020, 10:41:51 AM
Always seems to last at least 5 hours whenever I play it, "3 hours" shocked me. I'm sure it took me over 9 hours on my first playthrough as well

Maybe it's just the sheer density of stuff - changes in environment, setpieces, plot developments, puzzles, new weapons. A lot of games before it, at least the big ones, were more uniform in their gameplay, environments and weapons, so perhaps in the hyper-dense world of Black Mesa it felt like we'd travelled more ground than we would in a Doom clone (or even actual Doom) that's twice as long.