I’m not young. But 25 years after the hype, I am finally getting around to playing half life (1)! Stupidly missed the free action, but paid a few eurocents for it. They’re totally worth it! Awesome game, holds up very very well after two and a half decades!
The novelty was the story in FPS. Before Half Life, all you have to do is to shoot every moving sprite and grab keys to open doors. The story was a splash screen between the levels.
Nowadays it doesn’t look special to have a story. When I first played Half Life, my mind was blown away.
There were a lot of FPS with story on them, like Hexen (I and II), System Shock, Ultima Underworld (although it was more of an RPG hybrid), Outlaws, Unreal, Witchaven 2, Goldeneye, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Rainbow Six, Dark Forces, etc…
A lot of these had complex puzzles beyond shooting everything and colored keys, but also cutscenes, character classes, convoluted stories and extensive lore. Hell, Marathon and Marathon Durandal had incredibly complex stories and lore for what they where.
The biggest difference was that HL was a story without cuts where there weren’t “levels” nor cutscenes, but scripted sequences to push forward the story.
There were though “chapters” but the change between these was minimal. It was the closest to a cinematic feeling we had to the date.
A lot of those other games played like shit compared to HL1 too. System shock 1 is pretty much unplayable by modern standards purely due to controls, just as an example.
Maybe it’s confirmation bias of my part, but last time I played it, it was still very amazing to go through all the puzzles, not just the story, mechanically it was very well rounded, plus the ai feels really smart and all the details for the creatures’ ai makes them feel like real living beings if you’re able to notice them.
Indeed, the story was part of it, but the level design and the AI scripting was also a big deal in 1998. So much of today’s single-player FPS experience can be traced back to Half-Life.
Even comparing it to most modern shooters, I almost never feel as hunted as I did by the human enemies in HL. A big part of that is definitely the level design, but also the enemies in HL are very mobile compared to most games where the action is all happening roughly 180 degrees in front of you.
Also the scripted sequences that were all in-engine were amazing at the time.
We were used to cool things happening in a pre-rendered cut scene before, but with HL1 everything happens from the player’s perspective in real-time while you’re in control of them. Even the opening where you put the crystal in the beam and actually cause shit to go haywire felt like an incredible moment of player agency in the world. Like oh man what did I doooo
EDIT: oh @massive_bereavement@kbin.social kind of beat me to this point haha
I got half life (2?) in a bundle with Portal and didn’t understand at all what the fuss was about. After the introduction, it’s running and gunning through a building, then running and gunning through sewers, then running and gunning through more buildings, then running and gunning through a street, then running and gunning in a swamp, then driving a hovercraft, then running and gunning some more, and that’s where I stopped playing.