Half-Life

https://www.filfre.net/2024/12/half-life/

by dmazin • 1 year ago

547 231 1 year ago

Obligatory mention that if you want to enjoy Half-Life today (in spirit if not exactly the same game), Black Mesa is the best option for doing so: https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/

graynk2• 1 year ago

Yes and no. The original is still very much playable, one does not replace the other, both are very good

bl0rg• 1 year ago

As someone who has played both, why not just play Black Mesa?

cs02rm0• 1 year ago

Does it run on MacOS? (That page suggests not?)

haunter• 1 year ago

ymmv but runs under CrossOver https://old.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1e4pomu/black_me...

karlgkk• 1 year ago

While the original version did not get a port to Mac OS, later on the updated version did for Mac OS X

TazeTSchnitzel• 1 year ago

Black Mesa is not the same game!

ekianjo4• 1 year ago

Black Mesa is a recreation but it's not identical to the original either. So... Yes if you want modern graphics, no if you want the real thing

davikr• 1 year ago

Skip Xen if you're playing this.

loehnsberg• 1 year ago

Why skip Xen? Xen in Black Mesa is really good. I found it to be much better than the original.

deergomoo3• 1 year ago

Overall I think Xen was much better in Black Mesa than HL1, but why they felt the need to make it so long is a mystery to me. Half to two-thirds of the play time could have been cut and it would have only improved things.

on_the_train• 1 year ago

I really didn't like black Mesa at all. It's different for the sake of being different

deergomoo3• 1 year ago

There's still a lot of value in playing the original, but what the Black Mesa team achieved with what is effectively a fan project is incredible. And in a world where Take Two goes after people doing cool stuff with 20 year old GTA games, it's great that it got the official blessing from Valve.

butlike6• 1 year ago

As someone who's actively playing through GTA1 right now, what cool things are people doing with GTA?

scrlk• 1 year ago

Why do we all have to wear these ridiculous ties?

reubenmorais3• 1 year ago

And then there are an awful lot of jumping puzzles, shoehorned into a game engine that has way more slop in it than is ideal for such things.

I was taken aback by this comment. The original Half Life engine has super tight and responsive movement, to the point where the average "tryhard" in a server would be executing all kinds of movement tricks that require frame-perfect inputs or very close to it. Watch some speedruns or HL:DS games and you can easily find examples of gameplay involving super precise movement. In CS there was a huge scene of movement based maps like surf_, bh_, and deathrun_.

Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.

iforgotpassword• 1 year ago

I also found it very weird back then.

wingerlang• 1 year ago

My favorite pasttime in HL/CS back in the day was bhopping and kz_. To some degree I think it has too responsive movement. I recently went back to play HL and I fell down so many crates due to the instant movement, having been used to some inertia in games since.

reubenmorais3• 1 year ago

I remember never quite getting into Counter-Strike: Source because of the difference in inertia. I had friends who were masters of movement there so I know it wasn't a sloppy game, but my muscle memory from 1.6 just made it feel... uncanny :)

JansjoFromIkea2• 1 year ago

Super tight and responsive movement wouldn't necessarily mean jumping puzzles make sense in a 90s single player FPS. Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.

My memory is that it wasn't the controls but the sizes of the spaces you had to jump to and the clarity of where they were so you could adequately position yourself that were the issue. The latter of which is probably more down to texture usage than the engine itself.

reubenmorais3• 1 year ago

Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.

Fair, my point is more that in order for it to be possible for mere 12 year old mortals to learn to casually execute these tricks, the game has to have predictable, responsive and reproducible movement. In other words, the opposite of slop.

amlib• 1 year ago

Turok on the n64 had way more instances of jumping puzzles while controlling like a boat and having a nauseating FOV by even today's console standards. Yet the game was praised and well liked back in the day. Half-Life on a 90s PC in comparison is a much better playing game.

All that said, I still enjoy both. Maybe I've got enough muscle memory to plow trough the BS and enjoy the level design and challenge, specially regarding Turok on original hardware lol. Meanwhile people who didn't grow up with those games are off put whenever a hard jumping puzzle appears or the lack of direction gets them stuck.

da_chicken• 1 year ago

I assumed it was a general complaint about Xen.

I liked Xen when I played it. I thought the boss fights were terrible, but I think most FPS boss fights are terrible. The other complaint is that the healing pools were too slow. The navigation and obscure puzzles were great, though. They scratched an exploration itch I didn't know I had.

CannonSlugs• 1 year ago

Well it was responsive but it wasn't physically accurate at all, which makes it non-intuitive. The whole reason side-games like KZ and surf could exist was due to the bad physics. I competed in local IRC KZ tourneys and also surfed a lot in 1.6. The fact that you gained speed by moving left and right repeatedly doesn't make any intuitive sense. The surf scene was also heavily infected with frame-rate tricks (hotkeys to increase fps-limit in the air, and then lowering it on the ramps) since you floated more in the air the higher your FPS was. In the beginning you needed to have a PC that could support 250+ FPS to be a high-end surfer. This was fixed later with server-set fps limits etc. though.

It created an entire universe of movement based mini-games that I treasured more than the base-game, but it was mostly based on unintuitive physics and engine bugs.

I do agree that the modern game's "inertia" and slow heavy movement feels bad though. Last modern game that I remember had really fast and rapid movement was The Talos Principle.

mrkeen2• 1 year ago

Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.

I distinctly remember a noticeable delay between moving the mouse and the view turning, even when the frame rate was high. I think the fix was switching from DirectX to OpenGL.

HelloUsername• 1 year ago

Dupes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42478326

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42472847

gxd• 1 year ago

One of the saddest things in my gamer resume is that I was never able to get into Half-Life. I can absolutely see what everybody likes in the game - both technically and in terms of gameplay. But I was never into its uneven pace when compared to Doom, not even back in the day. I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure, what the article refers to as "friction".

The Orange Box console versions also suffered from a non-adjustable field of view that made me feel sick after a few minutes of playing.

mrkeen2• 1 year ago

I played through the single player, but like you I think I preferred doom.

That said, half-life mods were imo the golden age of gaming. Vampire slayer let you scare the shit out of your friends at 3am in a LAN. Day of defeat and firearms were the cod and mw of the day. Natural Selection crushed it in terms of fps/RTS hybrid, teamplay and overall quality and polish. Science & industry? Pirates Vikings & knights? Tfc? Several attempts at matrix mods & the opera. So much amazing diversity - it's such a shame that CS (the most banal, vanilla, milquetoast game ever) got all the mindshare. Even when CS ventured into making things more interesting/diverse (hostage rescue, shield, etc.) those things seem to have died off back to the 'standard' game mode (80% of players dead and spectating while "the bomb has been planted" sound effect plays).

hypercube332• 1 year ago

I deeply miss Science and Industry. Half life is still being modded these days just isn't as popular. Jollywangcore features some of the single player mods

paulryanrogers4• 1 year ago

Let's not forget Action Half Life.

The variety sometimes meant you only played your favorite mod a few times at the LAN parties. Because people had so many other things to play as the 90s and early aughts progressed.

archagon3• 1 year ago

I disagree, the CS betas were great. I miss the as_ maps the most — sneaking away to victory as the VIP with all my teammates dead and seconds left on the clock.

musha68k• 1 year ago

At that time in 1998 I mostly played Q1/Q2 online and contemporaries wise I preferred Unreal and SiN over HL's single player experience. Also Unreal's graphics were just truly next level on the Voodoo2 vs anything else. HL DM at LAN parties was surprisingly good and a bit overlooked though; the beginning of the game until the dimensional rift was definitely fun. What stood out the most to me was the soldier AI actually. I always felt the series was a bit hyped but I've come around as I returned to the games on my Steam Deck OLED last fall. In retrospect; clearly classics and the high praises were well earned after all. SDOLED apart from actual CRT setup is maybe the perfect way to experience it today IMO.

Of course DOOM is its own thing completely; a timeless distillation of the 80s - the arcade, Super Mario and D&D all astonishingly abstracted into an unreasonably blissful bleeding-edge hellscape; 93 till infinity.

paulryanrogers4• 1 year ago

SiN did have more character and tried some innovations of its own, but the gameplay needed a bit more polish. Bullets felt so slow you could run past them. JK/DF2 had this problem too.

uniq7• 1 year ago

I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure

I think I remember reading an interview with the dev team where they explained that playing action for too long was boring, as well as solving puzzles, so they consciously designed the game with interleaved phases of action/puzzle. Your recompense for solving a puzzle is action, and your recompense for killing all the bad guys is a relaxing puzzle.

It's funny you didn't liked that, because for me it was the complete opposite. I like pure action shooters, and I like pure puzzle adventure games, but I really loved Half-Life and I didn't know why until I read that explanation.

mft_• 1 year ago

It’s a long time ago now so my recollection is likely very flawed, but with HL I didn’t like the feeling of a created path that must be followed, irrespective how of the interleaving of different aspects. There are lots of modern games like this too - which on the face of it are relatively open-world, but underneath the apparent freedom there’s a strict path to find and follow for success. (I’d definitely include one of the modern Doom games —I forget which it was I tried— in this category, - it was so linear that it felt but one step removed from the old-fashioned shooters where you’re literally on a conveyor belt and shoot whatever appears.)

In the original Doom, in contrast, the only requirement was to make it to the end of the level, figuring out the map and puzzles along the way. Anything else (did you chase 100% kill and 100% secrets?) was optional. I guess it just felt more… honest?

butlike6• 1 year ago

Well in HL2 there were a lot of puzzles to show off their new Havok physics engine

TrackerFF• 1 year ago

Tried it when it was release, then bought it myself in 1999, after I finally had managed to purchase a new PC - can't remember if it was a Nvidia TNT2 or 3dfx Voodoo 3 card I bought with it. But it was the first time I could play the game without it being sluggish and looking like crap. We had bought a family PC 4 years earlier, which had cost a fortune - but by 1998/1999 it was woefully outdated. Also, a thought: Imagine purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years.

One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years. I also vividly remember downloading all the new iterations of counter-strike, which really took off - until settling on 1.6

On a side not, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well - having only been a teenager back then, and in 25 years I'll be this old man. Wonder if all the memories from LAN-parties etc. will be as fresh in 25 years, as they are now.

gonzo41• 1 year ago

I loved world building with the valve map tools. It was fantastic. Almost as much fun as the game itself.

nonrandomstring3• 1 year ago

Which in turn led to an exploding mod scene, clans, hosting and communities. Truly a world-changing game at a golden moment in game history (beside Unreal). And yes, like a good story book a generation have memories of escaping the crumbling Black Mesa facility chased by alien horrors. Mission accomplished Valve.

joquarky• 1 year ago

Worldcraft was so much fun!

At least until "LEAK LEAK LEAK" appeared

lqet4• 1 year ago

On a side note, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well

I also remember it like it was yesterday when, after school on a hot summer's day, a friend showed me this "cool new mod" he recently downloaded for Half-Life. It was an early version of Counterstrike. It took him an entire night to download the mod, and it only ran on his machine with a 320x240 resolution. It looked like crap and was basically unplayable. 6 months and a hardware upgrade later, we all played it for hours each day, and often non-stop for 12 hours on LAN parties. I also remember that you could contact the internet provider (Telekom) by mail, and after a few weeks they would activate something called "Fast-Track" for your connection, which would drop the latency from around 110ms to only 35ms, a huge advantage for MP games... it really blows my mind that all of this was 25 years ago.

In the early 2000s, CS was arguably better known than the original HL. I had some friends who probably played CS for thousands of hours, but never even touched the original HL.

time0ut2• 1 year ago

I was just reminiscing about this with a friend last night. We had tons of free time and games like Counter-Strike were the wild west of creativity. My fondest memory was a Spring afternoon in 2000 after school playing some janky fan made map whose name I don't remember and feeling so happy. Everyone was playing. We played every day. We went to a 300 person LAN party that summer. We formed a 5 man team and competed online.

It was so fun cobbling together a computer that could run it. Trying every trick to squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Trying to shave a few milliseconds off my dial up ping. Going to that one guy's house who had broadband internet.

It really felt like a golden age back then.

My friends and I planned our own mod and started working on it, but our ambition outstripped our ability. That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.

About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular, but seems very focused on competitive play. I wanted to experience that public lobby on a janky fan made map feel. I found a server running custom 'zombie' maps which scratched that itch for a few days. Then I got busy again and haven't touched it since.

t4h4• 1 year ago

I think you meant "FastPath"? - an alternative error correction scheme for DSL connections.

agumonkey3• 1 year ago

The hype was so hot and fast around HL when it came out, that I remember playing it without a dedicated graphics card (I think I was running on a motherboard integrated gpu) in the lowest resolution possible because there was this feeling of "you have to try it".

rusk4• 1 year ago

I got by for years on a Pentium 75 and 8mb of RAM. The specs always said the game wouldn’t work, but it did. You could get away with this right up until PC gaming (finally) moved away from DOS. One big issue was the real mode DOS Plug n play drivers (dwcfgmgr.sys - burned into my brain) which occupied just enough of my 640k that most games would fail to start cause they couldn’t claim the whole lot.

maccard5• 1 year ago

One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years.

Modding still exists. It’s just called “UGC” now. Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft have thriving and accessible options. GTA has an unbelieveable number of players playing role playing mods of it too.

doctorwho42• 1 year ago

It's not the same though, most FPS' games lock down their code and require you to use their servers. More or less murdering any chance of modding. For example, the same time I played halflife and all the mods (including this mod named counter strike), I played the shit out of battlefield 1942. It's modding community was insane! With total conversion mode that game was like 10 different games. And for a poor teen, that and half life were god sends for getting me into gaming

throwaway519• 1 year ago

purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years.

A time when technology changed that fast, too.

BlaDeKke• 1 year ago

Should be changing faster today, it’s just not always visible.

Spooky23• 1 year ago

The crazy thing is there are still a few people playing Half Life!

theshackleford4• 1 year ago

Maybe it’s because of where I sit on the spectrum but there are a handful of games I’ve not stopped playing since release, and yes despite this, I manage to hold down a career, friendships, family etc. (no kids though to be fair, I give that side of myself to my nieces/nephews)

Doom, Duke3d, half life (and mods) and blood. Half life and its expansions get at least a yearly play through in 2D or VR and I play a lot of custom maps.

Getting the opportunity to play them all in VR was a huge high for me. To “walk” through those same worlds from a new perspective, it was just something else.

I’m aware I’m wasting my limited time on earth etc but…I’m ok with it.

rpicard• 1 year ago

Nightmare House was a super fun mod that I found at some point.

I don’t remember where or how, but it scared the heck out of me.

MrPowerGamerBR• 1 year ago

One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods.

Another game from that time that was also easy to mod was The Sims 1.

For a bit of context, EA/Maxis released modding tools BEFORE the game was released, to let players create custom content for the game (like walls and floors) before the game was even released!

And installing custom content was also easy, just drag and drop files in folders related to what you downloaded and that's it.

Imagine any game nowadays doing that? Most games nowadays don't supporting modding out of the box, but of course, there are exceptions, like Minecraft resource packs/data packs. I don't think Fortnite and Roblox fit the "modding a game" description because you aren't really modding a game, you are creating your own game inside of Fortnite/Roblox! Sometimes you don't want to play a new game inside of your game, you just want to add new mods to enhance your experience or to make it more fun. There isn't a "base game Roblox", and while there is a "base game Fortnite" (Battle Royale... or any of the other game modes like Fortnite Festival or LEGO Fortnite) Epic does not let you create mods for the Battle Royale game. You can create your own Battle Royale map, but you can't create a "the insert season here Battle Royale map & gameplay but with a twist!".

Of course, sadly EA/Maxis didn't release all of the modding tools they could (there isn't a official custom object making tool for example, or a official way of editing the behavior of custom objects) but they still released way more modding tools than what current games release.

I think that most modern games don't support that easiness of modding because the games themselves are complex, because as an example: The Sims 1 walls are like, just three sprites, so you can generate a wall easily with a bit of programming skill, the skin format is in plain text in a format similar to ".obj", so on and so forth.

Lately I've been trying to create my own modding tools for The Sims 1, and it is funny when you are reading a page talking about the technical aspects of the game file formats and the author writes "well this field is used for xyzabc because Don Hopkins said so".

no_wizard• 1 year ago

The official toolkit for modding Baldur’s Gate 3 is extremely extensive. You can make an entirely different game on top of the game if you wanted

richardwhiuk• 1 year ago

Factorio has an extensive modding community - one of the community mods was adopted and became an official expansion.

archagon3• 1 year ago

Modding was amazing back then. I wasn’t a modder myself, but it felt like something new and crazy was happening every week. The excitement for every beta release of Counter-Strike. The buzz around newcomers like Action HL, The Specialists, and PVK. Experiments like Science & Industry that didn’t last long but were a fun romp nonetheless. Endless rounds of TFC and DoD. And there were always populated community servers for any mod you plucked fom Fileplanet.

We’ve lost something along the way.

Lonestar1440• 1 year ago

One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding.

I'm generally skeptical about the use cases for current-gen AI, but very hopeful that it can help us get back to this golden age of game Modding.

I think many people, like me, got lost in all the polygons and shaders soon after Half-Life 1. But if AI tools can make it easier to express Modern game outcomes, the way we could make a funky HL1 mod with the IDEs back then; it could be swing things back.

mediumsmart• 1 year ago

this balancing act between scripted story and open gameplay with "conscious" AI defense is so hard to pull off. In the scripted entertainment league Half-Life rules I think. Crysis had the tech to do the real thing and failed - too much cinema and a bad story. But the realism, the mechanics of movement and physics - it was all there in god tier quality.

agumonkey3• 1 year ago

there were other brilliant ideas bridging nascent technology for the sake of gameplay, like surround sound to locate some fast (nearly impossible to see coming) enemies. It really was perfectly executed.

nonrandomstring3• 1 year ago

Great early examples of simulated acoustic spaces matching geometry, like delay networks for metallic ducting in the crawl spaces. And notable firsts in sound management - before there were really "sound engines".

Christian_A• 1 year ago

This was the game that brought me into counter-strike and in my opinion still one of the best stories there is. Well done, especially when you think about how limited their possibilities were in the days back then.

hadriendavid• 1 year ago

I remember playing on the computers at university. Someone had modded the campus map, was so fun to play.

sylens• 1 year ago

The observation that Doom was on more PCs than Windows was very astute. Doom was everywhere at the time - it was not uncommon to find the shareware on computers inside many typical office jobs

bombcar3• 1 year ago

The shareware version of DooM was more of a complete game than many boxed games at the time. It’s no wonder it spread so far - especially because it was also an amazing hardware demo.

simonjgreen• 1 year ago

Wonderfully written article, but especially delighted to see extensive mention of DF2: Jedi Knight. This game absolutely dominated mine and friends free time for multiple years, both single player and multiplayer. Up there as one of my favourite of all time, certainly most played.

Lucasarts absolutely ruled on the story based games genre merges. See of course all the point and clicks such as Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, but also of course XWing and Tie Fighter.

DylanSp• 1 year ago

The same author has full articles on Jedi Knight [1] and X-Wing/TIE Fighter. [2]. If you go through his archives [3], he's also written a lot about LucasArts' adventure games; I think the first posts that talk about them are the three "A New Force in Games" posts.

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2024/04/jedi-knight-plus-notes-on-an-... [2] https://www.filfre.net/2021/02/the-second-coming-of-star-war... [3] https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/

HaZeust• 1 year ago

I've been waiting decades for a re-visit of the Jedi Knight series; preferably in the breadth of Jedi Outcast. I hope to see it soon.

gyomu• 1 year ago

It was far from flawless, but it was really trying to push the boundaries of a young medium.

Great read, it made me realize how far we've come. Video games as an art are really in an interesting spot right now - big budget projects all end up being bland, buggy, cookie cutter rehashes of the same couple templates.

Companies that once represented the pinnacle of creativity and what could be achieved with high budgets - Blizzard, Bethesda, Ubisoft, etc - are now the laughing stock of gamers. Not that it matters when the bulk of gamers are still putting dozens of hours and plenty of microtransaction dollars into decade old games like Fortnite/Minecraft/GTA every week.

What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression? What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?

Thankfully, there are a bunch of indie developers that still release fresh experiences - but they too kind of end up falling into the same tropes (if you like 2D roguelike/platformer/puzzler there's plenty of choice, otherwise...).

Not too unlike the state of the film industry. It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.

ekianjo4• 1 year ago

GTA5 had a super big budget yet received very good feedback from gamers and critics alike, and is still played to this day. So not sure you can just discard big budgets as a whole.

And then Star Citizen is quite innovative in many regards and has virtually unlimited budget, and would not exist in the first place without a long runway

dijit2• 1 year ago

GTA5 released more than 10 years ago fwiw, the zeitgeist has changed significantly in the last 5-7years.

throaway19893• 1 year ago

GTA5 was criticized for dumbing down the driving and other mechanics, and generally being way more goofy and casual than 4 and even San Andreas & Vice City

msm_• 1 year ago

What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Witcher 3 comes to mind. But I just realised it was released 10 years ago...

the__alchemist3• 1 year ago

I'm playing through that now. Just finished the main question, and doing Hearts of Stone. Probably the best single-player game I've played. Maybe it's the "next-gen-update", but the graphics are still great.

cr125rider• 1 year ago

Cyberpunk 2077 I hear is great now after its many bug fixes and DLC

coffeecantcode2• 1 year ago

Black Myth Wukong had a fairly hot entrance onto the market but fizzled out a bit, keep an eye out for the upcoming DLC though.

alabastervlog• 1 year ago

Uh.

That’s the “new game” I’m still meaning to start.

God time gets weird as you pass through middle age.

Tade0• 1 year ago

Developers really put their hearts into it. I loved the Dziady reference.

drodgers• 1 year ago

BG3 was great.

I don't think it counts as big budget, but I've recently gotten into Last Train Home and it's a fantastic and unique premise (with gameplay that's a mix of Company of Heros + XCOM + This War Of Mine).

mock-possum• 1 year ago

Last train home is coming up soon on my todo list and I’m pretty psyched to get around to playing it, the demo 100% sold me on it

huckyaus• 1 year ago

What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Elden Ring. You’d need to go quite a bit further back for the last one before that though.

azakai• 1 year ago

Definitely Elden Ring.

As evidence, even Harper's Magazine wrote about it:

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/11/dying-is-a-form-of-educa...

popcar2• 1 year ago

What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Elden Ring and its DLC, probably. The Japanese games industry is doing far better than their western counterparts, there have been huge headlines that in 2024's Game Awards, 4 of 5 games nominated for Game of the Year came from Asia (3 Japan, 1 China). The last game (Balatro) was an indie game developed by one person.

Not a single nominee was from a major western company like Ubisoft, EA, etc. They may be financially successful now, but the games industry is imploding. This is what happens when you treat developers poorly and chase greedy trends while expecting consumers to put up with it. Like you said, most AAA games releasing these days are either dead on arrival or completely unnotable and miss expectations.

hackernewds2• 1 year ago

the nominees did, but the winner ultimately was still indicative of the circus that is US gaming awards

frontfor• 1 year ago

For one, id software is still making great big budget single player experience, see Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and the soon-to-be-released Doom the dark ages.

the__alchemist3• 1 year ago

What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Talos Principle 2. Does that count as big budget?

TingPing2• 1 year ago

Croteam is quite small, 40 employees total.

3eb7988a16632• 1 year ago

Don't get me wrong, I love Talos Principle, but I did not feel a strong connection to the world of #2 vs #1. The sequel levels just seemed like, "Here is some sexy stuff the art team designed." No real connection or unifying theme. Super pretty, but that is true of any number of AAA games these days with big action set pieces.

At least in one, it felt a bit more cohesive in that you could imagine that canned video game assets had been corrupted and copy-pasted into new configurations.

anal_reactor• 1 year ago

I recently got to play Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Gameplay is virtually the same as the previous entry in the series, but the story is interesting and entertaining.

like_any_other• 1 year ago

What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

To add to the other answers - Half-Life: Alyx ;)

maccard5• 1 year ago

What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Kingdom come deliverance, baldirs gate are two massive titles in the last 12 months. God of war, spiderman, Indiana jones are other titles that are just stand alone artistic experiences, again in the last little while.

What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?

I think it’s funny you mention that because the games you sniped at (Fortnite Minecraft GTa) were seismic shifts in gaming - in the last few years - Fortnite wrote the book on live service games IMO. But, when they’re “popular” suddenly they’re not cool anymore.

It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.

What do you want? IMO the industry is in an ok place - aside from the mass layoffs over the last 24 months. But for consumers there’s so much choice - there’s massive hundred million dollar budget tiles with new content every year (Ubisoft/CoD/ Sony/microsoft doing these) there’s “smaller” budget games in the 50-80millon mark that are achieving critical success on PC and Console, there’s AA-budget games in the 15-30 million mark coming out every month that are hits and misses, there’s a thriving indie scene for every genre you could possibly imagine, and many you can’t (e.g. trombone champ).

There’s options at every level, dozens of games coming out every year - more than any single person could ever play.

disclaimer: I’ve worked on one of the titles you’re talking about here, but don’t anymore. Opinion is mine, not theirs.

TingPing2• 1 year ago

My concern is that consolidation has hit the industry pretty hard in the last decade and is only a bad thing for its future IMO.

throaway19893• 1 year ago

Kingdom Come was from 2018?

tikhonj• 1 year ago

I haven't played many different games over the last few years, but both Half-Life: Alyx and Zelda: Breath of the Wild left strong impressions. Both games have a rare sense of place that's hard to replicate in other mediums—the same thing that stood out for me after the first time I played Half-Life 2. These games feel less like a movie I've seen or a story I've read and more like somewhere I've been.

This isn't unique to video games—I've had the same feeling from, say, 2666 or Stalker—but video games seem especially well-suited to do this as a medium.

dceddia2• 1 year ago

What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Control was very good!

lokimedes• 1 year ago

I literally got the t-shirt (came with the game), and later became a particle physicist, working at CERN, we received a crowbar for the initial startup of the LHC.

This game defined my life.

nonrandomstring3• 1 year ago

Well, please be bloody careful and don't create any resonance cascade scenarios.

baruchthescribe2• 1 year ago

Lokimedes doesn't need to hear all this. He's a highly trained professional.

markus_zhang3• 1 year ago

Wow that's inspiring. Let us know when you are asked to send a crystal into the testing chamber. I'll go to the mountains.

tomaytotomato2• 1 year ago

Let us know if we need to prepare for "unforseen consequences".

Also I am really sorry but I messed up your lunch in the microwave earlier.

vasco• 1 year ago

how many computers were currently running Microsoft Windows in the United States. The number of 20 million that he got back was impressive. Yet he was shocked to learn that Windows wasn’t the most popular single piece of software to be found on American personal computers; that was rather a game called DOOM. Newell and Harrington had long enjoyed playing games. Now, it seemed, there were huge piles of money to be earned from making them.

Later on they also found out that introducing gambling to kids is indeed a much better business than just selling games. Going on for many years without anyone cracking down, and doing workarounds when governments try to make it illegal.

paulryanrogers4• 1 year ago

I'm reminded of my art professor whose friend worked designing lottery scratch offs, and found it unfulfilling yet well paid. While my professor struggled teaching at a B-tier state university and contracting for prestigious brands.

Around the same time I gave up my dream of making videogames because pay and hours were terrible, and I had no prospects in the Midwest.

ReptileMan• 1 year ago

One of the unfortunate fallouts of Half-life was Quake 3 arena, which could be viewed as it's exact opposite. I am convinced that after half life people just couldn't appreciate the opposite - just shooting, without any story. And it didn't create the deserved following.

Instead we had almost 15 years of Spunkgargleweewee-s as defined by Zero Punctuation.

k__• 1 year ago

I loved Q1 and Q2, but Q3A just felt like half a game to me.

6stringmerc• 1 year ago

Great article on the single player aspect of the game and absolutely accurate about how exceptional it was - and still is - in the canon of modern gaming.

What really gave Half-Life its legs was the multiplayer component. It came in just as broadband internet was appearing in households across the United States and Canada. The ability to host servers and coordinate through ICQ and message boards created a one-of-a-kind community.

I know because I lived it.

The [R]age Board for the Elites. The CLQ. Adrenaline Gamer and Counter Strike.

Half-Life was incredible and still has an online presence of note - mostly in developing countries. Their hardware matches the lift to run at decent FPS and join games. Now and then I still hop on a server through Steam.

The di clan video - digital immortality - can do more to highlight “why” HLDM and its physics and weapons were such a game changer, even compared to Q3 and UT at the time. There is nothing like using the long jump and tau cannon to literally fly around maps. Other games have tried, but I’ve never gotten the same high as with HL.

Mostly I miss the community, as juvenile and crass as it was. Like the NFL, it was a young man’s game. Most of us were under 25 with rare exceptions. I’ll never forget when Neo Maximus Babson went missing.

This article bring back a lot of memories and than you for sharing… -p$ychos!s- out (LMS, CML, syn, di)

divs1210• 1 year ago

Half Life is my favorite game franchise of all time.

Played all the canon games and SO MANY mods.

Still obsessed with it.

baruchthescribe2• 1 year ago

I was completely blown away when I realized that the opening cinematic was the actual game engine. First time I'd ever seen it and the scenes cleverly foreshadowed what was coming.

ge96• 1 year ago

I played this game on 512MB of ram and a 20GB HDD

simonw• 1 year ago

I got my start in the tech industry thanks to Half-Life - or more specifically thanks to the Half-Life mod Team Fortress Classic.

I built an early fan news site for that game (effectively a blog before I knew they were called blogs) which got me a job with an early online gaming company ~1999 where I got paid to learn how web development works.

dceddia2• 1 year ago

Man, TFC was the greatest. I’m surprised there aren’t more threads mentioning it here. Got overshadowed by Counter-Strike of course (also great) but TFC was the “prototype mod” released by Valve themselves as an example of what could be done with the HL SDK and it was a great game in its own right. I spent many hours perfecting rocket jumps and timing those grenade throws to wipe out unsuspecting enemies. 2fort ftw.

jamesfinlayson3• 1 year ago

Yeah Team Fortress Classic seemed to be a lot of the reason that Half-Life got the VGUI SDK 2.0 (basically exposing a bunch more interfaces and callbacks to mod authors) - Team Fortress Classic needed all of this flexibility (and without engine access to show off the SDK).

kleiba5• 1 year ago

Newell and Harrington had long enjoyed playing games. Now, it seemed, there were huge piles of money to be earned from making them.

The gaming market today is completely different, very competetive, very saturated, ranging from huge stakes at the top end, to an enormous number of indie studios and individuals toward the other end that are trying to make ends meet.

Yet, I've been seriously thinking for a while to start-up a game studio. The hope being that it would be one of these crazy ideas that everybody recommends against ("it can't be done") until you actually do it and prove them wrong.

Ideally, I would like to start the studio as a loose group of like-minded people that have time for developing a game solely a hobby, and if that pans out, transition it into a business. Not AAA, of course, but with the definite goal of making the best game that such a setup could realisitically produce.

The thing is, with today's tech, you can get started with very little capital if you begin doing this as a hobby.

markus_zhang3• 1 year ago

The indie market is a bloody red sea right now. But as long as you don't care about money or can expense your hardware and internet costs, I think it's good enough.

9999000009993• 1 year ago

I sorta want to do this, but developing completely open source games.

Maybe even developing my own game engine.

Of course all this costs a lot of money with no clear way to make it back. If I had to come up with a monetization model, I would come up with an ad network similar to Unity.

If Unity needs 2 billion in revenue to barely keep going, I reckon a more focused engine could be funded for 20 million a year.

It's a moot point since I'll never have that much money or be able to raise a VC round.

But HN, let's dream. Imagine a .net or JavaScript engine that's web first. With mobile and PC support coming later( PC can just run a local server). The engine developers dog food their own engine, making very high quality examples for the community.

Keep the engine focused on small lightweight games.

Unity's ultimate problem is they keep trying to do literally everything.

I wouldn't do that. I'd say straight up this engine isn't going to do AAA gaming. It's not going to scale. I'm not supporting 800 design patterns.

kleiba5• 1 year ago

Don't write your own engine, unless you want to do that just for fun. But if you actually want to make a game, use one of the exiting engines.

If you want to develop a game engine as a product to make money of, it's probably better to forget that idea. There are enough very sophisticated engines out there, so why would any third-party developer take the risk and use yours instead? I mean, even the big open source engines that already exist today have trouble gaining traction.

dijksterhuis6• 1 year ago

Not AAA, of course, but with the definite goal of making the best game that such a setup could realisitically produce.

have a read up on Savage Game Design and the SOG Prairie Fire CDLC for Arma 3.

hands down, the best DLC ever created for Arma3. a good chunk of the original team were Unsung modders. they went down the road of CDLC, now they’re working on their own standalone game and a bunch of other stuff (look through Rob/Eggbeast’s posts on the SOG PF discord for more info).

Arma is actually a great way to hack something together for basically nothing. buy Arma, start scripting sqf to build a gamemode, create new assets in blender and stick ‘em in a mod, host a server. though the engine has lots of weird bugs/footguns, your costs are basically Arma+devtime+servers.

disclaimer: i’m a maintainer on the Mike Force multiplayer gamemode they released. do it in my spare time for kicks (although been slacking recently).

tomaytotomato2• 1 year ago

I love a bit of SQF although trying to get missions to work with server sync was a PITA.

Often thought about making a lost in the woods sort of game using Arma 3 and Chernarus.

bombcar3• 1 year ago

There’s a ton left that can be done by small companies - factorio is just one example out of the hundreds waiting to be discovered.

Find a niche and polish it to perfection and you can make headway.

Most big-budget games have more to do with interactive movies than with gameplay, anyway.

cryzinger2• 1 year ago

Balatro also comes to mind. And that one's the work of a solo dev!

Pannoniae• 1 year ago

Yeah, similarly, there's quite a few established games/genres just waiting to be disrupted because of the incumbents losing their ways and their charm. The most obvious, blatant example is Minecraft - a game where you can survive, thrive, build anything and mod it to your hearts' desire. That's not true about it anymore - but any game which would fulfill this would probably go big.

It's one of those things where someone's going to eventually do it. As they say, "watch this space".

Tycho• 1 year ago

I only ever played Half-Life on a friend’s PC, but it still made a big impression. Especially the start, how you arrive at this massive research facility and get to just walk around before things really kick-off. Part of the appeal also in the Hitman games, I think.

I remember playing Deus Ex on our iMac which was barely powerful enough to run it. Severe slow down during intense moments, and some major lighting problems. And yet, it remains probably my fondest gaming experience. Something about the way game worlds can capture your imagination when you’re young.

mikehar• 1 year ago

Nice writeup. FWIW, I never saw Michael Abrash wear a tie. :)

We were very into 3D cards back then. We had a lot of ties to that part of the world. I had been doing video drivers for OS/2 and NT. I got to know Abrash from his writing on the VGA, 8514, and, of course, asm. At Valve, we hired a couple of great guys from 3dfx. I still have a 3dfx hat somewhere that I bust out on special occasions. The killer setup back then was hooking up two 3dfx cards (SLI). But I usually played on a standard card because I wanted/needed to see it run like most people would experience it.

We had a deal with one of the companies, maybe 3dfx, but I forget who, to include the first three levels of HL with their card. Even though the game wasn't anywhere near finished, we sent off a disk to the company with our first three finished levels so we could get paid. Somehow, it leaked. We were pissed at first, but then it took off. People loved it. It really gave us the confidence that we were on the right track. It was our first game. The validation was just what we needed.

Fun times.

dleeftink• 1 year ago

What was the other fish?

JadoJodo• 1 year ago

Perhaps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picnik

mmustapic• 1 year ago

It was called Half Life Day One, and I remember seeing it as a bundle with some hardware, not sure which one.

sho_hn• 1 year ago

This is how I was introduced to Half-Life - I got it with my GPU and played Day One.

Unfortunately I also don't recall which it was. I do recall I had a Voodoo, then moved to a TNT2 and then later a GeForce 2. The TNT2 came out well after Half-Life, so it must have been 3dfx at least.

pbrum• 1 year ago

Thank you (and the whole team of course) for creating something so amazing

EdwardDiego2• 1 year ago

I bought a 3dfx just to play Half Life, 3dfx because of that association between your game and their tech, figured it was the obvious choice, likewise so did most of my gamer mates.

So hope you had shares in them :D

dlyons• 1 year ago

Getting my hands on a 3dfx Voodoo3 felt like such a dream.

jamesfinlayson3• 1 year ago

I was wondering which Mike this was - Mike Harrington I see!

Thanks - Half-Life is a great legacy.

sporkland• 1 year ago

I remember playing that leaked first level on the tram with roommates in college over and over again. We were so psyched by it. All salivating for the final release.

Next to playing Quake for the first time with 3d acceleration (3dfx voodoo) it was an awe inspiring flashbulb moments that changed what I thought was possible.

i_c_b2• 1 year ago

I was knee-deep working as a technical game designer + engine programmer on Soldier of Fortune when Half-Life came out. I can't put into words the impression that the opening that game left on me; I still remember very distinctly experiencing the tram ride, just being utterly entranced, and then being deeply irritated when an artist walked over to my cubicle, saw the game, and jokily asked what was going on, pulling me out of the experience. For me, it was one of those singular experiences you only have a very, very rarely in gaming.

It's funny, though - I would say in retrospect that Half-Life had the typical vexed impact of a truly revolutionary game made by a truly revolutionary team. In terms of design, the Half-Life team was asking and exploring a hundred different interesting questions about first person gaming and design, very close to the transition from 2d to 3d. And their influence, a few years later, often reduced down to a small handful of big ideas for later games influenced by them. After Half-Life, because of the impact of their scripted sequences, FPS games shifted to much more linear level designs to support that kind of roller coaster experience (despite many of Half-Life's levels actually harkening back to older, less linear FPS design). The role of Barneys and other AI character also really marked the shift to AI buddies being a focus in shooters. And the aesthetic experience of the aggressive AI from the marines as enemies also cast a long shadow, too, highlighting the idea of enemy AI being a priority in single player FPS games.

Certainly, those were the biggest features of Half-Life that impacted our design in Soldier of Fortune, which did go on to shift to much more linear levels, much more focus on scripted events, and would have resulted in much more emphasis on AI buddies too if I hadn't really put my foot down as a game programmer (and in my defense, if you go back to FPS games from that era, poorly implemented AI buddies are often, by a wide margin, the most frustrating aspect of that era of games, along with forced poorly done stealth missions or poorly implemented drivable vehicles - the fact that Barneys were non-essential is why they worked well in the original Half-Life). You can see this shadow pretty clearly if you compare Half-Life to, afterwards, the single player aspects of Call of Duty and Halo. Both are series that, in their single player form, are a lot more focused and a lot less varied than Half-Life was, but they clearly emphasize those aspects of Half-Life I just mentioned. And in practice, those were the single player FPS games that were in practice actually copied for quite a while.

sunnybeetroot• 1 year ago

Thank you for soldier of fortune. It was a pioneer in its own way with how brutal the enemy destruction was. I loved it. Incredible game that is up there with DOOM, Half Life and Halo for me.

i_c_b2• 1 year ago

Hey, thanks! I ran myself ragged on that project, so that's nice to hear. And yeah, I think we really did nail a particularly kind of visceral experience.

kirso• 1 year ago

I remember Soldier of Fortunte, at the time I was still in my home country and somehow I get to find the CD.

It was a great game and one of those which stuck in my head despite being a kid back then.

rowanseymour• 1 year ago

Just finished playing through HL1 and HL2 again.. as I do every 3-5 years. Maybe it's all nostalgia at this point but I just love being in that universe. The familiar sounds of a crowbar on metal, a sliding door etc. I was never very good at the relentless keyboard gymnastics required for other FPSs so I fell in love with this game that had puzzles and varied pacing and felt like a movie.

moomin• 1 year ago

I feel like the “no cutscenes” thing is overplayed. I’m not saying it wasn’t huge, but there was a lot more to HL’s storytelling than just the “animatronics on a fairground ride” stuff. They could have done that without the constantly evolving gameplay that kept pace with the story. Who can forget playing the soldiers against the aliens, working your way through a ridiculous set of traps, calling down a satellite strike against something otherwise unlikeable, and my personal favourite: the moment you get an RPG and then hear the sound of that damn helicopter.

usrusr• 1 year ago

Mark Laidlaw, the sometime science-fiction novelist who wrote the script, makes no bones about the limits to his ambitions for it. “You don’t have to write the whole story,” he says. “Because it’s a conspiracy plot, everybody knows more about it than you do. So you don’t have to answer those questions. Just keep raising questions.”

That's an amazingly humble insight. It's so simple, so true, and so totally not common knowledge.

I wonder if he secretly enjoys sharing it as a "say what's wrong about The Matrix sequels without mentioning The Matrix at all"

Nition2• 1 year ago

It's incredible how fast games evolved in the 90s. As the article mentions, Half-Life released less than five years after Doom.

These days, people will still cite games up to 10 years old (e.g. The Witcher 3) as looking graphically top notch.

XCSme• 1 year ago

Probably also because graphics nowadays are "good enough". I would rather have a new game with current-gen graphics and awesome story/physics/mechanics/world, than a game with shitty gameplay but slightly better textures.

Nition2• 1 year ago

It's not just that though. CPU and graphics performance also isn't increasing at anywhere near the rate it did back then.

lupusreal• 1 year ago

This reviewer's criticism of Half Life's pacing, difficulty and gameplay is painfully plebian.

EdwardDiego2• 1 year ago

What was really revolutionary, IMO, about Half-Life was how moddable it was, and how Valve supported the modding community and often acquihired good modders.

Oh, and when they purchased the Counter-Strike IP, and started selling it shrinkwrapped, if you owned Half-Life, you just kept using the mod as you already were

In these modern times, I suspect that would be monetised somehow now. Upgrade to a premium user to get golden lootboxes, likely.

But yeah, I knew people who bought Half-Life just to play CS when it was early beta.

Likewise, less famous, but still being played today, Day of Defeat - I was hooked as the experience of "Yeah the rifles can kill you in one shot, and grenades will kill you, it's not CS dude. Oh and press B if that icon comes up, it means you're bleeding"

(Still unsure how I feel about them taking bleeding out.)

markus_zhang3• 1 year ago

Two major contributions that I think Half-Life did to the gaming industry:

1. Shew that FPS games can be more than pure shooters and still succeeded;

2. First time that an official, easy to use level editor (Worldcraft) was included in the CD of a major hit FPS. Doom and Quake definitely started the modding scene but arguably Half-Life made it more popular.

scotty79• 1 year ago

John Carmack famously said: “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

I feel like these days many games, especially expensive ones, went with completely opposite take. That gameplay is something that's supposed to be there but not important. With terrible results.

Aeroi• 1 year ago

Half-Life and subsequently Counter-Strike changed my life. I was addicted, and it captured me in a way hard to explain for about 3-4 years. The gameplay, competitive drive, the simplistic sprites and world building. It touched all sensory inputs in a way that games prior hadn't. It's the only video game, or digital media for that matter, that makes me feel nostalgic.

physhster• 1 year ago

I remember buying a Riva TNT to play Half-Life better. Those were fun times! Then there was Counter Strike, many hundreds of hours were spent playing that too.

adityaathalye• 1 year ago

Oh those screenshots. Faded memories resurrect... It was the year 2000, our college dorm room. Friend's PC which was completely naked, fan pointed at it, in the summer heat of western-central India. Half-Life running at less than half the recommended FPS. Yet we played. And yet the chills ran down the spine.

butlike6• 1 year ago

To add to the nostalgia train. My friend Chris had it installed on his computer (my family computer was far too old to run it). F5 quick save had been a godsend in that game for all the surprise traps (which the article calls out). Anyways, he accidentally F5'd falling into a pit. His only save IIRC, which meant he had to restart the game.

A bummer, but made for a good story and fond memories

Half-Life

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