Half-Life 2 - official (9/14 Black Mesa Source?!)

You'd think a game that was in dev for 6 years would have a big ending all laid out to see. They might as well just made a blank screen with "Now you can wait for Half Life 3!" And while the last battle was really cool, they could have come up with something better. Maybe for the conclusion.


But that really shows how amazing of a ride the game was. I was totally into the story and I cared about the characters. Whenever Alyx or Barney (hell, even Dog) showed up I was actually happy to see them.

Man I really want to know who G man is. But with that kind of build up I have no idea what explaination they could make that'll make me go "Wow, that's pretty fucking good."

I agree with you guys a bit. We waited 6 years to get some questions answered and they gave us nothing. In that sense it is a huge let down, and it makes us question their ability to give us good, solid closure. But at the same time it makes me wonder if they even have their universe thought out at all. It seems to me like they're trying to hide the fact that the Halflife series hasn't really been written as a cohesive story. It seems more like they designed the story around the game haphazardly, and that's it.

We'll never know until they give us a solid answer in the next game(s).

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Originally Posted by MysteriousRacerC

The only problem I have with the game is that the correct path is not always as clear as it could be.

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I thought the game was pretty linear. For the most part it's pretty clear where to go, I never got lost like I have in Halo and wandered around like an asshole for a 20 minutes. The times I got stuck it was because I didn't look close enough. A lot of times you come to a dead end and it's a puzzle that needs to be done to go on, or there's a small path that you need to spot (like the roof I got stuck on).

I think that's why I liked the game so much. It always felt like I was progressing, the surroundings changed constantly and the action was some of the greatest moments made. One thing I would change though, is more kinds of enemies. Half way through the game and you've pretty much seen them all.

I got stuck at that same spot (on the rooftops) Rumpy.

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Originally Posted by Andrew

I agree with you guys a bit. We waited 6 years to get some questions answered and they gave us nothing. In that sense it is a huge let down, and it makes us question their ability to give us good, solid closure. But at the same time it makes me wonder if they even have their universe thought out at all. It seems to me like they're trying to hide the fact that the Halflife series hasn't really been written as a cohesive story. It seems more like they designed the story around the game haphazardly, and that's it.

We'll never know until they give us a solid answer in the next game(s).

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At this point I'm dreading Valve will pull a postmodern ending out of their ass to tie up everything ("it was all in Gordon's mind, the administrator is the leader of City 17 because Gordon hates his boss and the G-man is just some guy he saw while riding the tram into the facility," or maybe "the G-man is someone from our universe who can interact with the Half-Life dimension, fiction is reality and reality is fiction, boy this sure is some heavy stuff"), because I have a sinking feeling that's exactly where this is going to end up.

ah, i have a little more faith in them then that. while i agree that the storyline of hl1 didn't hint at what was to happen in the sequel, there are all sorts of clues/loose ends in hl2. it's certainly building up to something. and i don't the sense that it's going to be a george lucas-style "omg he's my father. omg she's my sister" revelation. we'll see..

Stupid women sucking up all my free time. Can I believe I only just now beat it? Anyway:

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Originally Posted by Rumpy

I thought the game was pretty linear. For the most part it's pretty clear where to go, I never got lost like I have in Halo and wandered around like an asshole for a 20 minutes.

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My problem with HL2 is that the progression is often completely artificial. If I ever got stuck the first thing I thought was "If I was a videogame designer what would I do?" never "What would be the logical way through?" You get a series of conviently placed holes and pieces of wood set just right to allow to walk through an area, the sort of thing you would never actually encounter in such a situation. The main problem I have with this artifice is that it's in such contrast to the rest of the game, everything was obviously designed with meticulous detail aimed at realism-with-fantasy-elements. Then you suddenly get retarded crap like having to jump off a roof to a telephone pole to get into a container of water to climb up a ladder to get to another roof. The sick thing is that it seemed perfectly natural to me to think of that in-game when I would never contemplate jumping to a telephone pole to get down from a roof in real life.

To be fair, they did have a few areas where there were wood piles and you had to make your own walkways and I thought those were beautiful, but there was still too much "videogame" in the level design.

I also felt the airboat sequence, while awesome, was definately a bit too long and I thought the buggy sequence was pretty poor overall. I kept getting lost on the beaches and having to shoot the thing every time it flipped over while fighting constantly respawning enemies was dumb and annoying.

Finally in my list of complaints, the AI still needs work. I played on normal and encountered all sorts of classic AI pitfalls: scooting around corners until only an arm can be seen and then shooting it over and over while the enemy never moves; getting shot in the back from teammates; shooting an enemy over and over in the back while he never turns around, instead moving back and forth trying to find cover on the wrong side of the crates; standing still while I plugged them full of holes; and so on. A lot of their tactics are great but they kept making dumb mistakes or had lapses in movement.

And of course, the ending. With Halo 2 most peoples problem seemed to be what they expected versus what they were given. I thought the ending worked great, it was the classic style "this is just beginning" and obviously led into a whole crapload more stuff. HL2's, on the other hand, just stops. There's no direct lead-in into anything else, there's no even hinted conclusion about the finish of what just happened... it just halts in its tracks and waves goodbye. The frozen-in-time thing was pretty cool but I'm not sure how I feel about the ending. It's okay, but no confirmation on when we'll get more kinda miffs me about the whole thing.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand I'm done. While I won't elaborate here because this post is long enough already, everything else was abso-freaking-lutely top notch and incredible. The final couple stages were amazing, the beginning was wonderfully absorbing, it was all just so damn cool! I think I'll start dicking around with the console commands tomorrow to speed up the loading and everything, I want to play through most of that again. Certain areas I could do without but Follow Freeman will most definately be played a lot.

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Originally Posted by MechDeus

Stupid women sucking up all my free time. Can I believe I only just now beat it? Anyway:My problem with HL2 is that the progression is often completely artificial. If I ever got stuck the first thing I thought was "If I was a videogame designer what would I do?" never "What would be the logical way through?" You get a series of conviently placed holes and pieces of wood set just right to allow to walk through an area, the sort of thing you would never actually encounter in such a situation. The main problem I have with this artifice is that it's in such contrast to the rest of the game, everything was obviously designed with meticulous detail aimed at realism-with-fantasy-elements. Then you suddenly get retarded crap like having to jump off a roof to a telephone pole to get into a container of water to climb up a ladder to get to another roof. The sick thing is that it seemed perfectly natural to me to think of that in-game when I would never contemplate jumping to a telephone pole to get down from a roof in real life.

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I disagree. I think for the most part the game dis an admirable job of using real-world elements to create puzzles. They were clearly gamey puzzles but they generally didn't involve things that ought not to be there. I never had to go find random keys in stupid places, or play a flute to open a door. They all involved beleivable parts of the environment. Granted your abilities are not so beleivable, but that's why Gordon is a badass and you are not.

There were a couple exceptions though. Like there was some kind of platform rigged up to a pulley, rigged up to a ramp in the boat part where you had to push a conveniently placed washing machine onto the platform to raise the ramp. That was just stupid.

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Originally Posted by Frogacuda

I disagree. I think for the most part the game dis an admirable job of using real-world elements to create puzzles. They were clearly gamey puzzles but they generally didn't involve things that ought not to be there. I never had to go find random keys in stupid places, or play a flute to open a door. They all involved beleivable parts of the environment. Granted your abilities are not so beleivable, but that's why Gordon is a badass and you are not.

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They actually toned down on the fantastical from HL1, Theres no more puzzles with a million teleporters that you need to go through, each leading somewhere different. Sure, teleportation still exists in the game, but they make a big deal of it at least.

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Originally Posted by Frogacuda

I disagree. I think for the most part the game dis an admirable job of using real-world elements to create puzzles. They were clearly gamey puzzles but they generally didn't involve things that ought not to be there. I never had to go find random keys in stupid places, or play a flute to open a door. They all involved beleivable parts of the environment.

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It's not that other-worldy stuff was involved or that it was fetch quests or anything, it's the whole getting from point A to point B involves getting onto a building roof which leads to a oh-so-convienently placed makeshift walkway that just happens to lead to the sole open window across the way which of course leads directly to your destination. It's just so artifical that such a path would already exist, I would prefer to have a much greater emphasis on grabbing nearby planks of wood to build your walkway across buildings. Things like that.

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Granted your abilities are not so beleivable, but that's why Gordon is a badass and you are not.

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His abilities stem from his HEV suit, which is what makes them at least semi-believable. Not to say he isn't a badass or anything but the man still started off as a weakling scientist.

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There were a couple exceptions though. Like there was some kind of platform rigged up to a pulley, rigged up to a ramp in the boat part where you had to push a conveniently placed washing machine onto the platform to raise the ramp. That was just stupid.

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That's the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Also: HL2 is the second-best use of backtracking EVER. Simply beautiful how it's all executed.