Half Life 2 and story

Do you remember there were a whole bunch of people heavily invested in the story of the Half Life franchise?

These people will even defend Half Life 2's atrocious narrative as "environmental storytelling", even though there's virtually no exposition, even in the environment.

Even the Halo series (up to Reach at least) has a better story than Half Life. Why did so many people care?

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Because are retards like you op, why do you care abot people care about something?

mate, this was truly revolutionary storytelling

The original Half Life was quite unique, I'd never played an FPS where there were non-hostile characters who actually talked before then. But Half Life 2 doesn't build upon it in any way, the narrative is trash.

Yes and this is why any HL3 game will be cancer, Half-Life 1 was good because it tried to be a game instead of having all of those long segments where characters that I don't give a fuck about stand around and smirk at you, like holy shit at least in HL1 you can kill them and they aren't annoying at all

HL3 will just be everything that made HL2 shit but amplified, every single character will be reddit overwatch tier cancer, even worse than it was in the first game, because nobody plays games for the gameplay, they just play it for the shitty "story" that is nothing but pandering to reddit. Seriously HL2 is just undermined at every corner by the "storytelling", its gameplay is mediocre and HL3 will have to be even more dumbed down because people are even worse a video games today than they were in 2004, I mean the most popular FPS games are ones that are class based, overwatch doesn't even have ammo boxes and most of the characters only have one gun and infinite ammo and these are the same exact players who will eat up HL3 for its (((story)))

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I like Valve's whole "it's all in-engine, there are no cutscenes" spiel.

I'd honestly rather the camera just does its own thing than being rooted to the ground and only able to mlook around.

ancient meme, kudos to you

Because the first Half Life had a cool b-movie plot that was told in a really groundbreaking way. Then Half Life 2 came out and it was gay shit, but people fooled themselves into thinking it was good because they liked the first one so much, plus brainless retarded normalfags hopped on the bandwagon because it was a meme game.

lel

Half Life 2 had a comfy storyline

Your opinion is wrong and you die now

Checked

Half Life 2 still looks good today and pretty much set the standard for both mocap and physics in vidya games.
No, just the forced segments because they do the opposite of the existing environmental that's heavily present in the game.

You know how faggots like you fellate Souls for it's lore that's not forced upon you?
Half Life did it first 11 years before and Half Life 2 did it with more subtlety 5 years before, shame about the forced segments though, still I like the game, it was fine for the time though the gameplay has aged like shit unlike everything around it including the mods.

You could also argue System Shock did the narrative aspects before those 2 in 1994, but I think they're handled differently.
Oh yeah, Left4Dead also did it first than Souls in 2008

I like the game, it's ok, even if it's shit as a sequel.

One of the bad things about the game's narrative is that Gordon is a silent protagonist. It adds nothing to the game and frustrates the player, since the player obviously wants to ask the basic and obvious questions of "why am I here? who brought me here? when did all this start? when did you guys get involved? how long have you been here?" etc.

Valve justify this by saying they want to place you in Gordon's shoes. But that makes no sense, Half Life 2 isn't an RPG - If I was in Gordon's shoes these are the questions I'd be asking.

Instead we just get a mute and apparently deaf moron who guys on whatever wild goose chase people send him on with no complaint. It's maddening. And he's not even a likable, cheesy action hero in the same way D3D's Duke or Halo 1 - 3's Master Chief are. He's just some faggot nerd.

Souls actually has lore, as in written lore embedded into the flavor text of items and what have you.

Half Life 2 has none of this.

because it was a simple story with fairy interesting setting and it ended upon a cliffhanger


this. also rolling

If you consider the plot of the first game to just be 90's IT guys and programmers writing about previous places of work then it's kind of funny and neat.

The people that confuse me are the ones who say they really want a sequel to opposing force.

Half Life 2 is bad thread over I'm mark I'm locking this thread

It's better than cutscene cancer but still is annoying and just pads out the game without really adding anything, other than a temporary distraction from the uncompelling gameplay


Jokes on you I never played souls, also buying a havok license was only impressive because they were the first to do it or something. The see-saw puzzles don't really make the game much better, although its nice technology, it's not used to compliment the gameplay, and instead the "physics sections" are segregated from the "shooting sections" for the most part because of a lack of effective integration between the two.


why? HLOPFOR is the best game in the series because it takes HL1's gameplay to the next level. It's really the direction that the series should have taken.

lol

Half-Life 2 story is great because it was set in Eastern Europe and being a slav I could deeply relate to everything being broken and depressing. If you disagree with me, that's okay but I won't be inviting you to get drunk by the lake with.

There was a lot of mystique to it and people felt like the pay off was going to be in the answers. Half Life 2 and the episodes that followed felt like build up to some sort of pay off. The game itself was also really nice to look at and it plays well enough.

As with most things shit on around here it's mediocre to decent but it receives way too much praise. You're digging up skeletons at this point so I don't know why people even bother

I disagree. If you are going to tell a story in a straight up FPS, then end of level → cutscene is still the best way of telling it. It's just nice to sit your hands down from the keyboard/controller and have a bit of a break.

Valve removed a lot of the dialogue from the final game. Most of it should have stayed.

I think that's what I find so bizarre about it, it's clear they were winging it, and they just play out the "mystery" element for the sake of it. It feels cheap.

Retrospectively I think most people would agree. I'm pretty sure Gabe said they were afraid they would let people down.

Not true. Everything in the game has a definite art design that leads into worldbuilding. The entirety of City 17 tells you how humanity got fucked over by the ayys.

Half-Life 2 was a good sequel, but its shittier parts were becoming the main story. That is why it is good that Laidlaw left.

The non-cutscene gameplay is a great you fucking underage faggot. Nobody wants to sit through a movie. The only part it gets lame is when they purposely trap you in a room with a character that wants to yammer on for way too long at an unnatural feeling point, which happens in HL2 onward.

Even really narrative-heavy games like Prey do this though.

And Half Life 2 has that in the environmmnent


Except the Gravity Gun did precisely that and so did most of Ravenholm.
You can even throw back the grenades enemies throw at you with it, something not seen until PsyOps.

And Prey probably drew inspiration from Half-Life 2.

That's bullshit, it's a shitty sequel and the gameplay is subpar compared to the first one.

Refer to:

There is no "environmental storytelling" in HL2 that other games, even modern ones (Bioshock, Prey etc) do not also have in abundance.


I think you're overplaying things here, it draws far more on Deus Ex than Half Life.

Nonsense. It's classic investment/payoff. You sink a couple of hours into beating a long level and you get a short rest and plot exposition.

There's nothing different about this from a gameplay perspective compared to Half Life 2's fixed-engine cutscenes except that you can control mouse movement in the latter. Oh, and the music is shit in Half Life 2 too.

Who's arguing they don't? All I said was that the backstory and world-building is done trough art-direction and scripted sequences instead of item descriptions.

The originally planned introduction, which would take you in a train over a barren desert showing the ruins of earth's armies sounded way better than what we got.

Because that environmental storytelling isn't enough to actually pad out the narrative fully in this case.

Shit taste tbh. Some pieces are great, some are meh.


Neither are item descriptions.

Pretty much everything cool or interesting from the beta was scrapped.

There's a reason nobody posts HL2 tracks in OST threads.

Bullshit, play Nova Prospekt, since its's the best and most blatant example of this.
You actually have to be paying attention to get the details.
t.System Shock autist


You really sound like you have never played the game or even post on this board.
Fuck, I've posted Triage at Dawn countless times.

people praise half-life 2 for the many of the same reasons it sucks ass: physics, facial animation, """story""", and "revolutionary storytelling"

valve focusing on these things instead of actually making a good fucking game like hl1 with decent weapon and high enemy variety is why the game ended up sucking ass, aside from all of the retcon characters and physics puzzles every 15 minutes

valve tries to make up for the shit gameplay and enemy variety by adding a gimmick every single level that nobody wants to use like vehicles or the gravity gun, the game is nothing more than a glorified tech demo and if every hl2 brainwashed fanboy retard died right now nothing of value would be lost

there's like 3 times you get lore by exploring the environment and the only one i can remember is nova prospekt showing what soldiers look like, there's no important shit like how the citadels got here, how kleiner got over to c17 while bringing all of his shit, etc.

the game is bad in every conceivable way, especially compared to half-life 1 which was basically quake 1 but upgraded into an actual world with interesting enemies and environments

see , the most basic of questions are never answered even by the time ep2 ends which is fucking retarded, all lore questions should have been answered by the time hl2 finished for christs sake


please tell me all of the enviromental details besides "stalkers are used for slavery" and "soldiers have pale skin and some scars in their bodies", please tell me all of the knowledge half-life 2 gave you by searching the environment

Wrong. It was a reasonably good continuation of the first.
Arguable. It was missing a lot of the more fun weapons from the first one, but had some cool weapons of its own. Really they should have kept more of the weapons that make enemies explode and gibs.

Your shit is nonsense. When you keep events written into a constant flow of game play there is no better formula for an FPS aside from maybe Deus Ex's approach that allows for dialogue trees. Even that could be improved upon in terms of making interactions flow better with gameplay.

Half-Life 2's problem was not storytelling, but the story it told. It was just kind of boring compared to the first. It was like spending the whole game in Xen in that the focus was on an alien world instead of an immersive one.

So Nova Prospekt has what exactly that other comparable games do not in terms of item placement, textures, characters etc giving you some exposition about the world?

I'd argue Prey's Talos Station tells you far more about the world than Nova Prospekt tells you about Half Life's world, and that's a space station.

Except it isn't gameplay. You're fixed in place and have the ability to mouselook. That's it.

no it didn't, the gravity gun was a useless gimmick and bugbait was completely useless. so, in other words, we have melee/pistol/revolver/smg/upgraded smg/shotgun/sniper/rpg, wow what an interesting and fun arsenel never seen that before in my life
no, i'm pretty sure it was the storytelling because marc laidlaw and raising the bar have millions of lore details never even hinted at in the entire half-life 2 saga. admit it, this style of storytelling is complete shit.

Blown the fuck out.

Valvecucks belong on >>>/reddit/

HL2 ruined FPSes thanks to its unskippable first person cutscenes. To enjoy HL2 is basically admitting you enjoy walking simulators.

As long as it's not overused, as in kept to an absolute minimum and possibly only happening once every few levels, I can see it being okay.


I Have been arguing against HL2 in these threads ever since I started posting on imageboards


You need to remember I meant "for the most part", I think Ravenholm was a very great intergration of the two but unfortunately most of the game failed to do it very well. Ravenholm played like a completely diffrent game and was definitely a high note, although it makes me feel like a game that was just completely based around levels like that could have been made and it wouldn't have the low notes that other sections of HL2 were. The gravity gun is fun to use but it's ultimately got the issue that the combat with it is limited and its use is really just there to distract you from the poor gunplay. \


This guy gets it

maybe it's because we once originally fucking thought there would be a third game you massive faggot

I think using it in places where an enemy has hold of you made sense, but when it was abused as a plot device to force you to listen to characters yammer, I agree that sucked and was blatant. Good thing it was barely part of the game.


discarded
discarded again

The conclusion that got leaked proved beyond all shadow of a doubt to me that Laidlaw is a hack and that Valve is better off without his shit. They were better off with their glue and duct tape approach to the story they did with Half-Life 1, and 1's storytelling was fucking great.

Are you fucking retarded?
And theres nothing comparable to Half Life 2 unlike System Shock 2 or New Vegas.


Must be hard being blind and having ADD


No, it wasn't and Gordon feels completely out of place in it besides the downgraded shooting.


No, kill yourself
Except they weren't cutscenes and had actual shit to play around with.
Half Life takes 5 fucking minutes just to start
0/10


Fair enough, I actually agree with most of those points.
Nah, Gravity gun is good fun and actually useful unlike most weapons once you reach a certain point.

You're reaching here. Whatever influence it owes to Half Life is minimal at best, for one it actually has a story, for another it's significantly more open-ended, there are characters you can actually interact with, non-combat ways of approaching problems etc.


You didn't answer him. Beyond those two elements, what environmental storytelling is there?

nice job failing to disprove my point
not even talking about epistle 3 you sperg, if you read my post clearly i'm talking about minor lore details left out of the games itself that marc elaborates on in emails

Must be hard being blind and having ADD
once again, nice job failing to disprove my points. refer to , please enlighten me on all of these juicy lore details that i missed.

Call of Duty actually did the always in first person thing better because they had much better pacing and actual interesting things happened instead of just being trapped in a room while being force fed a metric fuck ton of pointless exposition that could have easily been trimmed down 75%.

I agree, I Just think that, it feels like the game could have done better with both the gravity gun and the rest of the gunplay, although it has the issue that in both cases the game could have gone farther in its mechanics and fell short. The gunplay is unsatisfying when you get to more advanced levels, because it feels like it's hitting a ceiling in terms of how complex the gameplay can be with the existing elements. You can also feel this with how they use the gravity gun, as well.

the issue is that there's not enough exposition, dialogue doesn't elaborate on fucking anything but has characters talking to themselves uselessly to elicit a reaction from players 'emotioanlly'

Wow how not interactive
And after that train ride HL1 basically goes uninterrupted. If characters ever talk to you, they speak for at most 10 seconds, maybe hand you a weapon or follow you and the game just keeps moving.
Keep eating Gabe's shit Valvecuck

Oh bullshit you fucking nigger. The first person cutscenes were fucking everywhere in HL2.

i think the issue is not just the gunplay but enemy variety, at the very least houndeyes and bullsquids should have remained because they were actually well designed from a gameplay standpoint, then if they added more combine synths to fight alongside soldiers instead of just boss synths they would be golden. the antlions are so forgettable and generic that i actually forgot they existed until i replayed hl2 a few weeks ago, after seeing them for the first time i was extremely surprised and it took me 10 seconds to remember what they even are

Also, reminder that HL2 apparently thinks you're 5 years old and can't reliably target your enemies with companions, so now any humans who team up with you can't take friendly fire, where as HL1 gave the player urgency on whether or not a fleeing scientist or guard stay ed in your company.

Yeah. The "stuck in a box" scenes go on for too long, just from a structural perspective, but it's the corny dialog, trite drama and pathetic attempts at humor that really make them drag.

Is Laidlaw just a really shitty sci-fi writer or something then? I'm not familiar with his work, but Half Life's overarching plot honestly made me think Halo 1 to 3's was stellar by comparison, that's how bad it is.

Except for the fact that it has no cutscenes during ingame dialogue.
Pics related and also for


Theres like 7 in the whole game

Oh yeah, that's fucking bullshit
Likely done thanks to the absolute braindea playtesters they had.

Wait what? Is this your criteria? Tons of other games did this before Half Life and continue to do it without any influence from Half Life. And Prey has lots of cutscene like moments, e.g. the dream-esque sequences.

10/10 storytelling.

More than that, and even then that's 7 too many.

HL2 is an FPS for niggers.

You had no valid point to disprove.
I am, you huge fucking faggot. You can have the thickest fucking design document full of minor details such as which characters bleach their anuses, but if your core story is boring so will the rest of the game. Epistle 3 shows me that the "good part" of the City 17 story that I was fucking waiting for them to get to just wasn't fucking coming and that the setting should have been left behind before the end of 3.

Seriously. There was nothing good to tie it back to Black Mesa and Xen. It was all just a big wank on a stupid post apocalyptic setting.

Maybe we should quantify them, keeping in mind we are talking about the ones that you are fixed in place. For the main game of HL 2 I only remember the stupid citidel areas, notably when they force you to listen to Breen pontificate.I vaguely remember being annoyed by a couple in the episodes as well, but maybe you have a fresher memory than I.


Bingo.

Weird why they stuck with him, even back then they could have afforded better writers.

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Literally only Max Payne did it


More than that
No, I'm refering to it's expansion.


And they take about as much time as Half Lifes intro.

The gunplay had poor projectile and hitscan weapons, most of the guns like the SMG's are just inaccuracy cones and while that has its place, it shouldn't have been so prominent. The projectile guns like the RPG and the grenades took too long to use, to be as good as the kind of projectile weapons in a quake game, so it really just slowed down the game and didn't allow for the kinds of complex gunplay that quake, doom, HL1 could achieve. The crossbow is good but unfortunately the game's weapon lineup combined with as you said an unsatisfying enemy lineup made it fall short.

You can see how HL1 has the MP5 grenade launcher and the Gauss rifle, as well as the gluon gun, HL2 did not create a game with satisfying guns like those so there really was a void left to be filled, and when the game is just shooting each other with innaccuracy cones and then using physics to kill enemies, it really added a ceiling to what the player could do and what the levels could be like compared to HL1.

I agree with you that the enemy lineup is also unsatisfying, I think that possibly the issue with the gravity gun is that it's a separate weapon from the other guns, and this really creates a kind of shift in how you play the game, so when playing you have to choose between the gravity gun and the other weapons. If they made it a hotkey that would actually make the game a lot better, so that you wouldn't have to switch out guns, and it would have allowed for some more interesting design.

Nope, nigger you aren't moving a single goal post. Anytime the game stops you in an area and you can do is jump around and throw shit in the air or at characters who just yammer on regardless, might as well be a fucking cut-scene. That's not game progression, it's the game blowing it's story load in your face while not moving forward.

wew

So in other words, worse than HL1 which has just one long train-ride before letting the player loose and dictate the pace for the rest of game.

Try and actually play HL1 after the train stops before talking out of your ass.

it's funny that when they remade the dialouge they made everybody suck gordons dick like he's the messiah, but in the original script the random people didn't even recognize him and alyx says he put civilization to a screeching halt.

Not until you reach the Lamda complex.

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The problem is more that a game that boasts its lack of cutscenes managed to make you sit through things that were very apparently equivalent to them since they interupt gameplay.the same way cutscenes would.

There are definitely some shitters in this thread acting like this invalidates Half-Life's approach, which is just retarded and reeks of trying to push a narrative.


I was responding to someone who specified mouselook you dumb fucking autist. Learn to fucking read.

break between action is needed, otherwise the game would be just a boring gallery shooter

I agree but trapping someone in a room with a character they may not be interested in is boring as fuck. The moment I was trapped in a room with Alyx I was basically humping the door trying to get out waiting for her to shut up.

I meant Half Life 2
You actualy think the shitskins at NuArkane actually played the first one?

Arkane make better video games than Valve ever could, or they would if Valve actually made video games.

This is a fault in the gameplay not being interesting enough. HL2 already has "downtime" In areas without action to create pacing, aside from the cutscenes.

It's been more than 6 years buddy.
It's time to make a change and stop being a faggot

yeah but the game's still bad though

Really its a case of story not being interesting enough if you trap someone in a segment for story and it becomes boring.

Maybe they could have littered a few things to read around the room Deus Ex style with the characters that yammer, or designed more interesting characters and have more of them available during scenes that progress plot.

The only other time the game stops. Still has less down than HL2. Again, finish HL1 instead rehashing secondary information.

And you're not going to use those as criteria for first person cutscenes, Valvecuck.

So give some exploration in the levels or more gimmicky puzzles to solve, or at least, cut the script down to a handful of lines.
Keep showing your underage by thinking a game where everyone vomits 10 minutes of dialog while you chuck a piece of plywood in their face because they can't shut the fuck up isn't boring.

I wonder what the fuck happened to that guy, I mean why would you hate a videogame so much?

Nope, nothing but garbage after Dark Messiah


And? The interactions are 3 minutes long aside from the intro.

He only posted those threads because they got replies and he moved onto something else once they stopped.

I'm using the critera of the conversation you jumped into whether you like it or not you autistic piece of shit. Quantify fixed mouselook areas or get wrecked out you goalpoast-moving sperglord.

WHO IS THE GMAN Holla Forums??????

so what, it closes in on the city, this is known
yes, combine are modified, this is pretty much the only environmental detail available
oh, you mean like how the suppresion field speech is forced into your face at the start to the point where it's unavoidable to know what's going on, especially with the playground and its 88 kb/s audio file? talk about not being subtle here.
also thrown in your face, but yes this is an enviromental detail. however, these are four major lore details you have given me, and the only time the game hints at something is through radio dialogue and city announcements, which only tells you about combine military structure and very, VERY minimal information about civilian life.

how did kleiner get into city 17 with all of his black mesa gear? how did eli set up a lab with all of his gear? where did judith come from? a bullsquid ate elis leg, but where did the bullsquids go? what about houndeyes? what happened to alien grunts? what happened to controllers? what's life like under union rule, is it communist? what do citizens do besides sit in their apartment and collect rations, surely they're forced to work? why hasn't the resistance been completely stamped out on the coast when their bases are extremely blatant? where did the antlions come from? where did the fast headcrab and poison headcrab come from? what do metrocops do off-duty? where did striders come from? are they connected to gunships and dropships? do stalkers remember who they were? who are combine scientists, certainly they're not stalkers or soldiers? what workers does the combine use to maintain their shit that have any intelligence whatsoever, since stalker shave been mentally crippled… surely they can't maintain electricity, construction or whatever? none of these questions have been answered in any form and they never will be answered unless you get marc laidlaw to email you.


there certainly should have been projectile weapons and enemies that fired projectiles, instead nearly every enemy is hitscan which is retarded because this is a sci-fi game and you can use any excuse you want for it to not be hitscan. i also think they should have kept weapon roles from hl1 instead of having the pistol and smg be 100% worthless after getting anything else


enemies that should be includef are the bullsquids, houndeyes, female assassins, and a few more synth enemies to support soldiers in combat. boom, you now have a good game if you fix the shitty metrocop and soldier A.I.

gordon's son.

yee nah

yeah and hl1 wasnt thats why you start out in a moving box seeing all the crazy shit the quake engine can do

valve has the bad habit of testing their games with the "no retard left behind" philosophy

im fucking sick of these weekly "hl2 is shit" threads
what prompted so many newfags because hl2 was never really held in high praise here

gordans fatha

Translation: I'm a retard who can't piece shit together.

a space jew. Not even kidding

forgot to add the famous quote:
>a (((right man))) in the wrong place could make all the difference in the world

Yeah, all signs pointed to him being that or him being interdimensional CIAnigger.

Mid 2003, PC Gamer UK write a preview article extolling the virtues of the strider AI, which supposedly dynamically adjusts its movement depending on the extent of surrounding environmental destruction. The fight with the strider is described as taking place in a cityscape which is progressively torn apart by the fighting, and expansive enough to imply a far more nonlinear experience than the first HL. In a post Deus Ex world, it seemed Valve were offering the player more choice.

I'll never forget how far short the actual HL2 experience fell from that preview. Looking back, it was probably based on one of the E3 2003 videos (which you can see on youtube). After HL1, the gaming press became credulous morons who thought Valve could do no wrong. It's clear now, looking at this video, that everything is heavily scripted in typical Valve fashion and even allowing for the idea that it existed merely as a demonstration, the writer had assumed Valve were capable of far greater things than what actually followed.

In comparison to what the press had to say about HL2, it was painfully average and underwhelming and as time goes on I'm baffled that there hasn't been a harsher critical reappraisal of the game.

by the same token, it was a major step in video game history. the physics engine was seminal.

hl1 immerises you into the environmental for five minutes then lets you off to play a good game for the rest of the game, half-life 2 has you on the hook with its tech demo gimmicky bullshit every single level to make up for the lack of good gunplay and enemy variety
god forbid someone discuss anything, cry about it

you didn't know that everything in the e3 demo, literally everything is scripted to high hell? the community found out when the game was leaked and was furious, of course everybody forgot that now and it's the best game ever. seriously, download the leak and you can play these maps, on the maps that work if you do one thing wrong the entire map breaks completely.

youtube.com/watch?v=4ddJ1OKV63Q

your physics engine means jack shit if (a. you shove it in the players face every 15 minutes and make an entire shitty level around it and (b. your game itself is shit and you need gimmicks to make up for poor gunplay

fuck me

Ultimately this is what Half-Life 2 is today. It has not aged as well as it's predecessor, but what it was a huge step forward for game engines in general. Source and Source 2 are still very powerful and effective ways to make a game.

What?

source is one of the shittiest, slowest, and most unstable engines ever made. did you even play half-life 2 on launch? sound stuttering, crashing when changing menu options, physics glitches galore, it was a fuckfest. hopefully source 2 is not complete shit.

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TL;DP,

Earth's been taken over by aliens and Gordon Freeman's gotta fuck those bitches up.

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valvecucks who have never played a source game out in full force

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It was a mess for third party devs and Hammer is still a piece of clunky shit but it's been decent since 2007.
Fucking Insurgency and Titanfall 1/2 are made with it.
You have to stop embarrasing yourself you butthurt faggot

I've played dozens of Source games for a decade and it's a pretty passable engine for multiplayer.

The last Nihilant not tampered by the combine.
The Nihilant in Half Life 1 has marks of surgery and a Combine collar.

Reading this post made me realize you're just mad that half life 2 wasnt 1 with better graphics.
And in some aspects thank god, you can shove your pistol sniping up your ass along with that shitty smg that does less damage than the pistol.
Regards someone who still plays sven ever week.

no shit, obviously i'd take hl1 over hl2 because hl2 is complete shit and hl1 was actually good, but if they wanted to make a new arsenal that isn't complete shit that'd be fine too, too bad they didn't.

half-life 2 had zero potential as a game outside of being a proper successor to half-life 1 in which it failed in every single way

Except it did precisely that
>in which it failed in every single way
True

are you the sperg that mentioned? maybe you should move on man

There is nothing wrong with Source engine. My biggest complaint is slow loading times due to lack of multi-core support. It was still great for it's time though.

i'm not even op nor have i seen many half-life threads around, the majority of threads related to half-life i've seen derailed into discussion solely about half-life

it looked great and it had a physics engine, those are the only positive things that can be said about the source engine as literally anyone who played the original build will tell you. later updates made many improvements in stability but it's still shit, and the modding tools are also absolute dogshit, though that's apparently being fixed in source 2.

And I'll add the entire premise of Half Life 2 made no fucking sense. You, as Gordon, bare witness to the fact that most aliums can be killed by one guy with a fucking revolver. The only super strong enemies are the behemoths and the jolly green dicks in the blast pit, but even they're far from invincible.

Yet we're supposed to believe that Earth's combined military power lost to the aliums? In 7 hours no less? Bullshit. Everything we see in HL1 implies the aliens would get raped by conventional firepower. HL2 is one big plot hole.

i mean, they're different aliens, but what i don't understand is what happened to everybody who had guns. it would only be logical for many governments to arm their civilians to rebel immediately after surrender, and america would not be habitable outside of california which would surrender immediately and suck combine cock. the military were raping the aliens and only had to pull out due to overwhelming numbers as well.

The military actually had to fuck off once aliens that were actual soldiers started going through the portal, the aliens that you see beyond the alien grunts on earth are just fauna and non-combatants, so it's not horribly impressive that the grunts can kill those easily enough. While meanwhile alien grunts were very strong and very capable of dealing with them. Only the black ops soldiers from HLOPFOR were very effective against the alien armies, and even then they had to fuck off too once the other aliens from OPFOR started entering Black Mesa. Although I do agree that it wouldn't have taken 7 hours to fight a war with the aliens.

And in HL2 you obviously see that Gorden can wreck the Combine's shit all by himself just like he was wrecking the ayys in HL1. So how the fuck was Earth ever conquered? Overpowered aliens you never see just happen to obliterate Earth's military forces and then leave? It's such shitty storytelling. HL2 should have been Gordon's adventures working for G-Man. That's what HL1's ending set up and it's the only premise for a sequel that would have made sense.

>It's fucking Halo again
Are you not tired of humiliating yourself like this?

There's also that bit towards the end where they've got Freeman captured, but decide not to kill him for propaganda reasons or something. Without him they had no trouble raping mankind into the ground, but after they've been doing that for 20 years, they suddenly need public opinion on their side?

(checked)
Obviously not, since nu-Holla Forums keeps sucking on that same bait for months like no tomorrow.