What's So Great About Half Life?

^ This

@dakan45: yo dawg, free advice: stop info-seeking a game before it's out.

Ok, first there is practically no difference between Doom and Wolfenstein, also they are both pretty standard rail-room shooters so i have no idea what you can see was revolutionary in those games, and BF1942 came out in 2002 so a lot of what is in there came from halflife and expanded on the concept so should we please keep the debate on topic and not start with games that came out after HL.

But do please elaborate on what Doom/Wolfenstein did that was so epic that its still a part of shooters today.

@Jacanuk: Wolfenstein 3D pretty much invented the FPS genre as we know it today, establishing both the familiar perspective and the "run-and-gun" gameplay setup that you'd largely expect in many FPS titles. And it wasn't a rail shooter at all, as there were many different rooms to discover in each level, each with ammo drops, health packs, or just more enemies to kill.

Doom polished the action formula from Wolfenstein 3D and singlehandedly made the FPS one of the most popular video game genres known to this day due to the fast-paced action of its combat while still retaining the sprawling map layouts of Wolfenstein 3D. Not only was it released on just about every major console during a time when shooters were considered PC-only, but it also popularized online multiplayer and invented the term "deathmatch", which is arguably the most common multiplayer match type in an FPS.

So there: the reasons why Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were the two most influential FPS games ever created.

I think you have misunderstood something there, Wolfenstein was the first and was what Doom was based on and was nothing more than a basic room shooter, so no it didn't really invent FPS as we know it today.

What did invent the FPS genre as we see today was Halflife who not only took the very familiar multiplayer elements from Quake/Unreal but combined them with new things like a story driven gameplay, also it allowed you to stay in control during the "cutscene"

So nice reasons but they are all wrong.

Wolfenstein and Doom basicly made the genre... Battlefield 1942 was a benchmark aswell. The only thing Half Life did was to add voiced dialogue

Right because highly complex scripted plot sequences like the 'resonance cascade' in half-life was totally commonplace before half-life. Honestly if half-life had come out before doom, no one would have played doom because half life did everything doom did and more (also it was actually in 3-d).

i guess he isn't around in the 19s or maybe he isn't gamer that time,because if he is,then he would have loved the Half Life franchise

Am I the only one that thinks this is like watching someone arguing about which figure on the evolution of man chart that is the most important.

It's all a part of an evolution to the FPS genre we have today.

Google it.

Do you know that Battlefield 1942 came out in 2002 so perhaps go back and look at when Halflife came out.

Also no Doom and Wolfenstein didn't make the genre.

TBH, now that i think of it, it's unfair to say they didn't. I mean sure, Ultima Underworld, that corridor tank game and the grid shooter from 1970's (forgot the names) came first, but they are pioneers, the genre didn't really take off until Wolfenstein.

The same could be said for Half Life; even though I think it did have a great impact, it wasn't exactly ground zero. From my limited knowledge, I could say Half-Life built on the narrative elements started in System Shock 1 and Marathon (if someone knows an earlier better example, please share)

@Jacanuk: i am well aware of it, it still had a bigger impact on gaming than Half Life

It's cute seeing people who know nothing about games attempt to make arguments about how right they are because they don't like a franchise personally, as though, somehow that reflects the reality of the rest of the world.

That's ego, I think.

it's actually nice seeing you not trolling and serious lol
on the thread,Half Life review and Half Life 2 review

The answer is on Wikipedia under the "legacy" section. All of the things that make Half-Life the worst playable game of all-time are the reason it's considered "acclaimed", inincluding the complete lack of anything interesting happening for apparently 90% of the game due to the fact that no dialogue can occur because the character doesn't talk (and in a game where "story" is constantly pushed on you rather then being in a game where story is irrelevant such as Mario or Doom), stuff that doesn't reappear and health replenishment "stations" that don't even restore your health, platform-jumping requirements IN A FPS GAME WHERE YOU CANT EVEN SEE WHERR THE FEET ARE, and having no particular levels so that you're just constantly either walking around even more bored then is expected because there is nowhere else to go in the game (or needing a walkthrough literally every 5 minutes) as well as having no sense of when the annoying first 90% of the game (apparently) will finally end, and having tucked up human enemies who follow you around in a non-predictable way and shit so that you can't use any strategy to kill the worst ones.

Even worse then that, it completely changed all future games so that you can never again have a decent FPS like Doom or Duke Nukem but that isn't so important of course since it's just FPS, but all of the other descriptions given on Wikipedia and other places of what makes the game "acclaimed" have been shoved into other games as well, most importantly once again the lack of levels, making your game more boring when it might have in some cases been a significantly better game otherwise, you know if you didn't have to spend 12 minutes grinding or walking across an ugly hallway several times in the game.

Lastly, it's an even worse effect in a way... Having hundreds of military-based games released an advertised as though they could possibly ever be a '"good idea", ever since. The Wikipedia article lists a ton of games that, if you were a legitimate garner then or a legitimate geek now, that you'll absolutely hate the existence of just because people will constantly pretend they are legitimate while playing these "stereotypical douchebag" games like Call of Duty, and the fact that for nearly a decade they appeared to release almost nothing else.

All because of the worst technically kind-of playable game you've ever played, Half-Life.

it's fun

Well, zombie thread lol

But basically, at the time of release, Half Life took sp FPS games out of the arena based combat, with the basic shoot this number of enemies before the next section opens up and added environments that were...well, environments, there was a varied use of gameplay, solid run and gun with a little bit of platforming and puzzle solving, along with sections that furthered the story.

I'm trying to think of another FPS in that time that came close to doing that? System Shock maybe? But the shooting was pretty archaic by that point.

However, playing HL now, you think, whats the fuss? Simply because those types of environments, in game story telling and game structure are part and parcel of most FPS games, and during the golden age of single player FPS, we got games literally built around the HL structure. It is to FPS what Resi 4 was to third person shoot em ups or Mario 64 to 3D platformers.

HL2 is obviously better because it is a game that still feels modern and playable now.

How on earth is asking why people think Half-Life is great, is in anyway disrespectful?

Anyway. I liked it because the world, the shooting, the story (how it was presented rather), the physics (from the 2nd one.)