Half Life thread - Discussions about Valve's FPS magnum opus(es) and any related content (spin offs, expansions and etc)

HL 3...is it still happening?

  • No and anyone that still thinks that it will is delusional

    Votes: 240 47.7%

  • Yes, they just need a few more years to perfect it so it can another game changer in the industry

    Votes: 134 26.6%

  • Shouldnt it be called "Two Lives and a half" instead?

    Votes: 82 16.3%

  • Half life is overrated, you neckbeard homos

    Votes: 47 9.3%
  • Total voters
    503
recanman said:
Tbh i thought everyone plays hl2 with mmod at this point, I've seen little to no one play vanilla hl2 anymore from what I've seen on my yt recommended list but that could just be me.
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Not being able to One-shot headcrabs with the crowbar as they are pouncing to you in vanilla HL but in HL2 you can is, for me, honestly aggravating. Thank goodness MMOD gives you a secondary attack to pull that off.
 
One Angry Computer said:
Not being able to One-shot headcrabs with the crowbar as they are pouncing to you in vanilla HL but in HL2 you can is, for me, honestly aggravating. Thank goodness MMOD gives you a secondary attack to pull that off.
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HL2 is on the whole easier, maybe because they were shooting for a larger audience of casuals, but at the same time, I generally agree with that. I like the crowbar being more useful.

Also, there aren't as many "so many headcrabs it's like a swarm of bees" levels, like the level in HL2 where it's practically nothing but constant headcrabs the whole level.
 
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AnOminous said:
HL2 is on the whole easier, maybe because they were shooting for a larger audience of casuals.
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HL2 is designed to be easier on the player without the player being aware compared to HL1. Enemies in HL2 deliberately miss their first shots on Gordon to allow you to get to cover. Enemies are programmed to prioritize shooting destructible environment pieces to make the game feel more 'cinematic' instead of shooting directly at the player. Enemies will also miss more frequently if you have lower health and will often hide behind destructible cover to allow the player to win the fight.

These are pretty much staple NPC behaviors of most early 2000s games and beyond. I don't think that the enemies in Bioshock can actually hit the player with their first shot no matter what. In the 90s game designers had more of an arcade mentality so the enemies are always out to kill the player and basically do not stop rushing the player to death until they succeed or are killed themselves. In the 2000s games would become more of a cinematic experience where players are rarely discouraged through losing or dying. And you started to see games where the enemies will hold back more often, the player will have regenerating health passively from the start, and the gameplay is more 'on rails' than open or free. Even games that people swear are working against the player like the modern X-Com games actually falsify stats to succeed so that players will feel luckier than they actually were. So on lower difficulties a 50% shot to hit is really more like 75% because the game isn't showing you the real odds.

Then you also have the rise of consoles for FPS and RPG games. Where not only combat and exploration but even the menus had to be easily navigable with a console controller instead of a mouse and keyboard. Look at how streamlined the interfaces are for something like Morrowind compared to Oblivion. So practically everything was getting streamlined.
 
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AnOminous said:
HL2 is on the whole easier, maybe because they were shooting for a larger audience of casuals, but at the same time, I generally agree with that. I like the crowbar being more useful.

Also, there aren't as many "so many headcrabs it's like a swarm of bees" levels, like the level in HL2 where it's practically nothing but constant headcrabs the whole level.
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Well also because hl2 doesn't have underbarrel impact grenades that 1 shot the player, its also why black mesa is so much easier than HL1.
 
Star Classic said:
Only if they make them worthwhile to use. Snarks might actually be the worst weapon in HL1. Say what you want about HL2's arsenal but you can see the reasoning behind it being a lot smaller than HL1's
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Snarks were actually really useful and kinda OP, which is why them attacking the player as well was a nice addition because it made them a risky but powerful choice to go with.

HL2's arsenal was just lazy as fuck. Not to mention I still don't understand the point of having TWO machine guns instead of just sticking with the OSIPR or bringing back the crossbow again instead of having a proper sniper rifle. The crossbow made sense in HL1 as a weapon specifically designed for underwater segments but it's outright useless in HL2 not to mention that its existence makes no goddamn sense.
 
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:semperfidelis:
 
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Blackstar said:
View attachment 6989624
:semperfidelis:
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>dies just after hitting 50

Man lived a half-life, true to his legacy.

Also never realized how much he looks like that one dude from Jurassic Park whose name escapes me right now.
The handsome tard said:
Snarks only attack humans, that excludes even Race X (which makes no sense) so its a limited weapon
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Do they? I recall them attacking aliens too, admittedly it's been a few years since I last played HL1.
 
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Star Classic said:
I like to think that the state things in the Middle East are still the same as they are here in the HL universe. Just a hellish warzone that never has peace. Maybe even the Combine with all their technological prowess can't take down the mighty AK and towelheads
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I think its more akin to "its just a fucking desert, why would we care for it? With the decreasing resources, the humans there will naturally die off anyway."

It goes along to how little Earth matters to the Combine in the grand scheme. If they truly wanted, they could just turn the whole desert into glass and be done with it but they dont so why waste time with it.
 
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One thing that I find particularly grim about HL2's lore is that because of the suppression field, every corpse you find, every zombie you see, every metrocop you kill, is one less human. Period. The number of humans will never go up again, so every time you kill a metrocop you're, in a weird way, contributing to humanity's extinction, without Freeman, mankind would've been doomed to a slow but inevitable death, this also made me wonder just how many humans are there left alive by the time of the game? I imagine there are less than a billion considering how humanity was absolutely assraped from the portal storms and then the 7 hour war.

Really when you strip out the gameplay and just focus on the lore, Half Life 2 is less of a shooter and more of a cosmic horror story, humanity finds itself in a desperate fight for survival against an eldritch abomination given the form of an extremely advanced alien empire, planet Earth is forever scarred but so is humanity's collective psyche, think about it, even if the resistance succeeds and wipes out the remaining Combine forces on Earth then what happens next? Earth is irreparably damaged, countless species have almost certainly been driven to extinction and been replaced with hostile Xen fauna, Earth's resources are most likely heavily depleted after decades of unrelenting Combine activity and perhaps worse than all of that, is that the fear of the Combine will never go away, because they weren't defeated, they were just sealed away from Earth, but the Combine still exists and still dominates multiple dimensions and countless species. That thought will linger on the minds of every human who ever looks up at the night sky and wonder if one of those stars is home to sentient civilization, a civilization that, like humanity before, began exploring where it shouldn't have and in their ignorance, obtained the attention of the Combine.

Anyway, that's why I personally want to play Half Life 3 before I die, to see how the story concludes, good or bad I just want to see if mankind manages to be truly free in the end or if we're doomed one way or the other to become slaves to either the Combine or the Gman's "employers".
 
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