What can one say about what is arguably the world's all-time favorite, first-person shooter (FPS) game? And more to the point, why would one bother to say it roughly six years after its release? The answer to both questions is that I think I've finally figured out what it was that made Half-Life (HL) so special, while playing through HL one more time in preparation for the release of the sequel. If you're interested in my analysis, or if you're one of the four gamers in the world who hasn't yet played HL, keep reading!
For its day, HL was visually a tad behind the curve. It looked good enough, mind you, but it was based on what was then an older engine from Id Software. Having said that, HL was still good looking for the engine it used. The modeling was nicely done, the texture work was good, the animations were as good as anything else at the time, and the special effects were actually better than any other game made to date.
My only visual complaint with the game is that some of the "skybox" textures (i.e., the textures used to give the illusion of being in a much-larger environment when outdoors) were pretty jarring. The outdoor sections of "Surface Tension" look pretty fake compared to the other objects in the player's field of view. But this really isn't much of a complaint; HL still looks good enough today to be worth playing. It can't hold a candle to the look of recent games, but it looks good enough.
In contrast to the visuals, HL's audio was absolutely superb. The game features neat music where appropriate, fabulously spooky sound effects, great ambient sounds, and makes good use of environmental audio effects like reverb. The visuals are important in any game, but it's the audio that really connects with a player's emotional center. If you don't believe me, go play your favorite game without any sound and see how compelling it is. HL is absolutely spectacular in the audio department. Today its samples are rather grainy, but they work nevertheless.
HL did little to advance the state of the art in terms of its interface. All the familiar controls are present, the heads-up display (HUD) provides all the typical information, the game menus are straightforwrard, etc. It all works and it all works well. The one interesting innovation in the game's interface is the categorical weapon selection. Prior to HL, the standard was pretty clear: every FPS game has a maximum of ten weapons because there are a total of ten number keys across the top of a keyboard. HL made it possible to give the player fa more stuff by grouping weapons into categories. I personally wasn't wild about having to hit two keys and click just to select a weapon, but it was an advance worth noting.
HL also adds several features beyond the typical FPS game mechanics. Running, jumping, crates to break, items to pick up, etc. are all there, but to them HL adds interesting variants on jumping (crouch jumping and the long jump), a nifty flashlight for those dark areas, stealth aspects when crouched, alternate fire modes for weapons, etc. All of these things are pretty much standard issue in most FPS games today, but HL was the game that added them to the general gamer's consciousness as must-have mechanics.
Better still, everything just "feels" good in HL. Ladders work intelligently, the health and HEV charging stations seem more "realistic" than the sorts of things found in other games, weapon inventory handling is smooth, running, walking, and crouching all seem about right, the player's use of deployables is a great addition, etc. The game mechanics of HL remain great even today. That's all there is to it.
In terms of its story HL was, to me at least, an irritating game. On the one hand, it provided the player with a more immersive experience than any other game. Other games had used cut scenes; other games had featured dramatic settings; but only HL did it so well. The cut scenes were always directed at the player, rather than taking control away from him and unfolding as some kind of pre-rendered cinematic. The dramatic additions typically came in the form of great little scripted bits. There's nothing quite like watching a scientist get dragged into a ventilation shaft kicking and screaming to heighten the tension. And, of course, the snippets of the enigmatic G Man wandering the halls served only to deepen the mystery.
Yet on the other hand, HL was the game that made reviewers lose their collective mind! All of a sudden every game had to have some kind of deep and complicated back story to justify its existence. Reviewers claimed almost universally that the era of story-less FPS games was over: HL had raised the bar to a new level and any game without a meaningful story just wouldn't compete. This was and is, of course, pure malarkey for two reasons. First, HL's story is ultimately quite trivial. Come on, folks, how many times have you heard the ol' science-experiment-goes-bad-into-another-dimension tale told before? Heck, you can't swing a dead cat in a bookstore without coming across it. HL didn't invent some radically new and interesting plot; rather, it took a long-established plot and made it work beautifully in a game.
And second, while a story can contribute much to a game it simply isn't necessary. How much story did the original DOOM have? I remember reading somewhere that the single paragraph provided to set the scene was cobbled together in just a few minutes, but that didn't stop the game from being a complete blast. And what about other more recent games like Serious Sam or Painkiller? Do they automatically suck simply because their stories are about a millimeter deep? I think not. In summary, HL's story really draws the player into the game, which is exactly what it should do, but it's hardly a classic tale. I truly dread reading some of the reviews of the sequel for this reason alone.
There's nothing to complain about here. The single-player portion of the game provides hours of entertainment even for veteran players. The environments are interesting and varied, the plethora of weapons are all fun to use, the bestiary of bad guys is ample, and so forth. In short, HL is straight out of the golden era of PC gaming, a time when the first few levels occupied the player longer than some entire games do today. Heck, even the tutorial is longer than some game levels these days!
Most remarkable of all, in my view, was how HL advanced the state of artificial intelligence (AI) in gaming. Prior to this time, enemies in video games were pretty much interchangeable. Sure, they looked different, but they all did fundamentally the same thing: run toward the player and try to kill him. Many of HL's enemies do this, of course, but some of them display a level of "intelligence" that too many games today still don't match. In particular, the way the human grunt soldiers work together remains impressive. They throw grenades, use covering fire, take advantage of cover, react only to what they should know about the player (rather than always magically knowing where he is), etc. The AI in HL broke new ground, which is often overlooked in discussions of the game as far as I'm concerned.
Perhaps best of all, though, was the game's architecture. HL was, and may still be, the most mod-friendly game ever made. By building not just a game but also a piece of software to serve as a game development platform for the larger community, Valve earned itself a place in gaming history. More mods have been produced for HL than any other game of which I'm aware, among which one finds such perennial favorites as Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, Deathmatch Classic, etc. The list is long indeed. HL provided the crucible in which a lot of new game-development talent was forged. Given the game's average selling price, it's wildly conservative to estimate the average cost per hour of entertainment at less than $0.01. That's serious value.
Of course, what review of HL would be complete without mentioning its multi-player modes? Though the game is surely better known for third-party, multi-player mods, the original multi-player modes that shipped with the game still stand well on their own even today. Heck, I played a few rounds of the original HL deathmatch prior to writing this review, and it filled me with nothing but nostalgic warmth for the old maps. I always preferred Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament to HL, but the multi-player aspect of the game is still fun in its own right, as is evident from the hundreds of well-populated servers still running it.
Obviously, HL deserved its crown as the king of FPS games in its day, and it's surely one of the best all around games ever made. As I said before, it stacks up well against even today's competition; it scores really high in the "fun factor" department, which makes it easy to overlook the now-outdated visuals. HL is truly a must-buy game for virtually any gamer, excepting only those who despise the whole FPS genre. In short, if you like FPS games at all, HL is a must-buy game even today.
But what is it that makes the game so great? I think I've finally figured it out. It wasn't its visuals, though they were good. It wasn't its audio, though it was spectacular. It wasn't its content, despite it being absolutely jam-packed to begin with and absolutely insane with the number of third-party mods out there. It wasn't even because it had a story. What made HL so special, in my view, was the way it brought its story together with an overall high-level of experiential density.
In other words, the story as a whole gave the player a reason to want to play the game from start to finish, while the high level of experiential density in any given "scene" made a large fraction of the individual moments entertaining. HL brought everything under the sun to the table: jumping puzzles, environmental puzzles, great enemies, great weapons, etc., all of which provide great situations and tools with which to face them. But what made all of those moments so special is that they were arranged perfectly. Each new situation was interesting both on its own and as a part of a larger tale.
What this does is make the game a teleological whole in itself, a thing that has a life of its own and unfolds in a very special way to give the player an experience unlike any he's had before. This is what kept bringing gamers back to the single-player aspect of HL, even after so many years. Here's hoping that the developers haven't forgotten that in crafting the sequel. Either way, though, HL remains one of the greater games ever made.
07/16/2004