This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I am in the unusual position that I was working on a commercial FPS when Half-Life came out in November 1998, and it had an immediate and dramatic impact on our game and all the game design that followed. Halo, later, also had some influence (specifically the rise of Halo's shield recharging mechanic for health, a heavier reliance on drivable vehicles with physics breaking up FPS levels, and limited weapon carrying), but the difference in impact between the two, at least on designers, was stark.
So let me lay out some things that Half-Life ushered in. I'm not going to try to convince you to actually like the game, but I think it's worth noting its impact.
So, the organic story telling in first person, with the camera NEVER leaving the protagonists head, was arguably something that was specifically native to games and genuinely felt new. This is actually a feature that has not often been much copied, interestingly - it's can be a really powerful aesthetic choice, but it means throwing out tons of other techniques from film for story telling. (Technically the player does black out part way through the game, and then is hauled somewhere by soldiers, so one could quibble a bit about how uniformly this constraint was followed)
This is tied in with something else HL did. Valve intentionally made the levels smaller than comparable FPS games, they made the loading times shorter, and they strung together the entire experience physically from start to end (well, until teleportation and Xen). So the player almost never loses the ability to connect where they've traveled in their head. Black Mesa ends up being, to a first approximation, one giant long thread running through space. This combines mandatory first person to make a uniquely organic experience. This is also a really severe constraint that was generally not followed by other, later games.
And then, because of these constraints, Valve worked through finding a ton of ways to provide variety in levels within the context that Black Mesa was going to be one seamless whole, instead of globe trotting to various disconnected venues. And so that meant experiential variety in level design was all variations on the various science / nuclear / industrial underground and the parched desert over ground, and the overall experience swung the player through the various environments in a particular way, building both variation and repetition to further foreground the seamless base experience. As before, this wasn't really copied broadly.
The raw game design in Half Life is also more surprising and interesting than people generally note. Parts of the game feel very much like early survival horror, with very low resources and zombies and bull squids and other disgusting aliens, and with a shattered and collapsing and dangerous environment. Parts of the game feel like an early tactical shooter with the soldiers and their aggressive AI, quite famously. But a lot of the game is quiet, and it feels more like the sort of environmental puzzle design of Out of this World or Ico, say. There's a lot more novel and varied non-enemy interaction with the game world than many other shooters of the time or since, and all of the design is organic - the designers expect the player to fiddle with the world, prod it, explore it, and puzzle out what they're supposed to do and how to do it. The lack of an invasive narrator or HUD pre-parsing the world for the player is a huge aspect of the game. The quietness and loneliness was a major part of the experience of feeling like you were having to figure it all out yourself. It has a specific element of play in its design, with finding out what to do being a core part of playing. In this sense, I think Half-Life was much more influenced by Mario 64 (which came out two years before) than most people realize. Anyway, this specific kind of organic interactive level design was very much not picked up by subsequent shooters. And the wide breadth of genres that Half-Life embedded in its levels (which often changed at quite slow scales - many of the various chapters in the game leaned one way or another) was also something that was not copied by most subsequent shooters, which tended to lean more narrowly towards variations within the shooter (tactical or otherwise) formula, and tended towards being much more directive to keep mainstream players from ever being lost or not knowing what they were supposed to be doing.
The way that Half Life treated pacing, especially in the earlier parts of the game where it works best, is, I think, something else that's often gone overlooked. This shows up in all sorts of large transitions over the course of the game, but I think it's most evident in one specific transition that did massively effect other later games, but often without them understanding why it worked. The earlier parts of the game have, as I said, a more survival horror feel, especially the enemies, who honestly don't seem that different from Quake 1 monsters. This establishes a certain pace and rhythm. This means that when soldiers finally show up (in We've Got Hostiles, I think), and they're positioned in special mini-deathmatch maps, and they move so fast and aggressively, and the game provides them with multiple paths and cover in mini-deathmatch maps, essentially, and they have radio chatter to show off that they are thinking and communicating... all of these features came together to provide an incredible experience in late 1998 about what AI could be in the future of FPS games. And in that sense, that experience totally changed how FPS games would be made going forward... so there, Half-Life was massively influential. BUT, at least from my perspective (as someone who worked on technical game design and AI in FPS games specifically), a lot of what made that experience so incredible at the time was actually about stage craft - about pacing, and about contrast, and about player feedback, and about level design that helped heighten the player experience of how shocking and different and aggressive that new kind of AI fighting was. But those styles of design, this stage craft, did not tend to be copied by later games... and indeed, even Half-Life struggled with it later in the game, where chapters like On a Rail or Surface Tension often dropped the pacing and framing work and just put soldiers in halls or other generic environments over and over, to less appealing aesthetic effect.
Half-Life also really stressed something like themed physical areas that were novel specifically because of large scale, singular interactive features. Here I'm thinking about Blast Pit, with its giant blind tentacle boss that just kind of exists in the middle hub of the level, not confined to an end of level or cutscene. It exists organically. Same with the giant boss who exists in Power Up, who you have to eventually electrocute. Same for the pervasive trains in On a Rail. Half-Life had a tendency of trying to foreground these kinds of novel, space-based interactivities and make this part of how they handle pacing. And again, in my experience, this was not a kind of design that was much picked up on, in a general sense (obviously games like Call of Duty have had set pieces, but there's something distinct, at least in my opinion, about the kinds of large scale, long term interactivity that I'm thinking about in Half-Life)
For more things that were heavily influential... the Barney's following you around as NPC buddies, and doing a credible job of being somewhat helpful and building player empathy was novel for the FPS space at the time, especially how it was implemented. So that was obviously influential. But with that said, the thing that made the Barney's appealing (namely, they were allowed to be killed, and the game didn't end just because they had bad luck or were being idiots) was often not copied for quite a while, meaning many later FPS games forced you to babysit an idiot to make sure the game didn't randomly end. So that was an important difference that was often not picked up.
I honestly think, though, that the most far reaching influence of Half-Life, really, was how it ushered in a kind of FPS design that was vastly more linear, with a much, much higher density of one-off scripted events. The kinds of shooters I was working on prior to the release of Half Life were much more influenced by Doom - so levels tended to have keys and buttons and switches, and they would unfold and interconnect over the course of traversing a level. It's a kind of design that's still popular in games like Dark Souls, although in Doom on a level scope. And this kind of design had a bunch of cool features (especially with Doom's insanely fast running speed), but it meant a lot of backtracking and players getting lost or stuck, and it meshed poorly with rich linear story telling. As a practical matter, Half Life actually still had plenty of this kind of design too. But the idea it really hammered home was the idea of levels being more linear (while hiding that linearity through clever visual design) and then keeping players entertained by experiencing scripted events that were singular. It was a style of design that converged towards the experience of hopping on a haunted house ride and then being pulled along to all the exciting string of encounters. This specific aspect of Half-Life absolutely shaped the game I was working on at the time, and all subsequent FPS games I worked on or was proximate to.
As a practical matter, Half-Life reminds me very much of Super Mario Brothers (as an absolutely pivotal side scroller) and Mario 64 (as a pivotal 3d platformer). In each case, the game was monumentally significant, and had a huge influence on a genre that would come to be dominant... but in each case, it was also the case that the developers were asking like 30 different giant, deep, fascinating questions, doing all sorts of weird stuff, and eventually the genres they cast such a long shadow in settled down to much less particular and unusual designs. Most of the interesting things Half-Life was doing were not picked up by the games it influenced.
Maybe this is just tedious nitpicking, but... was that actually new? Did it feel new?
I cannot recall ever leaving the protagonist's head in Doom or Wolfenstein 3D or Marathon. I don't seem to recall that happening in Descent much (I guess short cutscenes of your spaceship escaping?), or in System Shock. Quake doesn't take you out of the marine's head, and Dark Forces never breaks up its gameplay. All its in-level storytelling is environmental. I don't think you leave Bond's head much in Goldeneye. Maybe I'm crazy here, but seeing the entire game from the first person perspective seems to me like it was industry standard in 1998. Games after Half-Life seem to have been the same, to me? 1999's Aliens versus Predator does the same thing; it's not until 2001's AVP2 that they introduced story cutscenes. If anything, I feel like it's leaving the player character's head for a cutscene that was the innovation!
Are you counting a text screen introducing the mission before it starts as 'the camera leaving the protagonist's head'? Because thinking back to the time, I don't remember feeling like Half-Life did anything new with the camera, and looking back today... I'm sorry, I just don't see it.
I am trying my best not to be biased. I admit that I don't like Half-Life and, no insult to you intended, I find the praise profusely heaped upon it somewhat irritating. Of course, whether or not I like Half-Life is a completely different question to whether it was an influential game, and I am probably subconsciously motivated by just not wanting a game that I didn't enjoy to be important.
Even so, it is nonetheless true that even doing my best to set all bias aside, when I think about the shooters that were popular in the years immediately before Half-Life, and I think about the shooters that were popular immediately afterwards, I don't feel a big difference.
I do see a difference between what I think of as the early shooters, through the 90s, and then the post-2000 modern shooters. I can see the difference between, say, Quake II (1997) and Doom III (2004). Something changed in shooters around the turn of the millennium, and the two most famously influential games in that transitional period are Half-Life (1998) and Halo (2001). I suppose I'm just, in the end, not sure that Half-Life was the cause of this transition or of it was one among a number of games experimenting with the genre (because, let's be honest, the shooter genre had gotten pretty stale by 1997), and it was the most famous in hindsight.
Subjectively from my end, the key thing, I guess, is that I remember playing Half-Life in the 90s, getting bored after a level or two, and thinking, "meh, that was whatever". It felt to me at the time as just another one of the interchangeable shooters in a genre that seemed increasingly out of ideas. But then playing Halo in 2001 felt like playing something from the future. It seemed revolutionary to me. Now, maybe that's just because of the X-Box, or because something had changed in me in the years 1998-2001 which made me receive it differently, or some other alchemy of chance and circumstance. But for better or for worse, that is what I remember.
The innovation is that in Half-Life, cutscenes are happening around you while you remain in first-person, and they don't all involve fighting, and they're all animated (instead of being "switches", text or terminals). The entire train ride at the start was so impressive, it showed you how the game engine was capable of doing much more than shooting and flipping switches. NPCs in shooters before were just linked to rudimentary routines that would dictate their actions all of the time, but in Half-Life their actions could be scripted and they could be animated to do all sort of movements that were not in their routines, which means at any moment you could be surprised by turning a corner and seeing one do something you've never seen them do.
The enemy AI was interesting in that the routines felt more organic than anything else before. The smarter enemies had rudimentary concepts of team tactics, and seemed to have an understanding of using cover. Halo would develop that much further. But outside of those moments, of that trick of showing the cutscenes in first person, and those carefully prepared moments where you fought the military in a space they could use to showcase their tactics. I'll grant you the gameplay wasn't too special. Guns didn't feel great to me, and the map was just a long corridor disguised to not look like one when everything's said and done. But those two tricks were extremely impressive in 1998.
Hrm! I'm curious as to what games have your favorite guns?
From roughly that era: Doom, Dark Forces, Quake and Soldier of Fortune.
Doom: the shotguns, chaingun and rocket launcher
Quake: double barelled shotgun and the grenade launcher
Dark Forces: the stormtrooper rifle
Soldier of Fortune: about everything
To me, gunfeel in games is half in the gun's sound and animation, and half in the targets' reaction to being shot. Half-Life's guns to me feel like they all miss one or both of those aspects. I know people love headshotting the headcrabs with the shotgun, but to me the hit felt spongy, like it never connects quite right. Maybe it's a limitation of the engine, you couldn't quite draw the kind of gore explosion of Doom's 2D sprites in a 3D FPS until the improvements in Soldier of Fortune, and polygonal gibs like in Quake were a bit goofy for a game that otherwise tried to look realistic.
We agree on what gunfeel consists of, but I think HL has some very good ones. Blasting alien with the shotgun feels excellent. The huge revolver too. I struggle to think of any examples of downright bad gunplay in HL. I think it's generally quite spot on. Maybe not quite on the level of SoF, which was pretty epic.
Half Life 2 is one the few games that capture how “ugly” assault rifles and grenades feel in real life. It’s like the video game equivalent of Heat
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As someone who was a teenager gamer when these games came out, I'll add on to agreement with this. Halo was certainly a great, innovative accomplishment in singleplayer fps design, but it doesn't really compare to Half Life in that respect. It'd be like comparing Half Life to Doom or Wolfenstein 3D.
I will say, though, that HL2's ushering in of the era of rollercoaster singleplayer FPSs was an utter travesty. Even as a teenager, I could recognize how vastly inferior HL2 was to 1 in level design, making everything feel completely artificial in how it felt like Valve was sitting over my shoulder and ordering me to "Go there, not there, only here, etc." instead of shoving me into an immersive setting where I have to use my wits and tools to map out the terrain and navigate it successfully. Unsurprisingly, Ravenholm was by far my favorite part of HL2 (and I have very little love for horror games or horror tropes), and I still consider HL2E2 as the best singleplayer FPS I've played, with only maybe Metroid Prime being in the conversation as a competitor.
More options
Context Copy link
Great post!
I pretty much agree with everything, though you're describing a few things that were new to me because I've never been a game developer.
I actually played through Half-Life again last year. The 1998 version, not Black Mesa (that game had annoying mouse acceleration issues). It holds up pretty well, and it's still good fun, even when you take the nostalgia glasses off. The variability in the level design surprised me though. It became more apparent to my more experienced eyes that a few of the levels in the second half of the game are pretty sloppily, borderline amateurishly put together, IMO. Maybe they ran out of time for polish before the deadline. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
TV Tropes has a YMMV trope called "Disappointing Last Level" for when the end of the game doesn't live up to the same standard as previous sections. The ending of Half-Life where Gordon travels to an alien planet called Xen is such a notorious letdown that this trope used to be called "Xen Syndrome".
More options
Context Copy link
I think I heard Xen suffered from that (Black Mesa tried to "fix" this and utterly ruined it by packing way too much content there - I quit after 2+ hours in Xen, likely only a few hours away from the ending, having grown fatigued of that area). It's kinda crazy to think that
HL2(correction: HL) came out just 2 years after Quake, the game whose engine it was partially built off of (I believe id gave Valve access to some Quake 2 engine material too). In 24 months, they had to put all of that together, enough levels to fill 15-20 hours. Compare that to the amount of content that games with 5+ year development times have today, when building using far more mature engines and tools, as well as well-established blueprints for game design.HL2? You mean, HL (1998) came out two years after Quake (1996). I heard the same thing; HL was built on a mix of Q and Q2 engines.
Too many cooks in the kitchen these days, maybe. It's a little odd how much more time everything is taking. Implementing a set of ideas shouldn't take 3x longer just because you need more advanced graphics. More hires should be able to get that task done in a set amount of time, and they do hire tons of people these days.
Similarly to how more women should be able to birth a child in a set amount of time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link