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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 aliens 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.
Edit: typo.
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
HL2 has the best grenades/explosions I've seen. So much power, and so suddenly. And with that excellent physics implementation. Great.
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