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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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