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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.
I remember one of the things that really struck me about Halo in its day was that it didn't have bosses. It had a small selection of enemies, and it then remixed them over and over in different scenarios, but unlike most earlier shooters, it did not have boss monsters, or specific boss scenarios.
Halo also, to its credit, mostly dispensed with exploration or keycard-hunting as a core mechanic. If I think about classic 90s shooters, the Dooms and Quakes, the combat in them was often repetitive, or just an obstacle while the core gameplay was exploring a maze of near-identical corridors and getting keys for doors. In Halo you always know where you are going (and you usually have an NPC voice, Cortana or Guilty Spark, ready to remind you). The challenge is getting from Point A to Point B in the face of determined opposition.
It's not unique in this - I suppose you're right and Half-Life had an earlier form of this, and then I guess F. E. A. R. did it even better - but it was done quite well for the time. The infamous 'four seconds of fun' idea paid off. If the basics of gunplay against the standard enemies are fun, you can re-use and remix those gameplay elements over and over to create consistently compelling scenarios.
I guess it depends on what you call a boss. I've been playing Halo CE recently (a coincidence, I started a bit before the conversation here about Halo came up), and the first time they bring up hunters (in the Truth and Reconcilliation mission) sure feels like a boss fight: you fight a bunch of Covenant on the way to the ship, you take high ground (with Covenenant turrets to use) around the lift to the ship. You keep mowing down the troops that keep coming down until instead of bringing down a normal squad (one elite with a bunch of grunts and jackals) they bring down two bigger aliens that the turrets are not able to take down, so you have to get down from the advantageous position and engage them from close range. It wasn't hard for me because by now, from having played a bunch of Halo before, exactly how to dance with the Hunters, but to a new Halo player, they might have felt like a boss fight.
From my recollection, they keep using Hunters more or less like that through the game and the series, as sort of a capstone to escalating fights.
Hunters are a tougher enemy, certainly, but the hunters you fight in Halo are all the standard model. There's no Halo equivalent of, say, the Makron in Quake II, or Mohc in Dark Forces, or the titular character in Kingpin.
Later Halo games have named bosses - Tartarus in Halo 2, Guilty Spark in Halo 3, and so on - but the first one always avoided that. Wiki does not list any bosses for the first game, if that counts for anything.
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Arguably hunters are mini-bosses, especially on the higher difficulties. And there was the unique elite with gold armor and the plasma sword—I think in “Silent Cartographer”—but he was easily dispatched with a single plasma grenade so it’s hard to call him a true boss.
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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.
Man, I did love the stormtrooper rifle in Dark Forces, though I don't know how much of that is because it perfectly captures the feel of the rifle in the films. I can't imagine that hurt, at least.
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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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