Half-Life was the same. The game doesn’t spoon feed you a narrative, the same way real life doesn’t have a narrator (at least one outside of your head).
You need to pay attention to your surroundings, listen in to NPCs talking, read posters on the wall, etc to piece together the story.
It was and is one of the cooler ways to do storytelling in my opinion. Cutscenes etc are fine but for a first person game, I love the immersion of the story happening around you rather then being loredumped on you while your agency is taken away from you.
Agreed. And in this line of more subtle storytelling, from the games I played from the franchise, if anything, it took all the way to Portal 2 for some things to start making sense.
Bro spent hours playing HL 2 and then had to turn on godmode? Does he only have 1 hand or something? What happened?
0.2 hours to be exact.
Ah good catch, that means they lied as well.
I did that for Control when I played that, I was just ready to be done. Im guessing by every other part of the review the person was also just ready for the game to end
Not to play the devils advocate but they do have an argument. Not in the physics point because physics haven’t been done to death so that part of Half-life 2 IMO is still fresh. But the rest of Half-life 2 can be dull and boring and nonsensical if played today. Half-life 2 was such a cultural shift that everything great about it has been dissected, analyzed and improved upon wherever possible.
Much like Half-life 1 the things that made the game great are industry standard now. You’re used to the greatness so all you see are the flaws. The boat section is too long, the car section is poorly paced, the story is too cryptic, the list probably goes on. But anyone who played it at launch knows how fucking sick the game is because there was nothing else like it.
I tend to agree with this. I had given up on PC gaming by 2004 so did not play HL2 until the Orange Box on Xbox in 2007 and my reaction was “Jesus this is boring!”
I’ve tried to replay it a couple of times since then, most recently on Steam Deck, but it just doesn’t click with me and I give up around the Canals.
Friends of mine who played at two different points far after launch still found it to be just as great, even if the physics and facial animations were no longer best in class.
Not only the author of the post frame the ineffably marvelous Ubisoft for their Assassin’s Creed only, or the people in the organization who are not even related to the case, and for literally unknown reason, but also the author of the review feels like a disrespectful bigot who has likely a bad time yet enough to make a choice to inscribe their pure hatred into someone’s effort, history, and indeed novelty. One might want to suggest them to try creating anything at least remotely marvelous to the subjects, they try speaking at, with their own hands…
Such a deep sorrow some people do not care about their actions, about anyone, including artists, developers, people in general… and ruin this world in hatred and utter, disgusting unfairness…
You do you, @Speedforce@multiverse.soulism.net and that reviewer, and let’s hope no one will state something so awful about your work after decades, hatefully believing their word has any weight the world outside their mind of hatred.
A dear kindergarten is it…
Dear lord, I actually hope you used AI to write that nonsense.
