Riven Armor said:
One thing that just hit me was that I really dislike Halo/Half-Life comparisons because I feel the first Halo was deeper than Half-Life. The former imagines a completely different universe and the latter is a shooter with great writing.
Okay, there is something to this, but it has nothing to do with writing.
And by saying this you kinda show your age, no offense. I'm going to guess that at the oldest you're 18 or 19, and probably in the 15/16 range. The reason I say this is because of what Half-Life actually did, and why it's harder to figure that out today.
Halo gets billed as a revolutionary first person shooter frequently by its fans. Half-Life gets the same treatment. The difference is, Half-Life, in my opinion lives up to it. In a way, it's writing is one of the few things it didn't try to revolutionize. In general, if you started playing FPSs after 1998 you will never play a new FPS that isn't heavily or fundamentally influenced by Half-Life, this includes Halo.
Basically you can chop up the history of FPSs like this. You have the Pre-Doom era, Doom, Quake, and Half-Life. If you want to get really picky, I'll conceede that Goldeneye is almost as influential in its own way.
There are a number of pre-Doom FPSs. Wolfenstein 3d is the most famous, but Bungie's Pathways into Darkness is another prominent example. Generally these are really primitive games, though Pathways is surprisingly deep given it's release date. (I'm making a bit of a guess here, I don't have a specific date for Pathway's release, it's 1993, while doom was first released December 10, 1993. Technologically it fits with the Wolfenstein era, and if it didn't actually predate Doom, it was released within 21 days of it.)
Doom changed everything. Really it kick started the FPS genre. Fair or not, this is probably the single most influential FPS ever. It set the gold standard for most of the fundamental systems that we use today for games. Including a lot of really annoying cliches in FPSs. Monster Closets and coop play both start here, as does death-match multiplayer.
After Doom we have Quake. In retrospect I'd drop this off the list, except for one thing. Quake really started the tech arms race. Up until Quake there were minor improvements in FPSs, (Marathon added room over room, Dark Forces could produce fake objects that looked like bridges) but there wasn't really a lot of effort put into really improving them beyond sharper textures, and some neat little technical gadgetry. Quake changed that. It was (as far as I can recall) the first fully 3d FPS, it used hardware rendering (which was almost unheard of at that time) and as ugly as it is today, it was the most prettiest FPS on the market.
Quake's gameplay is almost identical to Doom's however. You run through abstract mazes picking up floating ammo and weapons. The story is told through the manual, and even though I've finished the game, I'm not sure I can write a synopsis. The game world is almost an abstract Escher painting in hell.
In 1998 Valve released Half-Life. Now, what I'm not going to argue is that Half-Life was predestined to be what it is, or that it was the only possible game that could have steered video games they way it has. In fact, Unreal, released several months before Half-Life did a number of the same things that HL did to revolutionize the industry. The difference is twelve years later Half-Life is still relevant while Unreal is not.
Half-Life created a realistic environment. Before HL the most realistic environment in a video game was probably Duke Nukem 3d or Sin (Sin predates HL by 19 days, so it's a dubious counter example).
Really if you started playing FPSs after November 1998, you've probably never gotten the full effect of just how much it's influenced the current FPSs. To be fair, HL's real legacy is pretty much exclusively level design. It's narrative integration is rocky, its characters are (arguably) forgettable, and the story is flat out terrible.
The irony is, today, when a game that
hasn't been influenced by Half-Life's level design gets released, it tends to be noticeable. Prey is the most obvious offender. When playing through it, fairly early on, I was trying to figure out why the game felt so off. Finally I realized, it's building off the classic level design structures, rather than trying to create a real environment. Some others include Painkiller and possible Hellgate: London.
As I mentioned Unreal and Sin both go in the same direction, settings were more focused on creating believable environments than in creating FPS style architecture. Unreal doesn't go as far, it's still a very classic game in a number of ways, while Sin didn't really have time to catch on before Half-Life hit. If Half-Life hadn't happened, I'd probably be typing up the Legacy that the Sin series has had, instead of it being an awkward footnote.
Now, Half-Life 2 is overrated. It's a graphical upgrade on the original with more of the same story. The characters are better fleshed out, the level design is realistic, and the setting has incredible texture. But, where Half-Life was something unique and earth shattering, Half-Life 2 was the status quo.
It's a lot like going back and watching The Matrix again. Everything in the Matrix has been done over and over again to the point of parody. Everything Half-Life got right has become industry standard. So looking back, it looks incredibly bland. And that was the experience I had, when I first played it. I didn't get around to it until 2002 or so, by which time, it had been heavily mined out for material by everyone.
Halo builds off of this. It steals liberally, the weapon system in Halo comes from Oni (if not earlier), and the regenerating shields were a neat concept we hadn't seen a lot of before in FPSs, (greening up was a standard feature in MMOs even then). But, fundamentally Halo's contributions to the genre have been minor game mechanics. Half-Life changed what an FPS is, its just almost impossible to see that today.
