Sgt. Sykes said:
Will people ever shut up about HL2 already.
I replayed it a few weeks ago. It's still as mediocre as it always was. As for facial animation, it was definitely interesting in its time, but I always felt the animations (and everything else) is too overplayed. Too much 'in your face'. It's like the characters were doing movements just for the sake of moving, like they had too much caffeine or something. I guess the engine couldn't display subtle movements so they made everything un-subtle.
Honestly I'll rather take a bit wooden character than empty 'look how much we can animate'.
Of course most games these days kinda suck in all areas except the amount of explosions, so this 9 year old game suddenly starts to look impressive again...
^Pretty much my thoughts, although I played it last year and was just as disappointed with it as I was with Half Life 1. The game just didn't click with me, and the graphics looked like graphics I expect in 2003, nothing more, nothing less. Resident Evil 4 has pretty decent facial animation, at least for it's time, and unlike HL2 they didn't, as Sgt. Sykes pointed out, "the characters were doing movements just for the sake of moving". Also, recent games like Resident Evil 6, Hitman Absolution, Assassin's Creed 2/B/R/3, Aliens vs Predator, Max Payne 3, etc. all have rather decent animations both in gameplay and cut scenes.
I understand that Half Life is considered by some as the Jesus of video games, but it's really not. It's story was convoluted, it's been so long that it's (I should say the series) cliff hanger ending is no longer that interesting as it's clear Valve really just want to move on, Gordon Freeman is a boring character (totally subjective), and it basically tried to be Doom for people who wanted more story. I'm sorry Valve, but your game just didn't click for me.