Daedalus1942 said:
What year did you play it? I have to ask.
It pretty much set the precedent for creating shooters with more in depth plot and puzzle solving gameplay. So, you're either extremely ignorant, or you didn''t play it when it first came out.
No, I didn't play it when it was first released, I played it about 3 years later.
However, compared to contemporary games, HL2 was nothing big back then either, sure, it had physics-based puzzles, but they were practically the same puzzle repeated over and over again, throughout the entire game, and as far as First Person puzzles go, they were vastly inferior to "proper" puzzle games such as Myst.
Another
huge pitfall are the guns, a central part of any FPS, but in HL2 they are boring, they don't "feel" like guns, you get a very boring "standard" set of them, and the gunplay-mechanics are horrible (lack of ironsights, "rigid" guns etc). The only innovative thing was the Gravity Gun, yet it felt very gimmicky.
As for the plot, I found it shallow and predictable, the premise of "scary aliens coming out of an interdimensional portal" has been done before, better.
I found the characters relatively one-sided, you had the action girl, the absent minded professor, the mentor-figure, the "comrade in arms" and the big bad. The "no-cutscenes" approach was interesting, but ultimately broke immersion as I found that I could be hiding under a box, and characters would still talk to me as I was standing in front of them.
Ultimately, when you think about it, HL2 has not brought very much to the FPS-genre beyond what's developed by Valve. There are
few contemporary FPS's that feature physics-based puzzles, or even puzzles at all, and the "no-cutscene" storytelling has seen little action outside of the Half-Life franchise (including Portal). In fact, I'd say the biggest contributors to the genre, as it is today, have been Quake, Rainbow Six and Medal of Honour/Call of Duty, possibly System Shock as well.
I also noticed that during my writing of this post, you have been insinuating that I am a "brat brought up on CoD 4, who thinks he knows it all", and requesting my MW2 rank.
I'd like to inform you that I was mainly brought up on combat flight simulators, and Myst. And I don't play CoD, in fact, I far more enjoy Tactical shooters such as the SWAT series, early Rainbow Six games and STALKER when it comes to FPS's.
