Nazulu said:
I recommend playing nice and actually studying how to write in detail since you want to be opiniated. You might as well do a good job of it, kapeesh?
Oh, you mean like this:
"A more interesting, involving story that makes you feel like a small (important) piece in a much larger game of chess. Open-ended world allows for varied approaches--including stealth, ranged attacks (sniper), frontal assaults, a mix of everything or avoiding the situation entirely. A wide variety of well fleshed out environments that seem alive--including a vibrant tropical island, complete with marine life and flora, cold, militaristic bases and dens that vary from technological marvels to haphazard throw-togethers, small villages and towns that feel lived in and world weary and an appropriately alien ship that is both disorientating and fascinating. More than a simple set piece, the alien ship throws the player into a completely foreign landscape that hungers to be explored, while simultaneously making known its tremendous and unsettling dangers at every turn. The ship also marks a turning point in the game, when both the world around you and the enemies you face permanently change in dramatic and fantastical ways. All that and I haven't even spoken of the people populating the breathtaking world of Crysis, all of whom behave and appear more realistically than I think any game has ever dared attempt.
Half-Life 2, on the other hand, I found boring, tripe, dull and void of any sense of real human context. The game goes out of its way to make a point of its characters, but in doing so it also makes it painfully obvious that the bulk of them are set pieces, designed to open doors for you and to explain the story to the player. Those that are expanded upon are done so solely through long, detached dialog that is completely uninteractive. For a game so touted as deep and evolving, the majority of characters we are shown are lifeless and stale. The inherent lack of player agency and sense of place in the world is hammered home every time an individual speaks to Gordon, as you are given no way to respond or indeed interacting with them at all--people spend more time talking about you and too you than with you. The landscape is forgettable and uninteresting. The scenery is equally as bland, with the load divided levels serving more as things to do than places to explore or simply 'be in.' The gun-play is clunky and awkward, but not in a realistic way, but in a 'this feel shit' way. The story is slow and sporadically populated with purpose; most of your time is spent just going somewhere, with no real sense of reason or ultimate motivation beyond "bad guys are bad."
Half-Life 2 isn't a bad game--it's fine. What it is, is over-hyped and misremembered. The core gameplay is nothing special, with physics puzzles (something Valve wanks to so much my hand hurts) horrendously hokey haunted houses, long stretches of driving across randomly enemy dotted grasslands and beaches, and standing still being spoken at making up 99% of your time with the game. It doesn't do any of it badly, it just spends so much time setting up the world with that crap that it has no time to follow through with it and actually deliver anything I found worthwhile. I didn't even mention my biggest gripe--but I will now: it's utterly stupid. A lone scientist wins out over a massive military and technologically superior might with enough man power to populate a small island? Bullshit. A lone super solider kicking hundreds of poorly equipped militia? Sure. Throw in some aliens and shit is no longer playing to realism, so I'm cool with that--my suspension of disbelief doesn't even need to be contacted for an opinion. Give me a nerd with a crowbar somehow eluding and repeatedly devastating an industrial machine, the likes of which would make Nazi Germany green with envy and I have to pick up my phone and say what-the-fuck?
Crysis is a shooter with a big, awesome world and cool, engaging story to shoot, explode and fly your way through. Half-Life 2 tried to be too much and ends up not doing any of it well."
Yeah, turns out I did write some detail--you just didn't read the thread.
P.S.: it's against the forum rules to call others a troll. So to is it against the rules to blatantly insult others personally.
[link]http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.373160.14435369[/link]