Why the hate for Mojang?

[Eclectic Dreck]

Half life was the first game to have an in depth story as it did.

Unreal did many of the same things as Half-Life including telling a story through setting alone and it was released before Half-Life. Quake 2 was similar in many ways even if the story was rubbish. It could even be argued that Duke Nukem did the same. I think that if you really want to attribute some magical thing to Half-Life it wasn't that it was the first to do something but that it did these things incredibly well.

Team Fortress 2 revolutionized team based shooters.

It really didn't. The basic forumla of TF2 remains the same as it was when it was a mod for Quake a decade before. TF2 was little more than a balance tweak, generally achieved by reducing the things a class could do, to better reinforce their position. The Pyro is an excellent example. In the original (and TFC), the Pyro had a reasonably powerful flamethrower and shotgun but these were relegated to very close range. Most of the work a pyro ever did was with the Incendiary Rocket Launcher basically making the average pyro into a poor man's soldier.

The core ideas are exactly the same as they were in 1997 when Team Fortress was first released.

If you want to look at games that actually had an impact on team based shooters I'd say your list would necessarily include Tribes (Open spaces, highly mobile combat that included vehicles, base building and defense elements along with multiple sub objectives) and Battlefield (which was little more than multi-point king of the hill with vehicles).

Yes but Half Life was critically acclaimed, and during 1998. That year was the best year in gaming. One day "may not make a difference" but you must consider how long Half Life and its awards have been around. Half Life 1 innovated gameplay (plot, puzzles), Half life 2 innovated technically.

It innovated in exactly none of those areas. Other games had used the same story telling techniques that Half-Life used and puzzles were a common part of FPS games of the era. It really is difficult to understand even in retrospect why a contemporary game, Unreal, is so rarely remembered in spite of doing everything Half-Life did and, in most cases, doing it better.

Half-Life 2 offered no technical innovations of note, incidentally. The engine did not do anything contemporary engines were not also doing. The inclusion of physics for puzzle solving even wasn't a new idea by this point though few games used it as a common means of resolving a puzzle.

While I love Half-Life, I am not blind to the reality. The games never did anything new. They just did things people were already doing and tried to do it better. That is not innovation; that is iteration.

Because Minecraft is "Cool to Bash: The Game"

This is probably the best answer one could give. One of the primary hobbies of people on this forum is to ask a question of the form "Why is this popular and beloved game so great when it obviously sucks?".