Half-Life

Playing Half-Life has been quite educational as far as what has contributed to the shape of shooters after its release.

Which is good, because to my surprise I didn't really enjoy the game itself.

There's notable elements of competency to the game, don't get me wrong, but there's also very serious problems. Some of this can be waved off as a product of its age: it's clunky and awkward in exactly the sort of way pretty much every shooter in that general timeframe was.

But a lot of it is just bizarre, bad design decisions.

Freeman's Eternal Nemesis

You know what the greatest threat to Gordon Freeman's life is in Half-Life? Is it maybe the gang of soldiers out for his blood? Their highly lethal tanks? The aircraft eternally bombarding him with rockets and bullets? The interdimensional alien invasion?

No, of course not. That's all small potatoes.

No, the humble ladder is Freeman's worst enemy.

Ladders are badly coded in Half-Life. Unlike most modern shooters, you don't attach to them with a distinct climbing effect and move off in a pre-programmed way when you reach the top or bottom. Instead, you sort of stick to them and otherwise retain your normal motion, with it simply being impossible to move away from the ladder until you reach the top or bottom or press the jump button. This is an awkward, kludgy solution, but in and of itself that's not so bad. I mean, Shadow Warrior used a fairly similar system, and I didn't complain about it even though there were a couple of times it got me killed.

The real problem is that whoever all designed the maps in Half-Life seemed to be entirely oblivious to ladder physics. I lost 70% of my health before the game had properly started, and it was to the game's first ladder because the wacky physics and dubious environment design led to me launching straight up, over the safety rail, and all the way back down to the ground floor and taking fall damage. That was from one error, by the way -not repeated failure chipping away at my health.

And ladders just keep cropping up in environments where the game's ladder physics are going to murder you for complete non-mistakes. It got to the point that the single most common thing to prompt me to make a manual save was needing to climb up a ladder. Not climb down -going down is actually kind of hilarious, because you can just launch yourself from wherever and attempt to rub your face on the ladder as you're falling at terminal velocity and the result is a completely safe instant stop. No, going up is the dangerous part, because going up is where you go shooting into the sky, or in the process of trying to avoid that insane fate you jump off too low on the ladder and end up falling to death or at least extreme damage anyway.

Speaking of falling damage...

Fly Like A Bird, Or Was It Fall Like A Rock?

Half-Life's engine is really bad at precision platforming. Gordon's jump is floaty, you have more limited control over your midair motion -but not no control, even though that would be the actually realistic choice- and Gordon's ground physics are bizarrely slippery even when slip-'n-slide water sections aren't involved.

That's fine. Most shooters aren't designed to be good platformers, and they have no real reason to be good at that end of things. They're shooters. You shoot things. Jumping is for Mario, not Havoc.

Except for some insane reason Half-Life really likes to throw you into frustratingly precise platforming challenges. Failure is often instant death, and even if it's not you really should've saved beforehand and instantly loaded the save if you end up messing up and taking 70 damage from the fall. And you will fail a lot due to the aforementioned physics.

Naturally, the final stretch of the game is all about the platforming, just with even floatier physics and an improved long jump. Not that you falling slower has any impact on your fall damage, that would make far too much sense: nope, traversing Xen is going to involve missing jumps, falling for literally 30 seconds in a gentle drift like a leaf on the wind, and instantly taking 90 damage when your feet touch Xen's dirt. Why is this a thing?...

I've seen games with worse physics for precision platforming, but none of the ones I've seen doggedly insisted on forcing you through mandatory platforming challenges all throughout the game. At worst they have a one-time stretch of serious platforming, clearly recognize how garbage their engine is at such a job, and while they don't bother to fix the sequence in question they at least don't make even more such sequences.

A sub-point of this...

Let's Just Lie To The Player

One of the more maddening 20 minutes of the game was parsing how jump-crouch physics work.

See, you can crouch in mid-air in Half-Life. The primary and obvious use for this is to hop into vents and whatnot that are too small to stand in. That's actually pretty nice: it's pretty infuriating how many other shooters will turn crouch-tunnels into essentially one-way doors, even though you really ought to be able to climb back in. Half-Life's tutorial even explicitly spells this out, instead of expecting you to intuit/guess that the crouch button will do anything in mid-air. This is nice given that in most games the crouch button doesn't work in mid-air.

But, there's a secret-yet-mandatory use of crouching after a jump: getting on top of basic boxes.

Many of the boxes of the game are juuuust tall enough you can't get on top of them by jumping. For whatever reason, crouching after a jump will get you on top of them just fine. Normally I'd assume this was a physics oopsie the developers had failed to notice before shipping the game, but you're repeatedly required to get atop/over such boxes with absolutely no other way of accomplishing this goal. You have to figure out this bizarre mechanic that feels like a bug if you want to beat the game, and yet even though the developers clearly know about this mechanic and expect you to know about it, there is absolutely nothing in the game that educates you on its existence.

This is, in fact, a bit of a broader problem with the game...

Understand Things? What Do You Think I Am, Some Kind Of Scientist?

Half-Life isn't very good at keeping the player in the loop. This doesn't stand out in the initial portion of the game where you're supposed to be in a mysterious disaster, but no matter how deep you get into the game this doesn't really change. You'll occasionally run into a scientist and be given a new general goal or reminded of what you're supposed to be doing in broad terms, but mostly you're just wandering around with no clear goal. This is compounded by the level design being un-intuitive and unclear: at one point in the game, I launched a rocket into space, then with no apparent direction forward backtracked around halfway through the level before reloading and trying again to see if I'd missed what was the actual way forward. Note that going forward did still involve backtracking, with absolutely no explanation of what was sufficient backtracking vs too much.

This was a particularly egregious case, but it was a bit of a recurring problem in the game, and on a narrative level even though the plot isn't actually complicated I was regularly left with the sense that I had no idea what was supposed to be going on. The initial portion of the game is just trying to get out. Then it turns out the military has arrived and is shooting at everyone for reasons that are never explained at any point in the game, and you... apparently abandon the process of trying to get out of the complex? I guess? Like okay there's a whole thing about going to the Lamba complex that nobody bothers to clarify why you're doing this until you're actually there already, but no justification is provided for abandoning trying to get out of the complex. Yes, the military is here and has overall control of the surface. And? That doesn't mean trying to get out is no longer an option or something, it just means there's an additional complication in doing so.

And then there's several of the 'puzzles'. One particularly demented puzzle where you're trying to activate a test firing chamber to kill some otherwise-invincible murder-tentacles has as a critical step randomly realizing that you're supposed to jump out into a fan you've activated so the wind will carry you up into the air. Keeping in mind that you're wearing a heavy metal suit and in fact the game has already repeatedly illustrated that you sink in water if you don't constantly swim upward, and that the game provides zero hint that 'fans push things up' might be a mechanic in the game at all. And that activating the fan clearly served an entirely different purpose anyway, giving you zero reason to go 'well, clearly activating this fan was necessary somehow, so let's try jumping into it?'

This is a recurring issue with the game that you're left clueless and ignorant about basically everything for no real reason, while playing someone who is ostensibly educated and that the game makes a point of increasingly praising his performance as you advance. It leaves me intensely baffled as to why Gordon was made a silent protagonist, because just having him muse to himself would've gone a long way to make the game more playable, and having him be a silent protagonist... well, to be entirely fair the voice acting in Half-Life is uniformly terrible and so having Gordon be totally silent at least dodges that fate, but outside that point there isn't really a benefit to having him be a silent protagonist.

Speaking of the awful voice acting...

Talk. Like. This.

I don't normally feel the need to complain about 'bad voice acting' in a game, or indeed even a TV show or movie or the like. What most people find cringe-ily bad or literally laughable or whatever generally doesn't rate my attention at all.

In Half-Life's case though, the voice acting is quite bad, and more importantly its badness interferes with something important: the G-Man.

I'm pretty sure the G-Man is meant to be unsettling and off in the way he talks. He has a peculiar cadence, his delivery having a consistent rhythm normal people don't engage in, and more obviously he has a tendency to draw out 's' sounds like he's some manner of snake-person.

But I'm honestly not completely sure because nobody in the game talks like a real human being. The soldiers all have a weird rhythm of their own with long pauses between words, and for no adequate reason they all have an electronic filter like you're hearing radio chatter even though you clearly aren't hearing radio chatter. The scientists are generally too calm for the situation and there's only like three different scientist voices anyway, and they sound subtly off in further ways I don't know how to describe. Only the security guards sound more or less like real people, and only sometimes.

The overall result is that the G-Man doesn't actually come across as weird and alien. Outside the 's' thing, he actually sounds more normal than the majority of people you've been hearing throughout the game!

Bullet Sponge

One of the more frustrating aspects of Half-Life is that combat against human soldiers is unfun, immersion-breaking nonsense. There's not a lot in the way of tactics or strategy available to you: you can sometimes kind of sneak up on enemies, but mostly you're just going to have to accept that you're going to be getting through battles primarily on the basis of having way more HP than your enemies. Your weapons mostly don't hit hard enough for a first strike to down an enemy before they can take a shot at you -even a full shotgun blast right into the head isn't enough to kill human soldiers for some reason, even though it kills tons of other enemies instantly.

This has long been a bit of a design flaw with shooters that have you fighting other people with firearms, but most such shooters have their concept kind of centered on such combat. Half-Life really doesn't need to have you fighting human soldiers as much as it does. You're in the middle of an interdimensional alien invasion! The aliens are actually interesting to fight! Their mechanical behavior actually makes it feel plausible Gordon might scythe through them through sheer competency, rather than happening to be a bullet sponge for no good reason!

And on a more aesthetic level, the insistence on making the HEV suit inexplicably leave the head entirely vulnerable is just baffling. In a different game I'd accept that the head is being left unprotected so the player can see the character's face, even if it still bothered me. In Half-Life's case though, you can never see Gordon's face in-game and there's only a handful of times you see other people wearing HEVs -yet the game insists on making it completely clear the HEV provides absolutely no protection for the head. It's just making it harder to buy Gordon gets through everything, with no benefit whatsoever in exchange. Just make the main menu background art depict Gordon holding a helmet, come on!

(Incidentally, while in a lot of ways Dead Space feels like it's following in Half-Life's footsteps while missing a lot of what does work in Half-Life, this is one case where Dead Space wins. Isaac has full body protection, even if shambling zombies are way too capable of shearing right through it)

While we're on the subject of the HEV...

Take It All Except His One Actual Advantage

There's a point in the game where you get knocked out and two soldiers, instead of bothering to bring you in or even execute you, throw you into a trash compacter. They also apparently strip Gordon of every single one of his weapons, including his trusty crowbar... and leave him in the HEV suit. The thing that's the game's primary justification for you being tough, able to carry a lot of stuff, etc. There's not even a token justification for this.

I'm willing to gloss over how the trash compacter conveniently has a staircase of trash for you to climb out of it. Sure, whatever. It's a video game, of course you have to be able to escape somehow.

But they seriously didn't bother to take the HEV away why?

Or, again, shoot Gordon in the head. It's exposed. He's not got a helmet on, and anyway the sequence has shot itself in the foot by making it be based around Gordon being clonked in the face and this instantly KOing him so even giving Gordon a helmet would still lead to this sequence being immersion-breaking nonsense.

It's not even like the game does anything interesting with the idea of stripping you of all your equipment to get me tolerating this obviously nonsensical sequence. When Aliens Vs Predator 2 has you, as the Predator, lose all your gear partway through the campaign, it proceeds to have you acquire new gear before you start getting back your old gear, so that you have to give your new gear a try instead of just going with your old standbys. Half-Life just has you do some platforming challenges for a bit, then starts giving you largely the same gear in a similar enough order to how you first acquired it that there's no point at all.

Evolution Smevolution

One of the more disappointing things for me was seeing Xen at all. I'd actually been broadly kind of impressed with the design of the aliens up to that point, as the game did a pretty decent job of having them seem plausibly animal-like yet very different from Earth animals, but seeing Xen is actually a huge strike against suspension-of-disbelief: Xen is apparently a series of (tiny!) islands floating in empty space, largely connected through teleporters and flight, yet the alien life-forms are heavily slanted toward ground-bound bipeds and quadrupeds, some of them truly massive and with absolutely no ability to leave their tiny islands.

Shouldn't this be an ecosystem centered much more around creatures that fly, able to travel from one island to another as convenient/necessary? Shouldn't the land-creatures more often be small grazers and entities that ambush the traveling fliers? How could the giant murder-tentacles that rely on their hearing to find whatever idiot prey wanders into their reach possibly function?

The only alien design that clicked as making perfect sense was the ceiling-dwelling critters with tongue hanging down in ambush, and even then in Xen they were observed exclusively -or nearly so, at least- inside cavern environments rather than underneath the floating islands trying to catch fliers.

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That said, there were some things that stood out in a more positive way.

No Two Alike

Most shooters seem to be convinced they have some quota of weapon types to provide the player, like if they include less than six firearms they have dishonored themselves and must commit seppuku or something. Nonetheless, most shooters have limited variety in real terms: The Darkness II, for example, had shotguns/pistols/rifles/submachine guns as its primary categories, and even though each category had three weapons in it for a total of 12 weapon types the two common shotguns were so similar I can't name a difference of consequence of the top of my head, the rifles were 'the sniper-ish rifle and the two automatic fire rifles', the pistols were just a continuum of strength per shot vs quantity of shots, and I can't even remember what set apart the sub-machine guns. In real terms that works out to like maybe 6 different weapon types.

Half-Life doesn't have that problem. The closest it comes to this is that the basic pistol shares ammunition with the basic rifle and so it's a bit dubious to try to find uses for both, and that two of your 'tossable explosives' category weapons are a grenade and basically-a-grenade-but-with-worse-range-and-manually-detonated.

That's not at all bad a rate of success given the game has more weapons than The Darkness II in the first place.

Hey! I Remember This!

One of the things that legit impressed me early on -though unfortunately it went away something like halfway into the game- was that Half-Life was pretty good about having a consistent sense of space. A particularly memorable example was a fairly early case of a room I could see into but couldn't find a way into. I could see a door into the room, but heading in the general direction of where that entrance seemed to go off led to no possible opportunity to head there. I spent maybe a minute trying to find a way in, then shrugged and assumed it was something obtuse like an utterly innocuous stretch of wall could be destroyed to reach it.

Imagine my surprise when, a 'level' or two later (Half-Life doesn't really have discrete levels, just points where text pops up on screen that matches what any saves you make will now call themselves), I found myself in a room, looked outside and... heeeey, this is that room I couldn't find a path into earlier!

This genuinely impressed me. Games often struggle to make environments that are actually internally consistent if you tried to assemble a map of their space together, and most of the games that essentially succeed lean pretty heavily on vagueness for the connecting zones. Half-Life succeeding at this is thus impressive in its own right, and more than that it conveys a sense that the facility is a real place instead of a convenient video game environment. A lot of high-fidelity triple-A title games of the modern day just don't really feel all that real because the world you're traveling through is so carefully designed to be a one-way tunnel that happens to look like a jungle, or a ruined city, or whatever the aesthetic of the game is, and you never get a chance to see how different parts of the world relate to each other. The most common 'solution' is to include the appropriate number of door graphics and just make most of them non-functional: the original F.E.A.R. is actually unusually effortful for even trying to justify the lacking functionality of its doors. (They're generally blockaded, and I think you're basically meant to assume people were trying to protect themselves from the Replicants)

Again, it's too bad it went away something like halfway through the game, but it was a rare moment where I could see why someone might play Half-Life back in the day and be wowed.

Physics!

While the platforming aspect of Half-Life is a giant misstep I find utterly incomprehensible, it's part and parcel of a larger pattern of the game where it keeps using physics as a stepping-off point for the more puzzle-y sequences. Like, actual physics, not its own crazy game physics. This works fairly well (... mostly) in terms of giving the game some additional variety while keeping the concepts something the player doesn't necessarily require be explicitly spelled out. Most players will readily grasp that electricity in water is bad, and try to find a way across without touching the water or try to find a way to stop the electricity. Your ability to shift around boxes, while it could've been coded better and the tutorial could've explained it better, lends itself fairly readily to things like building staircases and so on without requiring an actual explanation of the basic concept. Fire is hot, don't touch it. If it looks like a valve you can turn, it probably is and will do something when turned. Etc.

While Half-Life isn't unique in using real physics to reduce the learning curve, the Zelda series is the only other gaming case that leaps to mind for also trying to use it to keep the gameplay varied. Most uses of 'physics' of this sort in other games are lock-and-key puzzles, like needing water to put out fire so you can go past where the fire was, needing fire to melt ice to let you pass, etc, and so are very same-y. Even if it's not a lock-and-key puzzle per se, there's still a tendency for most games to use physics scenarios in some repetitive manner.

Half-Life avoiding that is actually notable.

Alien Alien Weaponry

Another nice touch is that even the aliens with gun-analogues have radically different behavior on their gun-analogues. You can even get a hold of one of these gun-analogues yourself, and it has unlimited ammo in the form of regenerating ammo that runs out fairly quickly, and is relatively slow-moving homing shots. The whole thing is one of the better parts of the game at selling the idea that the aliens are, well, alien. Plenty of shooters that try to emphasize the weirdness of their aliens/demons/whatever end up having them fight essentially the same as human enemies with guns, killing the effect.

It's not the only really weird weapon, either -one form of 'grenade' involves tossing an indiscriminately hostile bug, and several alien enemies attack with tools you'll never get an equivalent to yourself, which behave differently enough from human firearms that it doesn't feel indistinguishable from fighting humans the way several other shooters I've played end up.

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Overall, I suspect that if I'd played Half-Life when it was first released, I would have been quite surprised when Valve went on to become a giant in no small part thanks to the Half-Life franchise. If you're interested in the game because other people say it's great... it kinda isn't. If you're interested in it for historical context or something in that vein, it's mostly not like pulling teeth using a rusty hammer, and there's enough surprisingly unusual ideas in it to be good food for thought.

I'm glad I played it, but I don't expect to ever come back to it, and it's not something I feel comfortable recommending to others.

I am curious about what came after, though. Were the later Half-Life games really the kind of tremendous leap in performance that would justify how much people love this series?

I guess I'll see.

Comments

  1. Geez, I found your blog via your XCOM 2 analysis, and now I find this treasure trove of old analyses and reviews!

    Half-Life is the one game I am actually a bit familiar with "under the metal". See, back in my teenage days, there was this really obscure competitive team-based multiplayer mod for Half-Life. If I remember right, the name of the mod was Counter-Strike. ;)

    So in my younger and stupider days, "inspired" by CS, I actually thought I'd give modding a crack and perhaps even become a professional game dev. Turns out I had little in terms of design skills and even less in terms of artistic skills, but that was a no-go. Nonetheless, I did learn a bit of how the Half-life engine worked, and managed to get the basics of creating maps for it.

    The interesting thing about the physics puzzles in Half-Life is that the Goldsrc engine didn't really have a coherent and systematic physics. There's fall damage, friction, explosions, crushing, ladders, water... I think that's it IIRC. Like for example, isn't really a "fire" object that gives a fire effect. What you had to do as a mapper was a) add in a fire sprite, b) define an invisible field around the fire that will damage the player, c) define the "type" and intensity (over time) of the damage, which mind you doesn't really do anything mechanically other than change the HUD icon of the damage and whether the player/NPCs that come in contact with it explode into gory gibs upon death, d) add a light source of the appropriate color, brightness, and special effect if any, e) add a burning sound effect. There's no "fire" setpiece that you can just drop in that has all of the above that you just need to tweak.

    Speaking of which, the reason why that "fan blows you upwards" section felt ad-hoc is because it _was_ completely ad-hoc, from every perspective (mechanically, narratively, gameplay-wise, etc.). There is no "fan" object in HL. What the mappers had to do was a) create a fan object, b) made it spin, c) create an invisible field on top of the fan that will move the player, and defining the direction and speed.

    Every interactive environment object is pretty much done like this. The game does have a "water" object that causes water-like effects to its texture, and allows the player/NPCs to "swim" in it. But if you wanted it electrified, or freezing, etc.? Yeah, define a damage zone with the appropriate damage, etc. Imagine all the effort they went through to create all of those physics puzzles, especially given how besides the fan thing pretty much all of them are coherent and made sense from a gameplay and/or "real life analogue" context. No wonder they centered the Source engine's mechanics (and marketing!) around the physics for Half-Life 2!

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    1. Ladders are even extra janky under the metal. There is a ladder object, and you can just define a ladder, but it will be really weird. First of all, a ladder object can't have a texture with transparent portions, so one dead giveaway of a newbie-created map is that the ladders are blue (transparency color) where the transparent "empty air" sections should be. So, how you actually _put_ ladders on a map is you create a static object, which _can_ have transparency, and then put an invisible "ladder" object in front of it so the player can be climb. They are completely non-customizable, too; the dimensions of your ladder object just define when the game decides the player is "on" a ladder and make them climb. Other than that, they are totally rigid, and have the exact same sound effect, and you climb them at the same speed every time. Regardless whether it's an actual metal ladder, one with a wooden texture, a rope, or some jungle vines, you climb them the same way and produce the same "steel tube ladder in a warehouse" sound effect.

      And yeah, ladder physics are totally janky in HL, even for its time. Back in the day, broadband internet in my country was unheard of, so we all used 56k. So I always played CS either in LAN cafes with friends, or with bots, or both if it's a slow day in the computer cafe and we can't get enough players. While testing one of the bots available at the time, I noticed they were unable to climb down ladders properly and kept dying on levels with lots of them (e.g. Assault). I actually ended up creating test maps with thin "rope" ladders at the spawn points for the "bots" to "practice", and sent them to the bot developer. I also created a couple of other maps, one with a water obstacle between the spawns and the bombsite, and another with ladders _under_ water, because water was the other obstacle the bot was having trouble with. The developer really appreciated this and ended up improving the ladder and water navigation significantly, perhaps my _one_ productive contribution of my crappy mapping skills to the HL/CS mod community!

      As for the voice acting, the G-Man is really intended to talk like that (for better or worse), while the rest of the NPCs just had rather crappy voice acting. Which is a shame, considering that pretty much the whole storyline is narrated through random conversations by NPCs you come across. The HECU soldiers, however, worked a little differently. They didn't have recorded lines, instead there was a bunch of _individual words_ that are recorded for them. A rudimentary scripting language gives them their actual lines, which defines the individual words and IIRC you can also define pitch and tempo that the game filters the words through. Which is why _especially_ for the HECU soldiers, it didn't sound like they were yelling (e.g.) "Fire in the hole!" but actually yelling the _individual words_ "Fire!" "In!" "The!" "Hole!", because that's what the game was actually doing underneath.

      And yeah, the HECU grunts (along with the Black Ops Assassins) had to be the game's most boring and tedious enemies. Even back in the day the game was constantly praised for the groundbreaking AI of the Marines and the Assassins, and yet when I played the game I found them to be frustrating bullet sponges that somehow had omniscient knowledge of your position.

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    2. I'm not super-surprised by most of the jank you're relaying -most games, historically, were doing stuff like separately defining light/damage/etc when the devs wanted a fire or whatever, for example- but I am a little horrified to learn that ladders are even MORE janky than I'd realized. I'm sort of baffled they powered through and insisted on keeping them, given all that plus the horrible gameplay effects.

      The HECU soldiers voice point is a bit fascinating, though. I'd noticed their vocal pacing being weird, with a start-stop-start quality to it, but it honestly never occurred to me this might be literally a series of single words played separately to construct a sentence because, essentially, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?? Nice to finally know why they in particular sound so bad -and why I had this gut response of 'are these guys supposed to be robots?' Also makes me wonder what ambitious plans they probably had that didn't go through, given that sounds like it was meant as a foundation for something like semi-dynamic dialogue, but then they don't actually use it for that at all.

      Anyway, glad I'm not the only one that disliked Half-Life's human enemies. I've since been further disappointed by Half-Life 2 going 'hey, you know what the BEST PART of the first game was? That's right, the boring humanoids with guns! Make them far more dominant than the actually-interesting enemies!'

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    3. One reason why I'm enjoying your blog so much is that you point out so many things that are directly contrary to the conventional wisdom parroted by reviewers and the gaming community. Some of them I've already had a gut feel for, but couldn't quite articulate why. Then I stumble upon your game analyses and finally I find someone who nailed it on the head about ! Case in point here being how the HECU soldiers and Assassins in Half-Life are really boring enemies.

      Other instances would be how the almost universally acclaimed System Shock 2 is actually a bad game. And how the often lambasted XCOM 2 timers are actually mostly well-tuned. I thought I was the only one who had feelings contrary to the popular opinion on these!

      Regarding the Metrocops and Combine soldiers in Half-Life 2, they were a massive missed opportunity. Apparently, Valve created some sophisticated combat routines for them, that allowed a squad of them to smartly flank Gordon and the Resistance given the opportunity. Unfortunately, the level design of HL2 is even more linear and corridor-like than that of HL1, with the result that they are always coming from one direction, so they are just plain annoying, uninteresting bullet sponge enemies. The bullet sponge bit being addressed simply by having them inexplicably be standing next to a bunch of explosive barrels a good amount of the time, as parodied by the Concerned webcomic here: http://www.screencuisine.net/hlcomic/index.php?date=2005-06-24, and here: http://www.screencuisine.net/hlcomic/index.php?date=2005-10-07

      The one time they aren't all coming from one direction, you are under seige and they are spawning constantly from the same places trying to knock down your captured turrets. So it's not like you see them doing anything interesting there, either.

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    4. Ah, yeah. Part of why I started Vigaroe is that I've spent more than two decades frustrated by mainstream game reviewers and related, so it's a bit gratifying to hear that this aspect actually is part of the appeal for you.

      Yeah, System Shock 2 was a game I was intensely intrigued by back in the day, but it's... not good, and in particular is largely a downgrade over its predecessor if you don't credit it the switch to full 3D graphics and so on. (Which I don't, because it's really not anything special in that regard for its time, let alone in retrospect) I really wish I knew what factor lead to people praising it so.

      Ah, the AI point would explain why I had some unexpected, extremely unfair-feeling deaths the handful of times an actual open environment with gun-toting enemies cropped up: because they have actual code for trying to flank, and unlike F.E.A.R. the level design perpetually hides that they don't actually do the Renegade thing of mindlessly charging you in as straight a line as terrain allows so I had no reason to expect flanks. That's... disappointing. If they'd actually designed the levels appropriately, they'd have beat F.E.A.R. by roughly a year at achieving this quality!

      I'm pretty sure the explosive barrels was mostly about showing off/being excited by their newfound Real Physics engine. Half-Life 2 has a LOT of moments where physics objects visibly do dynamic physics things not because it makes any sense for them to be doing so as you arrive (The Combine has actual bombs. Why do they repeatedly roll flaming fuel barrels at Gordon just in time, and HOW did they arrange this in the first place, in multiple sense?), but just to show off 'look! Our barrels roll! And when they explode, this shoves other barrels away instead of just being instant-chain-explosions!'

      So I strongly suspect the part where exploding barrels could reduce the bullet sponge nature of enemies was a happy accident in most cases, where the actual point was showing off physics stuff.

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