Half-Life

I finally got around to playing the original mostly original Half-Life immediately after finishing Black Mesa. I say ‘mostly’ because I played the source port of the game that valve released alongside Half-Life 2. What spurred me to finally take the plunge and play Half-Life was Black Mesa. Specifically, how much I hated Black Mesa. I needed to know if I hated Half-Life itself, or I hated Crowbar Collective’s interpretation of Half-Life. Turns out, now that I have the perspective of early to mid 90’s shooters, I actually quite like Half-Life, and I do indeed, simply hate Black Mesa.

The first I noticed in Half-Life was how immediately readable the environments were compared to Black Mesa. In Black Mesa there’s so much detail. So much detritus and so many hi-res textures to make titular Black Mesa facility feel like a real place, inhabited by real people. But this has (what I have to assume is) the unforeseen consequence that I can’t just glance around a room and see what I’m supposed to. Instead I’m frantically searching around, spamming the use key on every surface, desperately trying to guess what exactly it is I’m supposed to do. I get the feeling the devs assumed I had already played Half-Life at least half a dozen times, and the design intention was less, “let’s lead the player here,” and more, “let’s put a spin on the classic level that fans will love.” Thus, as a new player, you’re left scratching your head time and time again.

The next thing that struck me, was how insanely well paced the original Half-Life was, while also being one of the first cinematic games ever. But Crowbar Collective seemed to think they knew better. They thought it would be just as well paced if you padded out every single segment by 20-50%. It’s an experience similar to reading The Hobbit and then going to watch The Hobbit. And if you haven’t seen The Hobbit movies, I envy you, but imagine if someone took your favorite book or movie, and tripled it in length by just randomly shoving in scenes of the main character quietly eating a full meal, brushing his teeth for five minutes, or struggling to take a particularly large shit. That’s kind of what Black Mesa feels like now that I’ve played the original Half-Life. Except for Xen.

“Except for Xen,” is a phrase I could end up saying a lot. For how great Half-Life is, none of that applies to Xen. None of it. The last 3 chapters of Half-Life take place on an alien planet called Xen. And they’re all garbage. Honest to god: some of the worst levels I’ve played in any game ever. I was constantly confused and frustrated, and the only saving grace was how short it was compared to Black Mesa’s interpretation of Xen. They were so bafflingly ill-conceived. The kind of stuff I except to find in a $5 indie title made by one developer. Putting your worst stuff at the end of your game was common-place back then. I would even say most of the best games from back then seemed to be designing and implementing in tandem, and working on their games from start to finish. Psychonauts, System Shock 2, and God of War (2005) are the worst offenders, where it seems like they didn’t even have time to playtest the final stretch of their game, let alone polish it. I don’t think it’s until 2007 or so that I feel like I started consistently seeing strong endings. So going forward just bear in mind that every compliment I pay Half-Life is followed by a mandatory “except for Xen.”

Having put some time into early shooters like Doom, Duke Nukem, and Rise of the Triad has made it much easier to see the magnitude of the impact that Half-Life had. Before Half-Life, you didn’t really reload in FPS games. Think about how fundamental of a shift that is. You go from having hundreds of units of ammunition that you can just unload at will, to suddenly needing to worry about times when you’re not shooting. Going from the super bad-ass, to a regular guy, with a real gun. While today we might look at Gordon Freeman as something of a crowbar wielding murder machine when compared to Joel Miller from Last of Us or Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2, but compared to Doom Guy and Duke Nukem Gordon Freeman is a milquetoast nerd who probably likes reading and has a pocket protector. I mean who does this guy think he is? He has to reload for Christ’s sake.

What I think is even more impactful is that suddenly you go from all these FPS games where it’s about finding secret, killing enemies, and doing it as fast and efficiently as possible. They’re all arcade games, to now engaging with a (paperthin) plot. You want to escape, to survive, and eventually to stop the alien menace. I’ve seen people say that Half-Life is the first game to have a story, which is laughably false, but it might be the first FPS to care more about it’s story than it does killing shit, which is still a huge leap from where the genre was.

And to top it all of, everything happens in one cohesive, unbroken sequence. There are no “Level Exits” in Half-Life. It all flows from one scene to the next, leaving the player completely immersed in the Resonance Cascade. When I first played Half-Life 2 back in 2007 I was initially struck by how how jarring the sudden pause and “Loading” text thrown up on my screen were. Why had they not done the standard gaming trope of hiding your loading screen being a difficult to open door, or slowly navigating a tunnel or vent? What I didn’t realize is that this was one of the first times there wasn’t a real “loading screen” in a game. It didn’t kick you out to a black screen with a spinning wheel, it just briefly paused, and then resumed. That cohesive experience Half-Life could give to players went miles subconsciously immersing it’s players in it’s world. Even more so in 1998, to a demographic that were used to level end music accompanied by a score screen.

But I would still add one qualifier to the statement, “Half-Life changed the industry”. What people really mean when they say that is, “Half-Life changed the PC gaming industry.” I still contend Metal Gear Solid is what brought that cinematic aspiration to the medium more so than Half-Life. Sure, in Half-Life you have NPCs that can (barely) move their mouths where in MGS you’re just looking at blocks move and words come out. And in Half-Life you have these dramatic setpieces that are just as hard-hitting without any cutscenes while in MGS anything that happens of note is accompanied by the game abruptly seizing control from the player. But Half-Life doesn’t really have a story, where I think MGS’ script is on par with real spy movies of the time. Half-Life is one elaborate linear corridor Gordon Freeman is forced down with no free will, and congratulated for doing so. Metal Gear Solid is a high-concept espionage thriller with cyborg ninjas, double-agents, clones, torture, the list goes on.

What I find truly remarkable is that these two games, both of which had a gargantuan impact on the industry, came out exactly 30 days apart (if you take the NA release date for MGS). Which I think is evidence that Valve wasn’t this once-in-a-lifetime team of geniuses that were years ahead of their time. They were an extremely talented group of developers who were the first ones to take a huge swing at the next inevitable step in gaming on PC, while Hideo Kojima was the first one to do it on console. If you’re a weirdo, you could also make the case Resident Evil was the first real trailblazer into cinematic games two years earlier, but that would be quite challenge with how god awful the cutscenes are in the original Resident Evil. If you’re even weirder, you could maybe mention Alone in the Dark (1992) as the original 3D cinematic game, but then most of the room would just look blankly at you, and the only person in the room who’d even heard of that game (me) would just laugh at you.

So at the end of all of this I have learned what turned me off of Half-Life wasn’t how dated it was, or how overhyped it was, but a lack of perspective. Now that I’ve seen what came before, it became easy to appreciate all the innovative ideas Half-Life brought to the genre. I still think it’s overhyped. It’s not the G.O.A.T. I wouldn’t even say I like it more than Doom or Duke Nukem. But it is seminal, with some of longest reaching influence in the medium.

And Black Mesa completely lost sight of what made it special.

Talk about this post in the pickled.gg Discord