And ending everything with a still somewhat controversial trip to Xen, which feels completely unlike what the game has been up until then. Then it becomes a more traditional action title with a lot of human enemies, eventually reaching something of a boss fight, before resetting the tension and pace back to how the game felt at the start and building up again, but surprising players who understand the game by now. The game starts very slow and the first couple of hours are very horror-ish as you watch the experiment go out of control and aliens invade and affect things more and more around the facility. It’s also worth noting that unlike a lot of action titles that came before, Half-Life had very distinct overall structure to how it plays and how it goes with the story, with each “chapter” focusing on some specific mood and pace. And those little elements that were to play a bigger role originally simply help to make this world more reactive and interesting than it would’ve been otherwise. It’s not a fully open world you can explore, like something System Shock did 4 years before, but it’s still conveying the sense you tend to get out of exploration titles, like Metroidvania games or classic survival horror titles (curiously, Resident Evil 2, which features giant science lab came out the same year). And it’s all interconnected in a way that was fresh for FPS games in 98. The fictional Black Mesa Research Facility is genuinely interesting to explore, as it’s full of curious faux-science contraptions, somewhat believable infrastructure, lots of scientist and guard NPCs that react and interact with you in curious ways and a sense of wonder. The grand vision that was promised was made far less grand and yet the game still managed to become one of the most monumental and innovative titles of its time, its concepts and ideas still echoing in modern titles. Enemies repopulating locations based on how long players play the game, flocking or leadership-based behaviors in alien creatures, realistic conversations between NPCs – lots of amazing elements that are either almost unnoticed in the final game, or were partially or completely cut before release (some still available via console commands or edits to the game files). It was the age of simulations and systems and the most surprising thing about Half-Life to this day is not what it had achieved with those plans but rather what has been cut or completely downplayed in the end. It was made during the time when a lot of developers were trying to do something seemingly impossible with video games – create realistic virtual worlds where you can do almost anything and expect the world the react accordingly. Probably, the strongest point of Half-Life to this day remains its setting and its structure. With all of this done, I feel like my overall opinion on the game hasn’t changed much. I planned this revisit since the fan-made remake Black Mesa is nearing its completion, and after finishing the original decided to revisit both of the game’s PC expansions developed by Gearbox Software (the third official expansion Decay remains officially console only, though there is a mod I decided not to play). But I’m not really specifically a fan of the series, more of the admirer. I did enjoy them all, I played quite a few mods, tried making mods myself (never got far), revisited them a couple of times and still have a lot of respect for what all of them were going for and how they innovated and influenced gaming in general. Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve played a Half-Life game… They were never really as important to me as they were for so many people. O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
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