First, some background: I first became aware of PC gaming in 2012 (15yrs after HL1, 7yrs after HL2). I played both games back-to-back and then later replayed both separately.
There’s so much to be said about these two games, but I’ll sum up my feelings in a few bullet points:
- HL1 is more thematically unified. It plays true to its Sci-Fi & Die Hard roots up to the point of campiness, but that fits rather well for a game whose protagonist is effectively a nerdy Doom Marine – more a force-of-nature embodiment of survival than traditional hero.
- HL2, on the other hand, feels weighed-down by this legacy. It wants to tell a serious story about a charismatic freedom-fighter. That’s an aesthetic which clashes terribly with HL1’s mute, stoic survivalist.
- HL1 has a better core gameplay loop. It plays to its strengths: gunplay & level exploration. Exposition & puzzling are almost always delivered through these mediums wherever possible. Those few chapters which depart from this philosophy (On a Rail, Xen) are the weakest in the whole game as a result.
- HL2, by contrast, seems almost insecure. It only trusts the player to stick with the core gameplay-loop for a few chapters at most before pivoting into yet another gimmick – almost all of which (barring the gravity gun sequence) feel painfully drawn out:
- Water Hazard: Boating
- Highway 17: Driving
- Sandtraps: Physics “Puzzling” + “Platforming”
- Nova Prospekt: Wave-Based Point Defense
What do you guys think? There’s a lot worth unpacking here which I couldn’t quite articulate. What are your takeaways?
Good response, HL2 was originally done to show the new capabilities of their “new” source engine. (They eventually gave up cause steam is more profitable.) So when you take that into consideration, most of the game design decision and choice make sense.
I also don’t like HL2 that much because it’s also one of the early games trying that episodic approach, which at the time is really not fulfilling as you don’t feel the game has a proper closure so you anticipate the next one more. It felt more like you left and playing next game while in middle of a Uncharted chapter and later came back and forget about the plot. That’s how I feel when I played ep2.
Oh yeah, episodic gaming definitely wasn’t working for anyone. It’s clear why Valve instead leaned into Team Fortress 2 and CounterStrike and DOTA 2 after their failures with episodic gaming. Those kept people engaged, and it’s why Valve hired an actual economist[1] to help them organize their virtual economies, where they could take a small cut of each small transaction, which along with taking a cut from gaming publishers is obviously much more profitable.
Sorry for paywalled link. Unable to find free version of link at the moment. Wikipedia article section which references link in question. ↩︎
I think episodic gaming could have worked if they’d developed a full arc and stuck to it. Probably the right way to go would have been to make at least a base version of all the episodes first, so they could have released on a steady, regular schedule instead of “whenever it’s done, then never”.