Ubisoft target audience when they play a good game
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Not to play the devils advocate but they do have an argument. Not in the physics point because physics haven't been done to death so that part of Half-life 2 IMO is still fresh. But the rest of Half-life 2 can be dull and boring and nonsensical if played today. Half-life 2 was such a cultural shift that everything great about it has been dissected, analyzed and improved upon wherever possible.
Much like Half-life 1 the things that made the game great are industry standard now. You're used to the greatness so all you see are the flaws. The boat section is too long, the car section is poorly paced, the story is too cryptic, the list probably goes on. But anyone who played it at launch knows how fucking sick the game is because there was nothing else like it.
That's an insane claim to me. HL2 set the bar for worldbuilding. From the guy muttering "don't drink the water" in the train station, to the people and vortigaunts building homes in the sewers, to the stick legged stalkers waddling around the citadel, HL2 took "show don't tell" to heart. It was the most immersive experience anyone had played in a video game up to that point, or for years after.
I'll grant you that other games have learned a lot from it, but I would say the vast majority haven't. Games still come out today where everything needs to be spoonfed to the player literally for them to stop and process what they're looking at, instead of just running and gunning mindlessly.
When you say HL2 can be boring and nonsensical if played today, the first thing that comes to mind are all the people who turn movie subtitles on, and then for 75% of the runtime their eyes are in the bottom 1/3 of the screen, not taking in any of the visual information the filmmaker is putting in front of them. Like, yeah, HL2 is quite boring when you're not looking at it.
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That feels like a bit of a hate train on SOMA that's not really relevant. We often dislike character idiocy, especially when it's our player. But speaking protagonists can be done well - Dead Space 2 made the move, and even ported it back when they finally did a DS1 remake.
Perhaps the only major issue with using environmental storytelling to give City 17's base exposition is that the game is both a sequel, and intended as an entry point. I remember as a kid playing HL2 (with very little knowledge of HL1) and as soon as I saw the aliens in gas masks corralling everyone, really wondered what sort of story I missed in the first one. Leaving people to figure things out is definitely cool, I'm just offering ways to point out clearly that you, the player, didn't miss anything key, because in today's media deluge, often the reason for that feeling is because a story is slapdash and poorly written - as opposed to simply hiding the details in plain sight for the player to find.
Interestingly, there are some notes in an art book where the G-Man originally gave a longer opening speech to explain what's happened in your absence, but they removed it. Overall it was probably the right move, but I'm curious how it would have felt.
That feels like a bit of a hate train on SOMA that’s not really relevant. We often dislike character idiocy, especially when it’s our player. But speaking protagonists can be done well - Dead Space 2 made the move, and even ported it back when they finally did a DS1 remake.
Yeah, the DS1 remake had Isaac talking, and they did it pretty decently because he's not constantly surrounded by people who have answers to questions that Isaac has. The game is still about finding out what happened, and nobody can answer that, so you can't talk about it. You're discovering it with Isaac AND the other survivors. In DS2 you can't really ask all that many questions about unitology, because people don't really know the answers either.
But it would ruin all the interesting stuff about HL2's history discovery. If someone just tells you "Oh yeah, the combine conquered the earth, and now they're using these hybrid soldiers to suppress humanity after their military conquest, and their citadel is slowly expanding an ever more repressed population in this city" that's not nearly as interesting as finding it out. But if Gordon asks, anyone would know the info, because they lived through it. By having a silent protagonist, people can just assume Gordon's been around and knows this stuff, and not magically kidnapped by a supernatural magic guy in a suit who keeps mysteriously following him around. Half the fun in HL2 is figuring out the world, it's a core concept of the game. You learn something for yourself, you figure it out by putting it togehter. Having G-Man spell it out would remove the fun. And having Gordon spell it out for the player would definitely detract from the game too. HL2 really hit that level of natural discovery, and making it optional to the game enjoyment.
Of course, launching it today removes a lot of the fun too, since there will just be 5000 youtubers repeating eachother about the game.
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I expected a really bad take, but this is not it. HL2 has strength, but the story is not it. It's okay, but I want you to remember that the ending of HL2 is just not good - neither to 'boss fight' nor the deus ex machina ending.
Even the gameplay gets boring when you have the "op" gravity gun.
I prefer HL1 to HL2. The physics riddles are not hard either and I think Stratholm is only "horror" for people with no xp in Survival Horror games.
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Half-Life 2 would be a mediocre game if you lacked empathy for people in conditions where the protagonist (the player) starts.
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Its world building and such is visual story telling.
It’s much more rare nowadays in new video games that have this style of physics or visual storytelling. It’s a game that will always be a fresh experience to me anytime I replay it.
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Okay but like, Half Life 2 is similar to Citizen Kane.
A revolutionary piece of media for its time that brought the medium as a whole forward.
And kind of a slog to get through now because we learned a lot of lessons about the medium since then.
Like I'm sorry, but you're not going to convince me that the strider fights on your way to the citadel were actually good and definitely not a painful chapter that soured a lot of people ln the game. And Water Hazard is infamous for being very uninteresting to the point that people that play half life now joke about it.
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He said that he played through it in PS3 back in the day
Can Godmode be toggled in PS3?
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Watch Dogs 2 is a weird one. I absolutely understand all the criticism and see the flaws, but I still play it and the breaks between two runs only get shorter. I love its rendition of SF and the Bay Area, the game has that je-ne-sais-quoi that draws me towards it.
Watch Dogs Legion though? Oh my goodness...
Thank you! I believe both titles are
abs((float)$incredible)/INF... The story, characters, references, technical features, or every single bit and algorithm is perfect...Not to mention upgraded kernels and shells, including drones and 'dgets!
Yet it all may not match the "good" you are searching for at this particular moment, or would it? How could we know!
Both titles were developed by different genius teams even, the former is Ubisoft Monreal, the latter - Ubisoft Toronto!
I.e. Even ifMetaSploitand notSnyk's orPortSwigger's but FOSS is there... you may still find that the payload in all the exploits the solution provides you with, written by OSINT or more hopefully red... authors on the wires, is indeed a required parameter to be set upon execution/injection by you, the main host in the network!
How to not find
Watch_Dogs 2andWatch_Dogs Legionboth very different and ineffably marvelous...
I uploaded a few screenshots found in some remote backups:
- Watch_Dogs 2: https://imgur.com/a/GZ7F88U;
- Watch_Dogs Legion: https://imgur.com/a/U07Yfch (Wrench is there, too, with Aiden!);
Being bored and hateful is a choice. It all depends on what you are searching for, doesn't it ^^
That is so... meta! ~ Wrench
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Its world building and such is visual story telling.
This makes me think that the guy ran through the game instead of playing it. Just because what happened isn't spoonfed it doesn't mean it's not there.
Reminds me of all the haters of Dear Esther. -
Can Godmode be toggled in PS3?
I don't know that, I would guess not, probably
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I did that for Control when I played that, I was just ready to be done. Im guessing by every other part of the review the person was also just ready for the game to end
I suppose people who don't enjoy overcoming challenges or figuring out strategies wouldn't enjoy a lot of videogames in general.
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I have yet to play half life 2 (waiting on my son to get the motivation to help me beat decay, I’ve beat the other expansions)
But I can’t imagine that half life 2 doesn’t hold up when the first game is a masterpiece that holds up better than pretty much any FPS released after it
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Sorry, no. And I am sorry you found LLM useful, and consider experimental/unverified data "dangerous", likely inadequately or for the sense of hateful trolling, and it's hard to live that way, I presume...
Related:
- https://lemmy.world/post/41419554/21487153
- https://mander.xyz/post/45102281/24408089
- https://lemmus.org/post/41151011/21366171Wanna share your ambien? I want to speak walrus with you.
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I suppose people who don't enjoy overcoming challenges or figuring out strategies wouldn't enjoy a lot of videogames in general.
What does that have to do with anything? If someone's mentally checked out of the game so much that continuing to play through it becomes a slog, I can't blame them for cheating just to get it over with.
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What does that have to do with anything? If someone's mentally checked out of the game so much that continuing to play through it becomes a slog, I can't blame them for cheating just to get it over with.
If you're not going to enjoy playing the game then you're better off not finishing it, because by finishing it that way you've robbed yourself of the joy of overcoming the challenge.
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If you're not going to enjoy playing the game then you're better off not finishing it, because by finishing it that way you've robbed yourself of the joy of overcoming the challenge.
What challenge? HL2 is not a particularly difficult game. And there isn't going to be any joy in overcoming whatever challenge you're talking about if they're hating every second of the game. Its not like we're talking about a souls-like where they cheated because they couldn't defeat a boss. No, they cheated because they got bored, not because of some imaginary skill issue.
And they're not better off quitting if they still want to know how the game ends.
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I mean, Kleiner saying "I had expected more warning!" is a sort of mixed surprise. If he's been gone for 20+ years, the natural reaction I might expect is "What...? That's impossible! We all thought you were dead! Or lost in Xen forever!" Heck, even Kleiner's reaction to the "slow teleport" you and Alyx take late in the game is much grander. "I had...given up hope of ever seeing you again!!"
Yeah, that's probably because Kleiner knew the G-Man was involved in the interdimensional shit and had Gordon in stasis (or whatever), and he expected more warning when Gordon was on his way back, not just have him dropped on the doorstep, whereas the slow teleport was entirely experimental, accidental, and unexpected.
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I have yet to play half life 2 (waiting on my son to get the motivation to help me beat decay, I’ve beat the other expansions)
But I can’t imagine that half life 2 doesn’t hold up when the first game is a masterpiece that holds up better than pretty much any FPS released after it
Unfortunately several parts do not hold up when you remove the novelty and temporal context. The whole game was mind blowing when it was new; I very much enjoyed it then. On a subsequent playthrough years later, there were definitely parts that just did not hold up. I used the console liberally at times because I couldn't be bothered to do them for real.
I think it's the consequence of bringing a truly revolutionary game to market with limited resources. There are clearly portions that exist to showcase the cool shit they could do rather than to drive the narrative or be genuinely fun.
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Tbh, that's just the difference between someone who has nostalgia for a game and someone who doesn't.
I played Pokemon Red as a kid. I replayed it dozens of times since and it's always really fun. Just feels good.
I didn't play Pokemon Gold as a kid. I tried to play it quite a few times and never got throught it. Objectively, Gold is a much better game than Red in every regard. But I don't have nostalgia for it, so it's just an old game with bad UX, outdated gameplay and weak graphics to me. Can't get through it without getting bored and quitting.
HL2 was revolutionary, 22 years ago. Nowadays it's just woefully outdated in every respect including gameplay.
As OOP says e.g. about physics: That stuff was amazing in 2004, but it really isn't in 2026. Almost every shooter includes physics and in many cases better physics than HL2 did. In part because game designers have learned from HL2 and other games and improved upon it.
If you have nostalgia for HL2 because you played it as a kid, it's still going to be amazing to play. If you don't, then it won't.
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Idk, of all the ways you could criticize Ubisoft, dragging this random guy just because he didn't care too much for HL2 (and then took the time to write down his thoughts instead just going "game bad
") feels silly.They make some good points about how we view "classic" games too.
A lot of 16-bit games are remembered fondly because of things like "look at how many colors are on the screen at once! Look at how big the sprites are- they're almost as big as the arcade version! Hear how there are 4 separate audio tracks that kind of almost sound like real instruments sometimes!".
Mario 64 is a great example for me. I hear other people was nostalgic about how incredible it was to be able to move in 3D space at the time, and how they spent hours just wandering around levels and marveling at the technology. For me, I did that with Crash Bandicoot (which came out a few months earlier in the US). And shortly after Spyro blew them both out of the water with its incredibly smooth controls and, imo, better graphics and sound. When I've tried to go back and play Mario 64 I find it a clunky mess of a game, more of a tech demo than anything else.
On the one hand I can respect the pioneers. The original thinkers who push the frontiers of what art can be. On the other hand, those games that rely so heavily on being "revolutionary for their time" often don't hold up well decades later when tons of games have done what they did better. I think it's possible to appreciate those games for what they did without enjoying going back and playing them.
When I look back at what I've played the past couple years, games like Control and Horizon: Zero Dawn stick out. I don't think either one of them had anything particularly innovative or new. I see any games coming out today where I say "wow that's a Control-like" game. But what they did do was execute on a high level, with a lot of polish and very few flaws. I think that's the biggest strength of AAA games: execution, not innovation.
