I've been overcome by nostalgia lately, so as expected, here is another post about Half-Life! At the time the first Half-Life was released (in 1998), there were already too many first person shooters which were considered groundbreaking (like Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem 3D). Although Half-Life was a first person shooter on the surface, it was radically different from every other first person shooter released until that point. Before reading this post, please keep in mind that whatever I'm saying here is with respect to the year 1998, and may not be entirely relevant today.
The first thing you'll notice is that Half-Life (and every other game in the series) doesn't have traditional videos or cut-scenes. You're never taken out of the protagonist's perspective, and the entire story is told through the happenings in the environment and the non-playing characters' (NPC) dialogs. In fact, the level of immersion is so deep that the protagonist doesn't even speak a single word (because its not possible for the actual human playing the game to be able to speak as the protagonist). Also, Half-life's protagonist is just a scientist, which is unique because he isn't a soldier or mercenary as in the case of other games (which means he isn't trained in using weapons effectively). This sense of vulnerability is ever present almost throughout the game.
Half-Life doesn't have traditional 'levels' as most other games. The entire game is one huge, continuous level by itself, and the gameplay is only interrupted by brief 'loading' messages (which just last a couple of seconds) while loading another area of the game. Also, Half-Life has a rich and varied color palette, which is in stark contrast to previous first-person shooters because they had environments which felt a bit dull and claustrophobic.
The placement of items in the game is significantly different. You won't find pickups like health, armor, ammunition, keys etc. floating on the ground (which was the norm in other games). Instead, you'll find them in more realistic locations and they never float. Health packs are found on racks or tables, and you can regain health by recharging from wall outlets. The concept of 'armor' is different in Half-Life, because the the amount of protection is determined by the remaining electric charge in your suit. You can recharge it by picking up spare batteries, or through a wall mounted unit. Similarly, ammo is found in storage crates, on racks, or on the bodies of dead human enemies. There are no 'keys' in half-life to access locked rooms, so you actually need to get an NPC (a scientist or security guard) who has access to that door to follow you, so that he can unlock it for you. Everything seems completely natural and realistic.
Half-Life was probably the first action game to feature physics based puzzles in a first person shooter. Unlike other games, you couldn't beat Half-Life just by running and gunning. You needed brains to solve these puzzles, which were always logical and never too tough to figure out. I'll provide a couple of examples. Early in the game, there is an area where you need to reach a higher level, but the ladder is broken. So you need to stack up 3 crates which are found nearby in the proper order (biggest one at the bottom and smallest one at the top) to create 'stairs' and reach that higher level. Then later on, you encounter a situation where there is a huge pit with barrels at the bottom, and you need to reach the other side of the pit. So you need to first get down into the pit (because this side has a ladder), arrange the barrels in a straight line towards the other end of the pit, climb back up and pull a a lever to fill the pit with water. This makes the barrels float on the water, which acts as a make-shift bridge for you to cross over to the other side of the pit (I don't remember if this scenario was from the original Half-Life or one of its expansions). These concepts were innovative, unique and much ahead of time.
Another aspect noteworthy about Half-Life was its bosses, or rather the boss battles. Until that point, the boss enemies in most games were just those who had several times more health than normal enemies, and usually appeared huge too. To kill them, you just had to pump them full of lead until their enormous amount of health got depleted and they died. Half-life's bosses too are huge, but the similarity with other first person shooters ends there. It is impossible to kill these boss enemies even if you unload all your ammo from every weapon on them. You need to think out of the box, and use your environment to kill them. For example, the first boss enemy you encounter in the game needs to be killed by turning on various switches (which are scattered in different areas and present challenges of their own to reach them) so as to create an electricity leak at one particular location, and then lure that boss there so that he gets electrocuted to death. Then later on towards the end of the game, you encounter another boss enemy who is invincible to your attacks in general. But still you need to shoot him at specific intervals and keep going after him so that he finally retreats to a location where you can actually kill him (because he becomes vulnerable to your attacks in that particular location due to the environment). There are 6 boss enemies in the game, and only one of them can be killed by conventional methods. The remaining 5 must be killed in other, not so obvious ways which requires you to think in a completely different way.
The final point about the gameplay worthy of mention, is the significantly improved Artificial Intelligence (AI) of both friends and foes, compared to other similar games of the era. The non-human enemies don't blindly charge at you. Smaller enemies attack you in groups, whereas bigger and stronger enemies usually attack individually or in pairs. Even then, they avoid brute force type of attacks. When you're far from them, they just spit acid on you, zap you with electric bolts, shoots fireballs at you or something else (depending on the type of enemy). But once you get close to them, they abandon all these attacks and just take you head on. Its innovative no doubt, but its nothing compared to the AI of human enemies. They almost always hunt you in groups, and you can even hear their chatter about how they plan to kill you, until they spot you and begin their attack. They're just too smart. If you're hiding in a corner of a large area full of human enemies and are waiting for them to charge at you one by one so that they become cannon fodder for your automatic rifle, that simply won't happen. They just lob a grenade at your hiding spot to flush you out, and be done with it. If you somehow survive this grenade attack, they just kill you with a single shot (because you're health would already be very low due to the grenade attack). What you might not expect, is that the non-human and human enemies are also enemies themselves, so they don't hesitate to attack each other in their own ways. Whenever there is an area populated by both human and non-human enemies, its great fun watching them attack and kill each other from a distance, and then you finally just have to clean up any remaining survivors. The same level of AI applies to your allies too, although it isn't easily noticeable. Unarmed allies run to take cover, so that you can handle the enemies in any way you deem fit. Armed allies provide cover fire when you're fighting enemies (because their firearms are usually much weaker than yours) and try to protect you as well as any unarmed allies who might be present in the same area. They're VERY careful not to shoot an ally. A funny but believable consequence of you shooting an armed ally yourself (either accidentally or on purpose) is that, they just yell 'friendly fire' for the first couple of times, but after that they just open fire on you when they believe that you too are an enemy.
Now coming to the technical aspects, Half-Life uses a heavily modified version of the Quake 2 engine called the 'GoldSRC' engine. Until that point, most games only supported software rendering, or any one mode of hardware acceleration (Direct 3D or OpenGL). But Half-life was capable of utilizing both Direct 3D and OpenGL, and also supported software rendering. This ensured maximum compatibility with your video hardware. The game looked gorgeous at that time on machines which supported 3D acceleration with Direct 3D or OpenGL, but it still looked surprisingly good and ran well on other machines too. The game even supported a wide array of resolutions, which was only limited by your monitor's capabilities.
If you haven't played this gem yet, do yourself a favor and pick it up as soon as possible. The full game and its single-player expansions (Opposing Force and Blue Shift) are currently available dirt cheap. You may find the graphics extremely dated compared to today's standards and some gameplay elements might seem out of place. But if you can look past those minor issues (can't really call them issues, I guess), you're going to have a very enjoyable and thrilling experience. Once you're done with the game and its expansions, you can move on to Half-Life 2 and its episodes which again were excellent games with tons of innovation. I'll write about those in a future post. For now, I'm signing off!
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