The inevitable Half-Life 2 Thread

[Soulicro]

Haha, that little "webcam threat" just made my day.

 

[[SAS]Orion]

i'd just like to say that revitalized price's post is fake - it is impossible to do what he suggested.
Also the wording of the "quote" is highly suspect - further reinforcing that it is indeed a hoax.

 

[KilledWithStyle]

I finished the game yesterday
PWNZORZ

MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE part was the boat system. I had so much fun witht that. I spent hours just playing the air boat levels. Even better than the dunebuggy.

 

[Vagabond]

I finished the game yesterday
PWNZORZ

MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE part was the boat system. I had so much fun witht that. I spent hours just playing the air boat levels. Even better than the dunebuggy.

i competed it today i liked hl2 but i need a continueation to the story badly

 

[Phatslugga]

As for the grav gun...i do the same thing. I went through most of ravenholm using only the gravgun, with the shotgun for those really fast zombies. And if you liked the saws, did you ever try the propeller like things they have on the engine blocks? I shot one and it careened down the street, ripping apart 5-6 zombies. It was great. And Father Grigori was hilarious. If think Ravenholm alone may have been enough to justify this game for me.

Yeah I found one too, and the sweet thing was when I shot it, it hit a wall and started spinning, tearing the bunghole out of a handful of zombies. It was awesome. :laff:

 

[Ravendust]

I completed it today too, only highlight the below text if you've completed it (so as not to spoil the later game):

Spoilers


Was anyone else severly confused and dissapointed with the story and/or ending?? I thought a storyline was supposed to tell a story, and an ending was supposed to...end it. And where were those watery snakes (Hydra's) from the trailers? The whole thing seemed too short. My oppinion of the game just dropped. I guess now we'll have to wait another four years for Half-Life 3 to explain everything that could have been explained in HL2's ending in about 5 minutes. /angst


/Spoilers

 

[owa]

Hydras's were dropped from my knowledge, and the ending may only be that way to leave it open for expansions to expand it.

Think about it... Half-Life 1 wasn't really explained at the end, you had an idea, but you were still kind of confused. Then out comes Oppsing Force, and Blue Shift, and they slightly added on to the story.

 

[Ravendust]

Oh yeah I forgot about official expansions, hopefully they're already in development, thanks Owa

At the end of Half-Life 1 you got part of a picture, Xen was under government control, Gordon was working for the Gman (the government) and only a handful of people made it out of Black Mesa (Kliener, Vance) etc

However, At the end of Half-Life 2 (spoilers) I was sitting there thinking 'please don't be the end, please don't be the end, please don't be the end...' and it ended before things had really kicked off, you learn so little from the Citadel (where I expected everything to unfold) and most of the ends were loose ones, what happened to Vance and Mossman? How about Alyx? Not to mention the mystery of the Gman posed by Nihlanth at the end of HL1 ("...He is not man...") remained untouched, in fact you barely saw him. It could all have been a dream. Come on Valve, don't leave us in the dark. (/spoilers)

EDIT1: Does anybody know when the SDK and Hammer v4 are coming out?
EDIT2: Got it!

 

[Sonic the Vampire]

Indeed.

Uh... spoiler talk below!

I was also disappointed by the ending. As a matter of fact, I think Doom 3 had a better ending... and that ending was terrible. Still, I had enough fun playing through half life 2, *especially* the last level with the ultra grav gun, to play through it again on hard. True, the hydra shouldn't have been removed, and the ending should have been at least three times as long with about 15x more story, but it doesn't damage my opinion of the game enough to say it isn't great. I hope against hope there will actually be expansions, I'd like to bust back in there with the guy from opposing force and continue the story.

End of spoilers.

The grav gun is crazy versatile, I keep finding new users for it, like grabbing one of those spinning blade bots and... well... try it.

 

[Hitokiri]

Just played through the whole thing. The game itself was amazing. The plot was good, and it kept you very intrigued throughout the whole game. The characters actually gained personalities and developed; they became a lot more real.

The problem is that, as everybody said, all they did was throw out little hints about the secrets and then WHOOPS! They completely cop-out on the ending, giving you no idea what the hell happens in the aftermath, and don't tie up 90% of the loose ends and facts you'd been hoping to figure out by the end.

I disagree that the physics were just a novelty. Physics defined how the game played and felt. It wasn't just about unplugging TVs or knocking over boxes. Just look at that part in the beginning, with the helicopter. You can see your flimsy wooden cover get ripped apart piece by piece, barrels knocked over and sent flying, bodies floating in the water, all of that. Part of a good gaming experience is immersion, and what helps that is a sense of realism. There's a big difference between a pre-scripted death animation vs. an enemy toppling over, spinning from your shot and sliding across the ground. There's a big difference between seeing an enemy get "gibbed" and seeing and enemy get sent flying into the air, then smashed again by a second explosion.

The HL team sort of prided itself on their ability to explain things. There were no huge empty rooms filled with ammo+health packs, the chargers on the wall were explained, etc. The one thing that slipped past the radar was the massive amount of explosive barrels. Yeah, they made no sense. But aren't they friggin' fun as hell?

While other shooters rely mainly on your accuracy and combat instinct, HL2 brings in a certain factor of thought. You get to make decisions with the materials before you, and the speed at which you make some of these decisions is important. You need to know WHEN to shoot an explosive barrel, or to pick it up and toss it, or to spare it. You need to be aware of your surroundings; should/can you take out the support beams on that dock or platform? Are there any huge objects around I can use as a shield? As a weapon?

About the enemy AI... I honestly think they aren't much smarter than they were in HL1. They take cover sometimes, dodge a little bit, they DO run from grenades, throw grenades when you're hiding, etc. That was all stuff they did in HL1. I dunno about timing barrels to roll into you and such. Never really tested that out.


Overall though? Great game, deserves the hype. However, the ending makes me want to beat my head in with an iron pipe. It felt more like a cop-out than a cliffhanger.

 

[tolore]

i am REALLY loving htis game, i agree with those that said ravenholm itself was worth the game, that was a great great level(they need saws in the later part of the game ).
The level with the ant lions is also awesome.

As fir physics being nothing but a novelty, its saved my butt, many times. Its also endangered it, because what do you know, that cover can be blown away, either way the affect is awesome. Plus with the gravity gun tehres all sorts of fun things you can do.

Seriously though, play through ravenholm at least if you don't think the game is great, that level is scary, and i liked to play marine AvP missions at night in the dark.

 

[Ravendust]

I started it again on Hard as I felt Normal wasn't challenging enough, fun though.

Question on the story:

(spoilers)

Who were the combine? At first I thought they were some sort of government force but they seem to be acting irrespective of the Gman, in fact if you look through the telescope on the beach you can see him talking to resistance members on the other side of the bay. But the Gman is working for the government and the government has control of Xen (according to the end of HL1) but then in HL2 the combine have Xen so they can use alien technology and headcrabs missles etc...it doesn't add up. I'm hoping that the first expansion pack they release is a continuation of the HL2 single player campaighn that ties up all the loose ends and clears up the story...as well as a proper ending. If you look on the Steam Forums there is a general outcry of confused gamers who also felt cheated at the end.
(/spoilers)

 

[SaiyanPrideXIX]

Say it pride, i want to hear it from you and smith both. I was right all along. Half-Life 2 > Doom 3 by a very long shot.

I got it, its the best thing i've played since.. half life 1.. or maybe even scarcraft.. who knows..

Actually, no.

I'm really furious about one thing about HL that is making me get more and more pissed off, and that is the fact that the engine is so obviously made off of the half-life 1 engine, and it irritates me. Now, I didn't expect them to start from scratch, but I also didn't expect to recognize the whole game. As I mentioned before, the texturing eats it, but that isn't really that bad--what IS bad is that there is an incurable audio skipping bug that is plaguing me and apparently like 30,000 other people on the steam forum. Upon research, we realized that this audio stuttering was even in the E3 G-Man demo from last year. A year old massive bug affecting systems of all specs and versions, and it was ignored. The glitch is unfixable, as we have been working hard at it since release, and there is no magic config tweak or anything like that.

That's why valve let gamespy and ign review it on an installed version on one of THEIR in house machines. To avoid a pathetic review because from the very first frame the sound skips.

There are also a number of people having horrible texture problems, where the textures just aren't there. Other people are getting an odd "object shredding" effect.

The install practically asked for my social security number. That was a minor 4 hour annoyance, thanks to steam.

The game also takes a whole five minutes to get to the menu. Before it loads the level in the background, you can see that it does the old HL1 thing, of being 640x480 until it loads a map. Pathetic.

That sound glitch and the huge load times apparently carry over to all the Source games. People say it is happening in CS and Bloodlines. Nice to know they sold a fundamentally broken engine.

The gameplay seems like it is really good, and I like a lot of the physics puzzles and the frantic escapes you have to do at times, but the game is like 10,000x less enjoyable when the 60fps hiccups to 1 intermittently and randomly throughout each level. But this reeks of stereotypical half-assery of Valve. Or as we with the glitch call them, Va-Va-Va-Va-Va-Valve.

Also, htere is like no bump mapping at all except on head crabs as far as I've played. That is just sad--to say this game is comparable to Doom 3's engine when it can't even do what was in fact a minor feature in that game.

To summarize:

HL2's gameplay and puzzles seem really good.

HL2's engine doesn't hold a candle to Doom's, though. The only thing they did an awesome job on was the water; otherwise it's half life 1 with copied Max Payne physics. It just reinforces my feeling sthat Valve are a bunch of corner cutting amateurs when it comes to technology.

Hopefully they patch soon so I can enjoy the game more. The fps drop is VERY annoying and I'd like to give it a fair shot, as it is obviously a good game.

 

[Big Kyle]

I have no Idea what you are talking about Pride.

Anyways Half-Life 2 > Bloodlines > Halo 2 > Doom 3

After playing Bloodlines for awhile the story has bumbed it up over Halo2 ^_^

 

[Ravendust]

It's possible to play HL2 over a LAN, both DM and Co-op, it's unofficial and slapdash but it's a start.

First, grab the MP HL2 map:
http://home.ripway.com/2004-11/205425/hl2multitest.zip

Put it in your HL2/maps folder.

Load up HL2 and from the menu open up the console:

net_start

deathmatch 1

maxplayers 2

map hl2multitest

restart

The person on the other computer has to add your I.P manually to join, make sure they know it.

Anyway, it works, it's not great but it's a start, though obviously not designed to be used like this. The noticeable shortfalls are that there is no player model (just a black, untextured human for mapping purposes) and that the ping spikes a little on each breakable.

For co-op, use the same as above but with maxplayers as 0 and the mapname as any of the official SP maps. Don't do a vehicle map as they're only one-seater.

It would be possible online but 'sv_lan 0' doesn't appear to change it from 'sv_lan 1'. Anyway, have fun manipu-punting barrels at each other, juggling cinderblocks and smashing drawers over each other :laff:

 

[Big Kyle]

or you could just play Counter Strike Source and wait until mods come out for it.

 

[Phatslugga]

The sound skipping isn't that bad at all. It can get annoying, but it doesn't mean the engine is "broken", and the loading times are long, but the overall performance of the game is better than Doom 3 was, and I haven't even tweaked anything yet. I had the same issues with Doom 3 anyway, and Im sure there was a fix, but it just didnt bother me enough. Most of the stuff that was pointed out are minor details that don't matter to most gamers. I think it's the best shooter out right now.

 

[ZariusZer0]

Yeah, the only thing that's annoyed me is the long initial load time. The ones in game seem much shorter, and while a touch annoying sometimes, it's livable. I haven't had the sound skipping problem at all.

 

[-Origin]

Even Vampire Bloodlines has the sound stutter problem. :\

 

[UnoriginalMind]

I must be lucky because i got half-life 2 silver over steam! but it took a day to update . I have been playing it non-stop since the 17th. It is great. but HL:source has only new physics,blood effects, weapon graphics an the like.Would have been nice to see the new models in HL:S. The main downside is THE F**KING ANT LIONS AAAAAAAARRRGH! The most annoying enemy until you get the bugbait. Then they become the best ally. I like what happened with the vortigaunts.