The inevitable Half-Life 2 Thread

[TehMuffinMan]

Halo 2 got .2 points higher than Half-Life 2. That doesnt mean one is better than the other. Those of you who insist on saying that i prefer Halo 2 over Half-life are assuming way too much. To be honest, i dislike Halo fanboys as much as i dislike Half-Life fanboys. I was merely pointing out that after 6 years in production, it is obvious that it wasnt as great as we were led to believe

dont refer to that review where halo 2 was given a higher rating, they have been marked on previous occasions that they are very biast to PC based games while praising all console based games and there reviews are not very good IMO, considering every other review praises it over all, i'll go with the laws of average instead of a biast review.

just been highjacking it on my bro's comp for a couple of hours, and i must say its the first game ive played thats had so much hype and actually lived up to it, its perfect in my opinion, a game of the year no questions asked.

salute the best game this year! o/

 

[HeavyArms]

i had school till 6 P.M and thats when the shops close..... so i have to wait till tomorrow (17 nov.). I'll buy 2 silver editions , 1 for me and 1....... for me (multiple personalities )

 

[FreeDoM]

Bah, i have the game installed and i can't even play it! First it removes my saved password, so i thought i knew it, apparently i don't. So i go to retrieve the password, enter my secret word, says i can't get my password, i answered my secret question wrong or my new password is incorrect. Now i certainly know my secret question, so i try two more times. Now it's saying my account doesn't exist! Ahh the joys of steam... i'm just ranting here since i can't on their pos web server that's down too. Wonderful!

 

[Valeska]

i dont give a sh*t about HL2, i only care about the engine, since vampire the masquerade bloodlines will come out on it, and way more better MODS ! :smile:

 

[DragonDude]

i dont even care that much about the game but about the engine itself and all the upcomming mods XD
but for sure ill give hl2 a try

Heh, same. I'll be getting in soon, once I've got the cash, but I'm not in any kind of a hurry.

 

[VivaLaPineapple]

to tell ya the truth i dont even like half life, ill buy it when the new CS comes out.

 

[Cold Steel]

i dont give a sh*t about HL2, i only care about the engine, since vampire the masquerade bloodlines will come out on it, and way more better MODS ! :smile:

Word. I allready have bloodlines, and it owns.

 

[Soulicro]

Pineapple - You get CS with the retail version of half life... although i suspect you might mean just a retail of CS, which isnt out yet.

 

[Ravendust]

They won't sell a retail version of CS: Source seeing as it's free on HL2's launch, it's impossible to buy a copy of HL2 that doesn't come with it

What was strange was that the Steam servers seemed to overload with all the registering, I was bought, home and registered 10 minutes within the shop opening and still had to wait for the server to spare some banwidth, I guess a lot of people bought it through Steam and downloaded instead. But at 9.30 I was up and on there and it doesn't just live up to the hype, it surpasses it. Instead of having scripted events and set pieces, the whole thing feels like one long one. Which can only be a good thing. Back to City 17!

 

[Big Kyle]

i dont give a sh*t about HL2, i only care about the engine, since vampire the masquerade bloodlines will come out on it, and way more better MODS ! :smile:

Dont avoid the swear filter, next time you get a warning.

 

[Sonic the Vampire]

I don't really get how people can say nothing about Hl2 is revolutionary. Have you actually played it? Do you see how the physics is actually used in gameplay? It's one of the *very* few (if not only) games that actually use physics in gameplay. Besides, you guys bought a first person shooter and you're acting like it isn't that great because "you shoot stuff." No nobody said that, a lot of people are implying it. A first person shooter is where you run around and shoot stuff to move through a story, and as far as moving and shooting goes, Hl2 does it fine. Hl2 isn't even very similar to half life 1 if you look past the "shooting"... there's actually some story going on, and vehicles, and the physics manipulation, different enviornments, puzzles, and a new story.

 

[Ravendust]

To comment on the new AI and physics, I just had an amazing gunfight against 3 or 4 combine and they knew what they were doing better than I was, they fired, it was in a garage sort of area, with cars and crate and whatnot. I saw them and hid, they branched out. One of them shot at a barrel causing it to fall off a raised platform and onto me. The other two took seperate paths around the cars to me to ensure there was one behind me and one to the side, surrounded. The one I shot at hid after taking a bullet while his buddy layed down some cover fire, while the barrel shooter took higher ground on some tyres to shoot over the crate I was crouching behind so i'd get caught in the crossfire. They stop at nothing.

Another time I saw 2 soldiers next to an explosive barrel, I shot the barrel for an easy kill, it burst into flames, primed to explode, and one of the soldiers knocked it away, (I think he kicked it, as the grunts in Half-Life kicked you) not just away from them, but towards me. Literally gauging how long until it exploded so that it would detonate as it rolled by me. And it did.

I refuse to believe any part of these were scripted, it's actually scary how the enemy visibly try to outsmart you. Obviously those of you who can hit a flea in a whirlwind will be accurate enough to pop heads as they appear, but even if you can I reccomend leaving them to their own devices for a while. It's mighty impressive. The first few puzzle challenges you're presented with show off the physics system better than any tech demo ever could, especially when it's so hands on.

 

[Optional]

*Cries*

Half way done through the tenth chapter (Entanglement) and still, no damn story anywhere to be found! I found it unrevolutionary but still ****ing fun! The game is verrrrry addictive.

To tell the truth, I will be seriously pissed off if the game ends without any explaination. Six more years - they better give me something.



EDIT: Sonic, it is revolutionary in terms of physics, but it isn't the first game to use nice physics. It is simply the first to apply them well. HL1 pushed the boundries of FPS games with a storyline. HL2 plays off of HL1 too closely to be revolutionary. I barely even see a story in HL2 so far.

 

[Sonic the Vampire]

Where's another game where you can use a couch as a weapon or the position of your body on an object effects its center of gravity? There are plenty of games with havok physics but none or next to none of them use it for gameplay, just eyecandy, whereas Half Life 2 almost makes an entire game out of them. I'll also take this time to note that the entirety of Half life 1 had even less story than HL2 up through chapter ten (I'm also on 10). Story is not the strongpoint of the series, it's true, but what does a game have to do to be deemed revolutionary? I consider the manipulation and application of physics to the degree that half life 2 has pulled it off to be revolutionary because I'm willing to bet games that follow in its wake will start putting more work into making use of their physics systems.

 

[SaiyanPrideXIX]

One thing I liked was at a point I half-assedly stacked some boxes, and when I got to the top of them, the pile began to tilt precariously like a cartoon character. It was intriguing...but again as I had said for months before hand, it invariably ends up being a novelty.

There are ****loads of explodable barrels everywhere, that guards stand quaintly next to. In almost every fight I've been in I've blown up a barrel so far.

I've got to be honest here...I'm kind of disappointed. I mean it's pretty good, but the engine is bugging me. I've got this bug where the sound is all miserably skippy, I think I've fixed it, but that's just weak anyhow since I saw that TONS of people with literally twice my specs got the same problems. The textures defaulted to medium, and the filtering to trilinear, and to tell you the truth I think the game looks like absolute **** on those settings. I raised the textures one to high and got little different.

I don't know about anyone else but I can very clearly see that this big source engine bit is actually just the HL1 engine with all of its limitations clipped and some VERY sparse bumpmapping. Maybe there's something wrong with my setup or something, cause there is NO WAY the textures are supposed to look as bad as they do...especially when the headcrabs look really good. There is just a ton of artifacting in the environment; I hope I can get it fixed soon.

I'm only about three hours in, but I'm thoroughly lost and confused, story-wise. I have no idea still about what city 17 is or what the hell I'm doing there. The only thing I know is that everyone apparently knows Gordon, and I'm headed for another Black Mesa type of deal.

The gameplay is pretty good (don't get caught overplaying the AI...the basis of it all is moving to get clean shots), I just really am pissed about those textures. And the sound skip. Anyone else get either of those problems?

 

[-JLN-]

Regarding the sound stuttering;

Right click "Half-Life 2" in Steam's "My Games" menu, select "Properties", then look for a button labeled somthing like "Launch Options" or some such. In the box, enter "-heapsize xxxxxx" without the quotes. The "x's" refer to RAM in kilobytes. So if you want the engine to use 256MB of RAM, you'd enter "256000". The recommendation is that you set this value to 1/2 your system RAM.

Apparently, this forces the game to preload as much as possible, significantly reducing the instances of lagging or stuttering audio. It made a noticable difference in my case. The default is something like 60MB, so this could have a dramatic impact on your performance.

I have 768MB RAM, so I set this to 384000. Now the only pauses I get are right after loading screens or when the game autosaves (pauses for about a second then is smooth after that).

Read this on some other forums I visit, thought it might be helpful here.

 

[Jesus]

well, i havent been playing it non-stop. been far too busy with other things, but from wat ive seen so far, it hasnt impressed me completely, i mean, after 6 years of waiting, you kinda expect more. sure if i just rate it as a game, it does cut highly above a lot of others, but it isnt the most revolutionary...in fact i would have to go REALLY far back to get the last revolutionary game (me thinks in order of revolutions... pong>packman>mario>sonic>ff7>hl1) those were just based on the totally new stuff that each had to offer, whether it be graphical or storyline based etc.

id still give the game 8/10....but like i said, its like valve sat on there asses for 5 years and only started working recently..

 

[Tsunami]

SaiyanPrideXIX, by looking at your system specs.....seems you need more ram. Get 1 GB of ram, that should help a lot.

This game is awesome. It's soo smoothe.......makes me wish CS: S ran this good.

The AI is awesome. even on easy there a danm pain.......

 

[Pain]

One thing I liked was at a point I half-assedly stacked some boxes, and when I got to the top of them, the pile began to tilt precariously like a cartoon character. It was intriguing...but again as I had said for months before hand, it invariably ends up being a novelty.

Yea, they shoved a lot of physics type puzzles into this. I came across a completely pointless counterweight system that could allow you to get a health powerup. One thing I do like about it is the crushing enemies with heavy objects. Especially vehicles :laff:

There are ****loads of explodable barrels everywhere, that guards stand quaintly next to. In almost every fight I've been in I've blown up a barrel so far.

Agreed, but then again, are you on easy mode? I was and there were an excessive amount of barrels. Perhaps on hard mode the guards are smarter and the player has less of an advantage. I am planning on going through again so I will find out.

I'm only about three hours in, but I'm thoroughly lost and confused, story-wise. I have no idea still about what city 17 is or what the hell I'm doing there. The only thing I know is that everyone apparently knows Gordon, and I'm headed for another Black Mesa type of deal.

Yea the storyline is pretty sparce. If you pay very close attention to things you can kind of piece together what's going on and what kind of situation you're in. I don't want to spoil anything so if anybody really must know send a PM my way and I can tell you what I've put together. I've beaten it but it's not a very satisfying at the end. I could explain why, but again, I don't want to ruin anything for those of you who haven't finished.

The gameplay is pretty good (don't get caught overplaying the AI...the basis of it all is moving to get clean shots), I just really am pissed about those textures. And the sound skip. Anyone else get either of those problems?

Yea my sound skips sometimes as well. At the beggining it sounded like the Gman had a speech impediment. Later in the game I found my screen pausing for split seconds more often accompanied by a skipping sound file. I've got a gig of ram and a radeon 9800 pro so I don't think it's just you.

This game is awesome. It's soo smoothe.......makes me wish CS: S ran this good.

The AI is awesome. even on easy there a danm pain.......

The game isn't that smooth. On many occasions I found myself skipping in step upon arrival in a level after a load point. I've even gotten caught on objects many times due to either bad mapping or coding. The AI is better than in other games it's true. One thing I've noticed though, they don't run away from grenades. Even in HL1 the AI ran their asses off when you threw a nade in their direction. The combine just seem to sit there and take it, but then again it could all be due to the easy mode. I will find out later when I play hard.

Overall my biggest problem with it is that they removed practically all of the scripted scenes that were shown in the preview videos. There are only a few still left which is kind of dissapointing.They even took the Hydra all together after we've all seen it in that preview video. Also a lack of ammo for weapons even on easy mode! What is that! That's ridiculous. I wonder what hard mode is like. The game is nice but the gaming experiance as a whole I think needs to be better.

 

[Arthos]

Well.


I see the story, I see everything great and revolutionary about this game.


It is at very least EQUAL to it's predecessor!!



I'm Sitting here, and I basically played it non stop since about 8:30-9 PM last night.....

Is it ok If I have a "fan-boy Aneuryism?"

Since I would die happy.