[eterm]

Absolutely this. In half-life you were exposed to a world and left to figure out what was going on from that. You were rarely directly told to do anything.

For the first hour or two you were implored to, "Get to the surface" because it was your and your fellow scientists hope of being rescued.

When you run into the marines you aren't told they're bad, they just start trying to kill you and you figure out that you're not getting a rescue.

World-building wise it was leaps ahead of anything that came before it and the in-game (rather than FMV) dialogue was fantastic and immersive.

It didn't have "level screens", the level transitions were natural rather than forced with loading screen hints and title cards.

While that's all completely standard now, the other competitor titles at the time were games like Quake 2 and half-life's predecessors were games like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, which while both ground-breaking in their own way weren't a touch on the visceral world of half-life.

The only other FPS games that came close to lore was rainbow six, but that was the "set pieces" style of choosing levels and going through rehearsed action rather than what felt like an emergent world in half-life.

While replaying half-life now it feels far more linear and scripted, that's because we have nearly 15 years of gameplay improvements built on top of where it lay the foundations.

For players at the time, going from games like quake to half-life it really did feel like it was genre defining.

[MomoXenosaga]

Half-life opening tram ride and test chamber were revolutionary. Nobody else had done something quite like that. Other games gave you the backstory in the manual and dropped you straight into the action.

[gary_0]

Half-Life is the "Seinfeld is unfunny" of FPS games.

[watwut]

> When you run into the marines you aren't told they're bad, they just start trying to kill you and you figure out that you're not getting a rescue.

That is not exactly subtle nor needs much figuring. Them trying to kill you is game telling you they are bad in very straightforward way.

[freeflight]

Let's be a bit more specific here: The first scene where the player encounters the marines is one where a scientist runs up to one of them, and gets gunned down by the marine.

That kind of scripted event, and environmental story-telling, was extremely novel in a FPS game back then.

It's easy to nowadays handwave that away as merely "Marines shoot player, player realizes Marines are enemy" like that kind of heavy scripting is just something mundane. But back then it wasn't mundane, it was quite revolutionary.

Before that the norm in the genre was mostly maze shooters with very limited NPC interactions, like certain Doom enemies fighting each other or some wall or another blowing up in Quake, Half-Life took all of that and brought it to a whole new level.

[watwut]

To be clear, I did played the game back then. I did not perceived it as subtle or indirect or needing to figure out. Back then years ago, that in the moment game moment was "ah, OK, soldiers are supposed to be bad guys and I am supposed to kill them".

Back then, half life was one of the games that made me think about how linear games are evolving to be. At one place, you could decide to go left or right and it joined back together quickly. It was straightforwardly prescripted, which is something we discussed with friends a lot.

I did not needed hindsight of years and my current experience. If anything now I have less experience as I spend significantly less time playing games like this.

[bsanr2]

Games have always been pretty linear, though. The ones that had a notable degree of "freedom" found that freedom in

a) Choosing which enemies to go and kill with your chosen color of pixel burst.

or

b) Choosing which set of text and vaguely representational spritework the game would expose to you.

Many "linear" games offer tactical rather than strategic freedom. There is a sort of conservation of experiential depth, limited by the players' ability/inclination to absorb new interaction concepts, and the availability of developer resources to build them.

[paulryanrogers]

> Many "linear" games offer tactical rather than strategic freedom.

This is a good way to put it IMO. Command and Conquer is an interesting exception in the action genre because it had some meta strategy in branching missions of the over world.

[watwut]

> Many "linear" games offer tactical rather than strategic freedom

Half life was not one of them. At the time, they were games that allows more strategizing and more tactic and more micro choices. Half life was as prescribed as it gets.

[nkrisc]

That’s the game showing you they’re bad with gameplay instead of telling you with a cutscene or text.

[mcphage]

That sounds like it’s still a cut-scene, just one done in-engine. Does the player have any control over the encounter, like shooting the marine or the scientist, before the scene begins?

[crtasm]

Here's the moment, unclear if you have full control but I don't think it locked you in to watching..? https://youtu.be/nHXtv11ZAH4?t=184

yes here's a clip of someone saving the scientist: https://youtu.be/e_l84_7jDoU?t=163

[mcphage]

That works—I wish the game had responded, but at least it's not a cutscene you're locked into.

[watwut]

Games were showing rather then telling long before half life. That was not something special. I don't know whether people here did not played games other then half life back then or half life is only thing they remember.

And the difference between full cit scene and what happened in half life was really really minor.

[crtasm]

But not in first person, you-are-present-in-a-3D-world games? At least I'm not remembering any that felt like Half Life 1 did.

The difference between a cut scene and embodying a character while things happen around you isn't a minor thing for many of us.

[watwut]

The castle of wolfestein or doom are both significantly older and allow more freedom. System shock was a year later and allowed actual tactical choices and somewhat strategical o es.

Half life was part of pattern of moving towards extremely linear. It had better graphics than normal at the time. It had attempt at actual story. It was not move toward more agency to the player nor toward subtlety.

It had less choices than normal at the time, not even in terms of whether to hide on left or right, less options for tactical decisions, less of anything like that.

[crtasm]

You've jumped from talking about storytelling to player freedom, I'm certain I way had more agency in HL1 than Doom.

[hypertele-Xii]

You're gonna have to list some pre-Half-Life games that did a better job.

[watwut]

Wolfestein or doom. The thing is, half life allowed exactly zero choice. So anything where you can go back or have a choice between opening left or right door is better in terms of player agency.

In terms of showing rather then telling via text, almost anything has that aspect.

Half life had very good graphics for the time. That is where it shined.

[hypertele-Xii]

Half-Life has a bunch of player/story choices. Most of them small and inconsequential, I'll grant you, like the microwave incident, but Half-Life even ends on a meaningul story player choice - whether to accept the job proposal.

Wolfenstein and Doom have literally zero story choices of any kind. Not even inconsequential ones!

Clearly, Half-Life has superior story telling to Wolfenstein or Doom. Not by much, can be argued, but it clearly does. And at the time, the little bit felt like a whole lot compared to literally nothing.

[ChrisKnott]

Yes but even this was revolutionary at the time - to reveal that information through gameplay rather than cutscene or text.