[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.