Nice writeup. FWIW, I never saw Michael Abrash wear a tie. :)
We were very into 3D cards back then. We had a lot of ties to that part of the world. I had been doing video drivers for OS/2 and NT. I got to know Abrash from his writing on the VGA, 8514, and, of course, asm. At Valve, we hired a couple of great guys from 3dfx. I still have a 3dfx hat somewhere that I bust out on special occasions. The killer setup back then was hooking up two 3dfx cards (SLI). But I usually played on a standard card because I wanted/needed to see it run like most people would experience it.
We had a deal with one of the companies, maybe 3dfx, but I forget who, to include the first three levels of HL with their card. Even though the game wasn't anywhere near finished, we sent off a disk to the company with our first three finished levels so we could get paid. Somehow, it leaked. We were pissed at first, but then it took off. People loved it. It really gave us the confidence that we were on the right track. It was our first game. The validation was just what we needed.
I remember being about 12 years old and downloading that leak (over 56k of course) with a friend. We were already excited for HL1 and when we discovered the leak we were absolutely blown away.
Iirc the full release wasn’t too far behind. It became the highlight of our year. We organized competitive matches and had teams with practices and tournaments. Later I got heavily into mod development which was definitely a huge inspiration for getting into software development. Some of the maps I made even got bundled on to one of those CDRoms that used to come with PC Gaming magazines. It was a lot more than just a game for me.
I’m sure there are hundreds if not thousands of others with the same story.
Tried it when it was release, then bought it myself in 1999, after I finally had managed to purchase a new PC - can't remember if it was a Nvidia TNT2 or 3dfx Voodoo 3 card I bought with it. But it was the first time I could play the game without it being sluggish and looking like crap. We had bought a family PC 4 years earlier, which had cost a fortune - but by 1998/1999 it was woefully outdated. Also, a thought: Imagine purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years.
One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years. I also vividly remember downloading all the new iterations of counter-strike, which really took off - until settling on 1.6
On a side not, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well - having only been a teenager back then, and in 25 years I'll be this old man. Wonder if all the memories from LAN-parties etc. will be as fresh in 25 years, as they are now.
> On a side note, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well
I also remember it like it was yesterday when, after school on a hot summer's day, a friend showed me this "cool new mod" he recently downloaded for Half-Life. It was an early version of Counterstrike. It took him an entire night to download the mod, and it only ran on his machine with a 320x240 resolution. It looked like crap and was basically unplayable. 6 months and a hardware upgrade later, we all played it for hours each day, and often non-stop for 12 hours on LAN parties. I also remember that you could contact the internet provider (Telekom) by mail, and after a few weeks they would activate something called "Fast-Track" for your connection, which would drop the latency from around 110ms to only 35ms, a huge advantage for MP games... it really blows my mind that all of this was 25 years ago.
In the early 2000s, CS was arguably better known than the original HL. I had some friends who probably played CS for thousands of hours, but never even touched the original HL.
I was just reminiscing about this with a friend last night. We had tons of free time and games like Counter-Strike were the wild west of creativity. My fondest memory was a Spring afternoon in 2000 after school playing some janky fan made map whose name I don't remember and feeling so happy. Everyone was playing. We played every day. We went to a 300 person LAN party that summer. We formed a 5 man team and competed online.
It was so fun cobbling together a computer that could run it. Trying every trick to squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Trying to shave a few milliseconds off my dial up ping. Going to that one guy's house who had broadband internet.
It really felt like a golden age back then.
My friends and I planned our own mod and started working on it, but our ambition outstripped our ability. That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.
About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular, but seems very focused on competitive play. I wanted to experience that public lobby on a janky fan made map feel. I found a server running custom 'zombie' maps which scratched that itch for a few days. Then I got busy again and haven't touched it since.
CS2 community servers are nothing like the 1.6 or Source golden era. Those games are still going, but the playerbase has shrunk considerably.
I'm glad I got to experience it all (primarily in Source): gun game, deathmatch, RPG, surf, jailbreak, zombie mod and escape, iceskate, sliderace, hide'n'seek, trickz, xtreme climbing, multigames, deathrun, knifeball, HE wars, vehicle maps, bob, nipper maps, even hack vs hack, and the many many communities, each uniquely flavored and with their own story.
I totally feel that. The most fun I ever had gaming was back in my teens playing various different game modes in source. And yeah the communities really made it so special, to this day I'm good friends with some people that I initially met in CSS.
I can't help but feel Valve dropped the ball with cs:go and cs2. I mean, they did become incredibly popular but IMO there was potential for so much more if they would've supported custom game modes even just a little bit.
> About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular
I played the "original" CS (at least a version that looked like 1.6) around 3 years ago, and was surprised how painless it was to install it on Linux using Steam. I was also surprised that it was still no problem to find a de_dust server with > 20 players.
> That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.
Yes. It was so easy back then to play around with game development, web development, or desktop development. Around 2002, I hosted a web site for months on my local desktop server, reachable via a DynDNS solution.
Sorry for getting nostalgic, but it was even easier in the mid-90ies. As a 9 year old, I created a Dyna Blaster clone using a Demo-Version of "Klik&Play" on Windows 3.11 [0]. You could develop quite advanced games by just dragging around sprites, animating them, listening to mouse and keyboard events and object collisions. You could even "compile" the game into a single portable .exe! It was dead simple, but it introduced me to the basic concepts of programming and animation, and I didn't even realize it. A little later, I was able to teach myself BASIC by just reading the DOS man pages. We didn't even have internet back then. I very clearly remember realizing that "if ... then ... else" statements and variables were exactly what was missing in my "Klik&Play" demo-version. In the demo, you had to simulate these concepts by triggering the spawn of a hidden moving object and listening for the collision with another object. The hidden objects encoded the game state. Basically, the developers tried to remove Turing-completeness from the demo version, but failed and forced kids like myself to restore it via wild tricks (I remember feeling very clever when I had the idea for this trick). I only realized 2 decades later how useful these experiences were for a career in computer science.
I ran a server that was primarily rat surf maps with a Warcraft/RPG server mod for years back then. It was super fun and something that modern games just can't touch in terms of that kind of niche.
It's still tons of fun but definitely different now, and since they came out with counter-strike 2 a while ago, it's me being specced out on my old gaming computer all over again - as with you I'm way too busy as a working adult to get too deep into it, was fun to play a lot during the pandemic though.
The craziest innovation I seen is counter strike 1.6 in the browser, fully playable multiplayer. Not sure how safe letting that much execution happen in wasm environment truly is but was still pretty funny to see how far the game has come in terms of graphics. Basically a bunch of the same maps still even though a couple have always been way skewed to one side or the other.
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods.
Another game from that time that was also easy to mod was The Sims 1.
For a bit of context, EA/Maxis released modding tools BEFORE the game was released, to let players create custom content for the game (like walls and floors) before the game was even released!
And installing custom content was also easy, just drag and drop files in folders related to what you downloaded and that's it.
Imagine any game nowadays doing that? Most games nowadays don't supporting modding out of the box, but of course, there are exceptions, like Minecraft resource packs/data packs. I don't think Fortnite and Roblox fit the "modding a game" description because you aren't really modding a game, you are creating your own game inside of Fortnite/Roblox! Sometimes you don't want to play a new game inside of your game, you just want to add new mods to enhance your experience or to make it more fun. There isn't a "base game Roblox", and while there is a "base game Fortnite" (Battle Royale... or any of the other game modes like Fortnite Festival or LEGO Fortnite) Epic does not let you create mods for the Battle Royale game. You can create your own Battle Royale map, but you can't create a "the insert season here Battle Royale map & gameplay but with a twist!".
Of course, sadly EA/Maxis didn't release all of the modding tools they could (there isn't a official custom object making tool for example, or a official way of editing the behavior of custom objects) but they still released way more modding tools than what current games release.
I think that most modern games don't support that easiness of modding because the games themselves are complex, because as an example: The Sims 1 walls are like, just three sprites, so you can generate a wall easily with a bit of programming skill, the skin format is in plain text in a format similar to ".obj", so on and so forth.
Lately I've been trying to create my own modding tools for The Sims 1, and it is funny when you are reading a page talking about the technical aspects of the game file formats and the author writes "well this field is used for xyzabc because Don Hopkins said so".
The hype was so hot and fast around HL when it came out, that I remember playing it without a dedicated graphics card (I think I was running on a motherboard integrated gpu) in the lowest resolution possible because there was this feeling of "you have to try it".
I got by for years on a Pentium 75 and 8mb of RAM. The specs always said the game wouldn’t work, but it did. You could get away with this right up until PC gaming (finally) moved away from DOS. One big issue was the real mode DOS Plug n play drivers (dwcfgmgr.sys - burned into my brain) which occupied just enough of my 640k that most games would fail to start cause they couldn’t claim the whole lot.
Modding was amazing back then. I wasn’t a modder myself, but it felt like something new and crazy was happening every week. The excitement for every beta release of Counter-Strike. The buzz around newcomers like Action HL, The Specialists, and PVK. Experiments like Science & Industry that didn’t last long but were a fun romp nonetheless. Endless rounds of TFC and DoD. And there were always populated community servers for any mod you plucked fom Fileplanet.
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years.
Modding still exists. It’s just called “UGC” now. Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft have thriving and accessible options. GTA has an unbelieveable number of players playing role playing mods of it too.
It's not the same though, most FPS' games lock down their code and require you to use their servers. More or less murdering any chance of modding. For example, the same time I played halflife and all the mods (including this mod named counter strike), I played the shit out of battlefield 1942. It's modding community was insane! With total conversion mode that game was like 10 different games. And for a poor teen, that and half life were god sends for getting me into gaming
It’s not the same but the environment isnt the same anymore.
There are lots of games that will let you mod the ever loving crap out of them. UEFN and Roblox are modding with distribution platforms. Cyberpunk has Bethesda level modding. Games like lethal company are existing in an indie space that was just unfathomable when I was playing those games.
Traditional modding still exists, especially for PC RPGs, where the community is huge. Also UEFN is an extremely powerful tool that sits closer to modding Fortnite than UGC for Roblox, say.
The problem is that multiplayer games and any game with a server component - and the engines that make them - are specifically designed to have security against cheating and hacks. No-one wants to play against a modded game. That makes supporting mods, even solo mods, all the more difficult, and it’s harder to make the business case for doing so.
Au contraire. There are plenty of people who would like to play against a modded game. They just might not want to play against a game that's modded differently from their own.
>Traditional modding still exists, especially for PC RPGs
Yes, I've recently been playing Fallout: London, which is a total conversion mod for Fallout 4. It obviously changes the setting to post-apocalyptic London, but also adds new quests, monsters and things. And it's pretty good quality -- in fact the mod kept getting delayed because Bethesda saw the mod in progress and kept hiring the people working on it because they were so impressed.
I just replaced my HP z800 from 2008 because it was holding it's own with the addition of a few ssd's and an RX580 GPU over the years. Went from 6c12t Xeon to 16c32t (R9950x) and 7900xt.
Performance just hasn't out paced people's needs in the last 15 years the way it used to...
Wait are you me? i shut down my z800 about a year ago (was my mainmachine for about 13 years) i buyd a second cpu for like 10$ after 5 years and upraded the ram to max, i think it was 46gb, also ssd's....and a rx580 which is still in use.
Which in turn led to an exploding mod scene, clans, hosting and
communities. Truly a world-changing game at a golden moment in game
history (beside Unreal). And yes, like a good story book a generation
have memories of escaping the crumbling Black Mesa facility chased by
alien horrors. Mission accomplished Valve.
I was knee-deep working as a technical game designer + engine programmer on Soldier of Fortune when Half-Life came out. I can't put into words the impression that the opening that game left on me; I still remember very distinctly experiencing the tram ride, just being utterly entranced, and then being deeply irritated when an artist walked over to my cubicle, saw the game, and jokily asked what was going on, pulling me out of the experience. For me, it was one of those singular experiences you only have a very, very rarely in gaming.
It's funny, though - I would say in retrospect that Half-Life had the typical vexed impact of a truly revolutionary game made by a truly revolutionary team. In terms of design, the Half-Life team was asking and exploring a hundred different interesting questions about first person gaming and design, very close to the transition from 2d to 3d. And their influence, a few years later, often reduced down to a small handful of big ideas for later games influenced by them. After Half-Life, because of the impact of their scripted sequences, FPS games shifted to much more linear level designs to support that kind of roller coaster experience (despite many of Half-Life's levels actually harkening back to older, less linear FPS design). The role of Barneys and other AI character also really marked the shift to AI buddies being a focus in shooters. And the aesthetic experience of the aggressive AI from the marines as enemies also cast a long shadow, too, highlighting the idea of enemy AI being a priority in single player FPS games.
Certainly, those were the biggest features of Half-Life that impacted our design in Soldier of Fortune, which did go on to shift to much more linear levels, much more focus on scripted events, and would have resulted in much more emphasis on AI buddies too if I hadn't really put my foot down as a game programmer (and in my defense, if you go back to FPS games from that era, poorly implemented AI buddies are often, by a wide margin, the most frustrating aspect of that era of games, along with forced poorly done stealth missions or poorly implemented drivable vehicles - the fact that Barneys were non-essential is why they worked well in the original Half-Life). You can see this shadow pretty clearly if you compare Half-Life to, afterwards, the single player aspects of Call of Duty and Halo. Both are series that, in their single player form, are a lot more focused and a lot less varied than Half-Life was, but they clearly emphasize those aspects of Half-Life I just mentioned. And in practice, those were the single player FPS games that were in practice actually copied for quite a while.
Thank you for soldier of fortune. It was a pioneer in its own way with how brutal the enemy destruction was. I loved it. Incredible game that is up there with DOOM, Half Life and Halo for me.
> It was far from flawless, but it was really trying to push the boundaries of a young medium.
Great read, it made me realize how far we've come. Video games as an art are really in an interesting spot right now - big budget projects all end up being bland, buggy, cookie cutter rehashes of the same couple templates.
Companies that once represented the pinnacle of creativity and what could be achieved with high budgets - Blizzard, Bethesda, Ubisoft, etc - are now the laughing stock of gamers. Not that it matters when the bulk of gamers are still putting dozens of hours and plenty of microtransaction dollars into decade old games like Fortnite/Minecraft/GTA every week.
What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression? What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?
Thankfully, there are a bunch of indie developers that still release fresh experiences - but they too kind of end up falling into the same tropes (if you like 2D roguelike/platformer/puzzler there's plenty of choice, otherwise...).
Not too unlike the state of the film industry. It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Elden Ring and its DLC, probably. The Japanese games industry is doing far better than their western counterparts, there have been huge headlines that in 2024's Game Awards, 4 of 5 games nominated for Game of the Year came from Asia (3 Japan, 1 China). The last game (Balatro) was an indie game developed by one person.
Not a single nominee was from a major western company like Ubisoft, EA, etc. They may be financially successful now, but the games industry is imploding. This is what happens when you treat developers poorly and chase greedy trends while expecting consumers to put up with it. Like you said, most AAA games releasing these days are either dead on arrival or completely unnotable and miss expectations.
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Kingdom come deliverance, baldirs gate are two massive titles in the last 12 months. God of war, spiderman, Indiana jones are other titles that are just stand alone artistic experiences, again in the last little while.
> What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?
I think it’s funny you mention that because the games you sniped at (Fortnite Minecraft GTa) were seismic shifts in gaming - in the last few years - Fortnite wrote the book on live service games IMO. But, when they’re “popular” suddenly they’re not cool anymore.
> It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.
What do you want? IMO the industry is in an ok place - aside from the mass layoffs over the last 24 months. But for consumers there’s so much choice - there’s massive hundred million dollar budget tiles with new content every year (Ubisoft/CoD/ Sony/microsoft doing these) there’s “smaller” budget games in the 50-80millon mark that are achieving critical success on PC and Console, there’s AA-budget games in the 15-30 million mark coming out every month that are hits and misses, there’s a thriving indie scene for every genre you could possibly imagine, and many you can’t (e.g. trombone champ).
There’s options at every level, dozens of games coming out every year - more than any single person could ever play.
disclaimer: I’ve worked on one of the titles you’re talking about here, but don’t anymore. Opinion is mine, not theirs.
In my experience working there - it comes and goes in waves. Layoffs happen, people leave and start their own studios. We saw consolidation under publishers in the 90’s and people laud it as one of the best periods of games.
I do think we lost our way a little from around about 2018-2022 where we had these absolutely gargantuan flops like Concord that were a symptom of many things, but I really really believe we’re in another golden age right now.
I haven't played many different games over the last few years, but both Half-Life: Alyx and Zelda: Breath of the Wild left strong impressions. Both games have a rare sense of place that's hard to replicate in other mediums—the same thing that stood out for me after the first time I played Half-Life 2. These games feel less like a movie I've seen or a story I've read and more like somewhere I've been.
This isn't unique to video games—I've had the same feeling from, say, 2666 or Stalker—but video games seem especially well-suited to do this as a medium.
I haven't played it, but I got the impression it didn't fizzle out so much as that it simply had one single player campaign and no reason to keep playing once it's finished, and that many people seem to have forgotten games with a finite nr of playing hours like that exist because of the roguelikes, hero shooters, MMORPGs, Minecraft-likes, etc that keep you hooked for as long as possible.
Very true, there is still a loyal following of new game plus players, including myself, holding down the fort but having a linear single player campaign was refreshing.
I have my opinions on the execution quality (or range of execution quality) of the game itself but it still served as my favorite “AAA/AA” major release of 2024.
CP2077's not American but it largely came out of the usual mould of big-budget, big-studio game software, especially after CD Projekt Red ended up abandoning promises to do certain things differently.
Spoilers: nothing short of a complete story rewrite could salvage what Cyberpunk 2077 ended up being. It's less of a No Mans Sky redemption story and more of a Duke Nukem Forever one.
I'm playing through that now. Just finished the main question, and doing Hearts of Stone. Probably the best single-player game I've played. Maybe it's the "next-gen-update", but the graphics are still great.
For one, id software is still making great big budget single player experience, see Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and the soon-to-be-released Doom the dark ages.
I don't think it counts as big budget, but I've recently gotten into Last Train Home and it's a fantastic and unique premise (with gameplay that's a mix of Company of Heros + XCOM + This War Of Mine).
Don't get me wrong, I love Talos Principle, but I did not feel a strong connection to the world of #2 vs #1. The sequel levels just seemed like, "Here is some sexy stuff the art team designed." No real connection or unifying theme. Super pretty, but that is true of any number of AAA games these days with big action set pieces.
At least in one, it felt a bit more cohesive in that you could imagine that canned video game assets had been corrupted and copy-pasted into new configurations.
That checks out; I think I should not have included it as an example, given that context. Maybe it instead reinforces the point that we rely on smaller companies for the gems.
I recently got to play Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Gameplay is virtually the same as the previous entry in the series, but the story is interesting and entertaining.
GTA5 had a super big budget yet received very good feedback from gamers and critics alike, and is still played to this day. So not sure you can just discard big budgets as a whole.
And then Star Citizen is quite innovative in many regards and has virtually unlimited budget, and would not exist in the first place without a long runway
> Video games as an art are really in an interesting spot right now - big budget projects all end up being bland, buggy, cookie cutter rehashes of the same couple templates.
hardly. I bet GTA6 will be a major success just like GTA5 was at the time, which will again counter the argument that big budget is killing the creativity in games. And I see no counter against Star Citizen yet
I haven’t played V or online but after III/Vice/San Andreas, GTA is the last game I’d use to argue for creativity in the gaming industry. It’s just the only game series in the “run over streetwalkers in a stolen car” genre, which is still a profitable niche apparently.
(But I don’t play many video games these days so what do I know)
I literally got the t-shirt (came with the game), and later became a particle physicist, working at CERN, we received a crowbar for the initial startup of the LHC.
> Newell and Harrington had long enjoyed playing games. Now, it seemed, there were huge piles of money to be earned from making them.
The gaming market today is completely different, very competetive, very saturated, ranging from huge stakes at the top end, to an enormous number of indie studios and individuals toward the other end that are trying to make ends meet.
Yet, I've been seriously thinking for a while to start-up a game studio. The hope being that it would be one of these crazy ideas that everybody recommends against ("it can't be done") until you actually do it and prove them wrong.
Ideally, I would like to start the studio as a loose group of like-minded people that have time for developing a game solely a hobby, and if that pans out, transition it into a business. Not AAA, of course, but with the definite goal of making the best game that such a setup could realisitically produce.
The thing is, with today's tech, you can get started with very little capital if you begin doing this as a hobby.
I sorta want to do this, but developing completely open source games.
Maybe even developing my own game engine.
Of course all this costs a lot of money with no clear way to make it back. If I had to come up with a monetization model, I would come up with an ad network similar to Unity.
If Unity needs 2 billion in revenue to barely keep going, I reckon a more focused engine could be funded for 20 million a year.
It's a moot point since I'll never have that much money or be able to raise a VC round.
But HN, let's dream. Imagine a .net or JavaScript engine that's web first. With mobile and PC support coming later( PC can just run a local server). The engine developers dog food their own engine, making very high quality examples for the community.
Keep the engine focused on small lightweight games.
Unity's ultimate problem is they keep trying to do literally everything.
I wouldn't do that. I'd say straight up this engine isn't going to do AAA gaming. It's not going to scale. I'm not supporting 800 design patterns.
The indie market is a bloody red sea right now. But as long as you don't care about money or can expense your hardware and internet costs, I think it's good enough.
One of the saddest things in my gamer resume is that I was never able to get into Half-Life. I can absolutely see what everybody likes in the game - both technically and in terms of gameplay. But I was never into its uneven pace when compared to Doom, not even back in the day. I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure, what the article refers to as "friction".
The Orange Box console versions also suffered from a non-adjustable field of view that made me feel sick after a few minutes of playing.
> I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure
I think I remember reading an interview with the dev team where they explained that playing action for too long was boring, as well as solving puzzles, so they consciously designed the game with interleaved phases of action/puzzle. Your recompense for solving a puzzle is action, and your recompense for killing all the bad guys is a relaxing puzzle.
It's funny you didn't liked that, because for me it was the complete opposite. I like pure action shooters, and I like pure puzzle adventure games, but I really loved Half-Life and I didn't know why until I read that explanation.
It’s a long time ago now so my recollection is likely very flawed, but with HL I didn’t like the feeling of a created path that must be followed, irrespective how of the interleaving of different aspects. There are lots of modern games like this too - which on the face of it are relatively open-world, but underneath the apparent freedom there’s a strict path to find and follow for success. (I’d definitely include one of the modern Doom games —I forget which it was I tried— in this category, - it was so linear that it felt but one step removed from the old-fashioned shooters where you’re literally on a conveyor belt and shoot whatever appears.)
In the original Doom, in contrast, the only requirement was to make it to the end of the level, figuring out the map and puzzles along the way. Anything else (did you chase 100% kill and 100% secrets?) was optional. I guess it just felt more… honest?
I played through the single player, but like you I think I preferred doom.
That said, half-life mods were imo the golden age of gaming. Vampire slayer let you scare the shit out of your friends at 3am in a LAN. Day of defeat and firearms were the cod and mw of the day. Natural Selection crushed it in terms of fps/RTS hybrid, teamplay and overall quality and polish. Science & industry? Pirates Vikings & knights? Tfc? Several attempts at matrix mods & the opera. So much amazing diversity - it's such a shame that CS (the most banal, vanilla, milquetoast game ever) got all the mindshare. Even when CS ventured into making things more interesting/diverse (hostage rescue, shield, etc.) those things seem to have died off back to the 'standard' game mode (80% of players dead and spectating while "the bomb has been planted" sound effect plays).
The variety sometimes meant you only played your favorite mod a few times at the LAN parties. Because people had so many other things to play as the 90s and early aughts progressed.
AHL was great, but The Specialists was GOAT. Never felt more like a badass after disarming an opponent, hitting slow motion, and chucking a katana at their head while diving.
I disagree, the CS betas were great. I miss the as_ maps the most — sneaking away a victory as the VIP with all my teammates dead and seconds left on the clock.
I deeply miss Science and Industry. Half life is still being modded these days just isn't as popular. Jollywangcore features some of the single player mods
At that time in 1998 I mostly played Q1/Q2 online and contemporaries wise I preferred Unreal and SiN over HL's single player experience. Also Unreal's graphics were just truly next level on the Voodoo2 vs anything else. HL DM at LAN parties was surprisingly good and a bit overlooked though; the beginning of the game until the dimensional rift was definitely fun. What stood out the most to me was the soldier AI actually. I always felt the series was a bit hyped but I've come around as I returned to the games on my Steam Deck OLED last fall. In retrospect; clearly classics and the high praises were well earned after all. SDOLED apart from actual CRT setup is maybe the perfect way to experience it today IMO.
Of course DOOM is its own thing completely; a timeless distillation of the 80s - the arcade, Super Mario and D&D all astonishingly abstracted into an unreasonably blissful bleeding-edge hellscape; 93 till infinity.
SiN did have more character and tried some innovations of its own, but the gameplay needed a bit more polish. Bullets felt so slow you could run past them. JK/DF2 had this problem too.
Wonderfully written article, but especially delighted to see extensive mention of DF2: Jedi Knight. This game absolutely dominated mine and friends free time for multiple years, both single player and multiplayer. Up there as one of my favourite of all time, certainly most played.
Lucasarts absolutely ruled on the story based games genre merges. See of course all the point and clicks such as Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, but also of course XWing and Tie Fighter.
The same author has full articles on Jedi Knight [1] and X-Wing/TIE Fighter. [2]. If you go through his archives [3], he's also written a lot about LucasArts' adventure games; I think the first posts that talk about them are the three "A New Force in Games" posts.
The observation that Doom was on more PCs than Windows was very astute. Doom was everywhere at the time - it was not uncommon to find the shareware on computers inside many typical office jobs
I only ever played Half-Life on a friend’s PC, but it still made a big impression. Especially the start, how you arrive at this massive research facility and get to just walk around before things really kick-off. Part of the appeal also in the Hitman games, I think.
I remember playing Deus Ex on our iMac which was barely powerful enough to run it. Severe slow down during intense moments, and some major lighting problems. And yet, it remains probably my fondest gaming experience. Something about the way game worlds can capture your imagination when you’re young.
I got my start in the tech industry thanks to Half-Life - or more specifically thanks to the Half-Life mod Team Fortress Classic.
I built an early fan news site for that game (effectively a blog before I knew they were called blogs) which got me a job with an early online gaming company ~1999 where I got paid to learn how web development works.
> And then there are an awful lot of jumping puzzles, shoehorned into a game engine that has way more slop in it than is ideal for such things.
I was taken aback by this comment. The original Half Life engine has super tight and responsive movement, to the point where the average "tryhard" in a server would be executing all kinds of movement tricks that require frame-perfect inputs or very close to it. Watch some speedruns or HL:DS games and you can easily find examples of gameplay involving super precise movement. In CS there was a huge scene of movement based maps like surf_, bh_, and deathrun_.
Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.
Super tight and responsive movement wouldn't necessarily mean jumping puzzles make sense in a 90s single player FPS. Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.
My memory is that it wasn't the controls but the sizes of the spaces you had to jump to and the clarity of where they were so you could adequately position yourself that were the issue. The latter of which is probably more down to texture usage than the engine itself.
Turok on the n64 had way more instances of jumping puzzles while controlling like a boat and having a nauseating FOV by even today's console standards. Yet the game was praised and well liked back in the day. Half-Life on a 90s PC in comparison is a much better playing game.
All that said, I still enjoy both. Maybe I've got enough muscle memory to plow trough the BS and enjoy the level design and challenge, specially regarding Turok on original hardware lol. Meanwhile people who didn't grow up with those games are off put whenever a hard jumping puzzle appears or the lack of direction gets them stuck.
> Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.
Fair, my point is more that in order for it to be possible for mere 12 year old mortals to learn to casually execute these tricks, the game has to have predictable, responsive and reproducible movement. In other words, the opposite of slop.
I suppose it's possible that they're viewing those factors as being inherent in the original Quake engine rather than something Valve should be credited for and relying on them in their fork so heavily when it didn't suit the overall game was a bad mishmash.
It's more likely they're just conflating how ugly a lot of those later levels are with the engine.
My favorite pasttime in HL/CS back in the day was bhopping and kz_. To some degree I think it has too responsive movement. I recently went back to play HL and I fell down so many crates due to the instant movement, having been used to some inertia in games since.
I remember never quite getting into Counter-Strike: Source because of the difference in inertia. I had friends who were masters of movement there so I know it wasn't a sloppy game, but my muscle memory from 1.6 just made it feel... uncanny :)
Well it was responsive but it wasn't physically accurate at all, which makes it non-intuitive. The whole reason side-games like KZ and surf could exist was due to the bad physics. I competed in local IRC KZ tourneys and also surfed a lot in 1.6. The fact that you gained speed by moving left and right repeatedly doesn't make any intuitive sense. The surf scene was also heavily infected with frame-rate tricks (hotkeys to increase fps-limit in the air, and then lowering it on the ramps) since you floated more in the air the higher your FPS was. In the beginning you needed to have a PC that could support 250+ FPS to be a high-end surfer. This was fixed later with server-set fps limits etc. though.
It created an entire universe of movement based mini-games that I treasured more than the base-game, but it was mostly based on unintuitive physics and engine bugs.
I do agree that the modern game's "inertia" and slow heavy movement feels bad though. Last modern game that I remember had really fast and rapid movement was The Talos Principle.
> Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.
I distinctly remember a noticeable delay between moving the mouse and the view turning, even when the frame rate was high. I think the fix was switching from DirectX to OpenGL.
I liked Xen when I played it. I thought the boss fights were terrible, but I think most FPS boss fights are terrible. The other complaint is that the healing pools were too slow. The navigation and obscure puzzles were great, though. They scratched an exploration itch I didn't know I had.
There's still a lot of value in playing the original, but what the Black Mesa team achieved with what is effectively a fan project is incredible. And in a world where Take Two goes after people doing cool stuff with 20 year old GTA games, it's great that it got the official blessing from Valve.
Just a quick bullet point list of differences from the top of my head:
- Half Life has much faster run and gun gameplay (stemming from it's quake roots no doubt), while in Black Mesa it's much slower paced
- The AI in the game is completely different, Black Mesa's soldiers feel way more aggressive, again encouraging a slower pace of play compared to the original
- Lots of levels have small changes - some are cool, others kinda feel like they're just different for the sake of being different
- Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo
Black Mesa is a great game, one thing I have nothing but praise for is it's presentation - it's really nice to look at and they did a bang up job with the graphics and animations. But which is better is a matter of opinion, and personally I much prefer how HL1 actually feels to play.
A couple to add, with my own biases included because I love Black Mesa
- Joel Nielsen's great sound track / sound design work in Black Mesa ... I believe he admitted in an interview that some of the "squelching" sounds are recorded by slapping someone's arse O_o
- The reworked Gonarch fight is, hands down, one of the most entertaining and intense boss fights for me in recent memory. It's way better than the original for sure, which I remember just being frustrating (lack of ammo).
> Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo
I see both takes. Like, in the original game I actually liked Xen (except Gonarch). It felt otherwordly and empty, as if one of the reasons for earth being invaded was because there was nothing left. But BM Xen is literally another world. I prefer BM Xen, but I did enjoy the original at the time.
For a deeper look into Black Mesa / Half-Life and some of the changes, Soup Emporium did a great video here, where he only stole some of the points he raises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d8KAq78gco
The game mechanics and how the story is told is worth experiencing by itself in it’s original form before seeing the modern interpretation in Black Mesa
Overall I think Xen was much better in Black Mesa than HL1, but why they felt the need to make it so long is a mystery to me. Half to two-thirds of the play time could have been cut and it would have only improved things.
It is so long, and I did not enjoy my time there. "Alright, here is the third or fourth energy door unlocking puzzle to slog through". It was so much slower paced you lose the thread from the human world of what you are even doing anymore.
> how many computers were currently running Microsoft Windows in the United States. The number of 20 million that he got back was impressive. Yet he was shocked to learn that Windows wasn’t the most popular single piece of software to be found on American personal computers; that was rather a game called DOOM. Newell and Harrington had long enjoyed playing games. Now, it seemed, there were huge piles of money to be earned from making them.
Later on they also found out that introducing gambling to kids is indeed a much better business than just selling games. Going on for many years without anyone cracking down, and doing workarounds when governments try to make it illegal.
I'm reminded of my art professor whose friend worked designing lottery scratch offs, and found it unfulfilling yet well paid. While my professor struggled teaching at a B-tier state university and contracting for prestigious brands.
Around the same time I gave up my dream of making videogames because pay and hours were terrible, and I had no prospects in the Midwest.
this balancing act between scripted story and open gameplay with "conscious" AI defense is so hard to pull off. In the scripted entertainment league Half-Life rules I think. Crysis had the tech to do the real thing and failed - too much cinema and a bad story. But the realism, the mechanics of movement and physics - it was all there in god tier quality.
there were other brilliant ideas bridging nascent technology for the sake of gameplay, like surround sound to locate some fast (nearly impossible to see coming) enemies. It really was perfectly executed.
Great early examples of simulated acoustic spaces matching geometry,
like delay networks for metallic ducting in the crawl spaces. And
notable firsts in sound management - before there were really "sound
engines".
This was the game that brought me into counter-strike and in my opinion still one of the best stories there is. Well done, especially when you think about how limited their possibilities were in the days back then.
I was completely blown away when I realized that the opening cinematic was the actual game engine. First time I'd ever seen it and the scenes cleverly foreshadowed what was coming.
One of the unfortunate fallouts of Half-life was Quake 3 arena, which could be viewed as it's exact opposite. I am convinced that after half life people just couldn't appreciate the opposite - just shooting, without any story. And it didn't create the deserved following.
Instead we had almost 15 years of Spunkgargleweewee-s as defined by Zero Punctuation.
Great article on the single player aspect of the game and absolutely accurate about how exceptional it was - and still is - in the canon of modern gaming.
What really gave Half-Life its legs was the multiplayer component. It came in just as broadband internet was appearing in households across the United States and Canada. The ability to host servers and coordinate through ICQ and message boards created a one-of-a-kind community.
I know because I lived it.
The [R]age Board for the Elites. The CLQ. Adrenaline Gamer and Counter Strike.
Half-Life was incredible and still has an online presence of note - mostly in developing countries. Their hardware matches the lift to run at decent FPS and join games. Now and then I still hop on a server through Steam.
The di clan video - digital immortality - can do more to highlight “why” HLDM and its physics and weapons were such a game changer, even compared to Q3 and UT at the time. There is nothing like using the long jump and tau cannon to literally fly around maps. Other games have tried, but I’ve never gotten the same high as with HL.
Mostly I miss the community, as juvenile and crass as it was. Like the NFL, it was a young man’s game. Most of us were under 25 with rare exceptions. I’ll never forget when Neo Maximus Babson went missing.
This article bring back a lot of memories and than you for sharing… -p$ychos!s- out (LMS, CML, syn, di)
Nice writeup. FWIW, I never saw Michael Abrash wear a tie. :)
We were very into 3D cards back then. We had a lot of ties to that part of the world. I had been doing video drivers for OS/2 and NT. I got to know Abrash from his writing on the VGA, 8514, and, of course, asm. At Valve, we hired a couple of great guys from 3dfx. I still have a 3dfx hat somewhere that I bust out on special occasions. The killer setup back then was hooking up two 3dfx cards (SLI). But I usually played on a standard card because I wanted/needed to see it run like most people would experience it.
We had a deal with one of the companies, maybe 3dfx, but I forget who, to include the first three levels of HL with their card. Even though the game wasn't anywhere near finished, we sent off a disk to the company with our first three finished levels so we could get paid. Somehow, it leaked. We were pissed at first, but then it took off. People loved it. It really gave us the confidence that we were on the right track. It was our first game. The validation was just what we needed.
Fun times.
I remember being about 12 years old and downloading that leak (over 56k of course) with a friend. We were already excited for HL1 and when we discovered the leak we were absolutely blown away.
Iirc the full release wasn’t too far behind. It became the highlight of our year. We organized competitive matches and had teams with practices and tournaments. Later I got heavily into mod development which was definitely a huge inspiration for getting into software development. Some of the maps I made even got bundled on to one of those CDRoms that used to come with PC Gaming magazines. It was a lot more than just a game for me.
I’m sure there are hundreds if not thousands of others with the same story.
It was called Half Life Day One, and I remember seeing it as a bundle with some hardware, not sure which one.
What was the other fish?
Tried it when it was release, then bought it myself in 1999, after I finally had managed to purchase a new PC - can't remember if it was a Nvidia TNT2 or 3dfx Voodoo 3 card I bought with it. But it was the first time I could play the game without it being sluggish and looking like crap. We had bought a family PC 4 years earlier, which had cost a fortune - but by 1998/1999 it was woefully outdated. Also, a thought: Imagine purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years.
One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years. I also vividly remember downloading all the new iterations of counter-strike, which really took off - until settling on 1.6
On a side not, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well - having only been a teenager back then, and in 25 years I'll be this old man. Wonder if all the memories from LAN-parties etc. will be as fresh in 25 years, as they are now.
> On a side note, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well
I also remember it like it was yesterday when, after school on a hot summer's day, a friend showed me this "cool new mod" he recently downloaded for Half-Life. It was an early version of Counterstrike. It took him an entire night to download the mod, and it only ran on his machine with a 320x240 resolution. It looked like crap and was basically unplayable. 6 months and a hardware upgrade later, we all played it for hours each day, and often non-stop for 12 hours on LAN parties. I also remember that you could contact the internet provider (Telekom) by mail, and after a few weeks they would activate something called "Fast-Track" for your connection, which would drop the latency from around 110ms to only 35ms, a huge advantage for MP games... it really blows my mind that all of this was 25 years ago.
In the early 2000s, CS was arguably better known than the original HL. I had some friends who probably played CS for thousands of hours, but never even touched the original HL.
I was just reminiscing about this with a friend last night. We had tons of free time and games like Counter-Strike were the wild west of creativity. My fondest memory was a Spring afternoon in 2000 after school playing some janky fan made map whose name I don't remember and feeling so happy. Everyone was playing. We played every day. We went to a 300 person LAN party that summer. We formed a 5 man team and competed online.
It was so fun cobbling together a computer that could run it. Trying every trick to squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Trying to shave a few milliseconds off my dial up ping. Going to that one guy's house who had broadband internet.
It really felt like a golden age back then.
My friends and I planned our own mod and started working on it, but our ambition outstripped our ability. That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.
About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular, but seems very focused on competitive play. I wanted to experience that public lobby on a janky fan made map feel. I found a server running custom 'zombie' maps which scratched that itch for a few days. Then I got busy again and haven't touched it since.
CS2 community servers are nothing like the 1.6 or Source golden era. Those games are still going, but the playerbase has shrunk considerably.
I'm glad I got to experience it all (primarily in Source): gun game, deathmatch, RPG, surf, jailbreak, zombie mod and escape, iceskate, sliderace, hide'n'seek, trickz, xtreme climbing, multigames, deathrun, knifeball, HE wars, vehicle maps, bob, nipper maps, even hack vs hack, and the many many communities, each uniquely flavored and with their own story.
Back then I took it for granted...
I totally feel that. The most fun I ever had gaming was back in my teens playing various different game modes in source. And yeah the communities really made it so special, to this day I'm good friends with some people that I initially met in CSS.
I can't help but feel Valve dropped the ball with cs:go and cs2. I mean, they did become incredibly popular but IMO there was potential for so much more if they would've supported custom game modes even just a little bit.
I spent long hours playing CS Surf. What a wacky mod. Good times, odd memories.
You may be interested in KSF. They host skill surf servers and publish chill WR runs: https://youtube.com/@ksfrecords
The more modern surf maps are aesthetically quite pleasing and smooth to play.
> About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular
I played the "original" CS (at least a version that looked like 1.6) around 3 years ago, and was surprised how painless it was to install it on Linux using Steam. I was also surprised that it was still no problem to find a de_dust server with > 20 players.
> That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.
Yes. It was so easy back then to play around with game development, web development, or desktop development. Around 2002, I hosted a web site for months on my local desktop server, reachable via a DynDNS solution.
Sorry for getting nostalgic, but it was even easier in the mid-90ies. As a 9 year old, I created a Dyna Blaster clone using a Demo-Version of "Klik&Play" on Windows 3.11 [0]. You could develop quite advanced games by just dragging around sprites, animating them, listening to mouse and keyboard events and object collisions. You could even "compile" the game into a single portable .exe! It was dead simple, but it introduced me to the basic concepts of programming and animation, and I didn't even realize it. A little later, I was able to teach myself BASIC by just reading the DOS man pages. We didn't even have internet back then. I very clearly remember realizing that "if ... then ... else" statements and variables were exactly what was missing in my "Klik&Play" demo-version. In the demo, you had to simulate these concepts by triggering the spawn of a hidden moving object and listening for the collision with another object. The hidden objects encoded the game state. Basically, the developers tried to remove Turing-completeness from the demo version, but failed and forced kids like myself to restore it via wild tricks (I remember feeling very clever when I had the idea for this trick). I only realized 2 decades later how useful these experiences were for a career in computer science.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/e2e98t/making_ga...
Rats maps or the ones with a ton of vehicles were the most fun before the game got way too serious (before 1.5)
I still remember the name "gimli", a creator of high-quality maps around 1.3.
He still publishes maps!
I ran a server that was primarily rat surf maps with a Warcraft/RPG server mod for years back then. It was super fun and something that modern games just can't touch in terms of that kind of niche.
It's still tons of fun but definitely different now, and since they came out with counter-strike 2 a while ago, it's me being specced out on my old gaming computer all over again - as with you I'm way too busy as a working adult to get too deep into it, was fun to play a lot during the pandemic though.
The craziest innovation I seen is counter strike 1.6 in the browser, fully playable multiplayer. Not sure how safe letting that much execution happen in wasm environment truly is but was still pretty funny to see how far the game has come in terms of graphics. Basically a bunch of the same maps still even though a couple have always been way skewed to one side or the other.
I think you meant "FastPath"? - an alternative error correction scheme for DSL connections.
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods.
Another game from that time that was also easy to mod was The Sims 1.
For a bit of context, EA/Maxis released modding tools BEFORE the game was released, to let players create custom content for the game (like walls and floors) before the game was even released!
And installing custom content was also easy, just drag and drop files in folders related to what you downloaded and that's it.
Imagine any game nowadays doing that? Most games nowadays don't supporting modding out of the box, but of course, there are exceptions, like Minecraft resource packs/data packs. I don't think Fortnite and Roblox fit the "modding a game" description because you aren't really modding a game, you are creating your own game inside of Fortnite/Roblox! Sometimes you don't want to play a new game inside of your game, you just want to add new mods to enhance your experience or to make it more fun. There isn't a "base game Roblox", and while there is a "base game Fortnite" (Battle Royale... or any of the other game modes like Fortnite Festival or LEGO Fortnite) Epic does not let you create mods for the Battle Royale game. You can create your own Battle Royale map, but you can't create a "the insert season here Battle Royale map & gameplay but with a twist!".
Of course, sadly EA/Maxis didn't release all of the modding tools they could (there isn't a official custom object making tool for example, or a official way of editing the behavior of custom objects) but they still released way more modding tools than what current games release.
I think that most modern games don't support that easiness of modding because the games themselves are complex, because as an example: The Sims 1 walls are like, just three sprites, so you can generate a wall easily with a bit of programming skill, the skin format is in plain text in a format similar to ".obj", so on and so forth.
Lately I've been trying to create my own modding tools for The Sims 1, and it is funny when you are reading a page talking about the technical aspects of the game file formats and the author writes "well this field is used for xyzabc because Don Hopkins said so".
The official toolkit for modding Baldur’s Gate 3 is extremely extensive. You can make an entirely different game on top of the game if you wanted
Really? Officially they don't even support modifying or creating new levels: https://baldursgate3.game/news/community-update-27-official-.... You are mostly limited to visual changes, UI mods and balance / tuning changes.
The hype was so hot and fast around HL when it came out, that I remember playing it without a dedicated graphics card (I think I was running on a motherboard integrated gpu) in the lowest resolution possible because there was this feeling of "you have to try it".
I got by for years on a Pentium 75 and 8mb of RAM. The specs always said the game wouldn’t work, but it did. You could get away with this right up until PC gaming (finally) moved away from DOS. One big issue was the real mode DOS Plug n play drivers (dwcfgmgr.sys - burned into my brain) which occupied just enough of my 640k that most games would fail to start cause they couldn’t claim the whole lot.
Specs similar to mine. Not far after that I got a diamond nv3 ..
1MB ATI Radeon all the way baby :)
ATI 3D Rage (1996), 500 nm, 50mhz or so.
Had to look it up, didn't know they had 1MB 3D accelerators.
I think my first was 8MB and it blew my hair back for sure.
It wasn’t a Rage it was a Radeon :) not even a 3D accelerator :) this was the first generation of graphics cards that had hardware acceleration for 2D
Was just about time for MDK, Quake, Tomb Raider etc even though it was way outside the official specs for these.
Oh wow, I stand corrected. Didn't know they brought back the moniker.
Nightmare House was a super fun mod that I found at some point.
I don’t remember where or how, but it scared the heck out of me.
Modding was amazing back then. I wasn’t a modder myself, but it felt like something new and crazy was happening every week. The excitement for every beta release of Counter-Strike. The buzz around newcomers like Action HL, The Specialists, and PVK. Experiments like Science & Industry that didn’t last long but were a fun romp nonetheless. Endless rounds of TFC and DoD. And there were always populated community servers for any mod you plucked fom Fileplanet.
We’ve lost something along the way.
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years.
Modding still exists. It’s just called “UGC” now. Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft have thriving and accessible options. GTA has an unbelieveable number of players playing role playing mods of it too.
It's not the same though, most FPS' games lock down their code and require you to use their servers. More or less murdering any chance of modding. For example, the same time I played halflife and all the mods (including this mod named counter strike), I played the shit out of battlefield 1942. It's modding community was insane! With total conversion mode that game was like 10 different games. And for a poor teen, that and half life were god sends for getting me into gaming
It’s not the same but the environment isnt the same anymore.
There are lots of games that will let you mod the ever loving crap out of them. UEFN and Roblox are modding with distribution platforms. Cyberpunk has Bethesda level modding. Games like lethal company are existing in an indie space that was just unfathomable when I was playing those games.
Traditional modding still exists, especially for PC RPGs, where the community is huge. Also UEFN is an extremely powerful tool that sits closer to modding Fortnite than UGC for Roblox, say.
The problem is that multiplayer games and any game with a server component - and the engines that make them - are specifically designed to have security against cheating and hacks. No-one wants to play against a modded game. That makes supporting mods, even solo mods, all the more difficult, and it’s harder to make the business case for doing so.
> No-one wants to play against a modded game.
Au contraire. There are plenty of people who would like to play against a modded game. They just might not want to play against a game that's modded differently from their own.
>Traditional modding still exists, especially for PC RPGs
Yes, I've recently been playing Fallout: London, which is a total conversion mod for Fallout 4. It obviously changes the setting to post-apocalyptic London, but also adds new quests, monsters and things. And it's pretty good quality -- in fact the mod kept getting delayed because Bethesda saw the mod in progress and kept hiring the people working on it because they were so impressed.
> purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years.
A time when technology changed that fast, too.
Should be changing faster today, it’s just not always visible.
I just replaced my HP z800 from 2008 because it was holding it's own with the addition of a few ssd's and an RX580 GPU over the years. Went from 6c12t Xeon to 16c32t (R9950x) and 7900xt.
Performance just hasn't out paced people's needs in the last 15 years the way it used to...
Wait are you me? i shut down my z800 about a year ago (was my mainmachine for about 13 years) i buyd a second cpu for like 10$ after 5 years and upraded the ram to max, i think it was 46gb, also ssd's....and a rx580 which is still in use.
So, what's your replacement machine consist of?
I used to use the hardware raid to stripe 2x ssd's to get over 1GB/s from my sata drives.
New machine has a pcie5 gen5 m.2 nvme. Stupid fast at 12GB/s.
I gotta figure out what to do with the old machine now...
I loved world building with the valve map tools. It was fantastic. Almost as much fun as the game itself.
Worldcraft was so much fun!
At least until "LEAK LEAK LEAK" appeared
Which in turn led to an exploding mod scene, clans, hosting and communities. Truly a world-changing game at a golden moment in game history (beside Unreal). And yes, like a good story book a generation have memories of escaping the crumbling Black Mesa facility chased by alien horrors. Mission accomplished Valve.
The crazy thing is there are still a few people playing Half Life!
I was knee-deep working as a technical game designer + engine programmer on Soldier of Fortune when Half-Life came out. I can't put into words the impression that the opening that game left on me; I still remember very distinctly experiencing the tram ride, just being utterly entranced, and then being deeply irritated when an artist walked over to my cubicle, saw the game, and jokily asked what was going on, pulling me out of the experience. For me, it was one of those singular experiences you only have a very, very rarely in gaming.
It's funny, though - I would say in retrospect that Half-Life had the typical vexed impact of a truly revolutionary game made by a truly revolutionary team. In terms of design, the Half-Life team was asking and exploring a hundred different interesting questions about first person gaming and design, very close to the transition from 2d to 3d. And their influence, a few years later, often reduced down to a small handful of big ideas for later games influenced by them. After Half-Life, because of the impact of their scripted sequences, FPS games shifted to much more linear level designs to support that kind of roller coaster experience (despite many of Half-Life's levels actually harkening back to older, less linear FPS design). The role of Barneys and other AI character also really marked the shift to AI buddies being a focus in shooters. And the aesthetic experience of the aggressive AI from the marines as enemies also cast a long shadow, too, highlighting the idea of enemy AI being a priority in single player FPS games.
Certainly, those were the biggest features of Half-Life that impacted our design in Soldier of Fortune, which did go on to shift to much more linear levels, much more focus on scripted events, and would have resulted in much more emphasis on AI buddies too if I hadn't really put my foot down as a game programmer (and in my defense, if you go back to FPS games from that era, poorly implemented AI buddies are often, by a wide margin, the most frustrating aspect of that era of games, along with forced poorly done stealth missions or poorly implemented drivable vehicles - the fact that Barneys were non-essential is why they worked well in the original Half-Life). You can see this shadow pretty clearly if you compare Half-Life to, afterwards, the single player aspects of Call of Duty and Halo. Both are series that, in their single player form, are a lot more focused and a lot less varied than Half-Life was, but they clearly emphasize those aspects of Half-Life I just mentioned. And in practice, those were the single player FPS games that were in practice actually copied for quite a while.
Thank you for soldier of fortune. It was a pioneer in its own way with how brutal the enemy destruction was. I loved it. Incredible game that is up there with DOOM, Half Life and Halo for me.
> It was far from flawless, but it was really trying to push the boundaries of a young medium.
Great read, it made me realize how far we've come. Video games as an art are really in an interesting spot right now - big budget projects all end up being bland, buggy, cookie cutter rehashes of the same couple templates.
Companies that once represented the pinnacle of creativity and what could be achieved with high budgets - Blizzard, Bethesda, Ubisoft, etc - are now the laughing stock of gamers. Not that it matters when the bulk of gamers are still putting dozens of hours and plenty of microtransaction dollars into decade old games like Fortnite/Minecraft/GTA every week.
What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression? What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?
Thankfully, there are a bunch of indie developers that still release fresh experiences - but they too kind of end up falling into the same tropes (if you like 2D roguelike/platformer/puzzler there's plenty of choice, otherwise...).
Not too unlike the state of the film industry. It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Elden Ring and its DLC, probably. The Japanese games industry is doing far better than their western counterparts, there have been huge headlines that in 2024's Game Awards, 4 of 5 games nominated for Game of the Year came from Asia (3 Japan, 1 China). The last game (Balatro) was an indie game developed by one person.
Not a single nominee was from a major western company like Ubisoft, EA, etc. They may be financially successful now, but the games industry is imploding. This is what happens when you treat developers poorly and chase greedy trends while expecting consumers to put up with it. Like you said, most AAA games releasing these days are either dead on arrival or completely unnotable and miss expectations.
the nominees did, but the winner ultimately was still indicative of the circus that is US gaming awards
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Kingdom come deliverance, baldirs gate are two massive titles in the last 12 months. God of war, spiderman, Indiana jones are other titles that are just stand alone artistic experiences, again in the last little while.
> What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?
I think it’s funny you mention that because the games you sniped at (Fortnite Minecraft GTa) were seismic shifts in gaming - in the last few years - Fortnite wrote the book on live service games IMO. But, when they’re “popular” suddenly they’re not cool anymore.
> It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.
What do you want? IMO the industry is in an ok place - aside from the mass layoffs over the last 24 months. But for consumers there’s so much choice - there’s massive hundred million dollar budget tiles with new content every year (Ubisoft/CoD/ Sony/microsoft doing these) there’s “smaller” budget games in the 50-80millon mark that are achieving critical success on PC and Console, there’s AA-budget games in the 15-30 million mark coming out every month that are hits and misses, there’s a thriving indie scene for every genre you could possibly imagine, and many you can’t (e.g. trombone champ).
There’s options at every level, dozens of games coming out every year - more than any single person could ever play.
disclaimer: I’ve worked on one of the titles you’re talking about here, but don’t anymore. Opinion is mine, not theirs.
My concern is that consolidation has hit the industry pretty hard in the last decade and is only a bad thing for its future IMO.
In my experience working there - it comes and goes in waves. Layoffs happen, people leave and start their own studios. We saw consolidation under publishers in the 90’s and people laud it as one of the best periods of games.
I do think we lost our way a little from around about 2018-2022 where we had these absolutely gargantuan flops like Concord that were a symptom of many things, but I really really believe we’re in another golden age right now.
I haven't played many different games over the last few years, but both Half-Life: Alyx and Zelda: Breath of the Wild left strong impressions. Both games have a rare sense of place that's hard to replicate in other mediums—the same thing that stood out for me after the first time I played Half-Life 2. These games feel less like a movie I've seen or a story I've read and more like somewhere I've been.
This isn't unique to video games—I've had the same feeling from, say, 2666 or Stalker—but video games seem especially well-suited to do this as a medium.
>What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Witcher 3 comes to mind. But I just realised it was released 10 years ago...
Black Myth Wukong had a fairly hot entrance onto the market but fizzled out a bit, keep an eye out for the upcoming DLC though.
I haven't played it, but I got the impression it didn't fizzle out so much as that it simply had one single player campaign and no reason to keep playing once it's finished, and that many people seem to have forgotten games with a finite nr of playing hours like that exist because of the roguelikes, hero shooters, MMORPGs, Minecraft-likes, etc that keep you hooked for as long as possible.
Very true, there is still a loyal following of new game plus players, including myself, holding down the fort but having a linear single player campaign was refreshing.
I have my opinions on the execution quality (or range of execution quality) of the game itself but it still served as my favorite “AAA/AA” major release of 2024.
Cyberpunk 2077 I hear is great now after its many bug fixes and DLC
I hope Stalker 2 gets to this point as well, with more A-Life brought back in after whatever performance optimisations they can squeeze out.
not from a large American gaming production company. Black myth wukong comes to mind but also in the same bucket
CP2077's not American but it largely came out of the usual mould of big-budget, big-studio game software, especially after CD Projekt Red ended up abandoning promises to do certain things differently.
Spoilers: nothing short of a complete story rewrite could salvage what Cyberpunk 2077 ended up being. It's less of a No Mans Sky redemption story and more of a Duke Nukem Forever one.
I'm playing through that now. Just finished the main question, and doing Hearts of Stone. Probably the best single-player game I've played. Maybe it's the "next-gen-update", but the graphics are still great.
Uh.
That’s the “new game” I’m still meaning to start.
God time gets weird as you pass through middle age.
For one, id software is still making great big budget single player experience, see Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and the soon-to-be-released Doom the dark ages.
BG3 was great.
I don't think it counts as big budget, but I've recently gotten into Last Train Home and it's a fantastic and unique premise (with gameplay that's a mix of Company of Heros + XCOM + This War Of Mine).
Last train home is coming up soon on my todo list and I’m pretty psyched to get around to playing it, the demo 100% sold me on it
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
To add to the other answers - Half-Life: Alyx ;)
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Talos Principle 2. Does that count as big budget?
Don't get me wrong, I love Talos Principle, but I did not feel a strong connection to the world of #2 vs #1. The sequel levels just seemed like, "Here is some sexy stuff the art team designed." No real connection or unifying theme. Super pretty, but that is true of any number of AAA games these days with big action set pieces.
At least in one, it felt a bit more cohesive in that you could imagine that canned video game assets had been corrupted and copy-pasted into new configurations.
Croteam is quite small, 40 employees total.
That checks out; I think I should not have included it as an example, given that context. Maybe it instead reinforces the point that we rely on smaller companies for the gems.
> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?
Elden Ring. You’d need to go quite a bit further back for the last one before that though.
Definitely Elden Ring.
As evidence, even Harper's Magazine wrote about it:
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/11/dying-is-a-form-of-educa...
I recently got to play Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Gameplay is virtually the same as the previous entry in the series, but the story is interesting and entertaining.
GTA5 had a super big budget yet received very good feedback from gamers and critics alike, and is still played to this day. So not sure you can just discard big budgets as a whole.
And then Star Citizen is quite innovative in many regards and has virtually unlimited budget, and would not exist in the first place without a long runway
GTA5 released more than 10 years ago fwiw, the zeitgeist has changed significantly in the last 5-7years.
In what way(s)?
The way the parent suggests.
> Video games as an art are really in an interesting spot right now - big budget projects all end up being bland, buggy, cookie cutter rehashes of the same couple templates.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/indies-games-...
hardly. I bet GTA6 will be a major success just like GTA5 was at the time, which will again counter the argument that big budget is killing the creativity in games. And I see no counter against Star Citizen yet
I haven’t played V or online but after III/Vice/San Andreas, GTA is the last game I’d use to argue for creativity in the gaming industry. It’s just the only game series in the “run over streetwalkers in a stolen car” genre, which is still a profitable niche apparently.
(But I don’t play many video games these days so what do I know)
I literally got the t-shirt (came with the game), and later became a particle physicist, working at CERN, we received a crowbar for the initial startup of the LHC.
This game defined my life.
Wow that's inspiring. Let us know when you are asked to send a crystal into the testing chamber. I'll go to the mountains.
Well, please be bloody careful and don't create any resonance cascade scenarios.
Lokimedes doesn't need to hear all this. He's a highly trained professional.
Lokimedes, we have complete confidence in you.
they’re waiting for you Lokimedes, in the the chamberrr
> Newell and Harrington had long enjoyed playing games. Now, it seemed, there were huge piles of money to be earned from making them.
The gaming market today is completely different, very competetive, very saturated, ranging from huge stakes at the top end, to an enormous number of indie studios and individuals toward the other end that are trying to make ends meet.
Yet, I've been seriously thinking for a while to start-up a game studio. The hope being that it would be one of these crazy ideas that everybody recommends against ("it can't be done") until you actually do it and prove them wrong.
Ideally, I would like to start the studio as a loose group of like-minded people that have time for developing a game solely a hobby, and if that pans out, transition it into a business. Not AAA, of course, but with the definite goal of making the best game that such a setup could realisitically produce.
The thing is, with today's tech, you can get started with very little capital if you begin doing this as a hobby.
[delayed]
I sorta want to do this, but developing completely open source games.
Maybe even developing my own game engine.
Of course all this costs a lot of money with no clear way to make it back. If I had to come up with a monetization model, I would come up with an ad network similar to Unity.
If Unity needs 2 billion in revenue to barely keep going, I reckon a more focused engine could be funded for 20 million a year.
It's a moot point since I'll never have that much money or be able to raise a VC round.
But HN, let's dream. Imagine a .net or JavaScript engine that's web first. With mobile and PC support coming later( PC can just run a local server). The engine developers dog food their own engine, making very high quality examples for the community.
Keep the engine focused on small lightweight games.
Unity's ultimate problem is they keep trying to do literally everything.
I wouldn't do that. I'd say straight up this engine isn't going to do AAA gaming. It's not going to scale. I'm not supporting 800 design patterns.
The indie market is a bloody red sea right now. But as long as you don't care about money or can expense your hardware and internet costs, I think it's good enough.
One of the saddest things in my gamer resume is that I was never able to get into Half-Life. I can absolutely see what everybody likes in the game - both technically and in terms of gameplay. But I was never into its uneven pace when compared to Doom, not even back in the day. I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure, what the article refers to as "friction".
The Orange Box console versions also suffered from a non-adjustable field of view that made me feel sick after a few minutes of playing.
> I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure
I think I remember reading an interview with the dev team where they explained that playing action for too long was boring, as well as solving puzzles, so they consciously designed the game with interleaved phases of action/puzzle. Your recompense for solving a puzzle is action, and your recompense for killing all the bad guys is a relaxing puzzle.
It's funny you didn't liked that, because for me it was the complete opposite. I like pure action shooters, and I like pure puzzle adventure games, but I really loved Half-Life and I didn't know why until I read that explanation.
It’s a long time ago now so my recollection is likely very flawed, but with HL I didn’t like the feeling of a created path that must be followed, irrespective how of the interleaving of different aspects. There are lots of modern games like this too - which on the face of it are relatively open-world, but underneath the apparent freedom there’s a strict path to find and follow for success. (I’d definitely include one of the modern Doom games —I forget which it was I tried— in this category, - it was so linear that it felt but one step removed from the old-fashioned shooters where you’re literally on a conveyor belt and shoot whatever appears.)
In the original Doom, in contrast, the only requirement was to make it to the end of the level, figuring out the map and puzzles along the way. Anything else (did you chase 100% kill and 100% secrets?) was optional. I guess it just felt more… honest?
I played through the single player, but like you I think I preferred doom.
That said, half-life mods were imo the golden age of gaming. Vampire slayer let you scare the shit out of your friends at 3am in a LAN. Day of defeat and firearms were the cod and mw of the day. Natural Selection crushed it in terms of fps/RTS hybrid, teamplay and overall quality and polish. Science & industry? Pirates Vikings & knights? Tfc? Several attempts at matrix mods & the opera. So much amazing diversity - it's such a shame that CS (the most banal, vanilla, milquetoast game ever) got all the mindshare. Even when CS ventured into making things more interesting/diverse (hostage rescue, shield, etc.) those things seem to have died off back to the 'standard' game mode (80% of players dead and spectating while "the bomb has been planted" sound effect plays).
Let's not forget Action Half Life.
The variety sometimes meant you only played your favorite mod a few times at the LAN parties. Because people had so many other things to play as the 90s and early aughts progressed.
AHL was great, but The Specialists was GOAT. Never felt more like a badass after disarming an opponent, hitting slow motion, and chucking a katana at their head while diving.
I disagree, the CS betas were great. I miss the as_ maps the most — sneaking away a victory as the VIP with all my teammates dead and seconds left on the clock.
I deeply miss Science and Industry. Half life is still being modded these days just isn't as popular. Jollywangcore features some of the single player mods
Jolly's Hardcore Mod is still one of my favourite youtube videos -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL8rxqodeRI
At that time in 1998 I mostly played Q1/Q2 online and contemporaries wise I preferred Unreal and SiN over HL's single player experience. Also Unreal's graphics were just truly next level on the Voodoo2 vs anything else. HL DM at LAN parties was surprisingly good and a bit overlooked though; the beginning of the game until the dimensional rift was definitely fun. What stood out the most to me was the soldier AI actually. I always felt the series was a bit hyped but I've come around as I returned to the games on my Steam Deck OLED last fall. In retrospect; clearly classics and the high praises were well earned after all. SDOLED apart from actual CRT setup is maybe the perfect way to experience it today IMO.
Of course DOOM is its own thing completely; a timeless distillation of the 80s - the arcade, Super Mario and D&D all astonishingly abstracted into an unreasonably blissful bleeding-edge hellscape; 93 till infinity.
SiN did have more character and tried some innovations of its own, but the gameplay needed a bit more polish. Bullets felt so slow you could run past them. JK/DF2 had this problem too.
Wonderfully written article, but especially delighted to see extensive mention of DF2: Jedi Knight. This game absolutely dominated mine and friends free time for multiple years, both single player and multiplayer. Up there as one of my favourite of all time, certainly most played.
Lucasarts absolutely ruled on the story based games genre merges. See of course all the point and clicks such as Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, but also of course XWing and Tie Fighter.
The same author has full articles on Jedi Knight [1] and X-Wing/TIE Fighter. [2]. If you go through his archives [3], he's also written a lot about LucasArts' adventure games; I think the first posts that talk about them are the three "A New Force in Games" posts.
[1] https://www.filfre.net/2024/04/jedi-knight-plus-notes-on-an-... [2] https://www.filfre.net/2021/02/the-second-coming-of-star-war... [3] https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
Why do we all have to wear these ridiculous ties?
The observation that Doom was on more PCs than Windows was very astute. Doom was everywhere at the time - it was not uncommon to find the shareware on computers inside many typical office jobs
I only ever played Half-Life on a friend’s PC, but it still made a big impression. Especially the start, how you arrive at this massive research facility and get to just walk around before things really kick-off. Part of the appeal also in the Hitman games, I think.
I remember playing Deus Ex on our iMac which was barely powerful enough to run it. Severe slow down during intense moments, and some major lighting problems. And yet, it remains probably my fondest gaming experience. Something about the way game worlds can capture your imagination when you’re young.
I got my start in the tech industry thanks to Half-Life - or more specifically thanks to the Half-Life mod Team Fortress Classic.
I built an early fan news site for that game (effectively a blog before I knew they were called blogs) which got me a job with an early online gaming company ~1999 where I got paid to learn how web development works.
Dupes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42478326
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42472847
> And then there are an awful lot of jumping puzzles, shoehorned into a game engine that has way more slop in it than is ideal for such things.
I was taken aback by this comment. The original Half Life engine has super tight and responsive movement, to the point where the average "tryhard" in a server would be executing all kinds of movement tricks that require frame-perfect inputs or very close to it. Watch some speedruns or HL:DS games and you can easily find examples of gameplay involving super precise movement. In CS there was a huge scene of movement based maps like surf_, bh_, and deathrun_.
Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.
Super tight and responsive movement wouldn't necessarily mean jumping puzzles make sense in a 90s single player FPS. Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.
My memory is that it wasn't the controls but the sizes of the spaces you had to jump to and the clarity of where they were so you could adequately position yourself that were the issue. The latter of which is probably more down to texture usage than the engine itself.
Turok on the n64 had way more instances of jumping puzzles while controlling like a boat and having a nauseating FOV by even today's console standards. Yet the game was praised and well liked back in the day. Half-Life on a 90s PC in comparison is a much better playing game.
All that said, I still enjoy both. Maybe I've got enough muscle memory to plow trough the BS and enjoy the level design and challenge, specially regarding Turok on original hardware lol. Meanwhile people who didn't grow up with those games are off put whenever a hard jumping puzzle appears or the lack of direction gets them stuck.
> Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.
Fair, my point is more that in order for it to be possible for mere 12 year old mortals to learn to casually execute these tricks, the game has to have predictable, responsive and reproducible movement. In other words, the opposite of slop.
Slop is an unfair word to use, agreed.
I suppose it's possible that they're viewing those factors as being inherent in the original Quake engine rather than something Valve should be credited for and relying on them in their fork so heavily when it didn't suit the overall game was a bad mishmash.
It's more likely they're just conflating how ugly a lot of those later levels are with the engine.
My favorite pasttime in HL/CS back in the day was bhopping and kz_. To some degree I think it has too responsive movement. I recently went back to play HL and I fell down so many crates due to the instant movement, having been used to some inertia in games since.
I remember never quite getting into Counter-Strike: Source because of the difference in inertia. I had friends who were masters of movement there so I know it wasn't a sloppy game, but my muscle memory from 1.6 just made it feel... uncanny :)
Well it was responsive but it wasn't physically accurate at all, which makes it non-intuitive. The whole reason side-games like KZ and surf could exist was due to the bad physics. I competed in local IRC KZ tourneys and also surfed a lot in 1.6. The fact that you gained speed by moving left and right repeatedly doesn't make any intuitive sense. The surf scene was also heavily infected with frame-rate tricks (hotkeys to increase fps-limit in the air, and then lowering it on the ramps) since you floated more in the air the higher your FPS was. In the beginning you needed to have a PC that could support 250+ FPS to be a high-end surfer. This was fixed later with server-set fps limits etc. though.
It created an entire universe of movement based mini-games that I treasured more than the base-game, but it was mostly based on unintuitive physics and engine bugs.
I do agree that the modern game's "inertia" and slow heavy movement feels bad though. Last modern game that I remember had really fast and rapid movement was The Talos Principle.
> Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.
I distinctly remember a noticeable delay between moving the mouse and the view turning, even when the frame rate was high. I think the fix was switching from DirectX to OpenGL.
I assumed it was a general complaint about Xen.
I liked Xen when I played it. I thought the boss fights were terrible, but I think most FPS boss fights are terrible. The other complaint is that the healing pools were too slow. The navigation and obscure puzzles were great, though. They scratched an exploration itch I didn't know I had.
I also found it very weird back then.
Obligatory mention that if you want to enjoy Half-Life today (in spirit if not exactly the same game), Black Mesa is the best option for doing so: https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/
There's still a lot of value in playing the original, but what the Black Mesa team achieved with what is effectively a fan project is incredible. And in a world where Take Two goes after people doing cool stuff with 20 year old GTA games, it's great that it got the official blessing from Valve.
Yes and no. The original is still very much playable, one does not replace the other, both are very good
As someone who has played both, why not just play Black Mesa?
Just a quick bullet point list of differences from the top of my head:
- Half Life has much faster run and gun gameplay (stemming from it's quake roots no doubt), while in Black Mesa it's much slower paced
- The AI in the game is completely different, Black Mesa's soldiers feel way more aggressive, again encouraging a slower pace of play compared to the original
- Lots of levels have small changes - some are cool, others kinda feel like they're just different for the sake of being different
- Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo
Black Mesa is a great game, one thing I have nothing but praise for is it's presentation - it's really nice to look at and they did a bang up job with the graphics and animations. But which is better is a matter of opinion, and personally I much prefer how HL1 actually feels to play.
A couple to add, with my own biases included because I love Black Mesa
- Joel Nielsen's great sound track / sound design work in Black Mesa ... I believe he admitted in an interview that some of the "squelching" sounds are recorded by slapping someone's arse O_o
- The reworked Gonarch fight is, hands down, one of the most entertaining and intense boss fights for me in recent memory. It's way better than the original for sure, which I remember just being frustrating (lack of ammo).
> Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo
I see both takes. Like, in the original game I actually liked Xen (except Gonarch). It felt otherwordly and empty, as if one of the reasons for earth being invaded was because there was nothing left. But BM Xen is literally another world. I prefer BM Xen, but I did enjoy the original at the time.
For a deeper look into Black Mesa / Half-Life and some of the changes, Soup Emporium did a great video here, where he only stole some of the points he raises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d8KAq78gco
> some of the "squelching" sounds are recorded by slapping someone's arse O_o
Quite reminiscent of deadmau5' famous trick: https://youtu.be/4mx_P_gPyiE
The game mechanics and how the story is told is worth experiencing by itself in it’s original form before seeing the modern interpretation in Black Mesa
Black Mesa is a recreation but it's not identical to the original either. So... Yes if you want modern graphics, no if you want the real thing
Black Mesa is not the same game!
Skip Xen if you're playing this.
Overall I think Xen was much better in Black Mesa than HL1, but why they felt the need to make it so long is a mystery to me. Half to two-thirds of the play time could have been cut and it would have only improved things.
Why skip Xen? Xen in Black Mesa is really good. I found it to be much better than the original.
It is so long, and I did not enjoy my time there. "Alright, here is the third or fourth energy door unlocking puzzle to slog through". It was so much slower paced you lose the thread from the human world of what you are even doing anymore.
Does it run on MacOS? (That page suggests not?)
ymmv but runs under CrossOver https://old.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1e4pomu/black_me...
While the original version did not get a port to Mac OS, later on the updated version did for Mac OS X
I really didn't like black Mesa at all. It's different for the sake of being different
> how many computers were currently running Microsoft Windows in the United States. The number of 20 million that he got back was impressive. Yet he was shocked to learn that Windows wasn’t the most popular single piece of software to be found on American personal computers; that was rather a game called DOOM. Newell and Harrington had long enjoyed playing games. Now, it seemed, there were huge piles of money to be earned from making them.
Later on they also found out that introducing gambling to kids is indeed a much better business than just selling games. Going on for many years without anyone cracking down, and doing workarounds when governments try to make it illegal.
I'm reminded of my art professor whose friend worked designing lottery scratch offs, and found it unfulfilling yet well paid. While my professor struggled teaching at a B-tier state university and contracting for prestigious brands.
Around the same time I gave up my dream of making videogames because pay and hours were terrible, and I had no prospects in the Midwest.
Half Life is my favorite game franchise of all time.
Played all the canon games and SO MANY mods.
Still obsessed with it.
this balancing act between scripted story and open gameplay with "conscious" AI defense is so hard to pull off. In the scripted entertainment league Half-Life rules I think. Crysis had the tech to do the real thing and failed - too much cinema and a bad story. But the realism, the mechanics of movement and physics - it was all there in god tier quality.
there were other brilliant ideas bridging nascent technology for the sake of gameplay, like surround sound to locate some fast (nearly impossible to see coming) enemies. It really was perfectly executed.
Great early examples of simulated acoustic spaces matching geometry, like delay networks for metallic ducting in the crawl spaces. And notable firsts in sound management - before there were really "sound engines".
This was the game that brought me into counter-strike and in my opinion still one of the best stories there is. Well done, especially when you think about how limited their possibilities were in the days back then.
I remember playing on the computers at university. Someone had modded the campus map, was so fun to play.
I played this game on 512MB of ram and a 20GB HDD
I was completely blown away when I realized that the opening cinematic was the actual game engine. First time I'd ever seen it and the scenes cleverly foreshadowed what was coming.
One of the unfortunate fallouts of Half-life was Quake 3 arena, which could be viewed as it's exact opposite. I am convinced that after half life people just couldn't appreciate the opposite - just shooting, without any story. And it didn't create the deserved following.
Instead we had almost 15 years of Spunkgargleweewee-s as defined by Zero Punctuation.
I loved Q1 and Q2, but Q3A just felt like half a game to me.
Great article on the single player aspect of the game and absolutely accurate about how exceptional it was - and still is - in the canon of modern gaming.
What really gave Half-Life its legs was the multiplayer component. It came in just as broadband internet was appearing in households across the United States and Canada. The ability to host servers and coordinate through ICQ and message boards created a one-of-a-kind community.
I know because I lived it.
The [R]age Board for the Elites. The CLQ. Adrenaline Gamer and Counter Strike.
Half-Life was incredible and still has an online presence of note - mostly in developing countries. Their hardware matches the lift to run at decent FPS and join games. Now and then I still hop on a server through Steam.
The di clan video - digital immortality - can do more to highlight “why” HLDM and its physics and weapons were such a game changer, even compared to Q3 and UT at the time. There is nothing like using the long jump and tau cannon to literally fly around maps. Other games have tried, but I’ve never gotten the same high as with HL.
Mostly I miss the community, as juvenile and crass as it was. Like the NFL, it was a young man’s game. Most of us were under 25 with rare exceptions. I’ll never forget when Neo Maximus Babson went missing.
This article bring back a lot of memories and than you for sharing… -p$ychos!s- out (LMS, CML, syn, di)
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