Reasons for Half-life's cult following

This is what the Half-Life popularity graph looks like on Steam in the past year. 33,000 gamers run the game and leave it open-- thus marking the 25th anniversary the first installment of the legendary action movie. Valve, on the other hand, in honor of the milestone gave the shooter away for free and released a documentary about its creation. But what has Half-Life done to deserve such love? On in fact, three important factors contributed to the success, that turned the genre around then a

nd still does. are the foundation of almost every video games. At the microphone is Ivan Loev, reserch conducted by Vladimir Sechkarev. And now we're we'll tell you why Half-Life it's impossible to tear yourself away. Let's go! Yeah, we decided to release in 2024. Half-Life video. But I promise you, it's not filled with platitudes and platitudes and platitudes, and interesting observations. But before Let's start with the platitudes, shall we? and obvious because the first major factor in

success of the game is that there's it was fun to run and gun. Half-Life, I remind you, is based on the of a wildly modified Quake engine (which should say a lot), and she herself, later on, became the basis for the Counter-Strike (the importance of which to the genre of of a first-person shooter is hardly necessary. to remind)! And that kind of speaks for itself The phenomenal quality of mooving and hustling in the game. On top of that we have: cannons - a carload and a small cart, and mos

t of them have alternate with ways of shooting; the bestiary is rich, from small to large, from humans to aliens; the scenery is varied, from cramped office spaces to vast laboratories. And that's adds uniqueness to each firefight, and all of these factors combine to make it possible Half-Life's passage into a hurricane of fresh sensations, directly from the shooter core: for there's either a new barrel waiting around every corner, either a new enemy or old enemies in a new combination, or

a new game situation. But again: is it only because of this that the game cool? No, it's not. Lots of different guns is good, The variety of enemies and locations is marvelous, but as a to build on that to make something that will be remembered, will leave a mark on your soul? Oh, good of you to ask! Designers have just one such tool. It's called mechanical drama. What is drama of the ordinary - we're all in the We understand in general terms: the character (or characters) on the the screen

is having some kind of emotional experience, and we, as bystanders, we react to it. When they say, that the work is dramatic, they mean, that it causes emotional swings: throws the spectator (well, or player) out of the from hot to cold, from fear to euphoria, from panic to triumph. Drama mechanical - it's the same thing, but instead of saying and of sentient characters for emotional Variables are responsible for gameplay mechanics. Here's an example from Half-Life. At the beginning of a l

evel. Power Up you see a big monster, who also throws jeeps and hurts. burns, and naturally, you try to decide the problem in the usual way: shoot while you're won't die. And this big guy, he's a piece of work, does not die and does not die! Having come to terms with his own impotence, you skip by, you scurry around. you keep going, and eventually you're gonna lure a monster in a trap! It ends up exploding into chunks of meat. And a voice in my head cheerfully shouting: "Yay, I won! I'm th

e smartest one here!" Do you have that voice in your head, too? There was a term to describe this kind of situation in 1998. hadn't even happened yet, but the designers at Valve were already were well aware of the importance of not only allowing the player can have all the fun he wants with everything available to him. an arsenal and a variety of enemies, but also manage his mood - here you are defeating a squad of dodgy assassins and feel like a king, a lord. Black Mesa, and in Freeman's ne

xt scene. knock him out, take away all his weapons and the poor guy has to fight for his life, trying to get out of the incinerator while it won't flatten under your control. You get a new weapon, and it's immediately has to apply: because the cage, where the crossbow is with Gordon Freeman. falls into a body of water with a big, aggressive fish. And here's the place where the most dangerous obstacle is water spilled on the floor. Your pockets are bursting with guns, you've already have sl

aughtered hordes of enemies with them, but this is where the game turns you into a cow on a on the ice, and your self-confidence is visibly fading. It's the same in the warehouse, where everywhere you look, there's a lot of is rigged with explosives - the whole game you're running around with the speed of Usain Bolt, and that quickness has been repeatedly and saved your life more than twice, and now she's becoming into the problem, you have to make every move, so God forbid you touch anythin

g. Half-Life wants you to think as much as possible. with her head, a skill she values far more than mechanical quick crosshair skill of aiming at someone's face. That's why the main character not a Marine, but a theoretical physicist. And all of this-- without a single word, without a single emotion to which a player could soak up the empathy, all the is built solely on game mechanics. However, to say that Half-life invented "mechanical drama" is not quite correct, because, for example, al

ready in the first part Quake has had similar episodes: at the end of the of one of the levels, when the player is separated from the finish line. a thin bridge, and suddenly two people jump up on it the monster and the hero finds himself in a very precarious position. position. The developers at Valve understood, what makes a good shooter good, and they made that's the basis of game design-- probably, he was the one Half-Life was pushing. more than anywhere before her. The very term "Mecha

nical Drama" in the sense of "directing emotional turmoil with the help of game mechanics" was first used by Developer and writer Doc Burford in one of his essays, dedicated to Doom Eternal. The developers organize the gameplay of specific scenes to plunge the player into a contrasting emotional to make him afraid first, a little later to give him a sense of triumph, then. to cause panic again, and so on. That's what this is. mechanical drama, and at the championship of the I think Hidetak

a Miyazaki's games will win. But, what turned the game from merely outstanding of a shooter into a revolutionary shooter? We know that too. There's a story in the book "Lords of DOOM" about how id software back in 1991. were brainstorming ideas for a shooter that ended up being Wolfenstein 3D. Tom Hall offered to do an action movie about the lab and mutants, to which John Romero replied: Oh, man, I don't know. It's such a trite topic. Everyone was sick of her. "Here we go, mutants again, a

lab full of shit, blah, blah, blah, blah." And then seven years later, Half-Life comes out, and what do we see out there? Mutants and a lab, full of bullshit. In trite clich?s. there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself: projects that experiment with the presentation of their stories, even resort to them on purpose, to make it easier for the audience to get used to the new one Media. The plot of Half-Life is largely about himself: something went wrong, a cascade of cascading resonance

, and now the protagonist is striving to survive, while salvaging what's left of the old one. of the world. But it's not the originality that matters, it's the presentation, the ability to weave story into gameplay. The fact that is now called narrative design. Let me explain with an example. The fifth chapter in the game is called We've got hostiles. "Uh-huh," you do in your head. a couple of notes, A) there's someone coming your way. very hostile; B) blue rays are deadly; and actually B) w

e have to get there somehow to this room and open the door, because she's apparently the only one exit". Item B is generally optional: even if you can understand English without subtitles or the pirate translation was bad, the game is still completely linear - venting like this or else it will lead you to the right place, although, of course, it's always nice to keep a specific Target. This scene lasts only a few seconds, but it has three purposes: it sets up the direction of motion, intro

duces new mechanics and brings us another plot twist. Very effective; however, that's not even the main point. The key highlight of this moment is, That mechanical drama is... absent here. The design philosophy of early id Software is all about what happened: a scientist who walked into a land mine, who took out a zombie guard, especially for a the animations created, the recorded lines, even the very words "We've got hostiles" in the the beginning of the level is nothing more than a surplu

s, which gameplay, generally speaking, is nothing. Gives. The uniqueness of Half-Life compared to to her modern first-person shooters is. it is the redefinition of the relationship between the player and the world. Ken Birdwell, a designer at Valve, in '99. wrote an article where he emphasized two principles, to which the studio adhered in working on the game. The first one he called "player recognition": if your avatar performs an action, the world must respond to it to react. You shoot at

the wall-- at the it leaves a bullet mark. You're pushing something, what's not bolted to the floor moves. You hit it with a tire iron on a fragile object, it breaks. Gordon walks into the room and everyone looks around and looks at the him. If possible, they also call him by his first name. The second principle in Birdwell's article is called "experience density" : with and around the player. events must take place, the number of which are proportional to the size of the card. In DooM and

Quake, things always happen to you, and you can shoot at walls till you're blue in the face, they won't react. Half-Life, on the other hand, revitalizes its own space, making things happen also around you: you're stepping on an invisible trigger, the script activates, and there's the elevator, that you used for five minutes backwards, falls down the shaft with the passengers, here's some poor guy being dragged into a vent. and torn to shreds, but his coworker, almost made it to safety, unc

lenches his fingers and flies into the abyss. DOOM had such invisible triggers too, but they usually opened a door somewhere and unleashing a horde of monsters to let loose attacked you. Half-Life does a similar thing, but in a different way: you open the door, and there's a scary tentacle monster, but right now he's not a danger to you represents-- this scene makes it clear what to watch out for in the future, and puts the player's next target. The quintessential example of this approach t

o utilizing of the scripted scenes was a ride on a suspension car. on the streetcar in the beginning: the Quakes were throwing you're in the thick of it from the get-go, and the action started almost instantly, and the Half-Life's first few minutes actually forbade the player to move: he was supposed to wriggle and admire the surroundings and animations. In conditional Doom, such a peaceful section would appear couldn't, because the game wouldn't have anything to fill it with. And Valve lea

ding you through a world that will soon cease to be to exist, by normalcy, for a return that you'll have to fight your way through the game. Unlike in Doom, where the portal to hell opened up an evil corporation, and you have to shut it down you, because everyone else is dead and no longer no one, in Half-Life, you're the one causing the disaster. personally, and her story becomes a kind of by the arch of redemption: every adversary is not only your problem, but your fault, a consequence of

your own actions. Mechanical The drama is thus added to the emotional drama. In this case, the unity of player and avatar is virtually non-existent is broken: with a couple of minor exceptions, the entire Gordon's story, from being late for work to being defeating Nihilanth and making a deal with G-man, uncut in one shot - 20 years before. when God of War started bragging about it. Yes, the story in the game is at first glance as simple as a the tire iron in Freeman's hand. But first of al

l, we have it's very effectively told in a way that creates a clear a sense of direction: at every moment the player knows where Freeman is headed and why. Secondly, parts of the narrative to us, if I may say so, very effectively not they say. Did no one really foresee cascading resonance? What were they doing in Black meze? Nihilanth - who is that, anyway? And who's wearing handcuffed him and sewed on a third arm? And most importantly. who's the G-man we've been watching all game, and at t

he end he proposes to Gordon? È what kind of mysterious employers does he have? And why is he talking so weird? A game, maybe, and it took about 10, 15 hours to get through, but it provided fans have been speculating for years. forward. Again, just like Miyazaki. A sense of continuity of action in it's only gotten stronger over the years: Half-Life doesn't hide downloads during transitions from one location to another, but with modern-day on SSD computers, they last a tiny amount of time.

fractions of seconds. Instead of becoming obsolete, the game, on the other hand, is just getting closer to experience, which is what I was trying to be in the first place, to the feelings I was trying to convey. So, the puzzle is complete. Three key pieces finally fell into place. What made Half-Life iconic project? First, the feeling of moving and shooting. They're cool. Secondly, the foundation of videogame action movies is a mechanical drama, which Valve skillfully creates by making you t

o feel all-powerful in some moments, in others, negligible. Thirdly, and this is exactly what Half-Life was pioneering in. genre, - player recognition and density of experience: the world responds to your presence, NPC skits bring the action to life, and in the intro, the game even puts them together a picture of a peaceful life, so that after the catastrophe. you understood and remembered what was at stake. Curiously enough, we even got a pass in time to see what's going on with the game,

when she abandons those principles. Â an ending that doesn't take place on Earth, and in Xen world, the density of experience is dramatic. goes down: you're on your own. with monsters and have to get used to the fact that. you'll find nothing around the next corner, except for a new group of enemies. A world that has yet recently seemed human and familiar and constantly reacting to our actions becomes almost static and intuitively incomprehensible. It turns out that in order to move from on

e level to the the other needs to activate three alien mushrooms, you have to regain your health by being bored blue puddles, a seemingly flimsy spider web. can only be torn apart by a special enemy, and the yellow ones the pyramids on the wall aren't just decorations, but the Horcruxes of the final boss. Tonight. Zen is rather considered an example of that, how not to do it, precisely because the game betrays itself at this point. Lastly, I would like to touch on the topic of development

Half-Life: it teaches us an important lesson about that pots aren't actually burned by gods, and that games they're not the ones doing it, either. From the documentary on the 25th anniversary of the release, we know that all of 1998. the Valve team has been working their asses off, and without it. a single person, the game would probably have been didn't work out. There's one thing, though: originally. nobody was planning on doing Half-Life in '98. It was set for release in late '97, and we

were even we know what she looked like at the time - not at all. it's not a given that if it sees the light of day, it would have been able to compete with the major The PC action movies of that year were Quake II and Blood. It's not just about appearances the look and feel of the shooting, but also in the design philosophy itself. Ken Birdwell wrote in his article that his two key principles: player recognition and experience density - team the developers formulated only after as she finis

hed the alpha version of the project; the one that ended up put it in the trash and started over. Talent and skill are important, of course, but it's just as important to realize at the right moment, that you've reached an impasse, to learn from your own and decide to push back the release date: in the case of Half-Life, the development timeline almost doubled compared to with the original plan, and with it grew and budget. A lot of other studios in this kind of situations would have decide

d to compromise and release what's available. But not Valve. Next, as they say, history happened. Freeman's adventures and shootouts in multiplayer both fans and critics received rapturously, and later. a lot of other things have grown on their foundation: and mods like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, and The long-suffering fan remake of Black Mesa, and the Black Mesa Classic remake of that remake, and dumpling-making videos, and, of course, the dizzying speedruns where Freeman moves fas

ter than a Formula 1 car. Will we ever hear Freeman's footsteps again, and will they herald a new revolution? This is one G-Man knows. Well, and maybe Gabe Newell is onto something. But as soon as we find out -- we'll be sure to let you know, right on StopGame.ru, so subscribe, hit all the bells and likes so you don't miss it. À that's all for today -- that's all, thank you for being and see you soon on StopGame!