There’s an after and before Half-Life in Valve’s history and the video-game industry as a whole.
Before the 1998 debut, Valve was a small indie developer. After their successful FPS hit, they became the massive behemoth they are today. Therefore, they changed the landscape forever by launching Steam, the biggest video-game storefront.
You’ve probably heard about Half-Life games before. If anything, you saw or playedHalf-Life: Alyx hailed as the best 2020 VR title. The thing is, they’re probably more entries than you realize, including a great third-party remake.
Also, I couldn’t stress enough how good Half-Life games are. Perhaps you already know this. But if you’re a newcomer, give them a try.
Half-Life debuted in 1998 to introduce the many formulas in the series. At the core, Valve’s franchise is an FPS experience that relies on environmental storytelling, dynamic environments, and varying scenarios.
The name of the game is due to how it works.Players spend part of the playthrough in underground locations and the rest on surface locations.
Underground settings add horror elements. Imagine a dark sewer filled with dormant zombie-like aliens at the corner. You have a flashlight in your suit, but it can run out of energy at any time.
Surface locations are different. It offers guns-blazing action against aliens, soldiers, ships, vehicles, and everything in between.
The next core element is the protagonist, Gordon Freeman.He begins as a scientist for the Black Mesa laboratory. A failed experiment opens up a portal to another dimension, and you’re one of the only survivors.
Nevertheless, Gordon Freeman doesn’t speak. As the ultimate irony, he’s not free: he obeys everything others tell him to do. His loyalties come into question frequently by the presence of the mysterious “G-Man,” a man in a suit that comes and goes, capable of using Freeman to do his bidding.
We’ll continue exploring the plot as we go through the series. For now, you should knowit’s a story offree will, corruption, humanity, ethics, and enslavement set within a human vs. alien war.
Either way, the next element we’re discussing is theHEVsuit. It protects Freeman from environmental damage like toxic wastes and grants HP and shield. Moreover, it comes with an AI voice and a myriad of sound effects that are hard to forget.
Another core element is how the story comes through. Instead of standard cinematic cuts, the relevant plot points come through scripted events. That also means the narrative flows through from beginning to the end, and the only loading screens connect one chapter to the next.
Lastly, there’s the arsenal. It’s a wide arsenal, with a combination of melee weapons, pistols, assault rifles, sci-fi laser beams, and alien weapons. On PC, for example, you carry weapons on numbers 1-to-9,similar to Doom.
That said, there’re no RPG elements and no choices. These arelinear games where you go from A to B, and the challenge is surviving.
