Quote: " I don't see any other aspect in which Half Life is inferior to modern games"
The way i see it, (graphics aside) Half life 1 lacked the atmosphere and immersion of half life 2. HL1 The world around you felt static for the most part altho there were places with explosions, around you and falling debree and stuff, it wasnt enough to make the game world of HL1 to feel real.
for example. in HL1 there was a place where you fight against a gunship trying to kill you. you doge its attacks, hide behind stuff, the gunship moves around and thats ok
HL2: you are riding a car or a hoverboat, there is a gunship chasing after you, either shooting you with its chaingun, or trying to drop the bombs in front of you which you have to doge and it all looks really epic you flooring it, there is stuff blowing up all around you, you doge obstacles try to slip trough some tunnels to hide from the gunship which still manages to drop bombs through holes that lead to the surface, etc.
HL1 didnt have that. The closest it did have is you riding on a rail cart with people trying to shoot you from the platforms. They could have made that scene better by getting a few soldiers on another cart chasing your cart on the paralell tracks. Or at least the soldiers could have trown grenades in front of your rail cart, that would have been much cooler for the fast pased action/chase scene
I am sure they could have done it back in 1998, the game has tons of really great effects but i felt they were used too rarley.
Also the atmosphere was kindof boaring. Idk maybe its the location of Black Mesa, southwest, Desert, clear sky. Well what they could have done there is draw the sky in each level according to the time its supposed to take place, HL1 was a long game, i am sure they could have fit at least a 1.5 days in there kindof like they did in HL2 which took place over a period of 2 days.
They could have made HL1 a bit creepier since it has a bunch of zombies in it. And graphics isnt a question here. If anyone played the original Thief the dark project the graphics are worse than HL1 yet the creepy atmosphere created in that game was amazing! (really freaked me out when i played it)
So i really think Half life 1 could have been a much better game if they put more effort into the details, like atmosphere, immersion action scenes etc. All it takes is adding some more graphical content, tweak the lighting here and there, add some more animated/scripted events like falling stuff, explosions and generally try to get more movement into the enviroment around the charecter (maybe this might be limited by the CPU power back then, but still they could have still done better than the end-result of HL1) and finally, i think this is the most important one, improve the sound. good sound (like not good quality sound but good placement of the right sounds in the right places) can create amazing atmosphere even with lack of graphics. (again Thief the dark project. Horrible chunky graphics. pretty bad quality lighting and mediocre quality of sound. but they were all arranged and placed so well, combined, it created eery as hell atmosphere.) When i played thief the dark project, i was just as scared as when i played Condemned Criminal Origins (also extremley scary game)
dont hate people who rip you off,cheat and get away with it, learn from them
