Sam’s Half Life 2 Impressions
Since the first Half-Life, every other shooter has just been trying to insert these cinematic sequences into the gameplay. Running through a collapsing building, diving from a plane at 30,000 feet with no parachute or escaping a sinking tanker aren’t unfamiliar tasks to the average gamer anymore. These experiences were intense and exciting, to be sure, but the problem with them is that the solution to these obstacles is always the same. You can insert multiple paths, but you’re still witnessing a static world dictated to react in a specific way. No matter what you do, the same thing will always happen in the same place and the same time.
What Half-Life 2 appears to do is create an environment where you can’t tell if these things are dictated prior or are changing based on your actions. While you’re still presented with the same basic situations every time you play, the result of those situations can have a greater change based on what you do and how the AI decides to react to that situation. A good example from one of the videos is a when Gordon Freeman gets into a gunfight with a trooper and then decides to retreat to a nearby building. Once in the building he pushes a table in front of the door. The trooper tries to open the door and fails, so he starts to shoot through the windows instead. Taking cover behind an old appliance, he retreats up some stairs just as the soldiers (now there’s two) kick the door in. The stairs end just in front of a window, and another soldier is visible outside for only a split second before he begins firing. The glass shatters and the shutters flap with each bullet that passes through. There’s another soldier up the second flight of stairs, so Gordon uses an antigravity weapon to rip a radiator from a wall and effectively use it as a shield to allow for a safe ascent. Once near the top of the stairs, he uses his weapon to rocket the radiator at the soldier, clearing his path. This same weapon allows Freeman to knock a pile of mattresses and other junk down the stairs, so the soldiers behind can’t follow. All of this occurring completely in-game, without any kind of pre-scripting. Had Gordon simply not decided to block the door off, the situation would have unraveled in a completely different fashion. This is the kind of shit I’ve been waiting to see in gaming since I started gaming. An interactive world with believable reactions from its characters. If someone were writing a thesis on why gaming has the potential to kick the shit out of the movie industry, Half-Life 2 would be the ideal example of why.