I have just finished replaying Half Life 2, which is an enormously fun game and you should all go an play it NOW in case you haven't. It's cross-platform, can be downloaded from the EVIL STEAM EMPIRE very easily and will keep you happily busy from those difficult talking-to-other-people expectations that we often have at this time of year. Play Episode 1 and 2 as well! They're bite-size!
(27 hours later)
Finished? Good! It's a great game but there are a number of things that bug me. You know me, pick pick pick, nothing's perfect, I'm living in the shadow of the bomb, you're tearing me apart, Lisa. I've picked the top five that I can think of right now.
There's an excellent article on general problems with game rules here, most of which I agree with, but here are my specific Half Life 2 issues.
1. Maintain the illusion of control.
Yes, we all know that Gordon Freeman is the puppet of the Universe, but for a man of such apparent importance and power, he is far too frequently trapped in rooms where the doors mysteriously open for anyone but him, where he is thwarted by a metre-high jump that anyone else can make or, worse, still he is trapped in a cut-scene where he becomes a spectator instead on an actor.
If I wanted to spectate my way through narrative movies, I would buy a movie. Let me move, let my guns work, cut down on the long on-rails cut scenes or transitional narrative elements where you have taken away all of my ability to do anything so that you can roll it out.
I work in edumacation (sic) and I can tell you what happens when students think that they have no control or agency. They stop listening, or go to sleep, or stop coming. Do it enough times and your game becomes boring.
On another note, if you want me to play at squad leader (Follow Freeman), then give me troops who (a) do what I say and (b) have more than half a brain. Don't keep restocking them automatically because they should be a precious and scarce resource - they are people in a child-free world. But give me control over them so that I can use them correctly. How about some basic formations? How about that when I tell them to go somewhere, they stay there for more than 2 seconds?
Am I in control? If I feel like I am, then my continued play and actions have value. Given the way that Episode 2 finished, I'm not sure that I even want to play Episode 3 because I felt out of control for so much of 2. This is a shame, because the Hunters are pretty cool, but not as much of a shame as...
2. Alyx Vance and DOG
Seriously? You want to set up a love scene with an obviously traumatised and at least partially shut-in daughter of one of my colleagues? Who is 20 calendar years younger than I am because she was a child when I went through the gate? Who I just saw nearly die and then got soul-linked to via Vortigaunt juju?
There is, admittedly, nothing sexier than a woman walking around wearing the clothes that still carry the bloodstains from where her abdomen was pierced by hunter claws, with the blood dripping down her back. Wait, ANYTHING is sexier than that.
There are many irritating things about Alyx. Not the least is that she can open every damn door, bar a couple, that the combine has but she never shows Gordon how or gives him a key. As a result, Gordon does all of the heavy lifting and then has to wait until she shows up.
I tried running off and driving away a couple of times in Episode 2 and, boom, she's back whenever the action requires her to be. One time I built a cage of rocks around her, only to discover that she had managed to move all of them and drive the car up. I note that she never chooses to drive the car when Gordon's around.
Yes, she's handy occasionally but, most of the time, she's fanboy service and a pain in the ass. She's also bulletproof, the cause of cutscenes and, given that I'm trying to save the world here, I would not waste some of humanity's valuable Gordon resources risking my life down a goddamn Antlion hole getting magic Vortigaunt ganja.
She won't even hold my extra rockets, which pisses me off for reasons I will explain in item 4.
Worse, she comes with DOG - the robot who makes all of Gordon's actions effectively irrelevant. It's the oldest error to make in any game or writing situation and is more commonly known as Deus Ex Machina. If you need the uber-powered thing to win, or only one character can wield the Insert Weapon Name of Doom Here, then all other players are background and irrelevant.
Having DOG show up to save the day is like going away for the weekend and leaving Iggy Pop staying over with your girlfriend - everyone's gonna get screwed. Once DOG appears, Gordon is a small piece of loose skin on the edge of the action. How about you guys just build about 100 of these things and go and kick the Combine's ass?
3. Pop-up enemies.
If I know, from a combination of years of military training, and from a knowledge of game design, where enemies are going to come from, then let me clear them out before they come and kill me. If a drop ship drops a container and opens the door then, in theory, all of the soldiers are inside waiting to pop out. So if I launch three rockets into that space, they should not pop out, one after the other, immediately after the rocket blasts.
What were they doing? Hiding behind each other? Teleporting in? I know you're in there - LET ME KILL YOU!
If, as another example, I have just cleared out all of the scrapyard and carefully and meticulously gone through to check that no-one is there, don't then have the GRAAA half-headcrab zombies come swarming out just to fuck with me because I HAVE DONE THE RIGHT THING and cleared them out in advance.
In short, generating enemies out of nowhere is bad form. Most of the time HL2 is pretty good about this - bad guys live in rooms and a well-placed grenade will dispatch them pretty well. In the open, however, all the rules go out of the window and shit just goes everywhere.
Stop it. It's irritating. It is, however, not as irritating as...
4. Deliberately limited ammunition for narrative purposes.
Physics are pretty straight-forward. Energy transferred from one place to another, in the right way, can be highly destructive. Why then is it that certain weapons, despite having the ability to hurt certain things, can't hurt other things? Why is it that striders can only be killed by four direct strikes from a rocket launcher - no less, no "three and a grenade", no "two rockets, three grenades and a pop-gun" but four rockets?
The answer? Because you can only carry three rockets at a time and, by doing this, you can only kill striders when the game deems that it's a valid solution. So any strider battle is a matter of 'finding the rocket stash', 'firing at striders', 'repeat'.
How about this? If you show me a strider, let me kill it and don't make it a fixed requirement of some narrative direction that I have to make it through some convoluted set of pathways to find the approved rocket stash and then, finally, be allowed to kill the strider.
Here, Alyx, take a spare rocket. Oh wait, YOU'RE NOT USEFUL! GRAA!
Oh look, hunters can be killed by the alt-fire on the Combine rifle. What a pity that I can only store three of those charges, despite there being more than that in the game. Catch, Alyx! Butterfingers!
5. Freeman ain't Free, man.
The number of times that people ask Gordon to do something and no matter of head shaking or nodding will change the outcome is irritatingly large. Gordon is mute throughout the entire game and, I don't know about you, but sometimes I'd like the option to tell everyone else to get knotted. How about "No, don't follow me, because all you fools will die in an irritating fashion".
Yes, as already mentioned, he is a puppet on a set of well-defined strings but let's not rub the player's face in it. Every so often, Gordon could have a choice of going down one corridor or another and *GASP* different things could happen! No! What happened to my carefully constructed rails?
You want to see good rails? Look at Deus Ex. You had to play it two, maybe three, times to really even start seeing the limited choices that you had. But you had the illusion of choice throughout. Sometimes you made a choice just be choosing not to do something, not realising that it would have an impact later. (I've mentioned it before, but Denton can stay and fight to protect his sick brother or leave him and let him be killed. It's not an obvious choice but it means that your brother will either be around later on or you find his corpse on a slab. It's a nice choice.)
I propose a simple solution: story first, with branching and interaction, THEN graphics and gameplay.
But, seriously, give me more rockets and no-one gets hurt.
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