Doctooor Freeeemaaaan…

It has been over 20 years, and Half-Life 2 continues to make a splash. Although it only has some official ports to consoles for those gamers, Half-Life 2 has shaped the industry in multiple ways. But since it has been over 20 years, the lessons of its massive impact might have been lost in some people. I’m not gonna go full marketing department with this, instead this is how I feel that we could learn from the game’s release and design.

A trekking journey

Valve had always intended for HL2 to be a long journey. They wanted to expand on what Black Mesa and Xen could offer, because in the end, you were inside essentially two biomes, Earthbound and Xenbound locations. The contrast was too much and many don’t play more HL1 past Xen because it’s boring/bad/hard. With HL2, we got multiple biomes but in a single location. We got a City, Canals, Countryside, Zombie-infested town, mines, coast, highways, beach, prison break(in), street wars, and the final dungeon. A lot of different things that went together in their own separate ways.

And not only there’s a vehicle section, there’s two of them. One with an airboat, one with a car. This makes the journey feels longer and more significant.

Open for Mods

Having an approach that was different from other companies at the time, Valve’s crew were essentially modders from the community that were hired to be part of the company. While GoldSource became moddable because of the SDK release, Source was more complex but they didn’t kill moddability, meaning that anyone can do simple texture and model replacements to outright new campaigns altogether.

Facial Animations Worth a Damn

Ken Birdwell spend almost an entire year (according to Valve’s HL2 20 Years Anniversary video) working on eyes alone. And the system they use for facial animations are still fancy, even today. The system got better with HL2 Episode One and eventually Left 4 Dead, where even today, it’s very good and expressive.

Steam

Hate it or not, Steam has been ingrained into our lives because of Half-Life 2. A huge gamble for Valve at the time, trying to tie up launching a game with a program they created. People used to hate it (and some still do), but it turned itself around, thankfully.

Open Linearity

Although you can argue that Half-Life 2 is a linear game, it offered a degree of exploration that games didn’t offer at the time, and some still don’t do this day. Several maps that allowed you to go and explore a bit for ammo, or something like just enough lore for the world itself. The Coastal levels offer that level of exploration that I wished that games had. Instead of having collectables or something like a numbered secret, it’s just a house in the middle of coast, that you could ignore or explore.

The Perfect Blend

Another thing that Valve did was to improve their idea of playing the game, with equal parts of lore, puzzles and combat. You have several places of downtime, where you’re alone figuring out of a puzzle to progress the map, and the combat never feels too overbearing. Sometimes it comes to a hard stop for the downtime. This is a refinement over what they did on Half-Life 1, where it always looked that you had to move constantly, but in HL2, you can move at your own pace, taking the time to explore if you wish.

Trendsetter

It’s kinda hard to imagine other games nowadays if it wasn’t for Half-Life 2. It set a new blueprint for devs to follow. A game that has lore, exploration, puzzles and combat in equal measures. A game that feels you’re going through a lot quickly but also doesn’t overstay its welcome, letting players deal with the challenge in the way they want to. And unlike many examples of trendsetters out there, you can play the game like it’s a modern release, because it has aged well. Not completely well, but well enough that you can play it without issues.

Closing Words

I love Half-Life 2 and I can’t express enough. It’s one of the best games of all time, for a lot of reasons. Some people diss on it, but your new CoDs and new Battlefields, or Bioshocks or similar wouldn’t be here if Valve didn’t take the plunge and make the game. It’s not just a game but an experience that is worth revisiting every so often. Which I do.