"it was really good for it's time"

Reminder, HL2 in 2004 came out the same year as Doom 3, Halo 2, Far Cry, UT 2004, Butcher Bay, Prime 2 and fucking CSS
All of these games feature better gunplay the HL2. Most of them even look better.
Also reminder that Fear came out the following year. Why the fuck is this shit recalled so foundly out of all of those games.

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> in current year its hailed as a master piece
No its not

hl2 feels like an adventure going through all kinds of different places and with an interesting enough story taking place as you play
literally the definition of greater than the sum of its parts

Because it holds up much better than any of those except maybe CSS

>Prime 2
>better gunplay
Retard alert

Yeah, the adventure of Loading...every time you take 10 steps forward.

Yeah I said it. HL2s gunplay is mediocre at best. It falls apart entirely at range.

>Doom 3
>better gunplay
you are out of your mind

>Yeah, the adventure of Loading...every time you take 10 steps forward.
what are you talking about the individual areas take longer to complete than levels in doom 3 and that game has loading screens

All those games suck compared to hl2. And Halo 2 and css, ut are only good for thier mp

it absolutely has better gunplay. neither is particularly good but at least doom 3's non-bullet weapons are ok

If it's so good
Why they don't release Half Life 3?

Oh yeah Painkiller also came out that year.

Go reinstall and play both then. D3 while shit was still serviceable and holds up. Also has a solid shotgun. HL2 suffers from "All our guns are either ammo limited or trash" Kinda sad when the best weapons available is the gimmick grav gun.

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Painkiller is shit tho

More like it's still good for its age.

I dont think you have replayed HL2 recently. I can tell. The amount of loading in that game is rough. Really fucking rough. EP1 and 2 are far better about it.

HL2 nailed pacing like no other game. The setpieces are rich in variety and last just long enough before they lose their novelty. Physics in HL2 were a new thing in that quality and never used in such a way before. Also, HL2's level design was incredible because it spoke to the player without insulting his intelligence. You almost instantly knew what the game wanted from you simply because of the way things were designed, not because they dumbed it down for absolute retards.

It's probably for the better HL3 will never see the light of day. You fags would never be able to appreciate it despite calling for it because of memes.

metroid prime 2 is my favorite game of all time but it does not have better gunplay than HL2

i dont care if its 5 minutes apart the loading is like 2 seconds on a regular hdd

>HL2 nailed pacing like no other game
wrong, all the vehicle sections were pace killers, especially the fucking boat

Yeah and in other games from that time their loads are also measurable in seconds. What's your point?

*sip*
Yep, that was a good year

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Doom 3 is a VR game it just didn't realize it at the time

in doom 3 the load times are easily over 15 seconds on a regular hdd

>Halo
>Better gunplay than anything
the crossbow alone in HL2 has better gunplay than any weapon from the Halo series

Strongly disagree. Their size alone helped in making the environments feel like actual places. Graphically impressive games for its time like Doom 3 or FEAR were a series of corridors while Valve dared to take it outside. Those segments featured exploration and were supposed to make you come down after stressful chases or shootouts, or setup another action sequence. Ups and downs are important, user.

>water hazard
>exploration
it's a straight fucking line

Unironically the thing that kills doom 3 vr for me is that you cant disable the weapon laser and exclusively use iron sights

You're insane if you think that. Like legitamly.
Yeah the crossbow. Ok. Sure. Simply because its a non hitscan sniper.

>Why they don't release Half Life 3?
cos Volvo cant make a game ever since they made steam they dont have a need to

gunplay in halo is complete garbage. HL2 being average/below average in terms of PC FPS in that regard still puts it above halo

t. Mindless contrarians that can't even define gunplay

Replayed it recently, it's just very pleasing to play throughout, each area doesn't overstay its welcome, music is top tier. What more could you ask for from a small indie budget starved company?

HL2 started the cinematic shooter meme. The nice thing about HL1 was the story was secondary and hardly any of the NPCs were absolutely necessary to advance, and those that were actually required you to protect them and utilize them in a meaningful way. HL2 interrupts the gameplay with exposition way too often and forces you to sit through a retarded amount of dialogue and "cutscenes" in order to progress, on top of giving you 50000 health allies that trivialize the actual game itself. Fucking stupid having to sit through kleinder or alyx or eli talk about how big and scary and evil the combine are for 5 minutes until they have to push a button to open a door for you.

Good thing it wasn't just Water Hazard, you disingenuous fag.

>legitamly
Anyways Halo is catered to console in a way that forces it to be shit via an actual control scheme, he's right

I'll be honest guys, I never played this game on release, I gave it a few shots in recent years but it just doesn't grab my attention. The shootouts in the drainage canals are so dull I just forget to keep playing it after a session or two.

HL1 started it, HL2 just went even further beyond
HL1 is cinematic FPS meme
HL2 is physics and faces meme
HL3 is VR meme

>le gunplay meme
all fps gunplay feels exactly the same. none of you can even define why you think it feels different and on the off chance you can you'd get tons of people disagreeing about how it feels.

Because "gunplay" is literally nothing but smoke and mirrors. it's how it sounds, how the enemy reacts, and its how it looks. At the end of the day if you disable First person models in all these games you wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the actual gameplay.

almost like FPS is a braindead genre for western cockgobblers.

water hazard is the biggest example, but it's not the only one. HL2's vehicle sections suck and the game would be better without them

>things /vpol/ would freak out about today

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No, your posts suck and this thread would be better without them.

>HL2 started the cinematic shooter meme

How did it do that? When you're going through a combat section of the game it stops for nothing. There's interactions with NPCs inbetween these segments but never is the gameplay interrupted so you can see le epic cool moment.

post your video game hours in the last two weeks.

Who gives a shit about input method, its sandbox is still infinitely better developed by comparison.

The adventure of what? The level design is terrible.

>tasteless zoomer nigger flaps his mouth
Only 4channel's anonymity saves you from public humiliation.

>blocks your path
youtube.com/watch?v=RZRNd6osQrk

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I bet you have a shallow definition of level design

What does that mean? The number of hours I've been playing games in the last two weeks? I've mostly been playing Hitman 2 and the RE2 remake these last 2 weeks. I'd say around 10 hours of Hitman and around 20 hours of RE2.

when you have so much variety and so many set pieces it really doesnt matter if the level design itself isnt all that good

t.
attack
skill
magic
item

sdfasdfas

if only this place had usernames like reddit, am i right fellow tourist?

>all lights turn on

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Haha, you said reddit. You almost sound like you fit in.

Get a trip so I can filter you.

Now that the dust has settled, can we agree that doom 3 is better than half life 2?

I can, very easily.
The Pistol and SMG feel like fucking dogshit to use and they are your primary weapons till Ravenholm. The pistol in particular while decent when going for headshots lacks any real feedback and still has a shit time to kill. You can tell even the guys at Valve knew this since Canals is stuffed with explosive barrels to make up for it. SMG does fuck all thats not spraying and praying and wastes more ammo than the US on its military budget. Shotgun is decent, but AR2 and Crossbow are actually good but both have no fucking ammo in the game, and the AR still takes too many rounds to put someone down unless you do single shots for the head.
Revolver still just fucking misses at times. Grav gun is a gimmick.

>Revolver still just fucking misses at times.

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It was only a good tech demo for it's time fuck valve

Which in turn is worse than
youtube.com/watch?v=QHRuTYtSbJQ

Dark souls in olden times would've been just a middling dungeon crawler but modern gaming has gotten so low in the triple A space people treat it like the end all be all of difficulty. Context matters a lot when speaking about games. Moron.

Man, 2004 was such a fucking great year for PC gaming.

What?

Thank god D3 is only 1.5 gigs. This is not 15 seconds, and its on a HDD.
Not that it fucking matters since read/write speeds are not uniform

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doom 3 and hl2 came out at the same time and people argued over which was better dumbass

ok fag who bows to hiro's site rename! yum yum advertiser cock!

Uh no they didn't, they overreacted to the handheld flashlight and horror over action angle

Worst part about HL2 for me was it wasting a minute of your life loading the menu screen because it wanted to load a level environment in the background. They eventually allowed launch args to just enable a console command to have it remain a blurred jpg after a couple patches.

>You can tell even the guys at Valve knew this since Canals is stuffed with explosive barrels to make up for it.
that's called good level design and high skill ceilings instead of a boring shooting gallery

No, its call "Ah shit our pistol fucking sucks ass."
Also what the fuck high skill ceilings? Are you high or something? Its legit shooting fucking barrels. You cant get any lower than that without auto aim.

I remember being not impressed while playing on day 1 even though I had been waiting for it and hype. The first one had such a better story and setting. 2 was all over the place and in the end you are fighting a human compare that to a giant alien baby on an alien world. Also remember the scale if the tentacle in one? Where was the giant scary monster in 2? Shooting striders with a rocket launcher..meh

Movement also had a higher influence in the gameplay of 1. 2 being a much slower game cut most of the depth out.

never heard of that game

Look at the number of posts and posters. It's all one faggot isn't it

youtube.com/watch?v=WYDsz1NFBJw

I wish mike and jay played video games

>Doom 3 is still a good game unlike HL2 though
Don't kid yourself lmao

>it's time

The singleplayer is overrated and the multiplayer is underrated

They turned it into a generic shooter vs humans for most of the game. Sure they are supposed to be alien hybrid things...they look like fucking normal dudes in masks. Even the vortiguants are on your side suddenly and they do shit all to explain that. You litteraly had to go find a secret tunnel area to listen to the dialog explaining why. They took an amazing setting in one and turned it into generic trash for two. Ravenholm was the only good chapter and it looked much funner in the leaked version.

The problem with Half-life 2 is that it was a tech demo for the engine and everything suffered. the HECU from half-life 1 are insane good compared to the AI in 2.

Wow sir, your a fucking faggot.

Resently played the game with this mod:
moddb.com/mods/hl2-ep2-enhased-mod

Holy shit it was fun, has a few parts that are kind of bullshit but the added challenge was really fun. Turn off cross-hair for immersion.

I'm sorry, but I've never heard of Dusk

HL2 has a better shotgun than Doom 3. Revolve is amazing as well.

>You litteraly had to go find a secret tunnel area to listen to the dialog explaining why.
More like you'd have to look at the first time you see a Vortiguant at the train station. It's pretty obvious that they're just as oppressed as humans. How did you miss that bit of non-dialogue storytelling?

>that it was a tech demo for the engine
lol its that meme again!

Funny you invoke that mod. Its that very one that made me start to think that HL2 was never that great of a game in the first place. Even more so when I just got done replaying the Fear series.

>its

Shut your mouth you whore bitch

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It's kinda scary that an entire generation of video game enthusiasts grew up without even knowing the name "Half-Life". Those are the ones who define what is getting played.

I guess but the point is they were fun to fight against. I would have rather had variants of them instead of variants of headcrabs. Hl2 isnt even about aliens anymore so much as how a human sold out to them. The gameplay was just bland. Black mesa was itself a character. As soon as alyx is introduced and its a cutscene where you cant move I knew they fucked shit up.

>It's scary that time progresses
>The media I consumed when I was young allows me to dictate objective quality

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What? HL2s shotgun?
The shotgun where you are within 2 feet of a Combine, fire it at his head and its a 75/25 if it actually does anything or not?
You have got to be kidding. HL2 is still the only game that comes to mind where a double barrel shot can just apparently miss when you are in their face.

>burnout 3
fuck me I never more than 73 takedowns in road rage
i remember reading a ps2 magazine and some guy wrote in about his 100+ record and said the AI changes I believed him
I never did get every gold medal
the racing generation is dead

Ehhhh you can't really miss, though? I mean you can but the weapon can't. I'd use the magic double blast though, just to be sure. Are you the guy who claimed revolver in HL2 "can miss"? I mean, it's pixel accurate, which is dumb but hey, it's not a military simulator.

Typical zoomer reading comprehension. I was lamenting that new generations are ignorant towards the achievements of the past. You play shit without knowing where it came from, what needed to happen to reach that state. You just mindlessly consume whatever is vomited in front of you without interest or appreciation for its history. This kind of ignorance gives us stupid threads like this one.

To put it in words you understand: you are cringe. Yikes!

Shits really fucking dumb, and yeah.
Still, even against zombies if you shoot the headcrab off their head sometimes it just takes 2 shots, sometimes 1. It might not have enough pellets and missing one makes you lose a ton of damage or something.

Doom 3's gunplay is hurt by it's absolutely terrible sound design. All of the guns sound pathetic, with the only memorable noise being the plasma reload.

>it's

As mentioned before, you are a faggot.

Yeah well, and in original HL the shotgun usually doesn't kill headcrabs in one shot because of spread. HL2 one is a big improvement, and D3 shotgun is a melee weapon (which is kind of okay but it's not remembered fondly for that, usually).

>all this whining at someone 28 years old
Did you know the history of all of video gaming when you were a little shit playing HL2 for the first time? No, you were playing the cool new shiny thing just like they are with their games.

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I've said that HL2 was overrated mediocrity since it came out.
I don't know if it was paid reviews or some global mental eclipse, but the entire gaming scene hailed it as some masterpiece when it was worse than HL1 and did absolutely nothing to move its genre or games in general forward, apart from the graphics that were absolutely stomped by FEAR, STALKER and Crysis in the following years.

You're not fooling anyone, zoomer. Even if true, anyone born after '90 should just kill himself desu senpai.

"gunplay" is a meaningless buzzword

weapon sandbox, Ai, vehicles, enemy variation, story
Half life 2 gets BTFO by Halo 2

Literally not OP, but ok.

I liked it more as a melee weapon. It was ludicrous up close but sucked ass from afar. Its inaccurately represented as all hell but then again so is the Spas in both Half Lifes. It struggling to kill headcrabs in 1 is also something I dont agree with even today.

Do the math that's '90 baka

>it spoke to the player without insulting his intelligence

HL2 tester detected.

Go play Arma 2 then come back to apologize for this shit post

half life 2 has the dumbest ai i ever seen

and don't go there really smart, they just look stupid

They stand still in the open and shoot, and walk in rooms one at a time

There retarded

You really should take up reading. That's still one year too late, sorry.

Nice typing AI.

whatever happen to physics? Gta4 and half life 2 is still top notch in that department and its been 10 years.

I meant to imply that you are also a faggot.

GTAV has been downgraded in that regard, but RDR2 caught up.

cuz they literally can't create something better than Half Life 2. No one has been able to for over 15 years.

Scathing. You sure told me.

physics were the only real next gen thing in gaming besides graphics

like the only thing that made me go. Yeah this is next gen and was exciting. vr is just so in a bubble no one is realistically going to sit/stand/strap shit to their head just to play video games.

i want better ai
I want more physics
I want bigger battles with less lag
thats what gaming should be going for

HL2s physics are...not the best. Games just stopped focusing on them and stopped trying to have gameplay revolve around them and instead just had them running in the background.

>if it doesn't impress me it never was good
you are right and I can't explain why we thought it was good other than the gravity gun was like the moonlanding of my generation

Hand on heart, can you even remember HL2 sections that didn't suck?
>physics bullshit
>the sand is now lava
>tower defense sections
>driving sections
>shoot down this airship while enemies respawn

I guess the bridge climb was kinda cool...

>most organic level design in any game ever made
>terrible

what the actual fuck

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hl1 and 2 both had more bad chapters than good, but when its good

Its real good

the prison is always a highlight

the only good part I can remember is getting out of city 17. pretty much the first 2-3 hours. and I don't hate the hoverboat segment, but I woulldn't call it "good".

But you said after '90
If you say after 2019 you wouldn't include this year

You thought that shit where you control the bugs and play engineer with turrets was good?

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You haven't played much games champ, there are a lot of games with worse AI where their pathfinding gets stuck on walls

HL2 physics are not special anymore. They are highly standardized. Just because a game doesn't have dozens of random cans you can pick up doesn't mean physics stopped existing.

>Boat and Buggy
>Tower defense yeah
>Antlions
>Gunship fight outside Nova Prospekt
>Both turret sections in Nova Prospekt
>Defend Alex in the courtyard (Holy shit was this one bad)
>Roof before strider courtyard
>Strider courtyard

Nova Prospekt is ass. Its so ass you cant even recall its name.

Yes I did.

Every game pre-dota 2 has held up since it's release date.
Prove me wrong

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>spawning antlion vs combine wars in gmod to recreate starship troopers
>think "wow I wonder how many can be fighting in future games like 2020 or something haha"

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Oh and the sewers and warehouse before the striders.
The Citadel is just a power trip and gets dull rapidly. I recalled thinking that in 04 and still do when I replayed it this January.

Yeah, it was more fun than just shooting the same dudes cause only 1 enemy type in cities for another hour or driving the fucking boat or escaping the city with the most boring gun the default pistol or getting all of your guns taking away so you can spam left click with the grav gun using the lmg's alt fire orbs? Like i said man there is a lot of bad chapters in half life. Well expect episode 2

episode 2 is perfect

>he used the turrets

yeah that really how it was

instead i got pretentious high quality overrated garbage like rdr2, and fucking retro games.

Well yeah but then again HL1 had that classic progression of weapons. Pistol is accurate and kills headcrabs in 3 hits but against beefier enemies with larger hitboxes you want the shotgun. But later you get much better guns than the shotgun.

Highway 17 (those little buildings with stuff inside were kino), Nova Prospect, Entanglement, the beach section (forgot name).

Nova prospekt is less ass than most of the game
Take that as you will
I liked it, and think its fun

Thats fair.

you can't compare the bad parts of hl1 and 2, because the bad parts of 1 are top jank whereas the bad parts of 2 are just bad.

True, but physicis should be improved in the last 10 years of tech

The only people who don't like physics are people who never played cs_office on counter strike source

pushing that filing cabnit over and deafending the little room with 5+ other people literally never gets old

i dunno man theres a reason whenever someone talks about hl1 they only ever talk about office complex, on a rail, and like surface tension

>all that cool shit in the beta that valve threw in the trash

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Not only is hl2 one of the best games ever made even when compared to today's games, but it is incredibly fun to speedrun. I'm not even into speedrunning, but I just really enjoy running through a couple of chapters on occasion. I've done a lot of rocketjumping in tf2, and a lot of the tech skill transfers over.

youtu.be/NV-AWxqYAgc?t=2503

more like it's still one of the best fps ever

How does he gain speed so fast from a standing stop?

It's actually really good.

yeah dusk is a fun game I can't wait for wraith Dude

Accelerated Back Hopping.
The game sees that you are moving too fast so it applies force to push you backwards to try and slow you down, except you are actaully facing backwards so it gives you even more speed. only works when you are in the air so you need to use a bunnyhopping script to spam spacebar.
wiki.sourceruns.org/wiki/Accelerated_Back_Hopping

It's literally so fucking good that it's not only a decent speedrun but it's awesome modded
just recently a lad imported the titanfall 2 movesystem to it in a ~25mb mod with 3 tutorial challenge levels, the campaign flows legitimately well even with the absurd wallrunning

>imported the titanfall 2 movesystem
you need to link this immediately friend

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It did physics. I've always assumed that's what the big deal was about.
I'm a big fan of Half Life 1, but have tried and failed to force myself through Half Life 2 about half a dozen times, always giving up in the end out of sheer boredom. I've completed most of the game several times, but barely even remember anything that happened in it, other than what felt like hours and hours of never-ending vehicle sections.

>It did physics. I've always assumed that's what the big deal was about.

No other games picked that up since, apart from indie joke games like Goat Simulator.

Talk all the shit you faggots want about half life 2, nothing has come close to it ever since in terms of single-player, halo 3 is the only game that comes close in that regard, metro exodus was really good too. I know how some people that love doom and quake might prefer the fast paced-projectile shooting instead of the hitscan from half life 2 and while I agree that half life 1 is better, half life 2 is still one of the best videogames ever made, the faggots that complain about the gunplay being subpar are the same that use the smg instead of the pulse rifle and the pistol instead of the revolver and the shotgun, the level design is timeless and feels just right and very natural and the game world is one of the best sci-fi media that I have ever seen, the soundtrack in my opinion tops halo and its one of the most underrated ones in videogame history. And no, half life did not invented cinematic shooters, call of duty 4 did and it fucking killed shooter, halo 3 and half life at least require skill to play

Im p sure most of v would agree fear is a better single player shooter and that came out at the same time im p sure

Dude Doom3 and CSS look like shit compared to HL2, you're crazy

Ok for one, your blind.
For two, CSS is the same fucking engine, in places the same assets. The fuck are you smoking?

>no mgs 3 in that image

>the soundtrack in my opinion tops halo
As someone who has loved half life and is annoyed by the negative aspects of halo (made to cater to its controller input) I can't actually agree with this
People point out tracks like Vortal Combat or Triage at Dawn and while good I do prefer the prominence and tone of halo tracks
youtu.be/mUD9dX0aNBs
youtu.be/iNhfuhiveUM
youtu.be/GGzrvMXdz88
youtu.be/i5jPy-GmyUc
It can at least be said to be more iconic, it's hard to invoke HL like this
youtu.be/nEun9I2VfP0

I've literally seen reviews on YouTube calling it a masterpiece. so...

Blame google it's just a search for "2004 games" or whatever
Holy shit at MGS3 being an addition to that year though, actually 1998 tier

I've seen people in this thread calling HL2 a masterpiece. People are subjective.

>youtu.be/nEun9I2VfP0
>going into a house of God and singing a video game theme song
how blasphemous.

yeah halo music, and sound design overall is top notch. I still listen to the odst ost, and i haven't played that game since its release

I don't care. I'm not even saying the game is good. I'm disputing the claim that it's NOT hailed as a masterpiece.

fear is one of my favorite shooter but it cant be compared to half life, the level design in fear is good but way to repetitive and while the enemies react more to beign shot at, the guns in half life 2 feel and sound better i know a lot of people might dissagree but I swear that the guns in fear sound like plastic toys while the guns in half life sound really punchy

even by the context of the early 2000s, HL2 feels astoundingly mediocre compared to its contemporaries. Core gameplay isn't fun, standing around waiting for the same half dozen resistance NPCs to open doors isn't fun, and shooting dozens of overwatch soldiers isn't fun.

>UT2004, Far Cry and Riddick
good times, HalfLife2 what?

Is the only truly "timeless" game Tetris?

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Yeah

>this came out too
youtu.be/RtAH7kGEqic
What the fuck was with that year?

selling based on name alone is p effective, who knew. Too be fair half life 2 entire selling point was just physics, not its levels, gunplay, or enemy variety

Unironically this

Yeah they made that pretty obvious
youtu.be/4ddJ1OKV63Q?t=495
Valve had the original scripted gameplay for E3

>if it doesn't have 60 hours of cutscenes with hyper-realistic graphics then its shit
>if it makes me use at least 1 brain cell to figure out the most retarded puzzle then its shit

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If you didn’t play this when it was new you’re an underage zoomer faggot

hl2 was just a glorified tech demo to show off the source engine, which is why people where hoping hl3 would be a glorfied tech demo for source 2 but that went to dota custom games Only?

HL3 is unironically the VR tech demo

the first rendition of tetris is objectively worse than a modern one such as tetris effect.

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that would make sense. vr is useless without a big name game to come out with it

I don't think timeless really means cannot be improved though, just that it stays enjoyable despite advancements

op here
thanks for the thread surprised you guys when for as long as you did

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>mods will fix it!!!1
Horseshit excuse

Funny that you mention STALKER. I think that is another game that gets an incredible amount of praise for no justified reason, just like half life 2

Half life 2 shitters suck dick, gunplay sucks and the game is boring as fuck. the only good thing about hl2 is the overall atmosphere of the game and the artistic design of it

HL 1 is where it's at

Thats the stupidest thing i've read today.

it was really good for its time though, now since you're an underage fuck and you've seen the elements that other games have taken from it and improved upon, yeah, it's going to be not what you expected.

Explain why HL1 still holds up then

Honorable mention to Resident Evil 4 which came out first week of January.
Also WOW is not on that list user, despite its age back then it was amazing.

I loved playing this game back then, but now... eh.
I hate the way accuracy works. Crouching, firing in bursts, standing still... nothing improves accuracy. The reticle around your crosshair is literally the possible cone where the bullet can fly. The SMG and AR have that wide as hell reticle while the pistols have sniper rifle accuracy.
I also hate the low ammo caps. I understand all of the weapon nerfing was done to force people to use the gravity gun more, but I don't think it was necessary; the GG is so much fun to use anyway.

It was pretty revolutionary in terms of physics, sound design, and facial expressions on NPCs but that is about it. The story presentation, enemy AI and variety, linear-ness, lack of open areas (unless you count those godawful dunebuggy sections), conveniently placed infinite rocket ammo crates whenever you have to fight those immune-to-everything-but-rockets synths, and silly gimmicks like the puzzles and "check this out!!" moments like picking up the crossbow for the first time and what do you know there is an unusually stationary combine guard across the way waiting for you to pin him against the wall which is probably the only the time you will even see this because the fucking thing is uselessly limited on ammo, it all made for a game that was laughably dated even on release. That it gets compared unfavorably to even Halo 2, a console shooter that was rushed out of its studio's doors after being completely scrapped and overhauled even moreso than post-leak HL2, shows what a weak game it ultimately was. But it was Valve. They owned the late 90s through 00s gaming communities. Calling out this glorified tech demo back then would've gotten you banned, blacklisted, and reported to Bush's terror list on the pre-Yea Forums vidya internets, for Valve doing something that we would absolutely RIP Bethesda/Bioware/Squareetc for doing.