News Halo 3 is now available on PC

I've never played Halo, is it as good as Half-Life?

 

No

 

At least these games are cheap. Other publishers would've probably charged that amount per game. Remaster or not.

 

Unpopular opinion for this forum I'm sure, but.

I have more fond memories of the Halo games than I do of the Half-Life games, or any games spawned by the Half-Life games.

I'd say Halo is quite good. Highly cerebral? No. Not really. But the game works very well, and in my opinion, always has.

 

I think I get where you're coming from. For me HL2 was a very good but not necessarily a great game. Then again, I still play Diablo 2 and Quake Live.

 

I enjoyed Halo but I don't rate it anywhere near Half Life. I felt the HL games had more of a narrative, and I enjoyed that more.

 

See, I can't even remember what happened in HL2, and I have only dim memories of HL1 - Despite owning both of them, and all their associated spawn. I don't think I played either of them more than once through. I might have dabbled in HL1 a little more, but it hasn't helped me remember it..

I'd wager, although I have dim memories at best, that the HL series has had a better narrative - But the series has also spent a lot of time meandering around and getting lost in itself, and well. We all know the HL3 jokes. HL feels, to me, like there's a lot of rose tinted glasses going on. As it stands, it feels like the games promised a lot and since they've basically become abandonware at this point, the story has (to me) lost credibility because there's been no.. Well, no progression. No new information.

To me, although the narrative is a little more retcon-y and arguably less complex, I prefer the Halo series. It actually moves, unlike the HL series. Which is somewhere in a field catching butterflies.

Hell, I'm still playing Halo. I've played through all of the games countless times, and as they get released on PC I'm doing it again.

If there's a Half-Life remaster, a-la TMCC, I don't see myself picking it up.

 

I always thought Halo was closer to Doom than Half Life, slower paced but the same emphasis on moving all the time and changing weapons often to counter different enemy types. I really like the series campaigns but never got on with the multiplayer. My biggest issue with the MP revolves around quality of life features, or lack of, they might have managed to sort those out for the PC though.

 

I like both story modes - HL is more personal, whereas Halo is a galaxy-spanning epic. Different styles, both very accessible. I do prefer the fact that you can co-op the campaign in Halo though - to me, that's the best form of online multiplayer. I hate the "run around jumping and getting shot by schoolkids on holiday" arena shooters.

Mainly because I'm rubbish at them. Which is mainly because I don't have the time to put into that side of any game these days.

 

Errrr, Half Life: Alyx came out just 3 months ago...

HL was remastered 16 years ago as Half Life: Source. It's also been remade by a third party as Black Mesa, which has been released as the final version this year.

This feels like quite a surreal post on a gaming forum...

 

Alyx is set five years before HL2, so while it's fluff, it's not exactly plot progression. I'd honestly wager that Valve needed a vehicle to sell their VR kit, which is why it's mucking about (catching butterflies..) instead of advancing the plot. Unless you count that piddly bit at the end where it jumps to "current" timeline. Which has no real progression.

HL being remastered as the HL: Source is still sixteen years old (And, given that it was a port to the Source engine from GldSrc, or "The Half-Life engine" (Both of which still contain remnants at least of the Quake II engine that they're distantly based on; https://web.archive.org/web/20060517235354/http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/recent updates/archive?news_id=290 ), and from what I recall of comparisons, the two versions are not that different - I really don't feel comfortable accepting HL:Source as a remaster. IMO, it's a port.), as you so aptly point out. Given how little effort Valve have put into the HL series, I don't see any reason to change my opinion that it is abandonware at this point.

Fan remakes don't count in my book, as there's no guarantee that the original IP owners (IE: Valve) wouldn't change their mind and shut it down, as many, many, fan remakes have experienced.

A quick check suggests that Valve gave approval for the Black Mesa project to be commercialised in 2015, which I suspect is a complex legal agreement that Valve probably has the option to end whenever they want.


Your last sentence confuses me somewhat. In what way is a discussion about two game series "surreal" on a "gaming" (I'd argue that gaming is, perhaps, not the primary focus of this forum..) forum?

 

Ah the surreal element was explaining on a gaming forum that there have been HL games more recently than HL2:ep2. However, you were actually aware of this and just discounted them. Fair enough.

 

I loved some of the little things in Halo - an example would be knocking on a door while the campaign was in force and different conversations played out depending on the difficulty level! Yeah - the easter eggs were good! I love HL2 also!

 

I genuinely don't get this argument of yours...

Why does a game series have to keep getting regular sequels?

 

Because the last one ended on a frackin' cliff hanger, that's why!

What's more, the spin off ret-conned the cliff hanger, into a different cliff hanger!

God Damnit Gabe!

 

Nope, still don't get it.

A cliffhanger isn't any obligation to continue the plot, just a shoehorned excuse if the company later on wants to please some shareholders with a sequel (or in the case of Valve buy more pie for Gaben).

Just make up your own ending in your head if there is a cliffhanger, some might call it thinking about the plot.

 

I thought Half Life 1 was overrated. The second game is very good. But I never understood the hoohar around the first game. As for Halo I felt it was a great game for its time. Maybe not groundbreaking, but it engaged my imagination.

 

I accept that it is a very personal hangup, but it really bugs me when there's a plot and then I'm just meant to write my own ending.

I don't pay game studios to give me a sandbox and some crayons to write my own fanfic about their characters. I pay them because I want a story with a beginning, middle, and end. I'm not super fussy whether that end comes in ten games (Assuming the intervening eight games aren't all pap) or two - I want the people who wrote the story to tell me the damned story.

Half-Life presented us with a non-speaking bespectacled scientist player character - A character that I'm sure many more of us gamer types back then could identify with more than <insert muscular cool guy> - And then ran us through a story that was (Having, since this discussion started, refreshed my memory via reading) capable of making some kind of sense. Only to give up part way through.

For me, the argument that I should fill in the ending with a 'write your own' is just not a good one. Imagine your favourite book was presented to you with the last chapter blank and a pen for you to make the ending up yourself. No offence, but 99% of the endings written by fans would be utter pap. It takes a lot of work to write something that doesn't sound like craptastic fanfic, and I'm under no illusions that I'm somehow immune to the pitfalls of writing fanfic. Not that I have a particular desire to, owing to wanting whoever I'm paying for the content to give me the whole story. (As an aside, this applies to basically every medium. Netflix is the bane of my existence because they cancel things left right and centre. At least The Punisher series were somewhat self contained.)

In the comparison of Halo to Half-Life, you'd be right to point out that Halo also doesn't have an "end" as such. But it keeps coming, and although 343 are making the same missteps as Bungie did with the first three or four, 343 are also correcting those missteps at about the same rate as Bungie did IMO. Also, some of the stories within the Halo games do have ends. Reach and ODST for example (Also, for reasons you can probably take a wild stab in the dark at, these two are my favourite entries in the series. I bought a game, I got a whole story. Heavenly.). Half-Life just feels like the writer expected there to be more, and opted for a cliffhanger, but then either by their own designs or someone else's went outside and never came back.

 

Except you aren't making it up from scratch, you have the world / character building as well as the parts of the plot that are there as a starting point.

When you where a kid reading say Lord of the Rings your brain didn't invent the same "graphics" as when reading Moby Dick after all.