T w e n t y S i d e d

I did this same thing for Final Fantasy X a while ago. How long (as measured by in-game days) was Half-Life 2?

(Spoilers ahead, if you’re worried about spoiling a three year old game.)

At the opening, the lighting seems to suggest morning. You arrive at the train station and manage to get arrested by Barney, sent towards Kliener’s lab, jumped by Metrocops, and rescued by Alyx. Then the teleport goes wrong and you have to flee the city through the canals, and ride the boat to the dam. Fight the helecopter and then arrive at Black Mesa East near sunset. You meet Judith and Eli, and as it gets dark you learn how to use the Gravity Gun. End of day 1.

The Combine invade the compound and you have to take The Bad Way. You spend the night in Ravenholm and then move on to the mines. You emerge at dawn. You make your way along the tracks and intervene as the combine are attacking the first outpost. They give you the “car”, and you begin the long journey along Highway 17, all the way to the lighthouse. Help defend the lighthouse, and then navigate the sand traps in late afternoon. You have been awake for about 36 hours now, but you must still be feeling peppy because you move on to assault the Combine outpost without resting. End of day 2.

Antlions in tow, you penetrate the Combine defenses and assault Nova Prospect during the night. You fight waves of Combine, and then battle another huge antlion beast. You can only see a little slice of sky when you meet up with Alyx again, so it’s tough to judge the time of day. It’s overcast and dark, but not night. Let’s call it early dawn. You assault the place with Alyx and endure a couple of Combine assaults with the help of the auto-turrets. You find Eli and discover Judith’s betrayal. She steals Eli back and you teleport out of there.

The teleport sends you a week into the future, although it looks like you arrive at roughly the same time of day. It’s morning again when you emerge and Kliener explains about the revolt. You’ve been awake for 48 hours now, give or take. Time for rest? Nah. Let’s assault the Citadel! The battle to get there is long and intense. It takes all day, so that it’s sunset again when you face off against Dr. Breen. End of Day 3.

After three days of non-stop combat and exertion without food or sleep, Gordon at last gets a little rest. Wow. Theoretical Physicists are unbelievable badasses.

Episode One spoiler:

After a night of sleep underneath a pile or rubble at the base of the Citadel, Gordon wakes up and begins Episode One. It seems to end late in the afternoon that same day.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’ve been through Episode One, and then went through again with commentary. It was short. The second trip through – where I instantly knew the answers to the puzzles – was preposterously short. Still, better a spoonful of awesome than a heaping bowl of mediocrity.

I’ve said in the past that the constant re-writing of graphics engines is bad for games, because your artists have to spend so much time re-learning how to do their job and use the new tools that nobody ever has time to polish anything.

A good example of this is how the Playstation games grew to look better and more sophisticated on the same technology. For the most part “early” Playstation games look crude compared to games made near the end of the console’s lifespan, even though the games use the same hardware. This is true on PC side as well, although usually developers are so busy chasing the latest rendering buzzwords that they don’t take the time to let their engine and tools mature.

I think Episode One is a good example of the step up in quality you can get if you’re willing to stick with one engine for a few years. They did manage to sneak a few rendering improvements in there (none of which are available on my hardware, so they don’t affect me) but the step up in quality is obvious. It looks like the same game as Half-Life 2, but it plays better. If you listen to the commentary, you’ll note that their initial design for most of the set pieces sounded annoying, confusing, or unrewarding. The game reached its final state of smooth, rewarding gameplay only after numerous iterations. Iterations they wouldn’t have time for if their artists and content developers weren’t so proficient at their tools and able to turn out assets at a steady rate. To put it another way: Those earlier, less fun versions of levels are what we’re usually stuck with in PC games.

I was right about the plot. It went almost nowhere in Episode One. Instead, we got what I predicted: More mystery (the new mind-blasting aliens) without resolving any old mysteries. This is not a bad thing, but I would really love it if they threw us a bone every now and again and revealed a bit more about the G-Man, the Vortigaunts or the combine.

The ending was yet another cliffhanger. And another explosion, at that. I see a pattern developing here. I’m more forgiving of that sort of behavior here than I was with Dreamfall, but only because the gameplay here is so tremendously fun. (In an adventure game, all you have is story. If your story doesn’t work, you got nothin’.)

I’ll probably get Episode Two once it goes down to $20. People complain about the length of these episodes, and they are indeed short. Five hours is a very brief game. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I’ll buy a 5 hour game for $20 without giving it a second thought, but I’ll agonize over spending $40 on a 15 hour game. The $20 price point is just irresistible to me.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Half-Life 2 ended in an appalling cliffhanger. (Spoiler: You and the female lead were caught in the midst of an explosion. Time stopped the moment before you were obliterated, and then there was a little monologue from one of the other characters. Roll credits. There were ways to justify the main character’s survival, but Alyx seemed to be doomed.)

The opening of Episode One wiggles out of the situation established at the end of Half-Life 2, and while it had the stench of deus ex machina, it was also fun and humorous.

Half Life 2 didn’t really answer any of the main questions: Who is the G Man? What is his goal? Why is he using Gordon – who most likely resents him – to achieve his goals? As I played the game I started to get the feeling this was an X-Files sort of mystery: Lots of mysterious stuff that doesn’t really lead anywhere except to further mystery. I’m a big fan of story arcs and endings, so I’m not crazy about the prospect that there may not be any answers to reasonable questions about the plot. If they aren’t going to tell a coherent story, the least they could do is give us something fun to do.

Which is exactly what we have here. The upside to this making-crap-up-as-you-go approach to storytelling is that it lets them look at the response from one game and adjust the sequel accordingly. Did you like the stuff with the gravity gun at the end of Half Life 2? Did you like teaming up with Alyx? The voice-acted and motion-capped characters? The physics puzzles? These elements seem to be what scratched everyone’s particular itch, and this time around we get a double helping.

The first half hour of the game is… not cutscenes, but scenes nonetheless. Half-Life never breaks immersion by moving the POV outside of the protagonist, and doesn’t lock the player in place without a very good in-game reason for doing so. What we end up with are scenes where NPC’s interact with each other (sometimes nodding in the direction of the camera) but leave you free to move around and watch or ignore them as you see fit. Sometimes developers talk about making the player “a character in a movie”, and this sort of setup is the closest we’ve come to that lofty ideal. The plot may grind on, but you never have an external POV imposed on you, and you’re never deprived of control of your character. I wish more games went this route. (Then again, I wish there were more first-person games in general.)

The game is just packed with cool moments. I’m not against a little padding here and there as required. Half-Life 2 had longish stretches of conventional combat without any dialog or plot advancement, and I didn’t mind. But here they’ve taken the various scenes and set pieces and placed them one after another, without stretches of filler. The result feels almost decadent.

Some mild spoiler comments follow:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Half Life Episode One: First Impressions”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.