Comment by uniq7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uniq7 | Hacker News Reader

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> I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure

I think I remember reading an interview with the dev team where they explained that playing action for too long was boring, as well as solving puzzles, so they consciously designed the game with interleaved phases of action/puzzle. Your recompense for solving a puzzle is action, and your recompense for killing all the bad guys is a relaxing puzzle.

It's funny you didn't liked that, because for me it was the complete opposite. I like pure action shooters, and I like pure puzzle adventure games, but I really loved Half-Life and I didn't know why until I read that explanation.

It’s a long time ago now so my recollection is likely very flawed, but with HL I didn’t like the feeling of a created path that must be followed, irrespective how of the interleaving of different aspects. There are lots of modern games like this too - which on the face of it are relatively open-world, but underneath the apparent freedom there’s a strict path to find and follow for success. (I’d definitely include one of the modern Doom games —I forget which it was I tried— in this category, - it was so linear that it felt but one step removed from the old-fashioned shooters where you’re literally on a conveyor belt and shoot whatever appears.)

In the original Doom, in contrast, the only requirement was to make it to the end of the level, figuring out the map and puzzles along the way. Anything else (did you chase 100% kill and 100% secrets?) was optional. I guess it just felt more… honest?

I did not mind this linearity in Half-Life, because the story was engaging. You wanted to know what happened next. And I found the enemies did had some advanced "AI" for that time; like the first time the commandos came was a big moment. They were nothing like the enemies you had seen in other games.

Well in HL2 there were a lot of puzzles to show off their new Havok physics engine

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