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this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Can I just ask what people expect from a half life story? Like it's always been pretty thin on the ground, right?
What was the first game? Experiment goes wrong, aliens notice us and invade, we kill a bunch of them, there's the occasional macguffin, travel to their planet, beat the big bad enemy, boom, mysterious gman puts us in the fridge.
The two expansions seem like the same story from another POV, I have no memory of any important events from either one.
Second game, gman drops us mysteriously back like 20 years later. We kill a bunch of enemies, there's some more macguffin, the vortigaunts were enslaved now they're on our side. There's a bit of intrigue, we beat the local bad guy, the vortigaunts save us.
The following two chapters, apart from having to rescue people, I couldn't tell you what even happens. The world is implied to be so big that you are an insignificant player and you could never hope to grasp what's really gping on, and we never get more than glimpses of what's really happening. It seems more like the idea of a world that leaves open the possibility of more or less anything happening and within which to set games, than a coherent story with structure and tension and stakes, beyond "world in peril" or "friend in peril", which is pretty bog standard stuff.
Like sure we might be a bit invested in Alyx & her dad's stories, but I always assumed people were hyped for sequels because the games play well and have an interesting backdrop. What exactly is the special sauce that mark laidlaw brings? Yes the environmental storytelling was novel and well done, but it's always been so vague because they're so committed to never leaving the players POV, and they spend so little time explaining the actual world.
I think this is why I always loved System Shock and System Shock 2 so much more as the narrative building was so much bigger than any game I've played before I since. I wish someone would sort the licensing out for that game and bring us a System Shock 3.
Speaking entirely personally, I thought at least Half Life Alyx's story worked on two levels. It was about freeing the gman as Alyx but gman sorta represented... Oh man, now I'm worried I can't remember the game well enough to communicate my original thoughts. I remember playing it and feeling like the gman represented the writers or creativity, a bigger picture concept or something that went meta. And if that was the case it felt like Valve creating a piece of art that said Alyx and VR have revitalized our desire to tell stories and GMAN is free again.
The moment they drop their new headset I'll buy it and play again just to relive the experience but I'd say I'm excited about Half Life because Valve makes A) good games B) they make solid diegetic games which I find to be kinda rare C) their games often feel like they came from a team of artists than just a team of coders. Maybe that's the polish or maybe that's the massive amount of testing I'm led to believe they do but when valve makes a new game it often feels like the guy who made Stanley Parable just made a new game - easy to recognize art because it's so good.