Sunday, April 16, 2006

I went back and played Half-Life recently, as I habitually do sometimes. It'll run on anything these days and the mods are still being played online, so it's worth a refreshing look every now and again.

Frankly, HL2 just doesn't do it for me over the long-term the way the original did.

Even with all the technological advancements that have you racing down massive highways and through a great monolithic citadel I never really feel like I'm part of something truly big in HL2; never really felt that there was far more going on than I could see or interact with, despite any subtle or not-so-subtle hints dropped in the game itself.

Developers these days have huge amounts of graphical eye-candy on offer. They can do things people could only dream about in 1998. Similarly they could do things in 1998 that they could only have dreamed about doing in 1993. However today it has got so good, or so bad if you will, that developers are sticking in huge vistas, massive set-pieces and forgetting about the little stuff. They're forgetting that just because you present me with an epic backdrop to my gaming doesn't mean that I'm going to take it for granted that there's a lot more in Quake 4 that I could be seeing, wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Some simple characterisation is required.