It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the incredible impact that Half-Life 2 has had on the world of video games over the last 20 years. The original game in 1998 was already a landmark in its own right, raising the bar for the standard of first-person shooters. Before the release there was enormous speculation about what the sequel would be like, particularly after its announcement at E3 2003. In September 2003, a source code leak contributed to a major delay which pushed back development, before it finally released on 16th November 2004.
Half-Life 2 was also the game which brought mass attention to Steam. Valve’s DRM and digital distribution service had originally launched in September 2003, but Half-Life 2 was the first game which required Steam in order to play, even if you owned a physical copy. The success of Half-Life 2 directly led to the dominance of Steam in the PC gaming space today, as the overwhelming hub for both the sale and playing of most games.
So, what is our editors’ history with Half-Life?
Gareth: Believe it or not, I hadn’t heard of Half-Life, or Half-Life 2 at all when it was released. The first I knew about it was when I got Half-Life 2: Collector’s Edition in a big tin as a 16th birthday present from my Dad in February 2005, 3 months later. I joined GameSpot.com in January 2005, and it was the year I first became properly active online. In retrospect the “Collector’s Edition” looks extreme paltry compared to those you get today, as all it contained was the game on a single DVD-ROM, digital versions of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life: Source, a mini version of the Prima game guide, and a cheap t-shirt with the lambda logo which quickly fell apart. None of that mattered though, as soon as I played it the first time.
To this day, no gaming experience has bettered that of the first time I played Half-Life 2. Not just the awe of the graphics, which to my mind looked almost photorealistic, but the richness of the atmosphere, the tangible sense of being in the world. The opening level of walking through City 17 is an absolute masterclass of this, gradually introducing the player to a setting which is vastly different to the first game. Add in the incredible gameplay, the shooting, the real-time physics, the characters… it completely blew me away.
Andy: It wasn’t just the Collector’s Edition – the standard physical release of HL2 was laughably low-effort, covered with screenshots of outdated builds featuring assets cut from the final game. It didn’t matter. Valve had put all of their effort – and reportedly every cent of the huge earnings from Half-Life – into their magnum opus itself, and it showed.
I had played Half-Life in 2002, via the Generation box-set which also contained the Opposing Force and Blue Shift expansions. For over two years, I anticipated Half-Life 2 with an intensity I hadn’t felt before, and haven’t felt since. What is staggering about Valve’s astonishing sequel is that it actually exceeded the extraordinarily high expectations attached to it. In the six years since Half-Life, few shooters had even come close to it. With Half-Life 2, Valve raised the bar again and proved themselves untouchable.
The game’s technical achievement in 2004 is difficult to overstate. Even on the comically underpowered GeForce FX5200 graphics card I had at the time, the characters were startlingly lifelike and photo-sourced textures provided realistic grit to the decayed urban environments. The physics were also stunning. Today, some of the implementations seem gimmicky, but the wealth of physics objects are a critical part of the lively, responsive feel of City 17.
Eduardo: Oh man, where to begin? Back during the time when the original Half-Life came out, legit physical copies of PC games were rarely an option especially for kids trying to keep current with games around these parts. We had to rely on burnt discs sold at stalls around town, and that’s how I caught wind of the game, got hooked and basically played just about every known mod for it.
With Half-Life 2, things were a bit different: by then, buying legal boxed copies of PC games was much more feasible, and it didn’t take long for me to get my hands on it, which I still have in near pristine condition to this day. In fact, my Steam account will turn 20 on the 26th of this month. The notion that I’ve had it for this long is positively bonkers!
As for the game itself, it’s downright incredible to play. Luckily for me, I had just upgraded my graphics card to a very budget-oriented but still useful model when it came out, but even so I didn’t have an issue getting it running and losing myself in it the same way I did with its predecessor. Seeing how Valve evolved the formula by having us run around in the huge exteriors and even getting to drive vehicles was mind-blowing to me. Ravenholm in particular was downright scary to navigate, playing into my paranoia as I skulked around its dark corners looking for seemingly invisible threats. It’s a shame we never got the cancelled game centered around that place, which NoClip talked about in their doc.
And don’t even get me started about the characters! Gosh, just about everyone in the game was so well developed. I know the culmination of their progression would come with Episode 1 and 2 a few years later, but the base for their personalities was already groundbreaking in 2004. There’s a reason why Alyx in particular is still so loved today and came to star in his own game a while back. She’s not only Gordon’s chatty companion: her presence is paramount to the Half-Life 2 experience.
Gareth: When I replay it today, I realize that a lot of the levels, particularly the later sections set in the ruined City 17, are actually really empty, in terms of general level clutter. At the time I definitely didn’t notice it, but graphically in the 20 years since release, Half-Life 2 has aged gracefully, but it certainly has aged. What hasn’t aged is its sense of style and storytelling; of completely immersing you into the shoes of Gordon Freeman. Valve’s commitment to only ever telling the story from a first person perspective, with essentially no cutscenes apart from the introduction and the finale, creates a single, unbroken experience from beginning to end.
The flow of the levels, from the grimy sewers and forgotten storm drains of “Route Kanal”, to the concrete, Alcatraz-inspired prison of “Nova Prospekt”, back to the devastated and wrecked plazas and streets of City 17 in “Anticitizen One”, feels like a cohesive place with its own geography, especially with the near omnipresent Combine Citadel towering over a majority of the levels, a Chekhov’s Gun, in tower form. The journey to the Citadel feels like a trek, and it is, given the game’s quite lengthy runtime.
If I had to give a criticism, it’s that I’ve always felt the game lacked adequate “downtime”, where the player could momentarily relax before something else happens. Plotwise this is supposed to happen once Freeman reaches Black Mesa East, but circumstances conspire to make that period feel extremely brief before you’re thrown into one of the most atmospheric and scary game chapters ever made, “We Don’t Go to Ravenholm…” The intensity varies throughout the game, but I think the pacing could be tweaked. Likewise, the modernist soundtrack from Kelly Bailey, although memorable, is rather misused with it sometimes kicking in at strange moments before suddenly cutting out.
Andy: I think one of the game’s most evident weaknesses has always been that, for a first-person shooter, the shooting is quite rudimentary. But Half-Life 2 makes up for this in so many ways. Valve continually deliver exceptionally exciting moments, in a way which few developers have echoed since 2004. In “Highway 17”, there is a sequence in which the player can rev up the buggy, drive up a ramp while under fire from Combine troops, and smash right through a huge glass window to make a dramatic escape. At the time, it was by far the single most exciting moment I’d experienced in a game. The “you are there”, visceral intensity of Half-Life 2 is still impressive 20 years on, even as the technology has aged.
Eduardo: I think both the original and the sequel suffer from that, honestly. It’s something that the spin-offs eventually sanded down and got to a satisfying state, but I never really thought the core shooting was especially fun in either of the games. That’s even more evident when we get to fight other humans or whatever the Combine are, as they end up being more bullet spongey than needed and could zip around Gordon with pinpoint accuracy.
The best part of these games is most definitely the structure, ambiance and puzzle design, for sure, but I do agree with Andy that Half-Life 2 was hugely successful at offering exciting alternatives in fighting against the opposition. All thanks to its multitude of exceedingly larger locations, a big improvement from the first game’s tight corridors and limited outdoors that held back an already lacking shooting model.
Gareth: I agree the shooting has never been best-in-class, but it has always been proficient in its execution. Some weapons, such as the SPAS-12 shotgun, feel and sound weighty, but others like the SMG are rather underpowered. I do think the sound design, particularly the noises of the Combine soldiers and the Overwatch voice barking orders, helps to give the combat sections a sense of urgency, even if the moment to moment gameplay doesn’t necessarily have the same kinetic energy.
It’s still incredible to me to think that Half-Life 2 is the sequel to Half-Life, when on the face of it, aesthetically and thematically they are extremely different. Half-Life was set completely within the Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico, during an alien invasion. Half-Life 2 is set decades later, on the other side of the world, somewhere in eastern Europe, and both the player and Gordon Freeman have no context whatsoever about what happened during the intervening years. When you play both, you can absolutely see the evolution of gameplay and style, but glancing at screenshots, they don’t even look like the same franchise.
Andy: I feel quite differently about that, perhaps because I did play the original first. To me, Half-Life 2 represents the delivery of everything that Valve could not quite accomplish with their budget and technology in 1998. The visceral excitement, the specific sense of place, the seemingly intelligent characters and enemies – these were all prototyped in Half-Life, and delivered on in Half-Life 2. The dramatic shift in setting and situation are one of the sequel’s masterstrokes, in part because so many sequels feel like hollow replications of what came before, even if the technology has moved on.
20 years on, I find it difficult to think of shooters which have genuinely picked up the baton from Valve. Even Valve themselves, despite their enormous wealth and central place in PC gaming, comes across as an almost spent force creatively. Playing Half-Life 2 today reminds me of a time when it seemed that anything was possible in the context of the FPS, and it is hard not to feel that energy has long since slipped away.
Eduardo: I think the closest that we’ve gotten to follow-ups scope-wise to Half-Life 2 are probably the Arkane games, most notably Dishonored 1 and 2. I know that they’re more of an evolution of the work Looking Glass did with the Thief games which I also hold in incredibly high esteem, but if you look at how they handle environments and interactions with NPCs, it’s got Valve’s fingerprints all over them. For as flawed as Prey was, it’s also a game that wouldn’t be what it was without Half-Life 2, not just in the way its world is put together, but for its narrative and pacing.
Of course, nothing outside of an actual sequel will satiate our hunger for more of the world that Valve built. It’s been a long while since we’ve had one and it’s exciting to imagine what is going to be the next big evolution both in terms of design and technology that these games have always ushered into gaming. Even more so considering just how bigger and convoluted the industry has gotten since the last big release in the series.
Gareth: The key question then; will there ever be a Half-Life 3? Valve, being the studio they are, decided to release Half-Life: Alyx in 2020, a fully-fledged prequel to Half-Life 2, exclusive to the Valve Index and other VR devices. Only a tiny minority have the desire and disposable income necessary to afford a VR-capable system, meaning only 2 million people have played Half-Life: Alyx versus almost 30 million for Half-Life 2. The plot of Alyx directly sets up the potential for a Freeman-centric sequel (thanks to a slight retcon of the end of Half-Life 2: Episode Two which originally ended on a frustrating cliffhanger), but will Valve actually do it? There have been various leaks which hint at something new might be coming in the Half-Life franchise, but it’s still too early to say if it will be called Half-Life 3. I’d love to see a proper sequel of course, but whether it would raise the bar in the same manner as both of its predecessors is an open question.
