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[Oct. 22nd, 2007|12:19 am] |
Just completed Half-Life 2: Episode 2, mostly because I felt obligated to having spent 15+ hours in Team Fortress 2 and several additional hours mastering Portal. It was... well, it was six more hours of Half-Life.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - one of the main problems with episodic gameplay is that it assumes the game is a content delivery system before everything else. Which works well in games like Sam and Max, where the primary interaction is exploring the content presented to you. It doesn't work so well in an epic high-fidelity first person shooter. The delivery of the narrative leaves something to be desired. Episode 2 ran about six hours long, but only about twenty minutes of that is actual plot progression. The remainder of that is blowing the hell out of things. It's like if The Matrix was delivered to us in segments consisting of a "Fall of Zion" length action sequence and a quarter of one of their philosophical discussions. Content creation for Half-Life 2 also hurts the ability for the game to be delivered episodically - a year and a half between six hours of content seems like a lot in comparison to film, but remember that you're only getting 20 minutes of plot there. What if we got the first 20 minutes of the next Harry Potter film now, and the next 20 minutes in March of 2009? Would it be cool as long as there were five hours of magic battles accompanying it? No? Oh, well...
Look, the level of technical proficiency here is astounding. The art is still gorgeous, the architecture still flows well enough that I'm never terribly bothered that I'm in a tunnel, the engine is solid, and the presentation is entirely professional. It's the (I'm guessing) six to twelve guys making high-level decisions about the series I'm bothered with. The Marc Laidlaws and the Gabe Newells. The characters are two-dimensional jokes. Alyx is a complete Mary Sue, Eli Vance is a surrogate father, Magnusson's a self-pompous asshole, Kleiner's the lovable yet absent-minded professor, G-man is the mysterious hand of forces unknown. The plot is an entirely forgettable good-versus-evil, mankind-versus-the-other affair. The gameplay is a series of action setpieces based around the idea that each one is "awesome" or "badass" and provides a quirky new twist on established mechanics. These are the premises upon which the entire game is based, and are the entirety of what the series aspires to. And for what it's worth, the series achieves those goals marvelously. My problem is with the people deciding these goals are all they want to do with the franchise. |
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