LATEST CHATTY HEADER
Subscribe to Shacknews Mercury starting at $1/month!
Chrome Shack Community Guidelines Chatty Search
Scroll down to join the conversation.
New to Shacknews? Signup for a Free Account
Already have an account? Login Now
Subscribe to Shacknews Mercury starting at $1/month!
Chrome Shack Community Guidelines Chatty Search
Scroll down to join the conversation.
I have yet to get the demo, but I'm planning on it (terrible download speed)
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 153 replies.
Half-Life is purely an action game and I think it necessitates being linear. The idea with Half-Life is you want to keep the action going, throwing stuff at the player at a fairly constant rate without too much slowdown. There are a few portions where you have to do a series of things to actually get to the next area, but even those (the tentacle monster part and the time you meet the first gargantua) there's a fairly constant stream of enemies.
Half-Life was never really hand holdy either. The game was very linear, but whatever mini objectives you had were usually yours to figure out based on what NPCs told you or signs around the level or whatever. So in that way it's the same as Deus Ex, which was always very explicit in telling you exactly what needed to be done. Dues Ex was actually extremely linear from a narrative standpoint; almost as linear as Half-Life (there were only a few minor deviations it could take and they didn't affect the overall story). Every level required you to get from point A to B, and aside from the multiple endings there was never any deviation from that. The path you could take between those points could vary, which was the major draw of Deus Ex. You could build a guy who was a great sniper, or great for combat, or great at hacking, or great at sneaking around and there was always a path you could take, but you always had the same end goal regardless of how you tackled a situation.
So if you're complaining that games like Deus Ex don't really exist any more, I guess that's a fair complaint. Dues Ex is an extremely difficult type of game to make, however, and I don't know if anything like it could exist today. It's largely a product of the time period it was made during. There are games without any RPG elements such as Far Cry 2 that take a very non-linear approach to narrative and missions, but again I don't know if it's fair to compare that game to Half-Life 2 or Bioshock or something that sets out to tell a linear story with a narrative. They're just different types of games even though they are all within what might be considered the FPS genre.
The post has been reported. Thank you!
You must be logged in to post.
You must be logged in to post.