Black Mesa vs. Half-Life 2

Black Mesa Archive The Cafeteria
#1

Playing Half-Life 2 right after Black Mesa may have been a mistake. BM is a great, very pretty game and to be perfectly honest… HL2 has not held up graphically. How could it have? It’s 10 years old by now. As I found myself pushing through Route Canal, fighting the urge to shut down the game and play something else, I had to stop and wonder why. I used to LOVE Half-Life 2. I even played it recently. Why does it feel so much worse now than it did before? My answer, as it turns out, is Black Mesa did it better. Let me see if I can explain why.

Black Mesa does two things so right I never even realise they were “things” to begin with. It does them so well, in fact, that I’m now having a hard time playing most other games because I’ve become aware of it. These two things are:

*Locations look like real, recognisable things. I recall playing through the original Half-Life and interpreting places as “a corridor,” “a room,” “a courtyard” and so on. The old engine’s limitations simply didn’t allow for anything more specific. Going through Black Mesa, however, is a much more stimulating experience. I can look into a window in a warehouse area (which I recognise AS a warehouse area) and see what looks like a machine shop inside. Well, that makes sense. You’d want to fix broken parts on-site. I’d go into a random room and think “Oh! This is an office! I get it!”

There is no better example of this than Residue Processing. In the original Half-Life, I HATED Residue Processing because it made me feel like I was playing Quake. It’s just a series of brown hallways and corridors and conveyor belts and brown water with little visibility and it just made me feel lost and confused. Where the hell am I? Nothing looks like a thing I can recognise! Cut to Black Mesa Residue Processing. Almost immediately upon entering it, I was hit with an image… This is a water treatment plant! I know where I am! The conveyors, the water channels, the pipes and catwalks - it all looks like a living, industrial area which could have had people working in it just mere hours ago. Half-Life Residue Processing looks like “a brown castle.” Black Mesa Residue Processing looks like a sewage treatment plant, and that’s amazing!

So as I found myself walking through Half-Life 2’s Route Canal, I ended up feeling lost. Where am I? Yeah, I know it’s a sewer, but what function does this part of it serve? Is it a storm drain? A black water sewer? Maintenance tunnels? I went off to the side in a tunnel and found a dead-end room walled off with bricks on five sides. What possible use could that place have had, other than to hang a Barnacle Creature off the ceiling? I found a little pool with a mesh churning the water, threatening to squish me as I swim for an opening under the surface. Why is that thing there? What is it churning? The water seemed to flow past a grate off in the distance, but where was it coming FROM? The only other entrance into this pool was the pipe I went into, but that didn’t go anywhere.

A lot of locations in Half-Life 2 feel like they started off as a Wolfenstein-style maze with a skin tossed over it. Corridors twist and turn seemingly just to run me across monsters and soldiers for a bit of action. I just got up into Ravenholm and found myself in a building with circular saw blades, oxygen tanks and paint cans. Why? What possible business could have been run out of that building to require all three of those? And why is the next room over empty? Why are small wood buildings comprised of long, twisting corridors that don’t join rooms together? Very few things look like something I can describe…

*Black Mesa has A LOT of doors that I can’t open. You’d think this would be annoying. After all, why have a door if the player can’t open it? For a very simple reason - because it makes the facility feel much larger without making the playable area any bigger than it already is. The original Half-Life made the facility feel like a mile long corridor. The only doors which existed led to corridors, which only ever led to other rooms, which in turn only had one door I come in through and one door I leave through. Black Mesa’s many non-interactive, locked doors are a MAJOR improvement. It makes the facility feel lived-in, like this could actually function.

I want to bring up the little checkpoint guard post in the first tunnel from Surface Tension. In Half-Life, this was a for-no-reason airlock tunnel to facilitate zone loading. Here, it’s a checkpoint with sealed gate leading off in a different direction and a little lobby area where you’d wait to have your papers processed. More importantly, a sealed gate leads off into a corridor somewhere deeper in the facility. Instantly, this felt believable. The corridor would lead to a mess hall, a rec room, to the locker rooms and showers. It would lead to the rest of the facility. The guard wouldn’t need to walk the road to his post. He would simply come out of the tunnel and sit at his controls. The whole thing makes Black Mesa feel like I’m making my way through a large, complex facility which may have MANY different routes - I’m just taking the only one that’s unlocked.

Half-Life 2, by contrast, doesn’t do prop doors all but entirely. My entire time moving through the Route Canal felt surreal. What kind of Byzantine, Escher-esque sewer design does City 17 have? Why are all drain pipes so… “Linear?” They have one entrance and one exit and never branch. Occasionally they may be open at the top, but they never deviated. There are no locked doors leading to other sections that I can’t access. There are almost no grates blocking off other sections of the sewers that I can’t visit. There are almost no places I can’t go, so I’m left to assume that what I see is all there is to this sewer And I don’t get why that is, frankly.

Sure, Half-Life 2 isn’t just Route Canal, and indeed the “I’m on a boat!” section is a lot better about this. The river I’m sailing on keeps branching off and seems to have multiple ways to go about it. It doesn’t, because every branching path is a very near dead end, but at least visually it looks like it continues on. OK, so I can’t go to the left because it’s blocked off, but I can see outflow pipes there, so at least I know there’s a sewer system beyond those impassible grates. OK, so I can’t go to the right because it’s sealed by a gate, but at least I know there’s more of the river in that specific direction. Hell, even Black Mesa East (the chapter) does a better job than Route Canal, if for no reason other than because that elevator ride takes you past several populated levels, suggesting the facility is larger than two rooms and a junkyard.

Now, there’s something to point out: Black Mesa takes place just after a disaster in an operational facility while Half-Life 2 takes place a couple of decades after an apocalyptic war. Obviously, a lot of places will have fallen into ruin and become unrecognisable… Right? Well, if that’s the case then why does Fallout 3 do such a better job of creating ruined but still recognisable buildings? Hell, Half-Life itself does this far better in a bunch of places. That iconic bridge during the car sequence, for instance - easily the most memorable aspect of Half-Life 2 in my mind. The problem is that outside of specific set-pieces, Half-Life 2 is just a lot of non-descript hallways.

I’m not trying to slag Half-Life 2. It’s a great game and one which defined a generation of FPS games. It’s aged a lot better than many of its peers and is still fun to play. However, Valve seem to have abandoned the game - there’s no Workshop for it, it’s still plagued with crashes and stutters and it just feels old by this point. And it took Black Mesa doing Half-Life right for me to really recognise this…

#2

You bring up a valid point. I’m sure if Valve had made it today, Half Life 2 would be as good as Black Mesa in that regard. I mean look at the episodes. They definitely do what BM does compared to HL2. Or look at Portal 2, which definitely had some amazing environments.

It does annoy me that HL2 doesn’t get a workshop tho. The workshops have worked to facilitate creativity, and a HL2 workshop might spark some interest in the game again.

#3

I see what you’re saying, but I think this issue is not something that plagues HL2 as a whole, and is more an issue with certain areas/chapters. Many other places in the game do have locked doors and do read as recognizable places. Water Hazard has the APC garage (with garage doors, APCs, and stacks of tires) and the shipping depot (with warehouses, wharfs, and shipping crates), City 17 (pre and post Nova Prospekt) has streets you can’t walk down, but there is typically either a broken building or Combine Wall blocking the road, the Coast has the bridge you mentioned, and most of the houses along the road do have mostly-sensible designs with kitchens and bathrooms, ect. And don’t forgot Nova Prospekt’s shower rooms, halls of prison cells, and the laundry room. Hardly just random rooms/halls.

While the overall layout of all of these areas doesn’t make complete sence… neither do Black Mesa’s. Black Mesa’s just better at weaving these locations together to appear cohesive.

SO, while I can see your criticisms of chapters like Route Kanal and Ravenholm (I myself have wondered about why Ravenholm’s houses are the way they are. LOL! So many hallways, so little bathrooms.), I think that most of the game does make sense, or at-least reads as recognizable places, even if the theming for each area isn’t as strong as it is in something like Black Mesa.

But that’s just my two cents.

#4

You’re right. Portal 2 is actually a pretty good example of a world which makes sense. They made a point to show the tubing of how stuff is delivered, the mechanisms for reshaping the test chambers, the mechanisms for moving the entire chambers around and so on. Portal 2 makes a lot of sense, and it’s a great example of how amazing the Source engine could be. The Episodes, as well, are a ton of fun. Even Episode 1, which is fairly filler, still looks very cool. DAT CAR PARK!

I can’t begrudge Valve for Half-Life 2. The game’s older than my nephew, of course it’ll look and feel dated. It was a technical and visual marvel when it came out, it set standards for the future and THAT counts for more than any barren criticism I can levy against it. I just wish Valve took a little more care of it. Hell, it shouldn’t be that hard to fix a lot of the outstanding issues, if anyone cared to give a Black Mesa treatment to HL2 itself :slight_smile: But…

That. It blows my mind that the game which SOLD STEAM way back in the day has simply been all but abandoned. OK, fine, we may never see Half-Life 3. I get that. But Half-Life 2 could have a ton more life left in it if I could actually find any mods, and if they actually worked. llpon has a few weapon mods for HL2, but comments on the mods themselves say how “after such and such patch, you won’t get sounds with them.” Great. The game suffers BADLY for lacking Workshop support, and I do not comprehend why that is.

Right, I don’t disagree. Some aspects of Half-Life 2 are actually pretty good. I love the open highway and all the little houses you run across along the way. Hell, Episode 2’s missile silo complex is actually quite amazing. It feels like a living, breathing space with people going about their business and maintenance areas sectioned off. I’m not as much a fan of Nova Prospekt, myself, but it’s not bad - certainly feels like a prison, I’ll tell you that much. But those damn sewers. What REALLY hurts about them is they’re first actual stage in the game - the first one you get to play for real, and they’re… Just not very good. To the point where I’d frankly wish for a map pack that spruces them up.

Half-Life 2 vanilla has the “box room” problem, in that almost all of its locations are a box with props in it, or at least drawn on a grid which makes it feel like something out of the Portal 2 map editor. The props can make up for that sometimes, but a lot of times it’s just boxy rooms with boxy hallway in a maze-like pattern. The Episodes go a LONG way towards breaking up the boxes, but it’s Black Mesa itself which has the most interesting spaces. Yeah, you still have a lot of boxy rooms, but they may have arched ceilings, or they may curve in a bow, or they may be missing a corner, or they may have notches cut out of them where a ramp descends towards a locked door.

But again - we’re talking about a 2004 game which had revolutionary graphics for its time. How critical can I really be? Half-Life 2 works, and it’s still a great game. A lot better once I got out of the sewers. But it just puts into perspective just HOW good Black Mesa is. Yeah, it has its flaws, but Black Mesa does a lot better at hiding them and distracting me from them than Half-Life 2 does.

I can say this much - the mere fact that Half-Life 2 still runs and looks competitive with games 10 years later is a testament to how well it was made. But it’s starting to show its years after all this time, is what I’m saying.

#5

So I played through Ravenholm again. Now that I’m aware of it, I actually went out of my way to look at the town’s buildings, and they’re… Wow. Silent Hill would be proud! I didn’t exactly take notes, so here are a few things that stuck in my head.

This was either after the “dropping car” traps or else after Father Grigori told me to get to the church. I climbed into a third-storey window and ended up in a room with only one door. This door led to a hallway, which led to a sealed-off room with exactly five steps up and only one exist. This exit led to another hallway with a single door leading out of it… Into a dead-end room the only door to which was the one I’d come into, and a bunch of windows looking out. So this floor of this building consists of two dead-end rooms connected by a hallway with no exits other than those two rooms.

There is no access to this floor from anywhere else in the building. And no, it’s not Father Grigori sealing off sections to curtail the zombies. Everything in the aforementioned structure was walled on all sides by the brick-and-mortar, painted walls of the building itself. This is, apparently, how it was built. Man, just imagine having to live in that apartment. I got into one side of that structure through a window via makeshift planks. To get out on the other side, I had to vault over the street to the building across, then drop down to a bunch of barrels so I don’t take falling damage. How did the tenants get in and out? Hell, imagine waking up in a room with no exits. This is Silent Hill stuff right there!

Right at the end of Ravenholm, just before the cable car section, I decided to give the area a thorough look. The industrial building I needed to climb to get to the cable car roof has a courtyard in front of it. For no reason, a stone fence topped with a metal catwalk railing divides the courtyard, despite there being nothing on the "other side. Funnier still, a pipe comes out of the ground and goes into the fence… But does not come out the other side. This fence is thinner than the pipe itself. Why does a pipe join a brick fence? Who plumbed this?

Walking through several streets narrower than my shoulders which still nevertheless apparently allow for car traffic, I found a for-no-reason tunnel. I say “for no reason” because this is basically a roof that’s been built over a narrow street with nothing above it. Funnier still, there’s somebody’s window IN the tunnel. Man, I’d be so pissed if my room’s only window looked out into a tunnel…

Then I checked the footpath leading to the cemetery and had to laugh - that bloody thing is a cobblestone road at a 45 degree angle! What? The people of old Ravenholm must have been badass, because I would need crampons and a grappling hook to climb that. A friend of mine that I showed this to commented “So you’re saying that should have been stairs, instead?” … Yes, that actually does make sense. Yeah, a 45-degree slope that people are supposed to walk on should be made of stairs.

The building interiors just don’t make sense even when they’re not ripped straight out of my nightmares. An apartment building ran AAALL the way around a stairwell area, circling around it on three sides only to let me enter it on the fourth. This despite the fact that a door could have been built right after the first turn, this saving two entire fairly large rooms for actual use, rather than serving as hallways. The buildings in Ravenholm are 90% hallways, maybe 10% actual usable space. Geez!

On multiple occasions, I would find buildings with massive walled-off internal space. So there’s this infirmary-looking room with zombies on wooden tables that leads me down the stairs to a zombie-infested hallway. This hallway circles around what looks like a 10 feet X 10 feet walled-off area on all four sides… With no way into that area. Is that the world’s largest supporting column, or did a whole room get bricked up on four sides for some reason?

And that’s not the only one. Many, many times I’d look at the outside of a building and see large bulges in the exterior that none of the interior spaces ever get to. So either these buildings have load-bearing walls 10 feet thick, or else large open spaces have been sealed up for no reason. Sealed up with brick and mortar, painted over and then adorned.

Ravenholm just makes my head hurt. I take it back - the Route Canal sewers are logical and believable by comparison with that Escheresque town. Yeah, the sewers don’t always make sense, but at least they don’t always have to. A lot of the times, they’re just service tunnels so they can afford to be long series of tubes. But Ravenholm’s buildings are actually supposed to look like something that I’ve seen before in real life - buildings! And they don’t look like buildings. They look like Doom 2 maps on the inside. GOD I can’t wait to get to Nova Prospekt!

#6

But think about it… Ravenholm is about atmosphere. The devs never wanted people to look that closely, and frankly you wouldn’t unless you really tried.

#7

On the one hand you’re right. I did go into Ravenholm specifically looking for this sort of thing. I wasn’t making a list, true, but I was still scrutinising the architecture. To a large extent, I did this to myself. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” as it were.

On the other hand, though, this isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way. From the very start, back when I bought Half-Life 2 as my first ever Steam game… I still hated Ravenholm. I didn’t have a way to express it then, I wasn’t aware of what it was that was bothering me, but I was always getting lost. I don’t get lost in video games, not easily. I have a pretty keen sense of orientation and dead reckoning, but I need an environment I can “recognise” in order for that to really work.

From my very first visit to Ravenholm, starry-eyed and gob-smacked as I was by Half-Life 2, I still hated the experience. I kept getting turned around, I never knew where I was, I never had a good sense of where I was going or what I needed to achieve. I always regressed to the most basic form of gaming - just try all doors and follow the one that opens.

That’s the problem with bad level design. Even when players aren’t aware of what’s wrong… Hell, even when players aren’t aware THAT something is wrong, the feeling of unease is still there. I ended up leaving Ravenholm convinced I should love it, but feeling like I never wanted to play it again. I’ve started playing Half-Life 2 several times and finished only roughly half of those. Every single time I’ve stopped playing was when I got to Ravenholm. Even though logically I knew it was good, my memories of it were painful.

Now I know why. Now I’ve put the problem into words. In a way, that helps. It should make Ravenholm a little bit less painful to play through now that I’m not fighting a feeling in the back of my head but simply accept the chapter for what it is. But DAMN is that chapter a cryin’ shame. Ravenholm is atmospheric, creepy and actually very cool in theory. If it had logical locations, it would be AMAZING. Instead, it’s kind of cumbersome.

#8

I don’t know, I never got confused or backed up when I played Ravenholm, it’s still one of my favorite chapters.

#9

You make it sound like you and Ravenholm had a break up or something. :stuck_out_tongue:

I think that you getting lost isn’t because “This apartment’s layout makes no logical sense!” It’s because Ravenholm has some flow issues.

Ravenholm is structured very differently from the rest of Half-Life 2. The route you take has a lot of twists and turns, sometimes doubles back on itself, and includes quite a few “stop progressing for a sec to go pull a lever to clear an obstacle for Gordon” dealios in it. I will give you that Ravenholm’s setting as “an old mining town taken over by zombies with this crazy priest running around” does make it harder for you to instinctively know where to find said lever to remove said obstacle… but again, it’s not due to a lack of logical archetecture. It’s because we’re eating an Unrelatable Setting cake with some Unusually Convoluted Layout frosting. Honestly, realistic archetecture with more rooms and doors would probably make it HARDER to figure out where to go. :3

Also, you can always type “map d2_coast_10” in the console when you get to Ravenholm if it’s actually an emotional roller-coaster that you just can’t ride again. :stuck_out_tongue:

#10

I think this is were fakfactory steps in.

#11

I think this is where Fakefactory steps over the line. :stuck_out_tongue:

#12

I disagree on that last one. Larger, more open environments are often cited as confusing, at least from what I’ve seen, but I frankly find them easier to navigate than tight, linear environments. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time taught me a very valuable lesson of game design - when you teach a player that there’s one and only one way forward in every situation, the player will stop trying to make sense of the environment and simply scan for the tell-tale sign of “the exit.” In the case of Sands of Time, I leaned to spot the one climbable thing which would initiate the linear climbing sequence. In Ravenholm, I learned to spot the open window I needed to get to.

By contrast, On a Rail: Uncut taught me the counterpoint lesson - when you leave the player with no clear, easily-identifiable way forward and set him in a large, non-linear environment, said player ends up having to explore and “map out” the area in order to progress. Ravenholm isn’t confusing to me any more precisely because I went into it with the express purpose of over-analysing it and mapping it out, stopping every 10 feet to check where everything is in relation to everything else. I doubt I’ll get lost in it again, not any more. But were the section actually more complicated, were it to offer me more rooms and buildings to explore, I’d have done this way back in 2004. I would have had to, pretty much like I had to, back in 1998 playing through the original On a Rail.

I don’t mean to misinterpret Ravenholm as some kind of bad romance. Far from it. However, “feeling” is how I learn. When something is said and done, what sticks with me is a very basic feeling - did that feel good or did it feel wrong. Without even thinking about it, I’ll try and repeat what felt good while avoiding what felt wrong. I don’t even need to be aware of it, that’s just how my brain learns from experience. Once you get past the initial ooh-aah of the Gravity Gun, what you’re left with is a twisting maze that doesn’t do enough to obfuscate this fact.

Others have said it already - Black Mesa is no less a twisting, linear maze than Half-Life 2. How could it, when it was draw after the original Half-Life, which was pretty much just that. But both Half-Life (at the time) and Black Mesa did far more to hide this. Black Mesa, especially, does a tremendous job of convincing me this really was a real, working facility between the experiments and that there would have been far more places for me to go under normal circumstances. Other paths exist, they’re just not accessible to me. Other paths don’t exist in Ravenholm. Streets come from dead ends and go into dead ends. Entire floors of buildings are walled off on all sides.

Ravenholm is confusing because it gives me nothing to work with except the bare-essentials layout of the locations. It’s why Xen is confusing, as well, and why it used to make me motion-sick as a kid. It’s why caves, sewers and crypts are confusing. It’s why the grey futuristic corridors of Doom 3 are confusing. If I can’t look at a location and put a name to it, there’s no way in hell I’ll be able to keep the lay of the land straight in my head over a long period of time.

Nova Prospekt, despite being even more bizarre and maze-like, still makes more sense to me exactly because of how much each location looks like a real place.

#13

Funnily enough, I think Route Canal and Ravenholm are chapters that had quite a few bits and pieces left over from the Half Life 2 beta. After watching Valve News Network on Youtube do a playthrough of a cobbled-together beta experience, all of the maps were essentially very confusing to navigate, even for him. VNN actually called it to attention and mentioned that these maps were much more reminiscent of the way Half Life 1 worked - winding and maze-like, with little attention being paid to how the structures would make sense in a real-world standpoint.

#14

Hmm… You know, that actually does make sense. The original Half-Life was always like this - a research facility in theory, but one which mostly played out like a prettier level from Doom. I don’t really judge Half-Life too harshly over this, however. It’s an old game from a time when this was simply how you did things. Indeed, it made some major first strides away from the “dungeons” that every other FPS game was set in, a lot to establish the fact that locations could look like real things. Half-Life is also built on a pretty limited engine, so I can give Valve a lot of leeway for simply not having the physical capability to render anything more “life-like” or to create all the extra doors, windows and props that make Black Mesa so cool. It was 1998. A lot of FPS games were still using sprites or fake-3D plane-shifting. For its time, Half-Life was revolutionary. Within the context of “a classic,” it still holds up.

But if Ravenholm and Route Canal were indeed leftovers from a very early Beta, then I can definitely see the resemblance. The funny thing, honestly, is that the game revisits the sewers later on (why Valve thought their game needed TWO sewer levels is beyond me, but…) and the second time around they’re actually a lot less silly and a lot less confusing. Rather than long, winding corridors seemingly built to make for a cool obstacle course, the sewers revisit consists of several large locations which run Freeman up and down across them, navigating around obstructions and usually finding ways to climb. While the environment still doesn’t make much sense in broad terms (I go into a sewer and keep going up all the time, only to emerge back onto street level O_o), the moment-to-moment locations very much do. I could recognise an arched sewer tunnel and its supporting infrastructure. There’s that very cool warehouse you have to climb along the rafters and gantry crane. There’s that destroyed winding staircase which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but at least I know what it is. For as much as I dislike sewer levels, that chapter is sewer levels done right, at least within the context of Half-Life 2.

Frankly, I wish they’d taken a completely different approach with Ravenholm, something more along the lines of what was done with the original Silent Hill. Chart out the map of a city, then block off all the streets except the one you want the player to go along. At certain points, let the player go into certain buildings to move between outdoor areas, but let the player find the dead ends on his own. Come to think of it, that IS L4D in a nutshell. Yeah, seriously - if Ravenholm were built like the original L4D in terms of basic level design, it would have been ten times as good. Still just as atmosphering, but a lot less goofy if you stop to think about it. Which - unlike in L4D - you will, because Half-Life is paced a lot slower and with a lot more downtime.

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The new forum UI is weird…

#15

I personally don’t understand most of your criticism. Just after I finished BM I bought the Orange Box and directly started playing HL2. At first I wasn’t really sure what to think about this game, mainly because Route Kanal is a very lengthy, boring and repetetive Chapter where nothing important happens (at least imho). But HL2 definitely managed to take my interest after Water Hazard. I think it’s a really awesome game that has aged extremely well. It didn’t feel like any sort of downgrade to me but just like I was continuing the story of Black Mesa. I also dont know why it’s important to you that every map needs to be 100% realistic. HL2’s design felt believable and nothing felt like it was out of place. I never thought that something made absolutely no sense, however I may just have different expectations.
And Ravenholm? Come on that place is all about the creepy athmosphere thats so different from the whole rest of the game. I fucking love and hate that place at the same time. (Friggin fast zombies) I love how you feel like you fight your way through the whole town through the streets, windows, planks and rooftops and that you dont just traverse the infested streets like in RE2’s beginning.

#16

Like I said - Ravenholm’s very atmospheric and a really cool idea. It both shows what the Combine’s regime does to people (though I’d argue Episode 2 does that better) and constitutes a very creepy, almost Resident-Evil-like survival horror section. Both the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are games of many themes, going from quiet exploration to survival horror to balls-out action to marvelling at alien stuff to more action again and so on. The idea of Ravenholm is great, and I definitely believe that the game benefits from having it. But the map design in that place is awful, there are no two ways about it. In fact, that map design serves to hamper the awesome theme of Ravenholm by making pretty much every location feel out-of-place and unbelievable.

I’m not looking for hardcore realism here, honestly I’m not. Half-Life 2 is a sci-fi action game, so a lot of creative liberty is afforded to it. I am, however, looking for immersion and a world which feels like it fits within the game’s own fictional universe. So when I run into a building the third floor of which is walled off on all sides and has no access to a lift or stairs, when I see a street both bricked up on all sides and too narrow to fit cars have cars in it anyway, when I see buildings which consist of 90% hallways and maybe one actual room… My immersion is broken, because I see the location for what it is - an FPS dungeon shaped like a town.

Obviously, that’s what pretty much every FPS game is, but even the original Half-Life did more to hide this. In fact, I think I’ve pinned down another reason why that is. Half-Life had a LOT of environment props. So does Black Mesa, in fact. Half-Life 2 has next to none… Which is bizarre, considering that game’s obsession with physics objects. Take Ravenholm, for instance. Aside from that one table and that one wardrobe, that place has next to no “household” props to speak of. There are buzzsaw blades, sure, and a lot of V8 engines for a town with streets too narrow to fit the kind of large American cars which would use those. A lot of meat hooks and air tanks, too. What about tables and chairs and bookshelves? What about a kitchen with a sink, or a bathroom with a bath tub and a toilet? What about an old abandoned cafe with chairs and tables strewn about outside? What about a deli full of rotting meat and a cash register I can hurl at zombies?

Ravenholm doesn’t feel like a town to me. It feels like a canyon made of small buildings jammed together. It doesn’t have any of the stuff an actual small town would have - we don’t even get to go into the church so I can smash zombies in the head with the church altar. now that would have been cool. It feels like a video game level. Worse, it feels like somebody made what he thought was a really cool video game level, then someone else went through it and took out all the props because… It would make the game too easy if we had too much stuff to propel? So what we ended up with is nondescript buildings jammed together into veritable hallways, themselves made up of mostly empty hallways and a few empty rooms. Man, Father Grigori must have hauled all the refrigerators, television sets, computers, bookshelves, coffee tables, couches, beds, flower pots, stoves, washing machines, sinks and countertops out of all the houses in the intervening 20 years. He left all the radiators in, though.

I’m not saying Ravenholm is bad. The theme and atmosphere is actually very good. However, the map design itself does A LOT to counter-act the cool theme, making it come across as boring and confusing as much as it’s scary. Again, look at something like the original Resident Evil. That entire game takes place mostly inside a single large building. However, because that is an ACTUAL building which fits to a floor plan, you end up making sense of it and growing familiar with your surroundings. You know your way around the mansion and are actively looking for ways to explore further while you face the horrors within. That’s what Ravenholm should have been like. Granted, not necessarily and indoor place, but it should have been a small town which runs us back-and-forth around it, finding ways to unblock our path through detours and backtracking. If it’s THAT small of a town that it doesn’t even have a single cafe, then rendering it as a small location that we spend a lot of time in ala Blast Pit would have been superior, in my opinion.

I like the idea of Ravenholm. I don’t think Half-Life 2 implements that idea very well. If ever I was going to skip a chapter in the game, Ravenholm would be it. Yes, even more so than Route Canal.

#17

Route Canal has always been my favorite chapter of Half-Life 2. :huh:

#18

The best description I ever read about HL2 is “every chapter is a map too long.”

I feel Route Canal and Water Hazard were too much of a slog for me to want to replay the game as much as I do the others in the series. The game gets a lot better once you get the Gravity Gun, but most parts still feel a little too long. HL1 (and by extension Black Mesa) and the episodes are much better in terms of pacing.

#19

“A map too long.” I like that :slight_smile: I don’t think I agree with you on that one, though. I’m the kind of player who can never have enough of a good game. Half-Life 2 could be twice the size and I’d still play it eagerly. I couldn’t imagine playing Black Mesa without On a Rail: Uncut and Surface Tension: Uncut. I look forward to the Hazard Course remake and even that We’ve Got Hostile: Uncut, despite there not really being much “cut” from We’ve Got Hostiles aside from vent crawling and the cantina kitchen. Now, I obviously don’t want just longer corridors and repetitive rooms, sure. This is predicated on the condition that the extra content be GOOD, which I find to be the case with both of the Uncut chapters.

And yet, you still have a point - Route Kanal and Water Hazard really feel like they drag on, though I suspect for different reasons. Water Hazard shares features and problems with Highway 17 - the other “vehicle section” in the game… Yet Highway 17 feels a lot less long and a lot less tedious. Gabe Newall likes to talk about contraction and expansion of space, sending the player though tight, narrow spaces then into wide, open spaces and back again. This is what Water Hazard and Highway 17 are, but that in itself is a problem: Their scale is too big. Locations are too large to explore and the routes are so long they’re slow to traverse. So why is that a problem in Water Hazard but not in Highway 17? Why does Water Hazard feel like it’s dragging on longer?

Counter-intuitively, I’d say it’s because there’s a lot more going on in Water Hazard. You’re ramping your boat over chasms, ramming enemies and structures, dodging rockets, swerving around bombs, racing a gunship, zooming down a complicated “track” at high speed and having to judge your steering, your speed and what’s around you - it’s an arcade racing game more so than a shooter in those sections, and that’s a problem. High-octane action is draining. If you put the player through too much at a time, you end up sucking the thrill out of it, until it feels like a chore. A complicated, attention-intensive chore. Contrast this against Highway 17. Yes, there are a few heart-poinding moments in it (GOD DAMN racing the train on the bridge!), but those are specific set-pieces. Most of Highway 17 involves fairly sedate driving on the open road. You may run over a few Antlions or stop to pull Roller Mines off your buggy, but you’re rarely in a GOGOGOGOGO! position. The chapter is no less long and involved, but it makes travel easier and less focus-intensive, which actually makes it fly by a lot faster.

I’d argue the reason that Water Hazard feels like it drags on for so long is it tries to do too much. It demands too much of your attention too often, and as a result… You end up realising you’re basically doing the same thing multiple times. Go out on the water, race the chopper, dodge missiles, ram wooden supports, do a jump, get into a pipe. Sail for a bit, then do it all over again about three more times. Yes, Highway 17 pretty much comes down to the same thing - drive until you find a building, clear the building, drive on - but because the actual act of driving is so much less complicated, you can almost tune out the driving sections. It’s good that they’re there because they add a sense of scope to the whole chapter, they add to the sense of immersion, but unlike the constant running the gantlet that is Water Hazard, it doesn’t make me tired to play through it.

The other issue is that - like Route Kanal - Water Hazard really doesn’t “look like anything.” The outside sections are pretty cool when they look like a river out in the countryside, but there are far too many samey-looking pipes and aqueducts. Worse, because I’m being chased all the time, I don’t have the chance to explore the environment and see how cool it looks. The only times I get to slow down and look around, I’m in yet another sewer level which is just so, SO very rarely interesting.

At the end of the day, I wouldn’t say that Water Hazard is a “map too long” so much as I’d argue it runs out of material half-way through and ends up repeating itself.

#20

I disagree; I dislike Half-Life 2 as well but feel that everything is rushed. I feel that each chapter is about half as long as it ideally should be.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.