Half-Life's storytelling

. . . is not THAT good.

Now, I can see you gearing up to throw your tomatoes, but let me explain.

I was reading this conversation on The Escapist, and just like every other conversation about "story in videogames" Half-Life was used as a quintessential example of how it's "done right". (Yahtzee in particular is always one of the first to bring this up, though his fellow contributors agree with him and even question why no other game company follow's Half-Life's example.)

Now, don't get me wrong, I feel Half-Life 1 & 2 are good (if horribly overrated) games. It could be Hype Aversion or Seinfeld Is Unfunny that color my opinions, but I tend to have faith in my general assessment. I recently replayed HL 2 because I hadn't played it in a while and I was feeling nostalgic. But there were a few things that bothered me about the way it told its plot compared to other games:

1) The biggest thing that bothers me is Gordon Freeman himself. Between the first and second games, Gordon has suddenly become this Christ-like figure symbolizing the indomitable human spirit and the promise of freedom. However, the game makes YOU Gordon Freeman and essentially makes him a Heroic Mime. Now, of course, the Legend Of Zelda, Chrono Trigger, Crysis2 and many other games do pretty much the same thing. But, in the case of Gordon, it's a bit odd because Link, Crono and Alcatraz are pretty much used as Butt Monkeys throughout much of the narrative. Your character has to go here and do this in order to get something they need and the other characters give them no choice in the matter. There are times in HL 2 when Gordon Freeman is just expected to make a leap of logic and follow the instructions given to him, even though Gordon just might have had a difference of opinion.

One of two examples that stick out for me are the moment when you get to Doctor Kleiner and he says he wants to get you out of the HAV suit and into a proper lab coat. What are Gordon's thoughts on this? Gordon has been tearing a swath through the Combine by himself and hasn't contributed anything of note to the scientific community. Frankly, he's doing better as a Genius Bruiser than a lab rat. The second example is when Doctor Breen later offers Gordon the chance to work with him and the Combine rather than continue to fight. We never get an answer from Gordon and Alyx/Eli both attest that Gordon would never do that. Here, Gordon's silence is extremely awkward, because for the last several hours we've been doing exactly what everyone told us to do, regardless of circumstance. Sure, most of them were working for the Resistance, but there's also the fact that Gordon NEVER mentions the G-Man to anyone.

2) Everyone seems to praise HL for telling its narrative as you play it. In other words, there are no cutscenes, and the player is always in-character. This is basically touted as brilliant and innovative, but I see no reason why it should be. After all, there are plenty of segments of the game where the action completely stops and all you do is listen to characters talk. For example, there are several scenes in HL 1 and 2 where Gordon does nothing but follow a character down a hallway, or in an elevator, or into a vehicle and they just talk AT him. Since you're ou have to view this every time you play, it's completely unskippable. You have to stand there until everyone is finished talking, and in the meantime, you can't see or experience anything except Freeman's perspective.

Even worse, because it's still active gameplay, that means you still need to be on the alert for something to happen. It's not exactly as bad as RE's "Press X To Not Die" cutscenes (which, ironically, you CAN skip right to the Quick Time Event), but things are happening. In other words, it's exactly the same thing as a cutscene, except you can't skip it and you HAVE to pay attention. How exactly does that bear repetition in the current generation of gaming, where not only are most cutscenes skippable (and games where they aren't are criticized thusly) and you don't even have to care about it if you don't want to?

TL;DR Version: I think HL 1 & 2 are good games, but the second-coming of Game Plot Christ they ain't. I really think the industry needs to get its head out of its ass and not compare EVERY FUCKING GAME with a story to Half-Life. It was good for its time, but that doesn't warrant repetition.

edited 29th Mar '11 11:15:21 AM by KingZeal

This wonderfully sums up why I loathe Heroic Mime in general for games that insist on making said mime an integral part of the mythos.

You wanna make the protagonist an active plot participant? Give us dialogue options, like in No One Lives Forever or Deus Ex.
You wanna make the protagonist a tool? DON'T MAKE PEOPLE TALK AT HIM.
You don't want either? Give the protagonist a voice and rare quips and stop pretending you have an immersive experience in there.

Bio Shock was about the only one to play with this, and suddenly everyone was praising it, although it was a (mind-rending) Lampshade Hanging that left This Troper in tears, not a revelation of game design genius (though it certainly required some of it to break out of the one-track-mindedness of the 'cinematic FPS experience').

I don't really see how 1 or 2 are issues, personally. My biggest problem with HL 2's storytelling is that the backstory is incredibly easy to miss. Like, unless you read the wall of newspaper clippings at the beginning, you can go through the entire game not even knowing what the Combine is. That, or you have good powers of deduction and can figure out the basics on your own (they're probably aliens, they have human converts or whatever, they took over everything). If you want to know more than that, though? Time to go to the Overwiki.

It's pretty ridiculous, especially because there's a really good setup for the story in there, you just have to dig too deep to find it. I applaud them for thinking Gamers Are Geniuses, but this is going a bit far.

The point you made is pretty much tied into Point #2 that I mentioned.

You HAVE to "immerse" yourself into the story, every time you play it. If you're the type of person who plays multiple playthroughs, then by the second or third time you play, your mind will start wandering and you'll have Gordon do all kinds of stupid shit like kick a piece of wood around a room or try to count how many tricycles are in the area.

Sure, this happens in other games, but it's only in narratives like Half-Life that an actual part of the game is standing around for 5 - 6 minutes at a time.

edited 29th Mar '11 11:23:00 AM by KingZeal

I'd actually like it if Gordon got some dialogue options or something once in awhile. Yes, we're supposed to be him, basically, but some spoken lines would be nice.

Still, a lot of the story to Half-Life is inferred from stuff you hear or see.

EDIT: What ^^ said. Some story-stuff is easy to miss. Which is why I like sight-seeing in first-person shooters, just in case there's some plot-relevant bit of something over younder.

edited 29th Mar '11 11:29:34 AM by pvtnum11

Well I don't think the talking-at parts are bad, though. They get the story across pretty well. It's just that no one takes the time to explain the backstory, probably because they assume you know what's going on. After all, they don't really know where you've been. They just explain what you need to know to help them or progress the current story.

The ability to ask questions would help this, but I don't think it's necessary. Being a mute would work fine if people told you more than what you needed to know immediately, or if you could pick up story segments on the way (a la Bioshock's cassettes).

Yeah, my biggest beef with HL isn't the way the story's told, is that there's relatively little story at all. It's beginning to run into The Chris Carter Effect pretty badly. (That and, in the most recent installments, the Advisers are textbook cases of Only The Author Can Save Us Now.)

Not having all the answers served up to you on a platter is one thing. Having no answers at all — and not enough information to even speculate past the level of completely making shit up — is another thing entirely.

It's worth noting, though, that the original Half-Life was essentially the first FPS to have a story worth mentioning at all, so there's a fair share of Seinfeld Is Unfunny, at least for the first game.

edited 29th Mar '11 12:29:05 PM by NativeJovian

The first mainstream-popular one, maybe. FP Ses have had epic and (marginally) coherent stories that were not an Excuse Plot since Marathon and Dark Forces. And the second one didn't have a Silent Protagonist!

Agree 100%. That one aspect is why I can't take those who praise HL's "superior" storytelling seriously. I think the actual *story* is more than good, but the praise for the way it's told is very overstated.

I also find the "It's immersive" argument dubious, because the NP Cs in HL 2 don't actually react to what you're doing. So for example, Alyx will alway say the same scripted infodump without fault, even though I'm more busy trying to jumpkick the wall or clobering her with a crowbar.

Fair enough.

I think the whole no-cutscenes can be used to tell an extremely immersive story, but that HL 2 doesn't necessarily do a great job of it. For a better example, I'd point to the Left 4 Dead series — with very brief exceptions at the beginning and ends of each campaign, it's entirely first-person, with no infodumps or obvious exposition, and doesn't even have Silent Protagonists, but it works really well as far as telling a story on the sly. This is especially noticeable in L 4 D 2, where they campaigns are explicitly connected — there's a definite story there, both in the small-scale "what's going to happened to the characters" and the large-scale "what's happening in the rest of the world", without ever having to rely on anything not direct observed from within the first-person perspective.

I love Half Life. I agree totally with what you said; Gordon Freeman is a terrible use of the silent protagonist, and the cutscenes are just made longer by being interactive.

Still, the levels are beautiful and fun, and that's what matters for me.

The big issue for me is that if I was Gordon Freeman the first thing I'd do in HL 2 after stasis was just ask everyone everything and try to get as much exposition out of Kleiner and Eli Vance as possible. I don't understand why Freeman would never ask anyone this after being in 20+ years of stasis. Does he think people will laugh at him for not knowing basic things? He has an excuse for that! And if Gman is preventing him from revealing who he is, he can still ask what happens and just let people think he's an idiot (Barney already seems to think this with his quip that his MIT degree is really paying off) - better that than just winging it for 20 hours without the slightest clue of what's going on.

Other than that I love HL 2.

edited 29th Mar '11 4:59:34 PM by ShadowScythe

That's the thing with Half Life, though: The writers will never give an official explanation. They'll never explain who the G-man is, why Gordon never speaks, or any other aspect. Take, for example, one thing the G-man says at the end of the first game:

That kinda implies two things: Either the G-man and his "employers" took over Xen, or the US military did. In the latter case, Half-Life 2 could have been very different if they continued from there.

Likewise, the appearance of the Headcrab variants also raises questions, mainly: Where did they come from? Did they exist even before the Black Mesa Incident?

So, I think you're kinda supposed to come up with your own answers for stuff in the series, and while it may not be a narrative masterpiece, it definitely was different from the Text Scrolls and FMV cutscenes in other games that came before the first one.

No mention of Alyx's feelings toward Gordon(no doubt due to his vibrant personality)?

edited 29th Mar '11 4:56:22 PM by JotunofBoredom

Let's face it, Gordon's the first remotely fuckable guy she has ever seen that isn't Barney or her father, and that's already a good enough reason as far as I'm concerned.

Maybe the G-Man rendered Gordon mute? =) He can still frickin' gesture! We could even SEE those gestures, maybe understand what he's saying =)

edited 29th Mar '11 10:07:52 PM by Noelemahc

Gordon's silence is exactly the thing that wrecks the immersion for me in Half-Life. I feel aloof and disconnected from everyone else because I can't talk with them, only observe them. I don't care about everything going on because I've stepped into the shoes of a man who doesn't care, he just does everything he's told with perfect stoicism. The "blank slate" approach to protagonists is very tricky; just making your character silent and telling players to "fill in the blanks" isn't enough, you need to give them means to fill in dialogue within the game. What good is a blank slate if you can't write on it?

Also, I don't buy your defense of the story, Rocket Dude. This is pretty much what every Half-Life fan pulls out when you complain about Half-Life's storytelling, but why is that such a good thing? Maybe sometimes I want some concrete answers in order to make sense of the world. Maybe I don't want my entire understanding of the background to come from speculation. Every Half-Life game introduces a host of new questions with few answers to the previous questions, such that most of the mysteries are just left unresolved. This is tiring to me. The plots of the games feel like a big tangled web now, which you can't even begin to sort out because we only have speculation available to us anyway. Exposition is not bad. It is not something to be avoided at all costs. Like everything, it has its place, and Half-Life could really use some.

Eventually I want this thing with the G-Man to be resolved. Maybe they don't have to explain to us exactly what he is, but I want it to come to some kind of resolution and ending. They can't just keep stringing us along like this forever. If they do, the whole G-Man subplot will get very tired very fast (arguably it already is).

Incidentally, these are the reasons I don't like Half-Life.

edited 30th Mar '11 6:20:41 AM by PhiliusLupae

They're pretty much gone through everything they can with the character as he stands.

He's some sort of resource manager, who hires Gordon out to interested parties after squiring him at the end of Half Life. In 2 he's hired by the resistance, but his contract shifts over to Breen in the end game (about when we're forced to get into the metal suits in the Citadel.) When Gordon rebells against Breen, the G-man steps in to tke control but the Vortigaunts take control off of him.

And I can't quite remember his role in Episode 2, but I think that he now holds Alyx's "contract" insted of Gordon's.

I wonder if we'll see some sort of Heel–Face Turn from her...

I don't think he was defensing. He was making an observation, not a value judgment. The first time I read his post, I actually thought he was complaining, but rereading it, it seems pretty neutral (I guess I was just projecting).

But yeah. I'd say that if Valve really wants to shake things up for Ep 3 and later (which will piss some people off, but doing anything to any long-running series will piss some people off — doing nothing included), I'd have them try to actually fill in some of those holes. Who is the G-man, really? What's his relationship to the Combine, and the Vortigaunts? What's the friggen deal with those Advisers? Etc.

Of course, if they're going to answer any of those questions, they better have good answers. If they answer it with a lame cop-out, then they'll do more harm than good. So let's hope that there actually are some answers to those questions, and they're not just making it up as they go along.

That's like 95% Fanon, dude. All we really know is that the G-Man is manipulating Gordon (and others) for his own purposes.

edited 30th Mar '11 7:25:55 AM by NativeJovian

It's the best explanation out there. What with Breen going on about contracts.

You are right though.

edited 30th Mar '11 7:38:14 AM by Nicknacks

I miss Shepard. Does anyone else miss Shepard? With his implied TALKING and cool gloves and being put into cold storage by the G-guy. I hope they bring him back, eventually.

I miss Shepard too. Shepard is awesome. Shepard is a Pretty Cool Guy, eh saves galaxys and doesnt afraid of anything. I also miss the HalfLife Shephard.

People with some variation of "Shepherd" always gets mixed up.

edited 30th Mar '11 1:11:43 PM by Spirit

That reminds me: with Chelle going into stasis for Portal 2, is Valve even capable of continuing between games with a protagonist not either in stasis or unconscious?

Well, there's Blue Shift. Barney got out of Black Mesa conscious.

^^Left 4 Dead, maybe?

Portal and Half Life take place in the same universe, it doesn't seem that strange to me. Just worry if they bring it into other franchises, too.

WTB time-suspended spy to kill snipers with.