The day Half Life 2 was
released my hard drive died. I never discovered what happened to cause the
passing of my precious repository and at the time I never even questioned the
why, simply the how. How could my drive cease to function on this most special
of days? What terrible events could be inflicted upon Gordon Freeman without me
watching over him? How, in short, could this happen to me? I played Half Life 2
shortly after these events. Sometime after the terrible circumstances
surrounding the game I must have grown up somewhat as I stopped asking myself
the whiney how’s and simply got on with playing games. Somewhere during this
time Half Life 2 suffered the same fate as my juvenile sense of entitlement and
slipped to the back of my mind; the excitement for the original game was simply
not present when it came to the subsequent episodes. I bought them a few years
later when steam launched for mac out a sense of guilt but didn’t give them
much though. A few more years have rolled by and things, I, have changed yet
again; the apathy which leached away the youthful excitement has in turn been
replaced by scholarly curiosity. It seems Half Life 2 has been there throughout
all of my formative years, waiting patiently for me to yet again be ready.
Both of the episodes prove to
be fascinating time capsules in some respects and in others examples of
superior design decisions which to this day remain curiously underused. The
storytelling technique of maintaining a strict first person perspective which
is employed in all of Valve’s single player releases has been heavily praised
since 1998 yet is still largely ignored in favour of the more ‘cinematic’ use
of cutscenes. Though Valve’s games are probably the best suited to this device
through their casting of the player as a silent protagonist, thereby allowing
them to completely inhabit the game world and indirectly interact with
characters, other developers have attempted implementation with varying degrees
of success. The Call of Duty series has used the technique throughout, though
it is the Modern Warfare trilogy where this can be seen most prevalently.
Unlike Half Life, however, these games dilute the powerful connection between
player and supporting characters by jumping between protagonists in rapid
succession, showing the hollow shell of the player-character to be just that.
Gordon Freeman works as a host because we consistently use his eyes to see. The
consecutive nature of all of the Half Life 2 games fosters an acute connection
between the player and the world by way of Gordon, thus making him a tangible
character unto himself, regardless of his personality being exclusively a
projection of the player’s own. In breaking up continuity and changing protagonists
the Modern Warfare games, barring a couple of effective moments in the first,
impede our ability to suspend disbelief and accept our host as a complete
character. This often reverses the relevance of one of the most important rules
of narrative, that of ‘show don’t tell’. In wanting to show the player
everything the Call of Duty games destroy any sense of identity the player
characters could possess. It is for gameplay reasons, then, that the player is
transported back in time to Pripyat and into the body of yet another character
and only tertiarily connected to any narrative or character progression. The
events of this flashback could be summed up in a short paragraph yet the game
dedicates far more time to it. While the Half Life games similarly show rather
than tell the player about many of the important plot points the fact we
inhabit a single character following a defined and temporally linear chain of
events is crucial. This elevates the narrative concessions made for gameplay
from mere contrivances to understandable compromises.
One such gameplay compromise is
that of player mortality. I had practically forgotten the time before
recharging health existed in shooters before I endeavoured to see Episodes One
and Two out. Neither Half Life’s health pack mechanic nor the modern shooter’s
penchant for regenerating health prove to be narratively sound solutions when
it comes to governing a player’s ability to sustain damage. I am not, however,
going to attempt to suggest a more fitting replacement to either, I’ll save
that for another day.
In my absentmindedness I hadn’t
only forgotten health packs but also the way they define how we play these
games on the whole. Jumping back into Episode One it had been some time since I
had felt the levels of tension I was experiencing from finite health.
Ordinarily one would just duck out of the action for a few seconds and then get
back to the job of killing things, here I was forced to endure a number of
reloads before my mind once again became used to the concept of being careful.
My ability to stay alive was
more directly connected to my understanding and implementation of the games
systems as a whole rather than relying upon them one at a time. For instance;
close to the end of Episode 1 I was tasked with escorting a number of groups of
soldiers and medics across a train yard, leading to a back and forth where
enemies and obstacles would change every time I returned across the yard.
During these trips I was using all of my movement options (run, duck, jump, strafe,
cower, sprint, strut) along with the different interactions I could perform
with the world (shoot, throw, gravity gun things, re-supply limited stocks of
resources, cower). All of these actions were being performed in a beautiful
sequence, fluidly linking into one another with grace and at my own free will.
Much like the best sequences in Halo, i.e. anything outside, the stage was set
and it was up to me to devise a way through. The cowering, then, was not a
simple couple of seconds which broke my combat flow in favour of health
regeneration, no, it was an intrinsic part of the dance which allowed me to
avoid danger itself, not simply the percentage of health it would deprive me of
for a short period of time. In forcing me to think carefully about how I took
damage, in making the health system a participative one rather than the more
passive ‘recharging duck’, the combat scenarios within the Half Life games
proved to be much more organically flowing and divergent. Enemies were scripted
to enter stage left, yes, but when they got there they had the entirety of the
stage with which to make a scene, not simply one corner. With finite health the
player is encouraged to lead and be led in this merry dance rather than the
singular task of skulking around and occasionally peaking out from behind
something to watch the show.
While this difference in
gameplay is rarely as dramatic as I am describing, I feel it highlights the
changes shooters have undergone in a very short period of time, a change which
would not have occurred so dramatically without the popularisation of
recharging health. If a player has a finite amount of health within a certain
section of the game the developer can control their experience with much
lighter brushstrokes than if a player can theoretically heal most of the time.
The ballet of the train yard and its varied, defined progression would be
transformed into an assault course of infinite waves of enemies, a challenge to
be traversed quickly rather than thoughtfully engaged with had Gordon Freeman
recharging health. The APC he faces would not pose anywhere near the same
challenge if he could duck in and out of buildings to replenish health. How
would this problem be addressed? More APCs. More soldiers. More bullets. More
rockets. More everything. This, however, rarely increases the difficulty,
instead simply prolonging encounters to the point where challenge is now borne
out of longevity, the gameplay of attrition if you will, rather than any
increased test of tangible skills.
Half Life 2, I feel, presents a
game where the lineage of shooters butts heads with the modernising of a genre.
The game is the zenith of the corridor crawler, giving the player a clearly
defined trajectory with just enough lea-way to mask the straight line we
follow. This creates a world where combat situations are diverse, player-driven
and divergent, pacing is (mostly) tight and character interactions timely.
Modern Warfare seemingly promised to do all of this and take us out of the
corridor, setting us free with pistol whipping, silencers and abseiling and all
we had to do was turn the corner and follow the light at the other end. It’s
just a shame that after only a couple of years our eyes adjusted to this light
of modern excitement and we found ourselves trapped in the shooting gallery,
firing an ever increasing array of munitions at the same paper targets.
