Half Life Hd Vs Original

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HalfLife is a 1998 first-person shooter game developed by Valve Corporation and published by Sierra Studios for Windows. It was Valve's debut product and the first game in the Half-Life series. The player assumes the role of Gordon Freeman, a scientist who must escape from the Black Mesa Research Facility after it is overrun by alien creatures following a disastrous scientific experiment. The gameplay consists of combat, exploration and puzzles.

Valve was disappointed with the lack of innovation in the FPS genre, and aimed to create an immersive world rather than a "shooting gallery". Unlike other games at the time, the player has almost uninterrupted control of the player character; the story is mostly experienced through scripted sequences rather than cutscenes. Valve developed the game using GoldSrc, a heavily-modified version of the Quake engine, licensed from id Software. The science fiction novelist Marc Laidlaw was hired to craft the plot and assist with design.

Half-Life is a first-person shooter that requires the player to perform combat tasks and puzzle solving to advance through the game. Unlike most first-person shooters at the time, which relied on cut-scene intermissions to detail their plotlines, Half-Life's story is told mostly using scripted sequences (bar one short cutscene), keeping the player in control of the first-person viewpoint. In line with this, the player rarely loses the ability to control the player character, Gordon Freeman, who never speaks and is never actually seen in the game; the player sees "through his eyes" for the entire length of the game. Half-Life has no levels; it instead divides the game into chapters, whose titles briefly appear on screen as the player progresses through the game. With the exception of short loading pauses, progression throughout the game is continuous, with each map directly connecting to the next, with the exception of levels involving teleportation.[4]

The game regularly integrates puzzles, such as navigating a maze of conveyor belts or using nearby boxes to build a small staircase to the next area the player must travel to. Some puzzles involve using the environment to kill an enemy, like turning a valve to spray hot steam at their enemies. There are few bosses in the conventional sense, where the player defeats a superior opponent by direct confrontation. Instead, such organisms occasionally define chapters, and the player is generally expected to use the terrain, rather than firepower, to kill the boss. Late in the game, the player receives a "long jump module" for the HEV suit, which allows the player to increase the horizontal distance and speed of jumps by crouching before jumping. The player must rely on this ability to navigate various platformer-style jumping puzzles in Xen toward the end of the game.[4]

The player battles alone for the majority of the game, but is occasionally assisted by non-player characters; specifically security guards and scientists who help the player. The guards will fight alongside the player, and both guards and scientists can assist in reaching new areas and pass on relevant plot information. An array of alien enemies populate the game, including headcrabs, bullsquids, vortigaunts, and headcrab zombies. The player also faces human opponents in the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit (a fictional special forces unit of the United States Marine Corps), and Black Ops assassins.

Half-Life includes online multiplayer support for both individual and team-based deathmatch modes.[5] It was one of the first mainstream games to use the WASD keys as the default control scheme.[6]

At the underground Black Mesa Research Facility, physicist Gordon Freeman participates in an experiment on a crystal of unknown origin. This triggers an explosion which severely damages the facility, and inexplicably causes alien creatures to appear. Many scientists are killed.

Gordon survives thanks to his hazard suit. Venturing to the surface for help, he discovers that hostile Marines have been dispatched to cover up the incident. Escaping below ground, he destroys a giant tentacled creature inside a rocket engine test facility.

Freeman travels by underground rail to the Lambda Complex, where scientists can stop the alien invasion. Along the way, he launches a space satellite to aid the scientists, and explores an abandoned older section of Black Mesa.

He is eventually captured by Marines and left for dead in a garbage compactor. He escapes through a waste treatment facility, and stumbles into a lab filled with alien specimens, seemingly collected before the accident.

The Marines are overwhelmed and withdraw. Scaling cliffs, navigating a bombed-out military base, and traversing sewers, Gordon arrives at the Lambda Complex. Inside, he restarts a nuclear reactor and uses mysterious teleportation technology to reach the last survivors of the science team.

They reveal that humans have been teleporting surveyors to an alien "border world". However, a hostile psychic entity opened an enormous portal back to Earth, triggering the invasion. The scientists send Gordon to kill the creature.

On the alien world Xen, Freeman encounters the remains of researchers who ventured before him, and crystals like the one in the catastrophic experiment. He defeats the monstrous Gonarch, and explores a factory manufacturing alien soldiers.

Finally, Gordon kills the Nihilanth, the entity maintaining the rift. He is then disarmed and summoned by the powerful and mysterious Administrator, who offers work for his "employers". If Gordon accepts, he is placed into stasis to await his next assignment.

Half-Life in many ways was a reactionary response to the trivialization of the experience of the first-person genre. Many of us had fallen in love with video games because of the phenomenological possibilities of the field and felt like the industry was reducing the experiences to least common denominators rather than exploring those possibilities. Our hope was that building worlds and characters would be more compelling than building shooting galleries.

Valve, based in Kirkland, Washington, was founded in 1996 by the former Microsoft employees Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell.[8] For its first product, Valve settled on a concept for a horror first-person shooter (FPS) game.[9] They did not want to build their own game engine, as this would have created too much work for a small team and Newell planned to innovate in different areas.[9] Instead, Valve licensed the Quake engine and the Quake II engine from id Software and combined them with their own code.[10][9] Newell estimated that around 75% of the final engine code was by Valve.[10] As the project expanded, Valve cancelled development of a fantasy role-playing game, Prospero, and the Prospero team joined the Half-Life project.[11]

Valve struggled to find a publisher, as many believed the game was too ambitious for a first-time developer. Sierra On-Line signed Valve for a one-game deal as it was interested in making a 3D action game, especially one based on the Quake engine.[16] Valve first showed Half-Life in early 1997; it was a success at E3 that year, where Valve demonstrated the animation and artificial intelligence.[17] Novel features of the artificial intelligence included fear and pack behavior.[18]

Valve aimed for a November 1997 release to compete with Quake II.[19][20] By September 1997, the team found that while they had built some innovative aspects in weapons, enemies, and level design, the game was not fun and there was little design cohesion.[19] They postponed the release and reworked every level. They took a novel approach of assigning a small team to build a prototype level containing every element in the game and then spent a month iterating on the level.[19] When the rest of the team played the level, which the designer Ken Birdwell described as "Die Hard meets Evil Dead", they agreed to use it as a baseline.[19] The team developed three theories about what made the level fun. First, it had several interesting things happen in it, all triggered by the player rather than a timer so that the player would set the pace of the level. Second, the level responded to any player action, even for something as simple as adding graphic decals to wall textures to show a bullet impact. Finally, the level warned the player of imminent danger to allow them to avoid it, rather than killing the player with no warning.[19]

To move forward with this unified design, Valve sought a game designer but found no one suitable. Instead, Valve created the "cabal", initially a group of six individuals from across all departments that worked primarily for six months straight in six-hour meetings four days a week. The cabal was responsible for all elements of design, including level layouts, key events, enemy designs, narrative, and the introduction of gameplay elements relative to the story.[19] The collaboration proved successful, and once the cabal had come to decisions on types of gameplay elements that would be needed, mini-cabals from other departments most affected by the choice were formed to implement these elements. Membership in the main cabal rotated since the required commitment created burnout.[19]

The cabal produced a 200-page design document detailing nearly every aspect of the game. They also produced a 30-page document for the narrative, and hired the science fiction novelist Marc Laidlaw to help manage the script.[14][19] Laidlaw said his contribution was to add "old storytelling tricks" to the team's ambitious designs: "I was in awe of [the team]. It felt to me like I was just borrowing from old standards while they were the ones doing something truly new."[21] Rather than dictate narrative elements "from some kind of ivory tower of authorial inspiration", he worked with the team to improvise ideas, and was inspired by their experiments.[21] For example, he conceived the opening train ride after an engineer implemented train code for another concept.[21]

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