Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release

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HL2 is peak first person shooter. More recent games have added a lot, but after playing through HL2 recent, it's really nice to strip all that extra stuff away.
- I can see why people didn't like some parts (boat, car) but they're so iconic to me.
  Except episode 2 (1?) car shit with the buckeyballs. Fuck that.
  
  I disagree, I cannot see why people dislike those parts—the tension is fantastic in both

Half Life 2 still holds up really well, honestly better than a ton of modern first person shooters. The only places it's lacking from a non-technical aspect is enemy variety. If valve did a remake just updating the graphics and gun play that would be my only knock on it and that says a lot for a 20 year old game.
- The physics puzzles, whole still functioning fine, feel extremely goofy today. It's easy to forget how revolutionary they were. I'm not saying the game shouldn't have them or anything, but some are just so silly lol.
- On enemy variety, I see the critique of games like Zelda: BOTW and even realistic games like Hitman. Something those games have in common is very well-made enemy AI that presents you many ways to defeat them.

I mean the game was given for free and just received an update. It's also a really good game as well

The way in which Half-Life maintained a continuous viewpoint over long stretches of gameplay and landscape was always so immersive to me. Games like God of War and Dead Space did something similar, but Valve had an additional challenge.
They almost never take player control, instead relying on mere hints of where to look; they even have the character sequences scripted for wherever the player was standing. That all usually took a lot of their effort.
I could be biased because I even enjoyed toying with their choreography tool, which let you layer simple gestures together; so without making a new animation, you could have someone both lean forward and nod right, and point their thumb right.
- You're not biased. You're completely correct.

FYI, that's roughly 50x the normal average over the past 3 months. And also the highest ever concurrent users was 4 hours ago. Not bad.

they should make another one of these
- Hey that's a good idea, lemme just email gaben
  
  It will be a Duke Nukem forever situation at this point. It will never live up and it'll flop

Nostalgia's a helluva drug. I've done my best to try to avoid it, but we all like that hit from time to time.
- Played Half Life 2 for the first time in my life at 25, 10/10 perfect game.
- Avoid nostalgia?
  
  Yes, ignore false history.

The workshop is a complete mess right now. There are multiple copies of every mod because people just rushed to get them on there.
It'll be funny when everyones game breaks after the dust settles.

Is half-life cyberpunk?
- As a genre? I would say no. Cyberpunk is usually described as a capitalist dystopia in which a handful of companies supersede government powers and wage wars against each other beyond the concepts of national borders. In addition, cybernetic enhancements become commonplace, as a way for companies to extract more value from their workers. Cyberpunk stories usually are about groups rebelling against the system through organized crime, who ultimately fail to escape the underlying system of capitalism, doomed to repeat history time and time again.
  HL2 falls in none of the genre stereotypes. While it is dystopian, it's not capitalist, so it's not "punk" and it isn't "cyber" either because of a lack of commonplace cybernetics.
- Not really.

76 comments