What's next after Half-Life?
What's next after Half-Life?
I have just finished the Half-Life series. Prompted by the 20th anniversary of HL2, I decided to play HL1 (1997), then HL2 (2004), and both episodes. I'm currently playing through Black Mesa and it's very enjoyable so far, it's like they took everything from HL1 and removed the annoying parts, I'm excited to see what more changes they decided to make, and what other references are present.
HL1 aged badly imo, but I recognize the technical achievement that it was at the time it was released. It's full of good ideas, and I'm amazed by what they've accomplished.
HL2 didn't feel like a it has a technical leap as big as its predecessor, but the gameplay ideas in there feel more modern than most game 20 years later. The game has some long stretches that were a bit annoying but the whole journey felt worth it. During the last chapter where you get the upgraded gravity gun, I started seeing the seeds of Portal games, more so in Episode 1, it was like I suddenly understood Valve as game devs and their philosophy. Episode 2 was the most fun I had and despite being short it felt like a full fledged campaign.
Alyx was fun to watch on youtube 🤡
I'm really happy that I completed the games and can put them down (compared to grinding endlessly in live service games), I'm really glad that I now understand why the series is praised, why people are aching for the third Episode, why Valve backed themselves into a corner because of their technical ambitions.
But now, I want more of this, more of those one of a kind experiences that push the genre forward. More gameplay ideas. I'll probably replay the Portal games, but what other games would you recommend?
Some times, Half Life reminded me of more modern immersive sims I played before (Dishonored, Prey, I'll probably go back to them at some point), maybe Deux Ex, System Shock should be on my list?
HL2 didn't feel like a it has a technical leap as big as its predecessor
Gotta disagree with you on this one. Half Life was basically the Quake 2 engine with different textures and models. It was applauded for being a good game, it did not really set any technical benchmarks.
Half Life 2 was absolutely mind blowing with the physics, facial animations, and shaders. It's the first game I can recall with that level of physics realism, and set the stage for many games to come. The Source engine was a massive technical leap from Quake engine.
Seeing the HL2 E3 demo was a peak moment in my gaming life.
Give the Deus Ex series a try, the story in the original is IMO one of the best, and the later games have awesome stealth and cool world building.
41Deus Ex and System Shock should definitely be on your list, just skip Deus Ex: Invisible War.
Also, as I don't see them listed, did you check out Blue Shift and Opposing Forces? They're 2 Half-Life expansions made by Gearbox, back in the day, that show the events of HL1 from different points of view.
29Invisible War is fine. It doesn’t live up to the orginal but it’s still a good game.
9Hey I liked invisible war :/
6Thanks! I knew of their existence but didn't know if they were worth it, I think I'll play them a bit later because at some point I was really struggling with the pacing of HL1
5The System Shock remake was amazing, definitely give it a shot!
5there is an ongoing project to remake them for black mesa, so if you wait you'll probably get a better experience.
5Opposing Forces is the better of the two, but if you enjoyed the general story/feel of Half-Life, they're definitely worth at least giving a shot.
3I've noticed that no one has mentioned Decay yet. It's a two player coop expansion campaign also made by Gearbox for the Half Life 1 release for PS2. There's a PC port with a singleplayer mode.
2Like others keep saying, check out the System Shock remake. It's fantastic.
But also with Black Mesa, another team is remaking Blue Shift within that game, and you can get it as a workshop addon for free. They actually just came out with the next level they've been working on a couple weeks ago. So far, it's pretty damn great imo.
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Half Life 3 should be out any day now.
26It is already out as far as I'm concerned.
4Anyyy day now anyyy day now
See Half 3!
No wait that’s half life alyx
3Project Borealis is a fan led spiritual successor. Unfortunately it's been a slow moving thing for a while. Suppose if this is about patient gaming, might as well be patient about it in case it ever comes out.
2"Half-Life 3 is already out, it's just we're not ready for it yet"
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Portal 1 and 2
16Along that same line, there are great mods for Portal. One of them even adds in a new "time" portal that really breaks your brain.
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Oh sweet, I have something either not suggested or I missed...
titanfall 2's campaigned challenged me like the first half-life and moved me like the second half-life. and it's often like 4 usd. the bad is that it's a short campaign but the good is the campaign and its replayablitity. i hear they fixed multiplayer but i can't play with those gods.
14Effect and Cause is one of the best levels in any videogame, period.
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- Mirror’s Edge: wholly unique, meh story but fun gameplay. More accessible than Kreedzmod but similar vibe of first person platforming and emphasis on ‘flow’ like you’d perform irl in parkour. Get it on sale, under $10/€10 it’s worth it
- Knights of the Old Republic: D20 based RPG set in pre-BBY Star Wars universe. Excellent story and characterization, great gameplay and progression - I’ve replayed it at least six times. If you like Mass Effect at all you should enjoy this. The sequel is worthy but not the same gem that moved the genre, but a worthy title
- Deus Ex 1: Unmissable. Accept the inventory management jank, it’s a product of its time. Absolutely worth buying
- Fallout 1 (and 2): Revolutionized the top down RPGs of the time, but will feel dated in retrospect. Make sure you save manually and make choices carefully, you can dead-end your play through or loose hours of progress because there’s no auto save
- STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl: Diceroll on this title, you’ll either hate it or love it if you enjoyed Fallout 3, 4, NV, etc. Great mood and atmosphere, solid progression once you get out of the starter areas, and understand the monster’s behavior. Dont you dare join Duty tho
- Freespace 2: Personal recommendation but nieche. “Flight sim space combat” is too simplistic yet accurate, but has excellent gameplay and story tone. Technically Descent 1 & 2 were the revolutionary games, but those have zero plot beyond arcade shooter ‘kill aliens for highscore’. Went open source years ago, and has a dedicated mod team keeping it alive and adding features.
- Command and Conquer Red Alert: The daddy of almost all RTS games, but you’ll have more fun with Red Alert 2 imo. Story is meh, but if you go online be ready to get smurfed hard by veterans.
12As for the last, OpenRA is good too if you played RA(2)
3Knights of the Old Republic: D20 based RPG set in pre-BBY Star Wars universe. Excellent story and characterization, great gameplay and progression - I’ve replayed it at least six times. If you like Mass Effect at all you should enjoy this. The sequel is worthy but not the same gem that moved the genre, but a worthy title
The sequel has Sara Kestelman as Kreia, that alone makes it worth playing IMHO.
2Very much free space 2 here. 99 was a fine year for games.
2And they abandoned the IP to focus on Saints Row 😥
FS2 was the first game that really ‘caught’ my attention. Other game were fun sure and had bigger budgets or larger market appeal, but FS maintained that narrative tone of a existential struggle to survive in a cold and uncaring universe, humanity ignorantly plodding the galaxy and awakening xenophobic forces beyond our comprehension.
FS1 is also excellent, but it’s a rare event when the sequel is hands down the better game in almost all aspects, while respecting the source material and keeping the story moving while being faithful to that original tone
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Excellent listw thank you for the links!!
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I'm really happy that I completed the games and can put them down
Good luck. I've played them countless times and they are installed permanently on my drive. 🙂
11Hahaha well I have all of HL2's achievements to complete
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Maybe the Metro or BioShock series? They play quite a bit differently, but they scratch the same itch for me, and I see them on sale quite a bit (especially Metro).
9Oh yeah I forgot to mention them, I absolutely love the metro series, I actually read metro 2033 before discovering there was a game about it haha, never played the Redux versions though, thanks for the idea !!
6The redux version of the first game actually looks worse in my opinion. The textures may be better in spots but the art design suffers because of it. Unfortunately you cannot buy the original anymore. I don't remember exactly but I think (fact check me here) that the redux version of last light was much similar and not as large of a change.
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Alyx was really fun. The first time a soldier reacted to my reaching out and touching them with my controller scared the bejeezus out of me!
9More action and environmental storytelling:
- If you want to play more Portal, try community-made campaigns! I recommend in particular Portal: Revolution, a prequel to Portal 2 that features a few new mechanics, and Portal Stories: Mel, which has basically no new mechanics but turns up the difficulty by making you combine mechanics in clever ways.
- Bastion — Action RPG with a rich story and lush art. A humble narrator tells the story of a place literally torn apart by war, and you play the kid trying to rebuild. This was the debut game from Supergiant Games, which later made Hades.
- Tunic — Mysterious, exploration-focused adventure. A little guy in a green tunic picks up a sword and goes on an adventure, but the game is in an unknown language and you only have a few pages of the manual. It’s like a metroidvania but your progress is based on knowledge.
More "genre pushers":
- Puzzle games
- Mosa Lina — It calls itself "a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim". It's an aggressively random puzzle platformer where the levels are random and the tools you have to solve them are also random. Mosa Lina is a puzzle game that wants you to be clever, not smart.
- Viewfinder — First-person "photography" puzzles. The featured mechanic has a "wow" factor that rivals Portal's: Take a picture of the level, then hold up the photo and click to copy the photo back into the level. The plot is pretty meh, but like the original Portal, it's pretty damn short.
- Baba is You — Push blocks and break rules. Blocks with words written on them define the rules of the game: Baba is you, wall is stop, flag is win. The rules themselves are puzzle pieces. If you can't solve the puzzle, change the rules!
- Inscryption — You find an old, abandoned video game and load it up. It’s an atmospheric, spooky card game, hiding layers of secrets for you to discover. The less you know before starting the game, the better your experience will be. You want one-of-a-kind experiences? This is one of them.
- The Stanley Parable — Comedy walking simulator. You enter a room with two doors in front of you. The narrator says, "Stanley entered the door on his left." What will you do? The Stanley Parable has many endings and it questions what video game narratives are really for.
8Puzzle Games:
The Talos Principal 1 & 2
6100% yes on Talos principle, and I will openly simp for Antichamber. I have never had my brain so full of fuck as that game, simply sublime progression and variety of puzzles👌
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I went into Inscryption blind and had an absolute blast once I got the hang of it. What an awesome little game.
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I would suggest Bioshock 1 and 2.
Bioshock: Infinite is verry meh, and hops that it's meh gameplay will be overlooked due to it's story, but to me the story was just annoyingly confusing.
7Should have played Black Mesa instead of HL. It's everything HL is but better. It was incredible even having played HL back in 1998. I recommend people who've never played HL to just do BM.
As a lifelong Half-Life fan, I really liked some of Frictional Games' titles. I liked Penumbra a lot and I think Soma was an absolute masterpiece. It's at a level similar to Half-Life for me. If you don't know anything about it, don't read, don't watch. Install and play.
7OP wrote he is playing both. I agree if you want to play the story once, Black Mesa is better, but if OP wants to play both, then nothing wrong with that.
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FYI, there's an No-VR mod for Alyx in case you want to play it, and lack of a headset is what's stopping you.
6Quarter-Life.
5It wasn't mentioned yet: Abiotic Factor is essentially Half-Life 1 but with coop.
If you have a friend or two interested in the same type of game I can only recommend it.
5If you found HL1 dated, there's a good remake in source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/
Even as a purist (HL1 is my favorite FPS period), I love how Black Mesa handles the source material. It's on sale for $5 right now too. Besides Valve's other games, check out F.E.A.R (2005), Doom series and the Bungie Halo games.
5I've been getting into boomer shooters and some more "retro" styled games.
Selaco and Hedon: Bloodrite are imo more immersive sim than boomer shooters, but they can still fit that description as well.
4Golden eye 007 for the N64 was pretty revolutionary. As was perfect dark and perfect dark 0, if you don't mind going back to half-life 1 times those are worth a playthrough.
3Perfect dark was my JAM back in the day.
I still have my original cartridge, but unfortunately my n64 is either in a box in someone's basement, or a landfill, as the friend I let borrow it (and my star wars games) left it at a friend's house and the friend moved states.
PD was the first video game my sister and I played together. We never managed to finish it when we were young.
3I relatively recently tried to replay Goldeneye. It was shocking—controller and FPS mechanics have evolved so much since then it was honestly not fun to play. While it was breakthrough tech at the time it just did not age well.
So many hours of fun into that game though; I’ll never not hold a special place in my heart for it even if it’s unplayable nostalgia now.
FPS keyboard+mouse shooters of that era have aged much better. I can still play Marathon (+2 + Infinity) (Bungie’s precursors to Halo) and have an enjoyable gaming session.
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The new System Shock remake is very cool and quite underappreciated. The original is far more dated than HL1, IMO. System Shock 2 is playable, though. You could also give the Thief games a whirl, if you played Dishonored. I think along that trajectory you could also go revisit the Hitman games. Hitman 1 and Thief are two takes on the same idea that were happening more or less at the same time. I was more of a Hitman guy at the time, and I think that first game, clunky as it is to control, was mind-blowing.
Are you looking for FPSs specifically? Blizzard is threatening to delist Warcraft 1 and 2 from GOG, so it's a great time to revisit those. 2 holds up.
If you're only looking into FPSs, I'd revisit Quake 2. It's the missing link between HL1 and the arcadey Doom-style early FPSs, and if you have the hardware, the path-traced remake looks really nice.
A few hot takes here: 1) I know I'm in the minority, but I love HL1 and could never get through HL2. The vehicle levels suck, as do the more open areas. The more contained original with its interconnected "Aliens meets Die Hard" setup was so groundbreaking, HL2 is meandering and slow by comparison.
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I know what you mean about the gravity gun, but also, the Portal devs weren't there for that, but also the puzzle design in Portal is more Valve-y than the stuff in the original Narbacular Drop. I don't know where that lands in reality.
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I hate the name "immersive sim". What is being "simmed"? Why is it immerisve? Isn't Halo immersive? I was immersed AF. And it's simming at least as much stuff as Dishonored, I assure you. It's such a dumb name, just words mashed together. Ditto for "character action game". Unless your action game features exclusively rocks, it's "character action", that means nothing.
2I hate the name “immersive sim”. What is being “simmed”? Why is it immerisve? Isn’t Halo immersive? I was immersed AF. And it’s simming at least as much stuff as Dishonored, I assure you. It’s such a dumb name, just words mashed together. Ditto for “character action game”. Unless your action game features exclusively rocks, it’s “character action”, that means nothing.
Genre names also annoy me. But there's no authority to define a taxonomy of gameplay styles, so the vocabulary is built informally. I likewise dislike MOBA, metroidvania, roguelike, and soulslike. In the end, we just need the right sequences of letters to accurately represent the gameplay.
In the case of immersive sim, I believe it came from Warren Spector trying to portray how Deus Ex was different from pure action, RPG, and stealth games.
1Of those I only object to MOBA, which is another generic word salad thing. The rest at least tell you what games the game in question is like.
I never accepted "roguelite", though. It's good wordplay, but the pedantry underlying the term rubs me the wrong way.
I'm aware of the history, too, but the thing is, it doesn't even make sense anymore. The term originates at a time where a game does one thing, or maybe one thing per level. Every game now does the things "immersive sims" are supposed to do. Immersive sims are just ARPGs that happen to model themselves mechanicaly or thematically after Deus Ex or Thief. By the numbers Deus Ex has more in common with Mass Effect than Dishonored, by far.
2Roguelike/lite especially feels overused and saturated nowadays it's annoying
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The team for black mesa is working on Black Mesa Blue Shift, where you play out half life 1 through the eyes of Barney! I have been meaning to go through the latest chapter that was released. It is on the steam workshop for black mesa.
2Deus Ex and both System Shocks should be on everyone's lists. I don't really "like" any first-person games (going back to Akalabeth), and I enjoyed both of those games. If you like that style of game, you might also want to try out Thief: The Dark Project.
But I think what comes after HL, given everything, is just Portal. You said "replay" about them, so I guess you already have. So maybe, Narbacular Drop would be the next best thing - it's the game that the Portal devs made before it was Portal. Maybe you'd want to look at The Stanley Parable, too.
There's also Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior that's more FPS-y. I don't think you must know anything about 40K to play it, but I couldn't tell you, because I already was into it when I played. Also, the two Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force games, built on expanded versions of the Quake 3 engine.
2Deus ex and system shock 2 should definitely be on a retro shooter/rpg list. Shock 1, you'd probably be better off playing night dives shock remake from last year.. or perhaps a modified remaster of the OG. The controls from shock1 are outright painful
2Half-Life and Half-Life 2 have plenty of really good mods if you are interested in those, Black Mesa started as just a mod as well.
Some of my favourites for HL2:
- Entropy: Zero Two (on the same level of quality as Black mesa and its free on Steam)
- Nightmare House 2 (now named Nightmare House: The Original mod)
- Half Life 2: MMod
Some of my favourites for HL1:
- Half Life: Field Intensity
- Half Life: Delta Particles
- Half Life: MMod
There are many more that I haven't mentioned / played myself.
1For historical perspective developed in parallel with Half-Life 2, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is worth a look. With Call of Duty being the revenue juggernaut it is now, I think we sometimes forget how it started. Allied Assault is a landmark game that's an ancestor in CoD's lineage.
On the other end of the timeline, the founders of the studio that developed the original Call of Duty went on to make Titanfall. Titanfall 2 has an excellent single-player campaign that holds up very well.
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