On the Subject of Half-Life

Shay Laren

I've managed to steer clear of annoying fuckwits on game forums for a day or two*, and instead used that time to play Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Being episodic (or, "short") it was over in a single sitting. It was quite good, nothing revolutionary though and really just the same old trivial puzzles and shooting at the same old enemies (with the exception of the token "new enemy"). I was under the impression it was supposed to be the best episode yet, but there was nothing really out of the ordinary.
It was yet another outing for the notoriously mute hero Gordon Freeman, and having just finished The Witcher (and then immediately starting it again) I was reminded just how odd it is to have a character-less character in the lead role. I know it's allegedly intentional, but personally I'm not a fan of that sort of hands-off approach to character design where the player is supposed to fill in the blanks.
The problem is, Gordon Freeman isn't an "everyman" character. The whole point of Half-Life was that he was a physicist, albeit an average one, who took part in an ultimately disastrous experiment and spent the rest of the game escaping from the Black Mesa facility. He's not a trained CIA assassin, or a rock musician, or a sculptor. There's not really much room for interpretation, and to suggest that his anonymity is somehow a clever, post-modern design concept is naive.
Freeman's (lack of) character is not the only aspect of Half-Life which is designed to be willfully minimalist but ultimately ends up falling flat. In Half-Life 2 the back story to the player's current predicament, essentially the story of what has happened since the events of the first game, is left purposely obscure. The idea appears to be that you pick up bits and pieces as you progress through the game. In practice, whether intentionally or as a result of poor design, you end up at the conclusion of the game with barely any more idea what has happened than you had at the start.
Valve's attitude seems to be that this obscuration is entirely intentional and the gaming media seem to have accepted it, treating it like some sort of masterpiece of game design. At a push I can accept that it's intentional, but I disagree that it's successful, or even appropriate to the game.
A similar example of character design which seems to be at odds with the direction of the game is evident in System Shock 2. Despite being an excellent game, I always thought it was odd that the player had three careers to choose from. Odd, because the whole story of the game revolves around you being a "hacker". It's even mentioned in the first line of the opening monologue of the game. I appreciate the desire to allow the player to be able to customise their character, but the career structure ended up feeling awkward in context. On the other hand while SS2 shared HL's mute, generic main character, it worked out better in SS2 since the player rarely encounters any dialogue with other characters. In HL2, and even more so in the subsequent episodes, the likes of Alex and her dad are forever jibber-jabbering at Gordon, while he just stands there like some sort of retard.
I can see what they were trying to do, I just don't think it works very well. There have been some great first-person shooters with strong lead characters (Duke Nukem, Serious Sam) so it's not that FPS's must have an anonymous leads in the style of Quake or Doom.
To me, letting the player do the work of designing the character just seems like a cop-out. It's true that reading a book allows you to imagine the details, and that good horror movies often work best when the scary stuff is mostly left to the imagination. It's also true that there are some instances where it's preferable to allow the player to design their character. For example in MMOs, where thousands, even millions of people are essentially playing the same character in the story so there needs to be some room for differentiation. Especially on old-school "role-play" servers where people rejoice in creating their own personal role within the game world. As soon as you put the player within a well- (or in Half-Life 2's case, not so well-)defined narrative, there's necessarily less room for improvisation without undermining the story you're trying to tell.
And I haven't even touched on the whole subject of the G-Man. Half-Life 2, like those piss-poor Matrix sequels, suffers from the franchise not originally having been designed to have sequels, and from designers who don't seem to be capable of expanding the first game in a compelling way. So instead they barely bother to write any story at all, and then pretend that that's what they intended all along. But that aside, what the fuck is the G-Man about? Don't imagine that "all will become clear" because I guarantee they'll never come up with a satisfying conclusion. Why does this suit, who seems to be capable of manipulating time and space at will, need some guy to go crawling around in air ducts and shoot zombies? Valve seem intent on painting themselves into a corner with this nonsensical bullshit, under the pretense of it being clever and abstract. It's not clever, it's shit.
Still, it was an enjoyable enough episode. It did make me wonder how much longer they'll keep flogging Half-Life 2 before leaving it die with some dignity. Two episodes down and neither have added anything fundamentally new and to be honest it's starting to feel a bit tired. That's actually the downside to episodic content; just when you reach some sort of conclusion within the story along comes another episode and the goal posts are moved just that little bit further. If Valve don't come up with some serious fireworks to wrap up this game (and they won't), it'll be a big disappointment. They will, of course, claim it was intentional.

* Mostly because I have a strict rule that when I'm wound up enough to actually post a reply in a thread, I won't return to it because I really don't care what self-important, ignorant bullshit the dumb fucks have responded with.