Newb Looking for a shooter

[TinCow]

Hehe, from the amount of Thief related answers here maybe I should turn the question back, and ask when you played it? At the time few people played it. It was only years later that Thief started to get much notice.

Played it on release and loved it, though I don't consider it in the same category as most other shooters. It was the prototype (and still one of the best versions) of what we now call stealth shooters, which is really a separate thing. One should not compare Thief with Painkiller and such, the games have different purposes and should be judged based on what they are, not what they are not. For instance, if we judged Thief based on combat, it would be near the bottom of the list. (You will also note I did list Thief in my short list of revolutionary FPS games.)

I think our opinions differ so much on this that there's probably not any middle-ground to be found, but I'll try and explain my own views a bit more. I think of HL1 like I think of Citizen Kane: it is not the best ever made, but it is the first true representation of what we now know as FPS gaming (or modern narrative film in the case of CK). Sure, other games did bits and pieces of the various things that HL1 did before Hl1, but HL1 combined them all with other innovations on top. Other games have certainly topped it since then, but they all use the formula that HL1 first pioneered. It is, like Citizen Kane, the first true representation of the modern form of the art.

Prior to HL1, FPS games were essentially solitary levels with weapons and power-ups designed to cater to reflexes and little else. HL1 combined excellent level design (for the time) with full voice acting, a stupendous number of scripted events (if you've forgotten them, pretty much every time a monster of some kind busted through a ceiling, wall, etc., that was scripted), cutting-edge graphics, seamless (for the time!) gameplay, and more puzzles in single levels than in many complete games. Prior to HL1, most FPS games paid lip-service to plot or dished out the plot in cutscenese between levels. HL1 did it during the game, with no cutscenes of any kind. While the plot may be tame by modern standards, it was a massive leap forward from the games which came before it. Keep in mind, before HL1, the games we got were stuff like Doom, Quake 1, Descent, and Dark Forces. Plot was totally ancillary to all of those and was simply done as an excuse to shoot things. HL1 told a lengthy story throughout the entire game and rewarded patience and attentiveness with plot details and surprises. You simply did not find that in FPS game before 1998. If you're poo-pooing the plot, I really do think you didn't have the previous experience with FPS games to understand what a shift it was. At the time it was released, HL1 was considered a story-based game first and a shooter second. Considering the absurdly minimal amount of storyline in HL1 based on modern standards, that's a commentary in itself about just how non-existent plot line was in shooters prior to 1998.



I don't know what else to say. Thief worship is fine, it's been the love-child of FPS historians since the day of its release (a few weeks after HL1, incidentally), but I really do believe that HL1 has had more impact on FPS gaming as a whole than anything other than Wolf3D. It was a seminal game and it changed the whole notion of what was possible with the genre. Much of what has come since then was based on doors that were opened in the minds of developers by that game.