I don't think it's a mistake that we don't hear Gordon Freeman talk, and barely ever see his face. I think the burden is on the player to feel connected to HL2. It's more an exploration of a dystopian landscape, which wasn't as played out 15 years ago as it is now. You get NPCs with excellent-for-the-time voice acting and huge landscapes to explore. You get to insert yourself into the character of Gordon, it's kind of "2004's VR" in that way.

Exactly.

Now combine that with what the GP said about HL1, some A-tier object manipulation and the impressiveness of VR and you have a game that's a lot of fun to play even if you're just along for the ride (in terms of plot). Throw in a decent story arc, hook people with letting them actually make some tough decisions (earth is descending into a dystopia in the time it's set so plenty of opportunities to force the player to choose between a bunch of bad options and feel guilty about whatever they choose) and you have a highly immersive experience.

I don't mean to make it sound trivial, each one of those things is hard to do right and they all have to be done right but it should not be rocket science. Valve just needs a Decent(TM) game using their existing principals. The hard part is going to coping with the constraints of VR without neutering player freedom within the story or botching the VR part.

This was exactly my experience. The story they were telling in HL2 was extremely poorly suited to the technology they were trying to use to tell it. You can't tell a story about being an insurgency in a huge city or running from your life from a totalitarian state while never letting the character deviate more than 10 feet to either side along a fixed path. It just doesn't work, and it never felt like more than a game. I often felt like I was playing a rail shooter like the old light-gun games at an arcade that moved the character for you.

It's weird, isn't it? It's not like I think the game was total trash, its got high points, but its always baffled me that Metacritic has had it for more than a decade as the highest rated PC game of all time. Was everyone drunk? Paid off?

https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/...

I doubt that was the case. Looking at HL2 now, with all those other FPS games that built up upon what HL2 introduced, of course it doesn't look that impressive. But at the time, it felt like it came from the future. The whole physics gameplay aspect was pretty much unprecedented at that time, especially with how seamless and integral it felt. It didn't feel forced or bolted-on at all.

A good analogy in other media would be Citizen Kane (movies), NWA (music), or Akira (japanese animation). Neither of those would garner mass praise if they were released today, but they were first of a kind and paved the way for moving their respective medium forward.

The story in HL2 is a mess. You go from city controlled by invaders to zombie town to "They" town to nonsense alien citadel. They all have absolutely nothing to do with each other, they're just glued together because some designers/artists thought it would be cool to have them. Players fill in the rest with their own imagination, not by any smart writing or design by Valve.

I would argue that HL2 was just “Gary’s Mod the Single-Player Campaign”—probably with Valve first thinking more along the lines of something that would look like Gary’s Mod itself if they had delivered it in that state; and then losing confidence, thinking that a pure sandbox title couldn’t possibly be something people would pay for (those really weren’t a thing back then, until GMod itself showed the demand!) So they backed off and built a single-player campaign instead.

But I think their goal with HL2 wasn’t really to deliver a compelling narrative, any more than the point of a modern Mario title is to give a compelling narrative. It’s a sandbox with a goal condition. (Sort of like Scribblenauts, now that I think of it.)