which was the better fps sequel? halo 2 or doom eternal

[Codename_Delta]

halo 2 was mid imo, not bad, but I much prefer CE, so I'd pick DE

[OliveTree]

if you ignore the DLC, halo 2's ending still manages to be more satisfying than the 2 second cutscene at the end of Eternal

[HeatedChocolate]

On 1/11/2023 at 12:25 PM, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

I think Ravenholm is the most memorable part of the game

Hate me for it, but I really like the coast chapters, something about depressingly cold shorelines really slaps at the nostalgia zone in my brain, probably because of the whole northeast US thing. Yeah the dune buggy kinda sucks, yeah, antlions are annoying, but I just can't bring myself to hate something that hits all the marks it does.

Still hate the parkour section though.

[Rudolph]

37 minutes ago, HeatedChocolate said:

Still hate the parkour section though.

The "parkour section"? What are you referring to specifically?

[TheFocus]

Halo 2 is so fucking boring.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

He's referring to the part where you have to do several wall runs while using bullet time to shoot all of the enemies before the room fills with lava. I'll admit it's pretty hard. If you increase your agility and switch to first person it's a lot easier, especially if you bought the broadsword in chapter 7.

[HeatedChocolate]

2 hours ago, Rudolph said:

The "parkour section"? What are you referring to specifically?

It's been kind of a while but I'm talking about the part after you lose the buggy and before you fight the big antlion. (I think poor Lazlo, the finest mind of his generation came to such an end somewhere just before it)

[Rudolph]

32 minutes ago, HeatedChocolate said:

It's been kind of a while but I'm talking about the part after you lose the buggy and before you fight the big antlion. (I think poor Lazlo, the finest mind of his generation came to such an end somewhere just before it)

Oh, the Sandtraps chapter! I like it fine (except for the tedious crane puzzle), as it forces the player to be creative in their use of the physics engine, but yeah, Antlions are not a particularly interesting enemy to fight and also they kind of come out of nowhere. I would have much preferred it if Valve had brought back classic enemies like the Bullsquid and the Houndeye instead.

 

But I do not know about you, but when I hear "parkour", I think of Mirror's Edge. :P

Edited January 13, 2023 by Rudolph

[nathanB404]

On 1/10/2023 at 2:17 PM, MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai said:

Boring sequel. There I said it

oh no you didnt. half-life 2 is the greatest fps game and greatest video game of all time!!! 

[nathanB404]

On 1/11/2023 at 2:10 PM, OliveTree said:

if you ignore the DLC, halo 2's ending still manages to be more satisfying than the 2 second cutscene at the end of Eternal

idk man. when doom guy said "No" i was stoked 

[nathanB404]

On 1/11/2023 at 11:57 AM, Codename_Delta said:

halo 2 was mid imo, not bad, but I much prefer CE, so I'd pick DE

the art style and aesthetics of halo ce look different than halo 2. idk if its just me

[TheSlipgateStudios]

Halo 2 sucks donkey dick, Eternal haven't played yet. So there, an honest answer.

Edited January 14, 2023 by TheSlipgateStudios

[arsac]

[Rudolph]

What does poor Willem Dafoe have to do with anything? :P

Edited January 14, 2023 by Rudolph

[pilottobombadier]

I have beaten Halo 2.  I have not beaten Doom Eternal yet, and every time I go back and reinstall to try again, I go "fuck it" and erase it.  I really want to like the game.  I mean, I actually really like the platforming, and I like the combat when it's not janky*.  What I do not like is the repeated arenas.  OG Doom was a lot more free in movement than that .  Someone once compared this to I think it was DMC and Street Fighter, I would compare it to a bastard child of Serious Sam and Unreal Tournament 2003, with some added lore that tickles overly-enthusiastic fanboys' jimmies.  

I mean, the DBZ lore, if you will, does not appeal to me.  I don't care how powerful the character appears to be, I care how powerful they are.  This game makes me feel like a fucking punching bag on normal difficulty.

So, as much as I despised Halo 2 due to its bait-and-switch advertising/ending/design process, at least I've finished it.  Halo 2 wins.

[nathanB404]

20 hours ago, Z50 said:

halo. mountain dew Doritos. awesome product placement. i love gaming

[nathanB404]

21 hours ago, TheSlipgateStudios said:

Halo 2 sucks donkey dick, Eternal haven't played yet. So there, an honest answer.

what was so bad about halo 2? for its time. the multiplayer was crazy back in 2004. shit had to be too good to be true. 

[nathanB404]

19 hours ago, Rudolph said:

What does poor Willem Dafoe have to do with anything? :P

he is advertising the greatest halo game

[Rudolph]

Okay, never mind. This thread made me feel like replaying Half-Life 1 and now I see that even it had some annoyingly-placed loading screens.

[BGreener]

Yeah they both have load screens. I replayed both last quarter, HL2 is much more about having you hang around NPCs talking to you before allowing you to progress.

[LexiMax]

I agree, Half Life 2 was mid.

 

What I really enjoyed about Half Life was the fact that the player character wasn't talked about as the second coming of christ.  He was just a random scientist who happened to be wearing an HEV suit when shit went sideways and also just so happened to have a front row seat to the catastrophe that caused the invasion in the first place.  Once you got to the surface and realized that getting out of Black Mesa wasn't really an option, the entire rest of the story is a series of leads given to you by survivors, prophylactic measures that might help, or it might not.

 

I also appreciated how utilitarian a good chunk of Half-Life's arsenal was.  HL2 removed laser tripmines, satchel charges, snarks, and the beegun, and I missed all of them since those opened up tactical possibilities and creative ways of solving the combat puzzles.  Combined with the rest of the arsenal, the first game often had situations where I realize "Oh, I'm out of ammo for the weapon I want, but I have these other odds and ends, how can I make this work?"  HL2 did add the Gravity Gun, which I liked, but most of the rest of the arsenal additions were very context-sensitive - the boat for the boat sections, the car for the car sections, and a gimmicky ant-lion thing that was useless past the section it was intended for.

 

I also preferred the environments of the first game.  HL1 took place in a modern science facility that happened to be located in the middle of a bunch of decommissioned ICBM silos, and there was a lot more variety to it.  HL2 looked prettier, but the entire aesthetic had this decayed look to it that I got tired of seeing halfway through the game, let alone the incredibly extended lifetime of custom content based on its assets.

 

But the biggest problem is still the story, HL1 felt like being trapped in a B-movie where your survival isn't guaranteed.  HL2 felt like I was being led along by the nose into being the savior of mankind and it really didn't work for me.

Edited January 15, 2023 by AlexMax

[Rudolph]

@AlexMax Also, the Episodes were a mistake, plain and simple. I would not say they are bad per se, but they ultimately do not amount to much, all things considered: no new weapons (no, the Strider Buster does not count), few new enemies, mostly rehashed set pieces and plenty of unaddressed loose ends. Third-party expansions, like Opposing Force 2 and that cancelled Ravenholm spin-off, would have been a wise approach.

Edited January 15, 2023 by Rudolph

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

The Episodes had better gameplay imo, but the whole episodic format thing was fucking dumb, and I agree with Rudolph Lundgren's assessment that they were an underwhelming mistake. It felt like they were stringing out a plot that was never that interesting to begin with.

[Mr. Freeze]

Valve's mistake was making the Combine this infinitely powerful multidimensional species instead of simply a hostile invading force. After you take out the Citadel...what's next? The Citadel is a single command structure out of presumably untold trillions and Breen was a leader of an unimportant backwater planet. The scale of dealing with such an over the top threat is that when it comes time to escalate or resolve the plot nothing you write is going to meet expectations. See also Mass Effect 3. 

[WSADKO]

doomy ternal is an arcade fps

halo 2 is more of a tactical shooter

different things, can't compare

[Edward850]

On 1/10/2023 at 12:24 PM, AlexMax said:

On the other hand, Halo 2's campaign was a let-down for me.  It gets off to a very strong start, but the moment you take control of the Arbiter the story's pacing gets bogged down and never really recovers.  Once it became obvious that there were too many loose ends for there not to be a Halo 3, Tartarus activating Delta Halo stopped being a credible threat, and the fight against him feels almost perfunctory. 

If anyone is let-down by Halo 2, it'd be Bungie themselves. The engine the originally wrote for Halo 2 they discovered much too late wasn't going to work on the Xbox for everything they had planned, which cut off a lot of the dev time they would have had to finish the game. As a result, the campaign is actually missing the last third, which is why Halo 2 finished so abruptly the way it did. The original plan was actually going to have it finish with ultimately what became Halo 3 (though the story did change a smidge to account for the division and the more Halo 3 needed to be a complete game). So yes, Halo 2 was originally meant to be the end.

 

Halo 2 and 3 are basically the Sonic 3 & Knuckles of FPSs. It's ideal to play them back to back.

 

4 hours ago, WSADKO said:

halo 2 is more of a tactical shooter

If you haven't played Halo 2, just say so. Don't make stuff up.

 

[nathanB404]

21 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

 

 

If you haven't played Halo 2, just say so. Don't make stuff up.

 

No, No. He's Got a Point☝️

[LexiMax]

7 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

The Episodes had better gameplay imo, but the whole episodic format thing was fucking dumb, and I agree with Rudolph Lundgren's assessment that they were an underwhelming mistake. It felt like they were stringing out a plot that was never that interesting to begin with.

 

I disagree, as I think the Episodes actually rectified some of the storytelling issues of the original HL2.  Even though most of the cast still treated you like The One Free Man, it's all overshadowed by the fact that your "victory" at the end of HL2 didn't deus ex machina the Earth out of the Combine's grasp and caused other problems like the impending destruction of City 17.  It also set up some actual intrigue, with some sort of conflict between the newly-freed Vortigaunts and the G-Man hanging over the proceedings.  And for all the issues I have with HL2's story, Valve still really knows how to spin a good yarn when it comes to lore and backstory, and I quite enjoyed what the episodes had to offer in that respect, as the ending of HL2 left me quite underwhelmed.

 

I'm also conflicted on the episodic format.  Although the story delay after Episode 2 was a real bummer, I'm not sure that getting an Episode 3 in the shape of Marc Laidlaw's proposed Episode 3 would've been a terribly satisfying ending.  The trouble is that as it was originally supposed to shake out, the adventure on the Borealis turns out to be completely pointless.  It's a suicide mission to turn the ship into a time-traveling bomb that Alyx kills Mossman to put into motion, and yet turns out to be completely pointless as you're not going to shut down the invasion force of a galactic invasion force with a single self-destructing ship.

 

Of course, both she and Gordon are plucked out by the G-Man and Vortigaunts respectively at the last minute, but the cherry on top is that's where the "Combine invasion of Earth" storyline was intended to end, with another time-jump forwards for whatever Gordon's next adventure was.  I prefer the the Half-Life: Alyx we ended up with better.  It set up the Alyx/G-Man vs Gordon/Vortigaunts intrigue like ending of Episode 3 did, but with room to wrap up the Combine invasion storyline in a more satisfactory way.

Edited January 16, 2023 by AlexMax

[Rudolph]

29 minutes ago, AlexMax said:

the cherry on top is that's where the "Combine invasion of Earth" storyline was intended to end, with another time-jump forwards for whatever Gordon's next adventure was

Honestly, I would be interested in a Half-Life 3 set in a far future where all of Gordon's acquaintances are long gone - except maybe Dog, since he is a machine and thus technically immortal - and we get to see what became of Earth after the eventual defeat of the Combine forces on Earth.

 

Until the Episodes came along, each Half-Life game managed to be a self-contained story with an open ending, which I thought was kind of neat.

[LexiMax]

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

Until the Episodes came along, each Half-Life game managed to be a self-contained story with an open ending, which I thought was kind of neat.

 

Half Life 2 wasn't really self contained.  It very much built on the consequences of the resonance cascade from the first game and had you encountering a lot of your former co-workers, just 20 years on down the line.  I'm not really sure where the story could possibly go once Black Mesa is entirely in the rear-view mirror - you need some sort of through-line or else why be a Half-Life game at all?

 

As for the open ending, cutting the story off at the immediate termination of the big bad might work for intrigue when you do it once, but it was really annoying to be rug-pulled two games in a row, and in retrospect I'm glad the episodes were made, even if they left us with a more conventional cliffhanger.