A Possible Explanation For HL2's Slight lack of difficulty.

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Dill

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I was thinking that, the reason that Half-Life 2 was notably easier than the original Half-Life would be to give the player a feeling of being "the one free man" as the games suggests. It wanted you to really feel like you were kicking some ass, as apposed to the original game where you were fighting for your very survival.

Just a Thought.
 
This has already been discussed. The AI Conspiracy theory...
 
Perhaps the weapons are too powerful.

The manipulator alone allows for you to create a shield and a projectile all at the same time. The two weapons that are attached to the mudskipper and the buggy never run out of ammo. The crossbow and the secondary fire to the Overwatch Rifle are one-hit kills (I guess the same can be said for the Magnum too). Alien Pheromones allow you to send Antlions to do the damage for you (like Snarks only more effective). Even the RPG now has a laser-guided sight, so even if you miss with your initial shot, you can still make the rocket swing around and hit your enemy.


I have a theory that if you were to replace the Half-Life 2 weapons with the ones from the first game it would be slightly harder.
 
It's easy when you play on easy or normal. :) Hard is the way to go.
 
Or it could be that we are better gamers than 7 years ago.
 
true, putting it on hard was much more satisfying. but I must say, I thought the AI was quite well done too, I have been surprised by things that they have done almost everytime i play through the game. (SixThree also has a very good point as well)
 
I thing that the soldiers in HL1 were much tougher and workeed together too well. I had to replay soo many times, expecially in the train rail level. They were more furious.
 
Play on hard mode, and they... kill you. Seriously. I was re-playing it, and I sprinted to some boxes where some combine opened fire. Then I crouched there, and I heard...

"3!"
"2!"

At this point, I popped out and opened fire.

"1! GO!"

And 5 guys stood up, and simoltaniously opened fire on me. I lasted, oh, 5 seconds. Wasn't very pretty.

Believe me, they are SMART. ANNOYINGLY smart. Their ownly downfall is that they like taking it to the offensive a lot, but other then that...

But really, go through and play it in HARD mode before complaining about how EASY it was.
 
A True Canadian said:
Perhaps the weapons are too powerful.

The manipulator alone allows for you to create a shield and a projectile all at the same time. The two weapons that are attached to the mudskipper and the buggy never run out of ammo. The crossbow and the secondary fire to the Overwatch Rifle are one-hit kills (I guess the same can be said for the Magnum too). Alien Pheromones allow you to send Antlions to do the damage for you (like Snarks only more effective). Even the RPG now has a laser-guided sight, so even if you miss with your initial shot, you can still make the rocket swing around and hit your enemy.


I have a theory that if you were to replace the Half-Life 2 weapons with the ones from the first game it would be slightly harder.

Crossbow was 1-hit kill in HL, and the RPG was laser guided then too :) in fact, the tau and gluon guns from HL would have made HL2 easier imo.
 
ComradeBadger said:
Crossbow was 1-hit kill in HL, and the RPG was laser guided then too :) in fact, the tau and gluon guns from HL would have made HL2 easier imo.

The crossbow remains unchanged in terms of damage. The RPG was slightly laser guided, but you couldn't swing it around towards your target once it passed by it. It would just keep going away from you until it collided with the skybox. :P

The tau and gluon guns wouldn't have made that much of a difference. On the buggy, the tau cannon never ran out of ammo (likely because it was hooked up to the car battery). It's original counter-part ran out of juice quite quickly. And since the tau and gluon guns both use the same ammo, they'll both run out more quickly. In Half-Life ammo for the two was relatively scarce up until the Lambda Core, and if the scarcity is transfered to Half-Life 2 (i.e. ammo for the two only avaliable in the city) their impact won't be as significant as you think.

Compared to the original game, the weapons in the sequel seem overpowered. Take the shotgun as another example: in the first game it would take a double-blast to take down the marines; in the second game it usually takes only one shot and rarely two to bring down the Combine. In fact the overpowered weapons are likely why the guns hold less ammo. The shotgun doesn't hold the 125 rounds like the original, just like the Magnum holds half of what it used to.
 
Hell even the USP can easily bring an enemy down with two well aimed shots.

But it's not as if they gave us the hornet or satchels again, that would've been crazy.
 
Puzzlemaker said:
...



Play on hard mode...

I did. Six rockets to down a strider, WTF. Maybe it was the long multiplayer experience that helped but it was just to easy. Whenever I saw a new enemy such as the Antlion Bull or Combine Elite show up I was thinking "Finally someone who can give me a good fight" but was always dissapointed.

:(

I finished Ravenholm in under half an hour and Nova Prospekt even faster.
 
I think that the reason Half-Life 2 was so much easier than the original is because there seemed to be health and armor every couple of feet. I was rarely at less than 70 health on my first run through the game. In fact, on my first run (playing on medium) I had to restart at the bridge and play on hard because I felt guilty about how easy it all was.

If they cut the amount of health and armor in the game by about fifty percent, I'm sure that it would be appropriately difficult.
 
PuzzleMaker, I dont know if your statement was directed at myself, or if it was just something more general. Regardless, I did not bring up this topic because i am complaining about the game being easy. I have played on both Meduim and Hard modes, and found difficulty to be both Challenging and satisfying. I was merely offering an explanation as to why Half-Life 2 may have been made intentionally easier than its predecesor.
 
Firstly, hard mode is the only way to go for those who have played FPS games before, which is most of people here.

Secondly, yeah, even hard mode isn't too hard. I'd say the reason is weapons. The Overwatch pulse rifle is very effective at its range, and there's ammo for it everywhere, practically after every Combine you kill. And the Shotgun is very powerful up close, killing Soldiers and Fast Zombies in one hit, if you do it properly. The Crossbow, of course, is an excellent long-range weapon.

That's the reason, IMO. Good weapons (that's good) with a bit too much ammunition for difficulty. Ravenholm had very little ammo, but lots of stuff to use with the gravity gun. After you get out of the Ravenholm mines, ammo is never again a problem, or at least that was my experience.
 
I would like HL:2 even more if they made it more like real life (limited ammo, but realistic damage from hits.) I mean, lets face it, even with the gas mask, a 9mm hollowpoint would penetrate through and the spatter would penetrate the skull. Their probably wouldn't be an exit wound, but the combine's brain would be splattered. And instead of carrying 150 shots for it, limit the player to... 60. Up the damage lower the ammo and its avialability, to make sure you aim and conserve what little you have. The 5.56 round used by the PDW is a devastating round becuase it is a highvelocity/small caliber. In r/l one good burst in the chest and you would be dead. But you couldn't carry weapons and ammo like you do in the game either. Limit ammo to 90.

The other thing is enemy shots should do the same damage to you that you do to them. Even on hard, the combine will die faster than they can kill you (with the same gun).

But then again this is just a game, so who cares?
 
Kebean PFC said:
The 5.56 round used by the PDW is a devastating round becuase it is a highvelocity/small caliber.

According to this, the MP7 fires 4.6mm x 30 cartridges.
 
I've been playing the Half-Life: Substance mod on Italian Extreme mode, and that gets pretty damn hard.

If a Gunship or Strider sees you in the open, you're pretty much dead; the later Combine take many many shots to kill and are sometimes half invisible (active camouflage). It's pretty fun and I enjoy the challenge.
 
Agreed, the Substance Mod adds quite a bit of challenge, as well as some cool new weapons and features.
 
It adds a sh!tload of enemies into maps, making low-end machines lag. It also adds bizzare (in HL2 world) weapons. With poorly textures HEV suit gloves.
 
if you want to make the game harder, go into the skills file in your config folder and start messing around. If you want, look up one of those comprehensive cvar lists that give you even more options.

Me, i made it so that all weapons deal much higher amounts of damage, the npcs do that same amount you do. Headshots do much more while body shots do less (armor). Combine soldiers, metros, and elites, now have 2x the health.

made it so that gunships do 25 damage per shot and increase their burst size from 20 to 200. The helos now fire their main gun in a 2 degree spreay instead of 22. Looks like they are firing one large shot.

I've been able to beat the game with it, i'm no hotshot, but i'd say the freak custom skill i made is a lot harder than hard.

You can mess with all of that to your liking, makes the game much more fun.
 
I love when the AI challenges me, or the tricky terrain. Not overpowered enemies. In NFSu and NFSU2 cars would simply be faster within each track, instead of driver AI performance increase when you win and proceed, and decrease when you lose several times. (AI Auto-balance)
 
I'm gonna put the following lines in the auto-something folder
ent_fire npc_combine_s sethealth_(something higher than it is)
budda
 
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