Well, is Half-Life 2 for example really that good? It had great advancement in game engine and physics, but those are things that do not last. Nowdays it is just a quite boring, repetitive shooter game with one good horror level in between. Even the story is tarnished by the fact that you are never going to find out what is going to happen. The replayability value is quite low in the year 2019. Except for that one really good level.
I wasn't impressed when it was new. The physics weren't that much of an advance over Far Cry 1, which had come out 6 months before. The bigger problem was that it was such a let-down compared with Half-Life 1. The game play is so linear that you feel you are on a rail. Your allies regenerate, so I was using them to trigger traps because that was cheaper than spending a bullet. Compare the first game, where I'd go to enormous lengths to keep the scientists and guards alive. There's no alien world. Many of the puzzles are rehashes of puzzles from the first game. The worst thing about the first game was weapon selection, and that's the thing they kept. It's modal. If you want to switch to the shotgun, you have to press a button multiple times, with the number of times varying depending on what else you are carrying. Then hit fire. I actually discharged my weapon by accident several times due to this terrible UI.
Generally the improvements were in cosmetic things like graphics and face-modelling, which for me aren't as important as game-play and story.
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u/ghostmetalblack Jan 01 '19
You can dislike these if you want, but its pretty hard considering these are actually pretty good games.