Again, "standing around waiting for shitty dialogue to finish" is your exposition scene. It's a basic necessity of any story.
And why is reading walls of texts in an RPG considered
, but having three or four dialogue scenes in your game so awful?
For the same reason that any RPG that reads out to you every single word and REFUSES TO LET YOU SKIP IT is awful. I read about 3 or 4 times faster than the blumbering idiots talk. Unless the voice acting is super-awesome, I DON'T want to have to listen to it once I'm done reading. RPG, adventure, FPS, wargame, whatever the genre is.
Oh and forcing people to endure unskippable dialog and cutscenes isn't "a basic necessity of any story", it's a retarded conceit by full-of-shit developers who think their cutscenes are so awesome everyone will want to watch them every time they play the game.
HL compares positively to *any* Build engine game - even Blood.
No, and most definitely NOT in the weapon department. SW, Blood and DN3D all shit on it. Unless you have a hardon for more realistic weapons, but then HL doesn't hold a candle to more realistic shooters like STALKER, OFP and so on in this particular aspect.
Alien design was cool, but really it's a pretty minor thing, especially since you spend half the game fighting the marines instead, who are as generic an enemy as you could ever get. The "AI" thing was novel at first, but then you quickly notice that they're still as retarded as most shooters, especially when they do things like throw themselves ONTO a grenade instead of away. Really the best thing about the enemies was the hitboxes and the armor stuff - definitely innovative at the time, though I'm sure Unreal did similar stuff too, and just as well.
Couldn't care less about the first-person thing. But the really stupid thing is the one-way conversations. Even Bioshock handled this better, at least there the NPC's are set up so that they really are talking AT you and not expecting an answer, but HL1 dialog is written as if it's a two-way conversation then somebody went through and deleted all the speaking part of one of the characters. It's really very jarring, and not made any better by NPC's referring to it. You can't use the "immersion" argument for going all-first-person when you've got such an immersion-breaker as this.
We've talked about this before - I don't consider HL1 to be a bad game, and in fact I had some fun with it when I played it, though I also got pretty bored with it and only finished it because it wasn't bad and I'm a completist. My biggest peeve with the game though is the completely uninspired level design, and the overreliance on scripted scenes has something to do with this I think. You can't fill your game with scripted pieces and keep the level design open and interesting, because that could mess up many of the scripts unless you spend a ton of time testing them (Hexen tried the more typical Doom-type design with scripts and as a result it's really easy to accidenttaly get a script malfunction). But whatever the reason, I still blame HL1 for popularizing the linear-as-fuck levels in FPS. It wasn't as bad as the horrible shit we get now, but many of the elements that are overdone to death in the modern FPS we like to bitch about (endless movie-like cutscenes, script-every-second, linear corridor shooter) originted with HL1, and they were already overdone there.
