Threads like these absolutely help me get through the most godawful workdays.
Which, I guess, shows you just how fucking boring my job actually is.
Now, I'm far from Half Life 2's biggest fanboy. I think the story was mediocre, Gordon's not even a person but rather a well trained dog who blithely does whatever Alex tells him to, he never for a second deems it handy to actually ASK someone what the fuck is going on, making him a completely unbelievable protagonist, there is a distinct lack of different enemies in the game, and on a whole it relied way too much on gimmicks rather than just solid core gameplay.
Having said that, I still enjoyed it, and still play through it every now and then. However, in my opinion, Farcry absolutely destroys it in pretty much every facet you care to mention.
Except one.
The facial animation system.
I've played through a fuckton of games, and Half Life 2 was the very first game where I felt the NPC's (Barney, Alex, doctor Steiner etc) actually behaved in a realistic fashion.
Some examples : When Barney stops you from going onboard the train to Nova Prospekt, and talks to the professor over the videophone, and says "Well, he should be okay as long as he avoids the checkpoints", he gives you a little smile that, to me, was the sort of "You can do it" statement you'd expect between friends.
Later, in Vance's base, Alex and Judith Mossman's little catfight against each other, and Alex just rolls her eyes in absolutely the most realistic manner I've ever seen in a game. It spoke volumes about her feelings about Dr Mossman.
A little bit later, she tells you, as the two of you are walking towards the junkyard, "So, I see you've met Dr Mossman", in a truly blistering tone of voice and her facial expression sends glares of death concerning the good Dr Mossman.
There are tons more examples like this. HL2 definitely does the most realistic looking facial animations I've yet seen. While I think that Nolf2, EF2 and Doom 3 are pretty good, they just don't have the same range of movement and display of emotion that the Source engine does.
Creston
Edit : Riley actually does provide a good example with the Tron 2.0 scenes, which were also pretty powerful. John Sheridan Bruce Boxleitner's character in the game shows a very powerful look of surprise when he sees his son inside the computer. Definitely very good facial animation there. I would rate HL2's slightly better because of the more realistic texture on the characters themselves, but it's not by terribly much.
This comment was edited on Sep 13, 15:26.