Analysis: How BAD Is Half-Life Source Really? (It's Busted Still)

Half-Life source is the punching bag of Half-Life games seemingly serving no purpose and being utterly broken but it didn't used to be this way and it doesn't have to be now so how can you fix this game what should valve do and as of right now how bad is Half-Life source really [Music] here and while most people are either bitter towards Half-Life source or more accurately probably don't even think of Half-Life source I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with it like many other people I was annoyed that they decided to release Half-Life source I mean this is half-life on the source engine I thought that it was just going to be half five two level Graphics a complete proper remake of Half-Life one and then we got it and it was just same textures Half-Life ported to Source engine and all this is what initially sparked blackface's development well fine if you don't want to make Half-Life 1 in The Source engine we will and we'll dedicate our next almost 20 years to it I think in the end it was worth the wait but after I got over that I started to appreciate Half-Life source for what it did I dare say half I Source was actually my preferred way to play Half-Life 1 for a while so before we talk about how busted Half-Life source is what did it do that improved upon Half-Life one there are a lot of small quality of life things in Half-Life source for example quick swapping between weapons and Half-Life 1 you have to deal that menu up top if you want to blog an SMG at depress 3 and then click to pull it out I much prefer to just press three and have my gun that's an option you can select and Source engine games it sounds really small but it goes a long way a much more significant change though is the lighting the source engine understandably has much better lighting than the initial Half-Life engine and this is most apparent with the flashlight the flashlight and Half-Life one kind of sucks it's just like a spotlight at the end of whatever you're looking at it doesn't really disperse light like you would think a flashlight would however the flashlight and Half-Life source works pretty much like the flashlight in Half-Life 2 it is much better and that's a good thing because you spend a lot of time in vents I mean this is half-life after all another basic Thing by today's standards that the source engine can do that gold Source could not is Ragdoll I've talked about this a lot but I really miss mid-2000's Ragdoll I find it more fun and more satisfying than animations it almost feels less like you're shooting the enemy and more like you're punching them this gives immediate feedback to the combat you did that something you did in game caused a reaction it makes the weapons feel more impactful and this is a small thing but it's a big thing at the same time and in a very similar way The Recoil there is something about the Gunplay and source that just feels better to me than half-life 1. it's most apparent with the SMG in the original it kind of just feels like a cone spread in front of you when you're holding the trigger down and Half-Life source there is an actual recoil pattern it makes no sense it just goes up and down like wild but it is there this allows me to TAP fire and get a little bit more accuracy out of the SMG but it doesn't invalidate the pistol's purpose of being accurate at long ranges they also made the Half-Life 2 change where it only takes one crowbar swing to kill headcrab instead of two thank God this is so much better seriously these are really small changes they're just quality of life changes but they add a lot to the game nowhere near a black Mesa a lot but it's still a significant change also Half-Life source uses a totally different water Shader that looks a lot more believable and is kind of out of place it's definitely the thing you'll notice above everything else but it doesn't really change anything aside from just looking at it so let's move on in my opinion those are good changes until the game suddenly no longer worked and became very broken but before I talk about that I have a message Yep this video is sponsored by into the am can you tell I like their shirts those socks are grip socks I was required to wear them at the business don't judge me can you tell I like their shirts into the am as a clothing brand I've worked for a long time now I'm wearing one of their shirts right now I wear these everywhere it doesn't matter if I'm at a trampoline park or mountain biking or just going out to get food or just laying around at my house being lazy they're comfortable and they look good but they make more than shirts I mean they make hats they make pants they make coats plenty to look through on their website and their deals are still going you can get three basic tees for 45 or three graphic tees 460. and if you use my link into the aim.com Dragon shirts you can get an additional 10 off site-wide and this does stack on top of those deals so a huge Thanks goes to into the aim for sponsoring and continuing to support this channel now let's talk about why half my source is so broken let's just go through while I was playing through the game starting with the more notorious ones residue processing is entirely broken when you have multi-core rendering selected what is going on here if you didn't know half-5 Source was buggy you might just assume your GPU was failing I mean this just looks like artifacting it's bad at certain points in the game the sky becomes Windows XP floors are oddly shiny and this is definitely not how they're supposed to look physics can go wild with some fun results foreign did you see that somebody clipped that please it was just out of here there is this floating scientist that has become a meme of his own NPCs entirely break when they take damage they'll just sit there and moan over and over again I wow this could be a album cover no Marines had some very interesting interactions with the player it seems like anything you did they would react accordingly in in a believable way at least for 1998. one of the things they did was they would fear MP5 grenades if you shot them they would cower you will see speedrunners abuse this a lot but they no longer do this this might actually be a positive thing because you could cheese the game pretty hard this way but it's definitely not intended not how it's supposed to work Barnacle tongues also don't work they just don't render so you'll find yourself walking into a lot of invisible nothing and getting dragged into the sky AI in general just doesn't work as it should they just don't know what they need to do they may be scripted to run away from an enemy then they'll turn right back around and run straight back to the enemy and this led to some of the funniest situations I've ever seen in Half-Life source all right he's gonna die now thanks for being a distraction alive never mind where the [ __ ] did he come from foreign what happened in a less funny note the first Marine you see the Marine that is supposed to turn and murder the scientist right in front of you a big point of the story doesn't work like it's supposed to this guy just turns around and runs up the stairs and ignores the scientist this was supposed to be the moment you realize that the US military is not here to help you they're here to kill you but instead you get this the model used for picking up snarks is the wrong one it's literally a snark instead of a snark Nest which gets confusing you don't know if it's going to attack you or you're going to get ammo this fan here no longer kills headcrabs they just land on it and spin around this fan here is supposed to jib you and just doesn't kill you this room here is supposed to have laser trip mines that you can set off which will make grunt start attacking but also send in Marines so they'll start fighting each other and you can kind of hide in this hallway this doesn't happen anymore those laser trip mines don't exist the Grinch just start attacking you the moment you walk into the room so the entire combat encounter is just ruined the scientists that's supposed to give you the cue to jump into the teleport after this defense section doesn't give you this cue anymore this is a really big big problem because if you wait too long you just fail if you jump in too early you just die the bosses are entirely broken quite literally the only boss that works as intended is the Gargantua the helicopter's hitboxes are entirely messed up it's almost impossible to hit and it has a lot more Health than it should that didn't hit it do I need to just like shoot at the very front of it to get it to hit you just you just won't hit it [Music] you literally can I hit it with a gerber what the [ __ ] is this there we go eat [ __ ] all right let's move on the tentacles are entirely broken they can't kill Barney leading to Barney and the tentacles fighting forever or at least until you push the button to kill everyone the tentacles also can't do damage the most broken of all it won't attack you aside from its ranged projectile which then leaves a black Square on the ground you can attack it back but it does so much health you will need to use almost all of your ammo just to get it to move one stage forward this is by no means a comprehensive list of all the bugs and glitches in Half-Life source if I wanted to do that this video would be 40 minutes long it's really bad the game is practically unplayable at this point but it didn't used to be this way and I know it didn't used to be this way because this channel has been around a long time I only officially brought it out as like my job a couple of years ago probably about four years ago now back in the day I had it just to post footage of me playing video games and show to my friends that's all I intended to use it for one of those old playthroughs is from 2012 and that was Half-Life source and looking back at this playthrough the game worked entirely as intended nothing was broken yet but then fast forward to 2015 and I streamed Half-Life source to YouTube back before I went to Twitch for streaming and in the Stream the game was entirely broken so in between 2012 and 2015 this game got busted the internet seems to say that the game became broken in 2013 with a significant Source engine update but that begs the question why hasn't Val fixed this game why do they just ignore it they seemingly don't care well to be honest I can't entirely blame them I mean you have Half-Life 1 and black Mesa there are much better options to play the original Half-Life than Half-Life source you kind of look at it and go why does this exist but at the same time if someone bought a game they should be able to play it as intended good news is there are mods to do that I haven't played any of them but for what people told me they do a pretty good job the way I see it valve has two options here they could fix up the game as it should be maybe even by hiring some of those modders and just using the work they've done to fix Half-Life source or they can just de-list Half-Life source entirely as it seems to be a bit redundant and not really needed but there's one really big problem with doing that if you de-list Half-Life source people will then not be able to get the assets they need to play Gary's Mod if you don't have Half-Life source or Counter-Strike Source you're going to be seeing a lot of the classic red errors those things are so common you can buy them on Etsy so if you wanted the d-list Half-Life source you would have to de-list it and then put all of the assets from Half-Life source just natively in Gary's Mod valve is never going to do this so the real solution is just to fix Half-Life source but why bother why even bother putting effort into that well I think the concern for most people as is the concern for me is that someone who has never played Half-Life before may not know any better so they buy Half-Life source they try to play the game and it's miserable because it's broken so if you were ever curious about how bad Half-Life sources gotten over the years now you know and you can share it around to your friends that haven't played Half-Life so they don't end up playing Half-Life source first and that should sum up Half-Life source I've been meaning to make a video of this for a long time I just kept delaying it and now we're here huge thanks to into the end for sponsoring this video go to into the am.com dragon shirts to get 10 off site-wide and of course a big Thanks goes to you for watching this video [Music]

Channel: JarekTheGamingDragon

Views: 40,441

Keywords: Half-Life, Half Life, Half-Life Source, Half Life Source, Review, Analysis, Glitch, Bug, Source Engine, Half-Life 2, Gameplay, Let's Play, Playthrough, PC

Id: D9pCCMM67jo

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 13 2023