@jdlwerewolf@snouts.online Yeah, it's... honestly amazing how Half-Life managed to age poorly yet fit within the modern landscape of games perfectly well? Its sheer linearity made sense for the time (taking one path, and doing what you can with it within the limited pool of resources '90s computers had to offer), and ended up pretty prophetic for what was to come much further down the line (e.g. most any modern FPS, a genre that holds your hand far more aggressively still nowadays to the point of approaching interactive novel levels of choice) - but at the same time, the '00s and '10s saw far more exploration of choice in video games, sometimes to the point of actively tackling the question of what choice in video games even -means- (e.g. The Stanley Parable, Undertale, etc).

I don't know. I'd -love- to see an open-ended conception of Half-Life where all that worldbuilding ends up amounting to way, way more than the linear experience we ended up getting from all of the franchise's installments so far.