Half-Life 2's Oversimplified Ammo Management - Beating The Game Without Pressing Reload
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- Опубликовано: 15 сен 2024
- One of my favourite games of all time has, in my opinion, a big flaw; which I turned into a challenge.
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![[1] A very spicy start!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/UhZWoyLM2PM/mqdefault.jpg)
bit of a longer one, hope that isn't a problem! prob gonna take a break from half-life videos for a while, i already did *three* in a row... heh...
Hey, try beating the game on hard with 1hp. I did so, it's possible. Just prepare the napkins.
wow just wow. at least you can count higher then two (cough) unlike SOME companys
That pun angered me on a deep level that i cannot describe.
40 dislikes, pardon me I have to go kill 40 12 year old fortnite clan members.. I mean, great video!
i'll watch any half life video regardless of the runtime
Gordon Freeman in HL1 with Python revolver: "I love to reload during a battle! There's nothing like the feeling of slamming a long silver bullet into a well greased chamber."
Gordon Freeman in HL2: "Remember - switching to your pistol is always faster than reloading."
Switching to your pistol is literally fast reloading
very accurate.
Melee with your crowbar!
And switching to your crowbar is faster
Hit that melon
Like the metal gear reference
Tbh I never noticed the backpack reloading until this video
Yeah. I never realized
I though that collecting ammo automatic reloads your guns
As an obsessive reloader neither have I!
Not only did I not notice, I'm a bit mixed about it.
On one hand, it does mean that I don't have to reload EVERY weapon post... anything. After using select weapons and a battle is over, the weapons will all be reloaded. Rather than going through every single one and tapping R, I can just... keep moving?
On the other hand, it is a bit... weird for it to happen if you are in combat. I mean, I know the HEV suit is basically magic, but magic reloading is a bit silly.
So a compromise: No backpack reloading if in range of an enemy encounter. This means speedrunners STILL can get backpack reloading, since now they would have to plan around this, and casual players get only a minor bump in difficulty... if they even noticed.
Same here. Never noticed it. Even with MMod adding more weapons.
1:02
"When playing HL1, you'll have to run the math. Your guns have limited supplies, and ammo caches are few and far between"
I have NEVER understood why people say this about HL1. You are STACKED with ammo in that game. You can (and after a while, regularly will) hold 300 bullets in the SMG. _125 shotgun shells. Ten rifle grenades. Fifty five crossbow bolts._ Things only get more ridiculous in Opposing Force, where you hold even more weapons with even more damage, including an explosive weapon _whose ammo pickups respawn_ just to make sure you never have to think about running out of ammo.
Half Life 1 is a great game, but it is not tactical in the slightest. Gordon Freeman and Adrian Shepard are bullet hoses, and they absolutely get the supplies to play like that
(yes, I realize Yama beat me to this three days ago)
you do get too much ammo, but you're not swarming with it like in 2. If the reserve was lowered a bit (like in Black Mesa) and the ammo supplies gave you less, that would've added to the challenge in my opinion.
Uhhhhhhhhh excuseeeee me? In xen you BARELY get any amo for the smg/pistol you NEED to save it
@@Luka2000_ lmao what? There's still a shitton of ammo in Xen in those canister things every 5 meters.
Because if you play like an idiot you will run out of ammo for most weapons, or run out of health for most encounters. In Half-Life 2 and Black Mesa the lack of ammo capacity just means you'll be using the same few tricks and weapons for every fight - ESPECIALLY with the fact that Black Mesa made the MP5 as accurate as the handgun and with the fact that HL2 doesn't even have any interesting weapons beside maybe the gravity gun.
The reason you and most people that have played it more than once or are good with first person shooters never run out of ammo in HL1 is that the game has a lot of ammo capacity, but not a lot of ammo pickups, depending on chapter and specific weapon. You can carry 10 snarks, sure, but that's 10 snarks you use up in a single fight, and their pickups are *rare*.
Meanwhile in HL2 you have infinite bugbait, infinite SMG ammo in several sections, infinite grenades and rockets in even more sections, etc, and for the few ammo types that *are* scarce, you get too little of an ammo cap to the point where when you do use them, you'll run out almost instantly, and when you try to be more mindful, you'll just run into pickups without having spent the last's contents.
Also bugbait is just downgraded snarks fight me
@@AlphaGarg ok
You think the airboat gun sounding like the tool gun is bad? The Gravity Gun says "Mmm, soup" when you use the alt-fire without pointing it at a physics prop.
Soup is good
[VE] Orange Juice yes
The missiles in water hazard sound like they are saying "cry some more"
I'm glad that I'm not the only one that thought that
The gravity gun saying "mmm, soup" is not bad because soup is very good
Seriously, why do people have ammo problems in Half Life 1?
The game gives you sooo much ammo all the time even on the harder difficulties. Unless you're an absolutely terrible shot you never run out of ammo. There's tons of it all over the place.
Play BIoshock on max difficulty.
That'll actually make you experience what it means to be "out of ammo".
In Bioshock, this applies more so in the early game and not so much the rest of it. Once you reach Neptune's Bounty, the game gives you a LOT of ammo to play with (and if you put off grabbing it until after the fight with Peach Wilkins, you're pretty much set for the rest of the game). That, and you get a lot of crafting materials to make those special rounds. Thankfully, in the Rapture games, you also get large reserve capacities for your ammo, unlike in Columbia, where you frequently get maxed out on ammo, and likely for weapons that you don't have at the time.
It's news to me that people have had problems with the ammo. Maybe if they were using the same weapons for every scenario like the SMG that shares its ammo with the pistol. Added on top that maybe they might've forgotten about using the other weapons? Or perhaps they didn't scrounge for ammo and just went through the entire level only thinking about shooting? Either way, still strange to imagine.
@@SaltyFrenchFries i have no idea. I never had ammo issues in the first half life. Hell not even in the second. Alyx instead never gave me shotgun ammo. Plenty of handgun ammo, but i finished the game having found like 20 shells in the entire game
@@h1tsc4n40 alyx uses a weird dynamic ammo system, where you get more ammo for weapons you use. i find it a bit backwards though, as if you dont use a weapon to conserve its rare ammo, you wont get any.
@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 yeah i figured that out after a while.
Doesnt make a huge lot of sense cause it means you just finish the game using one weapon and nothing else.
Wait, really? I honestly felt as if I NEVER had ammo problems in Half Life, even on the hardest difficulty, even for revolver ammo save for maybe the exceedingly rarer radioactive ammo type and rockets because rockets really only have ammo spawns for when you NEED to use it. I loved swapping between all my weapons in a fight and felt as if I always had enough ammo for all of them because of how large the ammo cap for them was, biggest example being how many shells you can carry for the shotgun and how many grenades you get for your rifle's launcher. Killing any human enemy always gave you an ammo drop and the military is a large portion of Half Life's enemy spread, that and if you looked around each area where the military set up an outpost you most likely found even more ammo. This isn't a bad thing because I love this game and it's combat so much that not having any ammo to use would make it worse.
I felt as if in Half Life 2 that there wasn't enough ammo and ammo reserves for all your guns were quite lacking. Sure this allows the game to focus more on the gravity gun for combat, but for when that isn't applicable, it's a real chore. On the hardest difficulty, enemies never seem to refund even a sizable fraction of the amount of ammo you have to dump into them, but I don't want to use my even rarer ammo type weapons cause who knows when I'll get ammo for those back, this leads me to just sticking it out with the weaker (less fun) weapons which I know will get an infinite ammo refill somewhere or have more generous spawns, leading me to have less enjoyment because of less combat variety because of as you pointed out, less gun variety which is cut down even more by my problems stated before.
Half Life 2 is too forgiving with it's ammo for less fun and much weaker guns, leading to over abuse of the infinite ammo caches negating much of the difficulty of the game in the first place, but not generous enough for the rest of its arsenal to allow for all the high octane gun swapping between so many options you love like Half Life does. Half Life 2's ammo pickups seem very artificial and forced and out of place at times, while Half Life's ammo pickups feel completely natural and fit in with the environment.
In Half Life 2, you screw up, the game gives you an easy way out, in Half Life, you screw up, you're crap out of luck, reload a save and get better. I can get the idea of not wanting to make a player forcibly reload a save as it might ruin immersion or the general flow of the game, but reloading a save is an easier way of making sure you don't over-bloat your player's arsenal and keep the game balance. For the puzzle you showed having to throw a grenade under the metal to propel yourself up, it should only give you one or two grenades on a table, not an infinite supply, so it still gives a hint to what the player should do without giving them too much to abuse later on.
Also, the general idea of backpack reloading sucks, takes a lot of the difficulty and immersion out of a game. If you screwed up and used all your ammo in your guns and can't reload without dying, you have to get good and land your shots better next time around, conserving your ammo and using your environment better to maybe sneak more reloads in.
In the end, to me, Half Life is way more fun, Half Life 2, while interesting and having genuinely great parts to it that I enjoy and did take great steps forward with the way it did the storytelling, it feels like nothing more than an over glorified tech demo you can fool around in combat wise with a lot less love put into it than the original... which had very sparing dialogue but still more than accomplished what it was trying to convey. Games with the underlying purpose of being a tech demo are not a bad thing, but when games feel like they're only a tech demo and not their own unique entity, that's when it's a bad thing.
I wish i had a good enough attention span to read all of this but I’ll drop a like anyway because if the effort in this single post
The only thing regarding HL1's ammo economy I find interesting is that the SMG and pistol use the same ammo, so you have to decide if you want faster but less accurate shots or slower but more precise shots. Aside from that, ammo in HL1 is plentiful, as you said. Unless you ONLY use the SMG and pistol you'll never have any issues with ammo management
Long comments I am ok with, but please, for the love of Gabe Newell, split them up into paragraphs. I keep getting lost trying to read through this.
the ammo in opposing force tho... oh boy that game was hard in every aspect. maybe because i was expecting it to be like half life but goddamn it was hard as shit.
This feels like a script for another video essay
Me: reloads every moment I can
Connor shaw: no
Your pfp has taste
Same xD
i'll even go out of my way to waste ammo and make the amount of leftover ammo a multiple of the ammo, like if i'm using the shotgun and the leftover is not a multiple of 6, i'll waste ammo in a safe spot
I'll go out of my way to waste ammo to make sure my ammo count is a multiple of 5.
"It uses the same sound as the Garry's Mod Toolgun, sorry to ruin that for you"
(flashes back to twitch chat losing their collective minds during your HL2 streams over this)
Didn’t garrys mod come out after the Release of hl2?
@@jesusquicksaves Garry's MOD is literally a Half-Life 2 MOD.
@@jesusquicksaves 🤦♂️
Channel oh did I miss a joke shit
man the airboat gun might be the toolgun sound effect, but you know what's even worse? the revolver chamber spinning sound has the same sound effect as most darkrp lockpicks.
oh my god
Ur wrong...the lockpick sounds like the revolver champer spinning
@@saintken9570 And by the same standard, the toolgun is the airboat cannon...
@@Y3SkyBreaker
That's because this IS the standard we are talking about. Garry's Mod came after half life, as a half life mod, using half life assets, therefore the toolgun sound is the airboat gun's.
@@xFluing I am aware of that, I just thought it was weird of him to have pointed that out for the revolver, while ignoring the fact that it's also the same for the boat.
I was surprised there was no mention of the wooden ammo crates scattered around prioritizing weapons you’re low on rather than providing a specific ammo type, it means most combat encounters aren’t designed around mastering a specific weapon type but instead about just using what you have. That said, this is a fantastic video that sums up a bit of my own gripes with HL2 compared to its predecessor. I kinda want to write my video about the game’s design now but I’m stuck working upstream on another 90-minute video at the moment.
that reminds me of the director system in left for dead,imagine a director mod for hl2,the crates appear when you need them and the enemies are the perfect ammount etc
Am I the only one who didn’t know Half-Life 2 had auto reloading until now
Don't worry, that's at least a mechanic the game tries to hide from you. I didn't know the buggy had an ammo crate at the back until now.
Never noticed it myself
@@asshatt6908 I understand you not knowing about auto-reloading, but how did you not know about the ammo crate on the buggy? The guy says that there is an ammo crate in the back.
@@jiraffe9600 i don't recognise that line so perhaps i wasn't paying attention (honestly the cut-scene like sections in half life were really boring and i just zoned out waiting for them to end)
Reminds me of Assassins Creed, where the game *_lies_* about your Health being at 5% when it's actually at 50%
Hl1 having limited ammo XD meanwhile I usually had full ammo for just about everything while on hard
I know right
Theres tons of ammo in the first game and you can store more of it
Also not everyone WANTS to use the grav gun. If you ask me Its good they didn't force you to it. Half-Life's difficulty at hard is also highly artificial so theres that.
Try OpFor on hard. Enemies like the Pit Drone, which were already annoying, now need to be hit with 120 damage in order to kill them... combined with the increased damage and it's just plain annoying.
@@revolutionstudios5052 yeah thats why theres 0 incentive to play on hard, you can instead use some damage tweaking mods to maybe make so both you and enemies die quicker or something
yeah, but it doesn't give you too much to the point where you're drowning in supplies. It gives you just the right amount of ammo to deal with enemies.
@@peppermillers8361 This. And the game gives you small amounts of specialty type weapons like Tripmines and satchel charges, while still giving you a large inventory so you never run into pickups with a full inventory and have to "waste" them on an encounter where anything else would have sufficed. The latter happens a lot in HL2 lol.
@@peppermillers8361 Wow, your aim must be complete garbage. For those of us without Parkinson's, HL1 gives us way more ammo than we could ever make use of.
Not Half-Life 2 uses the same airboat gun sound as the Garry's mod toolgun, Gmod uses Half-Life 2's airboat gun sound. It is like saying Source 2 came before Source 1.
No shit sherlock
@@Krisztian08 lmao
yeah
@@Krisztian08 thats what i said when i got to that part in the video lmfao
@@letterslayer7814 oof
Personally, I never knew this was a feature in the game so it never affected me on my play throughs. I think HL games give you the tools to play the game how you want to play it. You didn’t need to run shot gun and smg during your run, but that was your choice. That’s what I love about it so much, the freedom.
the freedom ruins gameplay tho, bnecause thats the optmial way to play not doing that its just handicapping yourself, its the same as playing a chess game and not caputring the queen enemy piece or not using you queen, i like to play the games doing my best just not cheating or using bugs,, and if the game allows this and its the optmal strategy its what i do and will judge the game at, tho to be honest i don't mind it and like the fast paced gameplay =)
@@gabrielandy9272 i never understood that mentality of "well the game lets me do it so Im forced to do it"... if I can beat someone at chess without grabbing their queen you bet your ass Ill find it more satisfying. Hell, if I can sacrifice my own queen and still beat them its even better.
unbinding reload makes me press r all the time and then going "oh wait yeah its unbound" and then i still press r at the end anyway
That's why I unbind reload in Borderlands 2 while playing Gaige not to lose Anarchy stacks
Weird, my experiences are quite the opposite during my runs. I tend to have an abundance of ammo in Half Life 1, but almost always have to be conservative with my special weapons in Half Life 2, but that's probably just the way I play where I tend to ignore the infinite ammo boxes and instead hunt for the finite supply crates.
There's an achievement in for only using the Gravity Gun in Ravenholm. Feels like there was intent behind that.
Half Life 2 has an auto-reload feature?? You learn something new every day.
Half life 1 gives you so much ammo
Yeah I’ve never been completely out of ammo or even close really
I’ve played on hard and i was always near empty
@LABXYR not rly one good double barrel blast from the spaz can put down a soldier you just can’t use nothing but mp5 all the time on hard
@@yaboyalijah352 bullet sponges
@@yaboyalijah352 yeah hard is totally a waste of ammo and enemies are spongy beyond reason
“Double barrel blaster”.........he does know the bottom tube holds the shells for the shotgun right?
The devs didn't, pressing the alt fire fires two shells.
@@n8dogue No you press both triggers at once
@@greenoftreeblackofblue6625 the spas 12 doesnt even have two barrels
@BOOZE & METAL not to mention the concept of damage in videogames in the first place
@@n8dogue Valve seems to have a hard time with guns. I suspect their devs don't do a whole lot of shooting IRL.
"I'm going to play with the reload key unbound!"
BL2 Anarchy Gaige players: "First time?"
My friend did that Giage Anarchy build. Fucking hilarious play through.
@@LonesomeKrow It's fun as hell. Can't hit the broad side of a barn, but the one that "close enough"s hits like a train.
I always thought about these infinite ammo crates as a way to tell players to use a specific weapon for that stage. If they get enough of them for learning how to use them, then they will use it later in the game when the infinite crates are more scarce.
You should've mentioned that there's even an achievement for clearing Ravenholm with only the Gravity Gun.
Connor's point really stands. My first reaction to the thumbnail was "Huh, that seems rather easy for one of those challenge-runs. And short, too."
What I find awkward is that not long after you say goodbye to the car, you find a box of a lot of magnum ammo. I was like "oh, I guess I should've used my magnum" even thou not long earlier, the game gave me tons of SMG ammo, basically forcing me to use the MP7 and then says "oh yeah by the way, here's a ton of precious magnum ammo that you didn't need to use for the past entire level".
To be fair the lack of weapons in half life 2 was because there was complaint there was too many guns
Who on earth is upset by too many guns
"you'll have to mathematically determine what enemies to kill with x amount of ammo to survive the level" 1:11, throws a nade at two headcrabs, lmaoooo
That's good though, that's 9mm ammo he can later use to snipe actual targets or to spray HECU with. That, and as long as he doesn't rely on them, he won't run out of grenades. That's the magic of Half-Life 1.
@@AlphaGarg
Or you know, not even bother with the crabs and move on?
Marathon is an older trilogy of games that do not have a reload key so you actually have to consciously expend ammo to reload
You may be a troon, but marathon was good
@@chickenman1801 nobody asked
I always figured that, since the HEV suit can do all sorts of things like manage your ammo, and automatically inject you with morphine, who says it can't reload your guns for you?
it doesn't have the space nor tech for that
Clips are used to load magazines, Magazines are used to load guns.
For what it's worth, I saw lambda crates and such as extra content and extra challenge. The point wasn't the loot, the loot was just to balance out the resources spent to explore, so the game didn't punish exploration. The reward I saw was just the gameplay/environmental storytelling
Same. And I still explore these parts of the maps even though I know them. It brings some joy and a sense of accomplishment. Same with Quake, RtCW or other games. It's just enjoying to fully clear out the levels.
So you're saying all those times I made sure to reload my gun before switching to something else I didn't have to? All those times I took bullets in the face while neurotically reloading to make sure I didn't run out of ammo were unnecessary? Cool. That's cool.
There are so many references in this.
“Unforeseen Consequences”
“Crowbar coming down a steel corridor”
“Major Striders”
“You wouldn’t need that much to empower Gordon Freeman”
The pistol and SMG not sharing ammo in HL2 actually makes sense, because the SMG in HL2 is the MP7, and the MP7 does not use 9mm ammo like the USP Match and most SMGs, the MP7 uses 4.6x30mm ammo, they look like mini rifle rounds, while the pistol is 9mm
hehehe i like to think that the revolver is a disguised awp. When you combine suit zoom and the revolver you get a sniper :)
Ammo caches also often have health. That's the real reason to stop there
5:55 Given that I finished playing Black Mesa for the first time today, I'd like to disagree with you on this point but also strengthens the point that Valve did prioritize making use of the physics engine as much as it could.
For Valve, physics allow you to do things and implement mechanics that would not have been possible in the original Half-Life, especially puzzles. While your point here is that grenades are not primarily for puzzles, with physics, I think the question should be flipped: grenades are primarily used as weapons like any other FPS, but in this game it also serves the purposes of literally solving puzzles to help you advance the plot. Of course Valve want to show off one of the most revolutionary uses of the physics engine in 2004, and their philosophy seems to hinge on introducing new gaming mechanics.
Another thing about a Half-Life game that makes it unique and revolutionary is the immersion in the story. In Half-Life, this was done by keeping the story within the player's perspective without cutscenes or separated levels like games of the late 1990s that break immersion. Where ammo-conservation is important in various games, the last thing you probably want to do is being forced to reload a save because it is impossible to advance. For Half-Life 2, the developers wanted to avoid this because it breaks immersion or make first-time players think the game is broken (which I would have felt when I played Black Mesa), so they made sure you always had a way to move forward even if you theoretically have zero ammunition. This may not be fun for veteran players but when I think about it, it wouldn't be fair for first-time players either. Imagine never seeing the end of Episode 2 because you couldn't figure out the grenade ramp unless you have to reload a save, which I think for the intention of the game design would be considered a flaw.
Finally, the reason why I think these ammo boxes can be good is that they serve as clues. To Valve's credit, their game design always trusts the player's intelligence to figure things out rather than popping tips in loading screens as most games do. But like a good mystery novel, its not fair if you don't give the player any clues to figure it out to begin with. Tehsnakerer's video on Hunt Down the Freeman makes this apparently clear, with Valve gradually showing the player how exploding barrels work and could be used. When I play such a game for the first-time, those ammo boxes aren't just lifelines but clues that tell me how grenades will have something to do with the puzzle. These puzzles can be notoriously difficult for first-time players and its things like these that keep them confident that the developers know what they're doing.
The worst case is randomly placing grenade boxes where they are not need. I forgot whose video but they said in HDTF, a grenade box was placed in a house with broken floorboards and the player automatically thought they need to break it to advance the plot when that wasn't the case. On the other hand, Half Life 2 always places it where they are needed, or at least likely so. The player could abuse it by hoarding it but I see no good solution to this other than cutting a really cool puzzle and use of the physics engine. I think Half-Life might have had good ammo management in part because it never had to experience a dilemma like this, though I can only say this for sure with grenades or rocket launchers.
Tl;dr: In terms of grenade boxes, HL2 needs them because it is an FPS with both an immersive narrative-style and physics-based puzzles that makes it friendly and intuitive for first-time players to advance the plot. Valve also exercised restraint by placing them only where you need them.
"Imagine never seeing the end of Episode 2 because you couldn't figure out the grenade ramp unless you have to reload a save, which I think for the intention of the game design would be considered a flaw."
here's the thing, do you NEED to solve that puzzle to advance? not really, it's a good puzzle but if you don't solve, only thing you lose on is getting a rocket launcher early. I couldn't solve it the first time, second time I solved it abnormally (literally climbed on the ramp until I got to the top), but by the third time I finally figured it out and it felt immensely satisfying. HL2 is good if you're a first time player, but if you're a veteran its hand holding feels so tight at times it feels like getting chocked.
I feel while HL2 those the crates better than most games, it still could've done them better because you have to put them strategically and to really think through your design. Not overdo it like HL2, but not go the HDTF route (although that's already bottom of the barrel since HDTF is peak incompetency).
I dunno, i finished black mesa on max difficulty and i never really had any ammo problems. The game has all the ammo you need scattered around.
Again, i don't see the purpose of this video. Half Life is not some sort of quasi-survival shooter where each single bullet counts, it's a game where you unload magazine after magazine into enemies while strafing around at breackneck speed.
I am not saying that it has no flaws, i'm just saying that this is not one of them. Bioshock, Prey and Metro put much more emphasis on ammo scarcity. Hell, on harder difficulties even Fallout has you truly saving bullets, especially because ammo has to come out of your wallet. And the same goes for STALKER. You really don't want to waste expensive PAB-9 9x39mm bullets on random lowly bandits, you wanna save them for difficult encounters, and you can't even hold that many of them because of their weight.
Honestly, half life is not the right game to talk about ammo management. It is not it's focus.
Being very stingy and conserving ammo, finishing game with dozens of melee kills and half of your arsenal capped.
That is the way of a me.
Lmao, I never even realised there was backpack reloading
I really like this deep dive into ammo management. It was one of the defining features of Half Life, which came out in an era where magazines were often just ignored in game play. For example Doom's pistol could be fired continuously until all your ammo was depleted. An interesting thing that some people bring up is that HL: Alyx has a "one in the chamber" mechanic as a welcome debut in the franchise.
I am someone who was a broke teenager when Half Life came out so I played through a day one demo dozens of times until I got the Platinum Pack for Christmas. The release version didn't have it, but these early demos actually HAD a "one in the chamber" mechanic that I lamented the removal of upon playing the full game. Noticing this change and the stark contrast with shooters before HL lead me to wonder when games would implement tracking the contents of each magazine. Something that Alyx does, albeit in a streamlined and simplified way. A feature I'd been waiting 20 years for finally come to fruition.
I actually never had ammo problem in hl1, I just use the *_GLOCK_* on hl1 for everything, human, aliens, some weird dogs, helicopter, tanks, you name it.
Well, except for the last level since there's no more soldiers to drop bullets
4:12 '''if i need to refil i either have to dran the mag entirely or swap to my crowbẪ₳r''
That sounds like matpat 😂
8:18 no love for reloading during a battle? Ocelot would not approve.
I usually just put "sk_auto_reload_time 120000" into the console and be done with it.
Because one thing I love in old-school shooters after a good gunfight is the downtime reloading the arsenal ready for the next encounter.
12:32 “a double barrel blaster tube”
Where’s the second barrel? ( the what looks like a second barrel under the one that fires is not another barrel it’s what the pump slides across and what’s stores the shells ready to be loaded for the next shot).
Moron
Why?
It's how it works in-game.
Ye stood point
Idiot
I somehow have never noticed the backpack reloading
Inb4 someone counts all the Half Life puns in this video
I have played through Half life 1 like 3 times and never noticed that the pistol and mp5 use the same ammo. I also played through Half Life 2 like 5 times and never noticed that the gun I pull out of my pocket always has a full clip, even when I didn't reload it before I stash it away.(which rarely happens, I reload way too often even when I don't really need to during combat)
This challenge seems so easy that it perfectly proves Their point lmao
Their*
@@rileyfreeman4606 literally nobody cares
@@rileyfreeman4606 My bad, completely forgot have fixed it now
@@ferret7508 Many people do (myself included) and I'm glad they corrected me
I really loved the ammo eco on Quake 4
You had a infinite ammo pistol, but it was a peashooter
and alot of the enemies were fairly tanky, with explosive, and high damage ammo being rare. there were many scenarios were i only had a mag or two of nailgun and then my explosives for close range combat (which if you didn't know, explosives in close range arent good, and the nailgun did splash damage)
I had no idea backpack reloading was a feature in half life 2.
I always struggled in Ravenholm when playing on Hard, wonder if backpack reloading trivialises this?
I haven't watched your videos in a while, not since you announced you were moving away from Payday forever ago. RUclips randomly autoplayed this video while I was listening to other things and I gotta say, you absolutely have a voice for this sort of thing in general.
It's kinda funny since I tied your voice to Payday 2 so heavily my brain kept expecting you to bring up something Payday related, lol. But really, I'll watch more of your newer content now after accidentally stumbling onto this video.
Me: shoots 3 bullets
My brain: you gotta reload
Me: why I only shot 3 that's just wasting a mag
My brain: you gotta
You are the brain. You are talking to yourself
@@yooo1940 bruh it's a joke stop taking life so seriously
Half Life Alyx players: *sike*
I wouldve gone further, reloading using ONLY backpack reloads, no static reload animations from running out of ammo ever, and forced myself to only use any ammo crate ONCE
I liked that for once in a game the Resistance were actually well stockpiled to fight a war, rather than being a situation where you get like 3 bullets from a supply cache or something.
The gravity really is underutilized in HL2. I often found myself far away from any objects worth chucking at enemies
This feature can be worked around with 'SK_auto_reload_time X' where X is a big number. Not exactly a toggle option in a menu, and it will eventually time out, but it can be done.
Also never had ammo problems in half life 1 playing on hard, but I've been playing it once a year since 2005 so I'm probably not representative.
in highway 17 the infinite ammo box on the car felt like a lot of pressure to exclusively use the SMG, and the main reason I stopped at every building was just from a desire for exploration
To prove this is stupid, I'm going to play through EVERY shooter I own without pressing reload.
good luck bud
dont forgot enter the gungeon *chuckles*
holy shit he actually did it
HES ACTUALLY DOING IT THE MADMAN
I figure this is going to be pretty damn easy xD
rebel #87: "Reload Dr. Freeman"
Connor Shaw: "absolutely not"
subscribed right after the end, very good writing, pacing, narration and editing. Keep the good work!
After discovering accelerated back hopping, I haven't used the jeep in years!
This video: HL1 ammo management good, HL2 free ammo
Me: Spamming my 12,000 mags of pistol and smg ammo, army's worth of grenades and 500+ rockets in HL1
Always running out of bullets even when headshotting enemies with near perfect accuracy in HL2
Fantastic video! I didn't even noticed the reload backpack glitch and I've been playing HL2 far to long.
This challenge reminds me a year ago where I've decided to beat Half-life 1 with only the crowbar and explosives (no bullets, lazer weapons, or alien weapons). It was difficult on easy lots of retries, but it was beatable (The videos are up in my channel for proof, it maybe boring for the first 2 parts but the editing and commentary gets better on later parts).
Someday I'll come back a do the same challenge on medium and hard.
I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise that "More weapons is automatically better". I'm my opinion, HL1 has _way_ to many weapons and too many of which are practically useless. The tripmine for example is a weapon you'll probably never end up using.
Compare this with HL2, where instead of giving tones of weapons they instead go for an arsenal of specific weapons that are tailor-suited for different roles. It makes for a much more cohesive combat experience.
Also, as others have said, you get absolutely loaded down with ammo in HL1. You're practically drowning in SMG bullets, shotgun shells, and grenades. HL2's more restrictive ammo reserve means you have plan more and think more tactically towards combat encounters.
1000% agree.
Half Life 1 is "more is better" design where every single situation has a weapon for it no matter how niche. Grenades, Snarks, Tripmines and Satchel Charges could easily have been cut down into 1-2 weapons and the game would've barely changed. The SMG dominates most situations, the shotgun is infamously underwhelming, the pistol is close to worthless after you find the SMG, etc.
Half Life 2 on the other hand was *EXTREMELY* harsh with its weapons in the development process. Every single weapon needs to (and does) have an important role in the combat and there's no such thing as a useless weapon in the game, at *most* there's weapons like the antlion bait that are mostly used for one specific segment of the game. There were even weapons like the web mine launcher that were pretty complicated to design and were essentially done, but were axed because they'd bloat the arsenal.
It strikes what might be the best balance in FPS history between allowing you to use what weapons you prefer, while still heavily incentivising weapon switchups. Obviously, there is still room for improvement, but it's still largely unrivalled.
I'm reading these comments and I'm actually really surprised by how many people are saying they never noticed the backpack reload feature. I'm not even a super attentive person and I noticed this almost as soon as the game first gives you a gun.
I've never really heard of this, so if someone told me, I'd think it's more like a special knowledge kinda thing. And with the infinite crates, they really only put them where you need them and people who continuously use them after their area aren't playing the game how any person reasonably would the first time. While yes, playing multiple times does trivialize the mechanics, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Speedrunning is built on trivializing a game as much as possible and it's a reasonably sized community for nearly every big game.
I didn't even know guns reloaded when you swapped to another gun, I always just reloaded.
I’ve been watching for like a week and didn’t realize I wasn’t subscribed, so here, take one, it’s the least I can do
14:54
can we stop and appreciate that sick 360?
My favorite way to play half life 2 today is cinematic mod (without their NPCs models) with Mmod and auto reload time set to 9999 seconds. When I found out it existed it honestly felt disgusting.
Now I wonder if there's a mod that removes the ammo crate.
I honestly didn't even know about the passive reloading before watching this video
i uh, never noticed half-life 2 had backpack reloading
and i've been playing it since 2005
Half-life 2 is a great experience the first time playing, because you’re so distracted by the immersion and new gimmicks the game is always throwing at you that you don’t really notice the ammo economy. I do think the game is a bit too easy and mods like MMod really help at making the combine more dangerous. As for the gravity gun I think the game encourages you to use it plenty of times - at the end of the day it’s usually quicker to just mow enemies down with a regular gun. The gravity gun can be kind of slow to use as it doesn’t always kill the enemy on the first hit and looking for an aiming with a prop can feel a little awkward and clunky.
One ironic thing about half life 2’s ammo economy is that enemies drop magazines based on how much health they had, meaning you actually get less ammo on easier difficulties.
Half Life was a game of a different time.
Old PC games forced you to use “ammo management” in order to proceed to the next level.
It was around the time of the first Metal Gear Solid that we started to see games that didn’t want you to get frustrated and quit.
Instead the games give you unlimited lives, unlimited ammo and plenty of health so you are enticed to continue forward.
Halo and Crysis introduced recharging health and recharging shields.
Call of Duty games introduced recharging health where avoiding damage allows you to get your life back before the screen goes dark.
Half-life 2 does not want you to become frustrated with the puzzles or obviously having enough ammo to deal with enemies.
It's funny, talking about Highway 17. I never did notice the infinite ammo supply at all, but yet I STILL didn't ever stop at those pitstops. No reason. Most of my weapons were passively full anyways.
Thank you so much for teaching me how to disable backpack reloading in this game, I had no clue that was a thing until now. Maybe whenever I play this game again it'll be even more challenging than it already isn't. Which will make it more fun!
hl1 has a bee gun with regenerating bees
I know it's called the hive hand
Feels like something like this should me more common, warframe has mods to do that for you, but imagine if a vr game let you swap pistol instead of reloading and also making akimbo unusably inaccurate and recoily to prevent actual dual weilding strats.
This is how I used to play EVERY game, never reload manually, because the spare ammo count not being a multiple of the weapon's clip count would always trigger my OCD.
Luckily I broke that habit.
Oh, and for the record, this is the first ever time of mine hearing about backpack reloading...So that's...yeah.
Most people didn't even notice this feature existed the first time through.
That means the feature was a success.
I feel like there is a lack of understanding on how linear corridor shooters are supposed to work. You are not supposed to run out of ammo in a linear shooter because that present a potential soft-locking issue that can only be resolved by reloading an earlier save or abandoning the run. Haft-life 1 knows this so it is designed in a way so that for every encounter there would be an equivalent abundance of ammo cache placed near it. You would need to go out of your way and deliberately waste ammo for there to be a risk of running out of ammunition. In haft-life 2 with ammo boxes and item_dynamic_resupply, Valve made it so that even if you deliberately waste ammo there would still be an unlimited pool to draw from thus removing the potential soft-lock entirely. The difference between hl1 and hl2 really is the matter of appearances, in haft-life 1 there is an impression that you can run out of ammo because there is a finite amount even though you are given far more than you will ever need, in haft-life 2 with unlimited ammo it appears like ammo is a non-issue even though you will come out of the encounter with roughly the same amount as before. It feels like people are imbuing mythical qualities to haft-life 1 in order to settle their gripes with haft-life 2 rather than it being remarkably worse than how haft-life 1 handled things.
Personally I found this making the combat more fast paced which doesn't bother me.
However you never mentioned the fact that in Half-life we could hold a ridiculous amount of ammo compared to Half-life 2 that were incredibly nerfed.
Revolver: 30 > 12
Shotgun: 120 > 30
Crossbow: 50 > 10
Smg grenades: 10 > 3
You hadn't to make a math at all or even any ammo conservation.
However I have to agree with the infinite ammo crates at some point but for some sequences like the grenades or the rockets that were required in order to advance are justified to not statying stuck in those sequences because of getting out of required ammo.
The hopper mines will let go of the ground before they hop, giving you time to instantly grab them. I think.
I personally hold RMB walking right into them, so there's no delay at all.
What's funny the game doesn't check if a hopper was triggered so if you unpress RMB it deactivates the hopper and makes it friendly.
Okay so I had not finished watching the video before I typed this, but i find it hilarious we both came to the same conclusions lmao. --- Maybe the ammo economy was intended to be as it is in Half Life 2. Half Life 2 was was more story based, and a vehicle to display the physics engine. Half Life 1 had a more conservative AMMO economy to better display the brand new form of gameplay, along with a new way to tell a story. Two tools for two jobs. Also, take into account the benefits of practically infinite ammo, versus putting difficulty curves in place in the form of amm scarcity.
the whole auto reload thing can actually be changed with the console.
if you use "sk_auto_reload_time (time here)" in the console, it can change the amount of time it takes for a gun to reload itself while unequipped.
just a bit of information out there.
Guess you didn’t watch to 21:58
On top of that, civil protection (and I think soldiers as well) are programmed to drop enough ammo for the weapon they carry to kill two of them.
i never even knew there was backpack reloading
Personally, i like to give the half life 1 experience in hl2 is never use the infin caches unless absolultly necessary(including the one on the back of the car, Used only if during main fights if you are completely out of rpg ammo) it makes the game exceedingly ammo strict if you are not careful, ammo can only be aquired from enemies and labada caches. To me it makes it worthwhile to keep stocked and think about how to engage... just how i play on occasion, its fun
I believe HL2 focused more on the gravity gun and I think this may have been done to make weapons too redundant as to add to another reason for why you should use the gravity gun.
I still remember the day (very clearly), waiting patiently for Steam to UNLOCK Half-life 2 on launch day. Seems like yesturday!
Tau gun? Weak? Tap the charge button and it one-shots *every* enemy on the coast.
Ammo management problems in HL1 are nearly nonexistent. Just use the shotgun for the most part, which will be able to kill most enemies in a few hits. If you're low on shotgun shells, switch to the MP5 or hell, even the revolver and switch back once you've got more shells. I've done so many runs of this game and not once have I found ammo to be a problem. In fact, I think the entire situation with ammo management problems is the reverse in this case. HL1 has an absurd amount of ammo scattered around (btw, you get to have 10 mp5 grenade shells, which is a fuck ton and more than you'll ever need, and it gets restocked so quickly without even looking for it). You're a complete powerhouse with the revolver having 36 ammo in the reserves.
HL2 on the other hand has a ton of ammo problems, a ton of things have been nerfed. Revolver has 12 reserve ammo, you only get 3 grenade shells for the mp5, and you have less reserve ammo in general. Not to mention, you have less weapons in your arsenal than you had in HL1. You're bound to run into problems especially in the street wars chapters.
I've never had any ammo problems on any of the Half Life games. Except maybe Alyx, but only with the shotty. I always had ammo for the SMG and Pistol in Alyx, but i consistently ran out of shotgun shells.
Yo, I used to watch your payday videos and I come back to find a cool ass video. Nice.
I actually sort of always knew about this in the back of my mind but never considered it. I always pondered over why infinite ammo crates existed in some areas, like on the bridge. Why were there tons of rockets right next to combine soldiers that I could just blow to hell. I never thought of it as a problem but now that you mention it I see it. I feel it would be a lot more interesting if during the bridge segment when the gunship activates, you have to make your way across the entire bridge with not enough rocket ammo to kill it. Once you get to the end, it blows up some gas pipe which breaks down a wall revealing a cache of infinite rockets, albeit in the open and no where near cover.
I don't think I ever realised those chests were infinite reload. I only ever took as much as there were visible ammo clips for which made the game much harder...
I'm glad I played half life 2 directly after beating half life 1 (i just bought them), because I only found out the crates were infinite in nova prospect, and it made the game so much better when i had to conserve. I also only found out about the backpack reloading during episode 1.
I played through the game like 6 times on various difficulties and I thought this was a bug that sometimes happens
Plus I don't think it detracts from the arsenal because all of it (except the pistol) is quite satisfying