So what when and how was you guys first experience with HL2?

[Richter The Dude]

I just wanna hear you guys opinions

[GokuGod]

2005, tried to play it on a office pc, it didnt worked but i remember donwloadding the torrent with a throotled connection for around 10 days.
i finally played it properly in 2021 with a modern pc, i liked it but it felt really old, my most memorable part of the game was killing the ant lion warrior at nova prospect and escaping through a hole in the wall into a section of combine wall advancing and eating the human buildings during real life sunrise with no sounds from the world. some low doses of psychedelics made that part of the game one of my most remembered gaming experiences... the alyx sequence after that was such a bad way of culminating that athmosferic escape of the prision.

The level designers made some excelent pieces from time to time

[Cat]

What's with all these new threads all of a sudden.

[Eevee Trainer]

just got its 20th anniversery update along with making it free for the weekend

[Syad]

Originally posted by Cat:

What's with all these new threads all of a sudden.

33k people in game. 🤣 Crazy, the power of FREE, and i guess HL2 being a good and a symbolic game doesn't hurt either.

[Beast Bottaro™]

I knew about it since 2016 but it didn't caught my attention, as I was busy playing GTA V, Minecraft and doing other things at the time. Later on in 2018 after trying CS: Source I decided I NEEDED to play Half-Life 2 solely for the graphics and physics displayed in the Source engine, everything was mindblowing for a game from 2004 (my only point of comparison was GTA San Andreas and it blew the hell out my expectation's house), and it just captivated me.
After playing it through for the first time I knew it was something extremely special, everything about it was perfect, the characters, the physics, the graphics, the gameplay, the story, lore, just the entire thing was amazing for something shipped in 2004 and the experience I had playing it changed my perspective on videogames.
Of course I didn't got right away everything at once, I was pretty confused about the plot and how it was supposed to follow up the first game apart from Barney and Dr. Kleiner being the only characters I could make a connection at the moment, but everything else was pretty fuzzy, and so I replayed it, one time, another, again, and again, and again...
The first time is unforgetable, and even if I was confused about what was happening plot-wise I still had an absolute blast playing it, but after learning about the story, the lore, the Combine, Freeman's role in the Resistance, G-Man, OH G-MAN (for me the best mysterious and cryptic character in videogame history), it's development history, and overall impact on videogames I knew it was something I would never forget.
The Half-Life franchise is one that marked me in a way I can't even describe, even with it's flaws, like the lack of continuation and cursed limbo status, it obviously isn't completely perfect in any sense objectively, but it is for me, the best video game franchise to ever exist in the history of FPS games, hell, even in videogames as a whole, it's just that special to me.

[Taehl]

I first played it right after it was released. Steam was awful back then, you had to spend a lot of time waiting for it to verify you owned HL2 before you could actually play... Every single time. And HL2 was the only game that required Steam. And the downloads and updates were super slow. Steam's GUI was a weird olive color back then.

Source engine had some pretty big issues back then. The AI would constantly disable itself. Nodegraphs were always out of date. One of the things nearly everyone encountered constantly was that the game would halt all the time while stuttering the last half-second of audio (for loading, autosaves, building nodegraph, and other reasons). That eventually got patched, but not before the stuttering ascended into meme culture.

Even with all that BS, the game was riveting. I spent a lot of time exploring the canals and highway for secrets. Doom3 released shortly before HL2 did, and everyone had been calling it the scariest game ever, but then HL2 came out and an unassuming little chapter called Ravenholm made them ♥♥♥♥ bricks.

Not too long after that, a guy called Garry made a silly little mod that let you staple things together with the crossbow and attach ropes to stuff. After some explosive growth, Gmod eventually got support for Lua scripting, which ended up being the third programming language I learned (and is still by far my favorite).