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Half Life Research Paper

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Half Life, everybody loves Half Life right? One of the most successful games in history, it’s been given countless awards in the time since it’s release. With people to this day still developing Half Life mods you’d expect them to have built upon the original to try to improve its quality. Some, like Black Mesa have, others, like Sven Co-op have most certainly not. Now don’t get me wrong, it has nothing bad about it in principle, the idea was to add multiplayer missions to Half Life and allow players to combine their strength against bots. On paper the idea of multiplayer Half Life sounds amazing, however all things come at a cost, and this mod paid that cost dearly. In terms of its original function Sven co-op serves its purpose fine, with players all on …show more content…

I found the AI had much higher numbers than the players on every server, reaching upwards of 300 enemies in 10 minutes on some. The servers actually had at most 32 or so players but that many can cause a lot of damage. So much havoc was caused in fact, that the players could lag the server to a halt. Unfortunately for the game this took very little to manage, because when such a large group of people are all causing explosions and banging on walls, or all trying to fit down one passageway while trying to hit each other with crowbars. So the servers lag out too easily, of course, I imagine a lot of games would have this problem if the players could run amok too. However part of the blame for this rests with Half Life, its engine wasn’t built to support 32 living players working together and heavy instances of AI beside them. There were other errors and problems that aren’t the fault of Valve, like the fact that there was no way to mute players spamming the voice and text chat (and boy did they), or that the guns either did virtually no damage to enemies or would one shot them every

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