An important personal note to the FG guys

[spukrian]

That's kind of odd considering the backstories of Doom and Half-Life are almost exactly the same.

I will not say that Half-Life did not have new things that were introduced to an FPS, but I will say it was not the end-all-be-all, considering games constantly made improvements over it shortly after it. The designer of one of my favorite games, namely Raven Software's Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force, stated Half-Life as an inspiration to make the storyline coherent, but I find there was much more coherency than what Half-Life did.

Well yeah, the stories are very similar. But Half-Life has a different presentation of the story, a different kind of storytelling (although I do agree that it is a bit lacking in some parts). And a totally different atmosphere.

As for improvements... well, the game called Sin, that came out at about the same time as Half-Life, had just about everything that Half-Life had, but no one remembers it. In my opinion it´s not just about good the story is or how fun it is to play, the game needs to be greater than the sum of it´s parts (oh, and it needs good marketing). In the case of Sin, it was brought down by small details (those killer rats and tedious underwater levels).

Then again, using Half-Life when you want to examine why a certain game is popular is a bad idea, since Half-Life is one of those special cases, those "blockbuster" games that are extremely popular even though they´re quite simple and old (Diablo 2 is another example).