SET PIECE 6-1: Sho-cart

The introduction of the drivable track cart could be considered through content; certainly most of the time spent on the cart in chapter 8 is just that. Its introduction, however, is a self-contained section with a clear beginning and end, and it definitely lasts long enough to be a set piece. It doesn’t fit with any other theme, but I think the designers did a good job finishing this set piece with a bang.

None of the enemies along the length of the track are a real threat, because their ability to target Freeman while he moves at cart-speed is limited. Because the area around the track is wide open, however, it’s easy enough to fire at and kill them, however. The memorable thing about this set piece is that it does have a clear end—when Freeman is catapulted into the air at the end, and flies a hundred feet onto a distant platform. This is obviously self-contained, it definitely qualifies as extended content.

SET PIECE 6-2: Tentacles

This odd boss encounter plays with numerous videogame conventions, especially those found in the boss fights of Quake and Quake 2. The encounter is clearly a boss fight, but the player cannot directly attack the enemy. There are encounters in Quake like this, in the sense that some bosses were effectively immune to gunfire, but nothing in Quake ever approached the level of elaborateness (or made the player so vulnerable) as this encounter. At best, the Quake encounters of this type simply forced the player to solve a very small puzzle, whereas this boss fight manages to involve the exploration of an entire level. The player has to pass through the chamber housing the tentacles at least three times, although only the first pass is really interesting. The tentacles attack loud sounds, meaning that regular running and jumping is extremely dangerous. This would make only for a moderate challenge, as there is a sneak function and it works here, but the designers throw in a clever problem to solve. An exit and a ladder are blocked by destructible crates.

This forces the player to take a risk, which is always good. It also demonstrates the finer points of the noise-seeking mechanic to the player, showing them exactly how to use the grenades to distract the beast. Killing the creature is an unremarkable event that involves merely pressing a button—but sneaking past it is an elegantly designed task. My only real complaint with the sneaking is that it can take a long time because it’s not clear what level of noise is dangerous, and the passage by the creature has to be repeated one time too many. The first two times through are good for building tension, but too much repetition just becomes frustrating. If the player overlooks some part of the puzzles beyond, or gets lost, this hurdle becomes annoying in a way that doesn’t add anything to the game.

SET PIECE 7-4: Gargantua

This fight is similar to the encounter with the tentacles, in that the player has to pass by it several times before defeating the boss, and that the player has to defeat the enemy through means other than a weapon. Like the tentacles, the Gargantua demonstrates its abilities on NPCs.

After reactivating the generator, the player has to cross this room again and race the Gargantua to the electrical nodes. This already presents a huge problem. How does the player know where to go, and if they explored the back room where the power nodes are, how are they supposed to get back out after being trapped by the pursuing Gargantua? The footrace itself is exciting and a nice break from the slow progression through cover-based content. The destination is the problem.

There’s no lighting or decals visible from this angle to tell the player where to go. Highlighting the path, even subtly, wouldn’t have broken the tension here. The switch that the player is supposed to reach isn’t especially clear, either. Moving slowly, a player should figure out that the walkway leads to a switch, but players are going to be panicking here, and might miss it the first two times. This is a low-skill boss fight, and after two or three deaths, unsuccesful players will realize they’re just missing something that’s supposed to be obvious. The thrill of a fight like this should be in nailing it the first or second time, while the feeling of fear is still palpable, and not after the player has become bored with trying to find a switch.

SET PIECE 12-12: Charge of the Vortigaunts

This set piece is a fantastic example of the "reward-by-fun" principle. Chapter 12 is full of difficult set pieces, but the purpose of this one is to give the player something mindlessly fun to do after trudging through the brutal encounters that precede it. The setup is simple: there's a floor-mounted rifle with infinite ammo pointing up a ramp full of Vortigaunts.

After the initial wave, the Vortigaunts teleport in one or two at a time, making it easy to target them one by one. Really, this is like a carnival shooting gallery. The point is not for this to be hard, but to relieve some of the tension that has been building through all of the intense (and deadly) set pieces that surround this one.

SET PIECE 12-14: Marked for Death

This set piece, although it doesn't fit into any particular theme, is one of Half-Life's most idiosyncratic moments. There are some curious design decisions here from the perspective of overall game difficulty. The set piece begins with a chase similar to the one in set piece 7-4; a Gargantua pursues Freeman to a device that allows him to kill it. The first strange thing is that this chase is actually a lot easier than its obvious ancestor. The Gargantua will become sidetracked by various enemy soldiers and obstructing cars. The set piece gets interesting once Freeman makes it to the artillery station at the end.

The interface for controlling the artillery is easy to use and the splash radius of its impact make it powerful (and fun). So what's the point of this set piece? Where's the challenge? The challenge is not the point. Chapter 12, since it is sufficiently hard already, doesn't require a grand challenge at the end. This is another example of reward-by-fun. I find it a little unusual that there are two such set pieces so close together. I will say, however, that chapter 12 of Half-Life is one of the most densely-packed levels in any game that I have ever played, and so I suppose its insistence on breaking the tension with puzzles and other unusual content makes sense.

SET PIECE 17-2: Second-Hand Violence

This set piece recalls both set piece 12-14 and 7-4, in that Freeman has to flee from a chasing Gargantua. Like many things in the Xen portion of the game, it's poorly done as compared to what came before. The chase itself is rather short, and quite abrupt.

In addition to being short, the goal of the chase is nebulous. First-time players are going to have no idea what they're supposed to do out in the environment seen above. The essential idea is the same as in both of the previous set pieces; the player has to use the environment to kill the Gargantua. But how is the player supposed to figure out that it's the tentacles that are the mechanism for killing it? How are they supposed to figure out a good place to stand? Set piece 7-4 had a similar problem, in that it wasn't obvious that the generator was the mechanism for killing the Gargantua. Even there, however, there was only one button to press, and there wasn't a large empty space to confuse the player. And finally, shooting the tentacles to kill the creature takes an unnecessarily long and boring time. Confusion can be useful in game design, but only sparingly, and not like this. Boredom is to be avoided.

Selected Through Content

What happens in between set pieces? Half-Life is not a series of set pieces lined up one after another with no breaks; often there are significant amounts of content in between set pieces which do not possess the defining properties of a set piece. I call these portions of the game through content. To understand what through content is and how it works, we're going to glance back at the history of videogame design for a moment. As game design history moved from the composite era into the set piece era, and the set piece replaced the challenge, designers began to need something to replace composite flow. Instead of bouncing back and forth between genres to keep up a good "rhythm" for the game and keep players interested without over-taxing them, the designers of set piece games needed to do something else. Generally this meant that set piece games returned to the up-and-down motion along the axis of obstacles we originally saw in the arcade era. There are some differences between what we see in the arcade and set piece eras, however. The through content portions of Half-Life and later set piece games tend to have a much shallower difficulty curve relative to the steadily increasing difficulty one would expect from sequential challenges in a videogame.

There is more to through content than just a low level of difficulty. Through content is also essentially the opposite of everything that defines a set piece. Through content is usually made up of brief actions; even if there are multiple tasks made up of through content between set pieces, they tend to be varied qualitatively rather than quantitatively. That is, the player may have to perform three different tasks between set pieces, but all three will be of roughly equal difficulty and each will be a different kinds of task. For example, in between set pieces 7-2 and 7-3, there is a generator puzzle with a few different kinds of enemies mixed in.

Although the player has to face several types of enemies and solve a puzzle, the difficulty in each of these rooms never really grows. (Interestingly, the Houndeye enemy seen here is almost exclusively used in through content. This seems to indicate that the set piece/through content model of gameplay might be a natural property of games made the way Half-Life was made.) With this in mind, we can set out three guidelines for through content as it appears in Half-Life.

1. Through content exists at a fraction of the difficulty of the set pieces it punctuates. As set pieces get harder, the through content gets harder as well, but its difficulty does not scale with nearby set pieces. Its level of difficulty is in place to break tension, not add to or reiterate it.
2. Through content does not scale in length with the set pieces it punctuates. The longest set pieces are not broken up by the longest through content. If anything, the reverse seems to be true.
3. Although through content may consist of many small tasks between set pieces, each of those tasks is short and tends to be qualitatively varied.

We're going to take a look at how Half-Life uses through content in certain spots in the game. This won't cover every single example of through content in the game, but the best examples contain real lessons, and we'll see what they can teach us about game design.

Moving Up and Down

The Right Monster for the Job

One of the observations that most clearly supports the set piece/through content division is that there are enemies which almost exclusively appear in small, short challenges. It would be a tautology to say that through content monsters appear only in through content, but I think the evidence in Half-Life speaks for itself in this regard. The Houndeye and Headcrab zombie rarely appear except in the shortest encounters. With a few exceptions, zombies come in groups of one or two. They move slowly and, except when they have the element of surprise, rarely present much of a threat.

If the designers are looking for a task which can punctuate set pieces to relieve tension or simply alter the pace of a level, zombies are perfect for that.

What is true of the Zombie is largely true of the Houndeye as well, although there are some significant differences between the two types of enemies. The Houndeye is less durable than the Headcrab zombie, but it also tends to come in packs and is much faster than the zombie. The speed and numbers mean that the Houndeye might actually damage players who are paying attention. Even on the hardest difficulty setting, however, they don’t inflict that much damage when they do strike. Instead, we see Houndeyes appearing in spots that might otherwise have been just a little too boring. Unremarkable corridors and catwalks which wouldn’t be appropriate for a full set piece are the habitat of the Houndeye.

Like the zombie, the Houndeye largely disappears at the climax of the cover theme.

Almost, But Not Quite

The presence of Houndeyes or Zombies frequently means that the designers planned a section as through content, but the presence of enemies like marines or Vortigaunts does not necessarily mean that a bit of content is a set piece. The primary criterion for a set piece, especially in Half-Life, is the “extended” aspect of content. Speed-runners may be able to blow through a set piece in a few seconds, but otherwise it tends to take around a minute or more (to say nothing of deaths and re-attempts) to get through a set piece. The appearance of the more challenging enemies does not, by itself, create an extended content situation; the context has to be right, too. Thus, there are many examples of a few enemies arranged to be dispatched quickly. The best example of this is the scattered marines at the end of chapter 8.

Want to read more? The rest of this section can be found in the print and eBook versions. In fact, the print version of this book has been significantly expanded and revised.

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