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Comment by teroshan | Hacker News Reader

The bleakness of both Half Life 2 and Dishonored's really resonated with me. I can't overstate how much I appreciated both of these games, and in no small part thanks to the art direction.

This is really sad news, but it's amazing how much of a profound impact he left on so many players, and without a doubt on so many past, current, and future artists.

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>The bleakness of both Half Life 2

Its just Eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s.

Not long ago I had to visit this town in Slovakia, and immediately upon arrival I thought “damn this is City 17”. Fun place though. No striders or anything.

Which town?

Watch Viktor talk about Austerlitz station he used as inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4

Imagine a hl2 theme park

Or almost all of the former USSR up to this day, excluding a few cities here and there. The place I'm living in basically hasn't changed in the last 30-40 years.

might be preferable to modern Los Angeles ?

Different beasts. Eastern Europe was impoverished, the malaise that is hurting the US cities is disorder.

A lot of American urban neighbourhoods are quite impoverished too though. Probably more so than eastern Europe was, for the terrible Soviet architecture was functional, cheap and ugly but not necessarily bad. And eastern Europe didn't have the large divide between rich and poor that the US has.

We had the divide between the nomenklatura and the rest, instead.

For this setting, there is even more depressive game - Belong Nowhere[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P4-4nK4RR0

The Half-Life Wiki has a list of candidate cities that more or less capture this: https://breezewiki.com/half-life/wiki/City_17#Background_and...

And in the 2020s too.

> The bleakness of both Half Life 2 and Dishonored's really resonated with me.

You'll really resonate with Remedy's Control and the Metro series if you haven't already played them.

With Half-Life and Dishonored, the bleakness always felt somewhat self-contained. Which those games can't really do anything about because they have levels and they're linear. Metro gets to escape that because the entire game is bleak.

I don't think any game has made me feel more like "this really is a forsaken desolate place" like Velen in The Witcher 3.

If you're looking for more of that type of experience, you should try dark souls.

I've done SL1 runs in all three, but yes those are also great examples! They very aptly pull of that whole "lost in the seas of time" vibe, with hollowification and all the bits of lore attached to random NPCs, items and locations, plus the subsurface cross-game references.

Sometimes I'd just hang out in either Firelink Shrine or Majula just for the music. And Majula's daily twilight moments are beautiful.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane haha!

I never got into control, the weirdness supernatural stuff was too much for me. I dropped it after the first hour.

The metro games are amazing though. Especially awakening in VR.

“The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.” -G-man

Thanks for making all the difference, Viktor.

Aww man I wasn’t gonna cry but you got me tearin up now.

I remember quitting HL2 at times because "man this is depressing".

A lot of it is quite beautiful.

Yeah I especially liked the section along the coast. Beautiful, but hauntingly beautiful for a lot of it.

I never noticed on my own that the sea level at the coasts is visibly much lower than it should be, because the Combine have been stealing the water.

Such an interesting detail and I totally missed it!

My favorite spot is the final area of Water Hazard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJpGHDZSSt4

I love how each area has the color of the sky change to simulate the passage of time getting closer to sunset as you progress.

You clearly didn't reach Ravenholm because throwing the saws into zombies never been that fun.

Somewhat related: That Creepy Feeling - What is it with Source games? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=03yL_JCeQBI

Well it seems I played almost all of his games recently. I have an Half Life 2 game in progress and finished Dishonored for the 4th time last december.

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