Constantly Ive been poking through the forums and it seems that everybody is split up between Half-Life having a cover system. Now is the time to decide. Yes or No. Simple. I say no. What do you think?

BY COVER SYSTEM I MEAN, A BUTTON YOU HIT TO EITHER LEAN AGAINST A WALL OR STICK TO ONE. LIKE IN GEARS OF WAR OR DRAKES UNCHARTED.

No. When I think of a cover system, I think of a more tactical shooter like Gears of War or Rainbow Six. Half-Life's just not that type of game.

I say yes, because its dumb to be strafing left and right behind a wall and having to completely expose yourself in order to fire at enemeis or return fire.

I say no. Unless Valve really want to put it in. I have complete faith in them.

I voted no, but as far as I'm concerned, HL2 had a cover system; the crouch button. Okay, a 'look round corners' button might be kinda useful, but I managed without (and I suck at all FPSs).

no, it seems that most peple these days cant stand taking a little damage to get the job done, no pain no gain.

No...because that would conflict with the fundamental rule in Half-Life.

Gaming Bible, The Gospel of Gordon, 14:3 > "Thou shalt never play Half-Life in third person view."

Cover systems, for people too stupid to crouch...

I've never understood what's wrong with the old run-crouch-lean system beloved of SWAT, CoD, Rainbow six etc. Surely if you put a bulletproof wall somewhere people will hide behind it.

A blind fire system (where you hold the gun above your head or out to the side to fire, but remain in first person so you can't see what your aiming at) would be good in a fps. It would allow you to return fire without getting some strange disembodied God eye but also without exposing your self completely. It also gives the other guy a better chance of surviving an unbalanced situation.
In Half life even that is probably probably too much, but it would a nice thing to see in multiplayer games like CSS or battlefield.

But having to press a button to use an arbitrarily decided piece of cover always strikes me as odd.

No, no, no. We already have a hundred different games with cover systems and we don't need the next Half-Life to be another me-too bandwagon jumper. Introducing a cover system would remove a lot of the intensity of the action and slow the game down far too much. Why some people don't understand this boggles my mind.

no, save it for 3rd person shooters and the likes

TheNecroswanson:

shadow skill:
I say yes, because its dumb to be strafing left and right behind a wall and having to completely expose yourself in order to fire at enemeis or return fire.

You hated Goldeneye and Perfect Dark than?

I say No. half-Life is a barebones shooter when it comes to the action. It does everything right to make the game challenging. Hell, when you go with a cover system it makes the game ten times easier. I hate cover systems.

Uhh no because those were some of the first shooters to ever come out. Cover mechanics have been done in first person before and they work quite well. Even in a game designed to be played using an over the sholder camera (GRAW 2.) The real kicker is that you wouldn't even need to use it if you did not want to.

As far as slowing down the action that's just bull, if that was true then every time you decided to strafe behind a wall you would be slowing down the game, of course you probably can't even get through the game without doing that since standing out in the open is just bound to get you killed.

These arguments against the whole idea sound alot like the complaints about the nano suit in Crysis, all the suit powers did was give the player multiple ways of tackling a problem. This is of course a good thing and adds more depth to the game overall.

Fix-the-spade do you not realize that all cover systems are just a way of collapsing the lean keys in some fps' onto one key?

What the hell do you think that holding items up with the gravity gun to absorb fire is, if not cover?

Half life already has a cover system as long as it has the gravity gun. It doesn't need a bunch of useless cocking up by having you get glued to whatever surface you're slightly near.
Cover systems are useless, QUINTUPLY SO in first person shooters. God, anyone who seriously wants a cover system in an FPS has to get their brain reattached to the fingers they post their crap with.

fix-the-spade:
Cover systems, for people too stupid to crouch...

I've never understood what's wrong with the old run-crouch-lean system beloved of SWAT, CoD, Rainbow six etc. Surely if you put a bulletproof wall somewhere people will hide behind it.

A blind fire system (where you hold the gun above your head or out to the side to fire, but remain in first person so you can't see what your aiming at) would be good in a fps. It would allow you to return fire without getting some strange disembodied God eye but also without exposing your self completely. It also gives the other guy a better chance of surviving an unbalanced situation.
In Half life even that is probably probably too much, but it would a nice thing to see in multiplayer games like CSS or battlefield.

But having to press a button to use an arbitrarily decided piece of cover always strikes me as odd.

My personal opinion is that cover systems allow people to map all those functions to a single button on a gamepad.

Take Stalker for example: sprint, walk, jump, crouch 1, crouch 2(analogous to prone?), lean left, lean right. Add use bandage, weapon mode, iron sights, switch weapon up and down, toggle grenade launcher, inventory, fire, activate, grab and a couple of other things I'm sure I'm forgetting.

That many commands won't fit on a gamepad but if you lump the movement commands in the first list into a single command, they will.

All told, I don't think cover systems are appropriate in first person games because that perspective limits what you can see of your immediate surroundings and the 'wall hump' button inhibits freedom of movement. I much prefer the freeform hiding methods used in most PC FPS games, but for 3rd person or console games they can work pretty well.

Very one sided so far. I saw the title and said no almost automatically. Just no.

100% no! With 32 votes, most impressive, useless poll award?

no, simply no.

thejoblot:
No. When I think of a cover system, I think of a more tactical shooter like Gears of War or Rainbow Six. Half-Life's just not that type of game.

+ 1.

shadow skill:

As far as slowing down the action that's just bull, if that was true then every time you decided to strafe behind a wall you would be slowing down the game, of course you probably can't even get through the game without doing that since standing out in the open is just bound to get you killed.

It's not bull, in every game I've played which uses a cover mechanic there is always a delay when you want to leave cover and move to attack your enemies. Plus the combat would be reduced to automatically jumping towards the nearest piece of cover and using GoW style fixed shooting. Which is slower than ducking behind a crate, jumping up to shoot and then charging the enemy.

You do have to use cover in Half-Life, but it feels freer than being stuck to a wall in Gears. It's not that style of game, and I really don't want to see Gordon backed up against a wall SWAT style. That would just be wierd.

Half-Life isn't that kind of shooter. It isn't a militaristic shooter. Gordon isn't a trained soldier. He's a physicist who happens to have the "badass" gene. Taking cover is for hard-boiled soldiers. Moving around is for unstoppable badasses like Gordon Freeman.

It fits in with the fact that most of Half-Life can be described as "Gordon goes from point A to point B, and kills everything in his path." Half-Life 2? Gordon goes from City 17 to Black Mesa East to the coastal base to Nova Prospect to City 17 to the Citadel. Episode One? Gordon & Alyx start at the Citadel, go in to stop the reactor, then get out of the city. Episode Two? Gordon and Alyx go from outside City 17 to White Forest. In most cases, the only reason you need to kill enemies is so they don't kill you before you reach your destination.

I vote no on the cover system.

propertyofcobra:
What the hell do you think that holding items up with the gravity gun to absorb fire is, if not cover?

Half life already has a cover system as long as it has the gravity gun. It doesn't need a bunch of useless cocking up by having you get glued to whatever surface you're slightly near.
Cover systems are useless, QUINTUPLY SO in first person shooters. God, anyone who seriously wants a cover system in an FPS has to get their brain reattached to the fingers they post their crap with.

Interestingly enough, I just finished playing CoD4. Although it didn't feature a "Gears of War" active cover system, that there is one game where you want to make use of every last little piece of cover you can, if you want to survive, so using cover in an FPS works.

The thing is that, in your first-person perspective, you can already make effective use of whatever cover is available just by moving yourself behind it, so an active cover system would be redundant.

I consider CoD4 to be a benchmark example of how to do cover in an FPS properly - have a lot of it about, for the player to make use of, but leave it at that.

So an Mit ttrained scientest wouldn't think of lowering his profile so a not to get killed?

Gears of War is not the first nor is it the only game to use a cover system and even if it was it hardly means that the mechanic would have to be implemented in the same way by different people.

Propertyofcobra you screaming lodly and calling people who disagree with your ridiculous assertion does not make you right. If you assertion made sense then no one would have ever decided to make such a system in the first place. Its also nice that you assume you would have to be glued to anything in order for this system to work. Yet you are goin to tell other people to get their brain reattached. Especially since in the end a cover system is really just a way to collapse the lean functionality onto two buttons using some kind of modifier instead of just spamming the keyboard like a moron so you end up having to memorize two more movement modifiers in addtion to the eight movement buttons you normally make use of.

Well, nearly every game I've played so far with a cover mechanic has involved the player being stuck to a wall at some point or another. And I'm not saying that the cover system hasn't worked for other games. It works rather nicely in GoW. But HL2 is a different kind of game. I admit, however, that I haven't played GRAW or Rainbow 6: Vegas because I'm not a fan of realistic gaming.

The main point I'm trying to make here is that Half-Life, as a science-fiction first person shooter, does not need to implement a cover system. Each of the other games I have mentioned are trying to do different things in different genres. If Gordon needs to hide, he can hide. If he needs to duck, he can duck. There is nothing wrong with the combat and I would be disappointed if Valve did decide to implement one into the next Half-Life game.

I don't really mind cover systems in principle, but adding them to Half-Life at this point would be very jarring and ultimately detrimental to the quality of gameplay.

In any case, I certainly don't play/love/worship the Half-Life series for its excellent and deep shooting mechanics, but for its interesting tools (gravity gun, snarks, etc.) and highly immersive experience. I played Half-Life for Alyx, the G-Man, and GLaDOS rather than blindfire or iron sights (though Iron Sights might be an interesting addition).

A good shooter need not require a cover system (i.e. adhesive ass) to be deep, challenging or interesting.

Some other shooters that accomplish this without referring to specialized mechanics include CoD4 (it's less serious than an r6 title) and Crysis (which is closer to Half-Life in the sci-fi/interesting tools sense than nearly any other non-tactical FPS).

Gears of War is not the game you want to reference or emulate when you talk about a cover mechanic; Gears is an example of how to take a perfectly fine system and destroying it. I would also argue that the only difference between a tactical shooter and a "normal" fps is that a tactical shooter ends your life real quick when you stand out in the open. Frankly most if not all of the "tactics" you use in Tactical shooters, you use in a more traditional FPS with added interfaces for such things in the Tactical shooters that make it easier to do the same kinds of things. The premise of Half-Life really has nothing to do with whether a cover mechanic is a good or bad thing. Suggesting that the cover systems in Tactical shooters are a genre related entity is a bit like claiming that Thief was an action game rather than a stealth game like Tenchu or Splinter Cell because you could not flatten yourself against a wall in Thief like you can in Tenchu or Splinter Cell.

Crysis is also a sci-fi shooter (One I wish wouldn't bring my computer to its knees so I could play more than just the demo.) and its also very "tactical" because you can use the jungle environment to conceal yourself as well as the different suit powers. You can do simillar things in Half Life; if you see Combine and headrabbed people battling you can run in and get shot too, or you can wait to see who wins and save your ammo, or you can sneak up behind an unsuspecting Combine and double barrel shotgun his ass, then grenade his buddies and the headcrabbed people who are busy with each other and don't see the grenade.

Eagle Est1986:
100% no! With 32 votes, most impressive, useless poll award?

I just thought I would clearify things with the rest of the forum community, and clearify I did.

shadow skill:
The premise of Half-Life really has nothing to do with whether a cover mechanic is a good or bad thing.

Well, it kind of does with in this thread. That's what we're discussing. I don't think cover systems are bad, I just don't think Half-Life needs one. It's a console innovation that doesn't need to spread to what is primarily a pc game.

And since cover systems are one of the defining features of most tactical, 'realistic' action games (Gears Of War, Rainbow 6: Vegas, Army Of Two) then it is fair to assume that they are a genre related entity because they are MOSTLY found IN THAT GENRE. When I say 'tactical action', assume that I'm talking about militaristic third person action games with cover-based systems like the previously mentioned games.

And I'm pretty sure you've missed a couple of logic steps with your stealth game analogy because it doesn't make any sense.

No, i want it to be a real fps. Not a third person shooter where you sometimes shoot in first person. Any cover system implemented without third person viewpoint is just destined to fail.

if you want cover in Half Life, take Gordon, and hide him behind a wall, or a box, and OMG! COVER!! same with CoD4 and such. be creative, and use cover even if there isn't a system for it.

I would want a basic one nohting like gears of war but the current one is clunky and osent always work somthing like the call of duty's sieries of permanent crouch prone or stand would be just fine AND IN HALFLIFE 3 NO MORE 10,000 CRATES JUST LYING AROUND ITS ANNOYING

Nah, I like Half-life the way it is.

(although theres a lot that can be improved).

no. if it had one, it would require the game to be 3rd person at least some of the time, and then it just wouldn't be half-life.

See, I agree with the people who say that Half-Life isn't the type of game that is in need of a cover mechanic.

There are games, like GoW, RV:6 and GRAW, which, due to the premise, and the ease in which you can die, as well as you having a squad, use the cover system, to allow you to survive, and make better use of aforementioned squad.

Games like Half Life, and even Halo and COD4, on the other hand, give you a one-man army (not so much the case in COD), and one man armies usually are too bad-ass to need cover. And the fact they have less use for a cover system, what with them usually being able to absorb more bullets..

See, I agree with the people who say that Half-Life isn't the type of game that is in need of a cover mechanic.

There are games, like GoW, RV:6 and GRAW, which, due to the premise, and the ease in which you can die, as well as you having a squad, use the cover system, to allow you to survive, and make better use of aforementioned squad.

Games like Half Life, and even Halo and COD4, on the other hand, give you a one-man army (not so much the case in COD), and one man armies usually are too bad-ass to need cover. And the fact they have less use for a cover system, what with them usually being able to absorb more bullets.

Poll should have been: "Should Half-Life 2: Episode 3 have a cover system" as there isn't going to be any Half-Life games after it. That said, I say no. The cover system in, say, Gears of War was a novel idea, but it grows tiresome after a short time as in the end that's all the game is. The cover systems to date are good for what they are, but the rest of the combat has always been tedious or just annoying. Then again, Half-Life has always had a "cover system". It's called the ctrl key. You approach a wall or outcropping, press said key, and presto your behind cover. That said, if there were ever one company out there that could find a way to revolutionize the standard "cover system", it'd be Valve.