I think you have to take it within the context of when it came out. CoD4 and Mass Effect came out 9 years later. There wasn’t anything like HL in 98. Enemies that talked to each other and flanked you? Unseen before. Does it stand up to games now? We’ve learned so much since then. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find a modern shooter that didn’t trace its heritage back to HL.

When did you first play it and what other shooters had you played?

I appreciate when a company chooses to not manipulate its customers with sales pricing and instead has a fixed price.

I disagree about it being legitimate for games with hard currency. Games do it purely for psychological reasons. They could easily let you earn and spend hard currency in game and spend real money directly. But it’s more profitable to have you buy points.

I don’t know that I would call Northgard a Warcraft clone. The mall is divided into tiles and each tile has its own resources and building limits. Units can only attack other units that are in their tile. There’s a much bigger emphasis on building up your tech tree and taking tiles.

Still, it’s one of the more interesting and fun evolutions of the RTS genre. If sci-fi is more to your taste, Dune the newer gameby the same studio is similar.