lol, I've been askin my self the other end of that question all day and for a while now... while base half life 2 is basic, not even close to the tech or gameplay level of something like FarCry, or FEAR or Dark Messiah...* For some reason when you tweak just a handful of variables to bring it into the the modern age of 2004 (before the dark times of gameplay in the post crysis consolitus era) Something about the way this engine does things has more satisfying shooting than the vast majority of titles in the modern era... The only thing that held it back was the hyper stripped down player agency, and given how all of this was easily doable on the engine, and then some... ie how we see things like this, or just garry's mod itself, or SMOD...or hell, dark Messiah... Whatever they did with source, it hit some level of perfect variable stew, the animation, physics, audio**. I remember back in the SMOD days, having achieved beyond FEAR, and pretty much Cyberpunk, almost Crysis levels of shooting mechanics before Orange box killed all the mods in a forced update. And I did that just tweaking somebody else's code...

I remember that feeling of the shooting in this game, and especially once the default audio had been swapped with louder variants, just having this weight and impact***, even before the ragodlls were modded to have decal persistence, even with a crowbar that functioned like a shortrange pistol (DM fixed alot of that, and ♥♥♥♥,,, CHIVALRY was incepted on source, and that would be the gold standard to this day... that no one will ever even attempt to replicate or improve, and that is a damn tragedy for sword play games... sigh).

Even with default movement ice skating mechanic's of HL2 basic, it still feels more immersive, and a good litmus test, one of the most artificial and paper target feeling game series of all time has to be Call of Duty (especially modern warfare and after)... yet you take those weapon animations and sounds and put them in source, adjust a few things like fov and levels and suddenly its a whole new shooting experience that is everything COD was missing... dunno... Just looking at things like the levels of brilliance that have become these gmod mod packs, and just the framework itself, and you really get that bitter sweet tinge that no one is going to make this, it can be done, they just don't want to, or even think it's a good idea...

I've sworn of aaa for all but the rare few that at minimum at least nominally hold to the system shock bible... (bioshock was never one of them...), And even in the indi games that do try and bring new things, it's like the last 15 years of bad and superficial game design of pretty (or complex and muddy more often lol) has taken it's toll and the current crop of game devs don't even know what it is to have that... or the direction gaming was going towards this, and HL2 wasn't in any way the end of that, just a solid step in the right direction... and then it went way the ♥♥♥♥ left and kept on going till the car ran out of gas... I'm pretty sure it's been pushing it on the side of the road ever since.






**(audio might be the key here, turns out gunshots sound better if they have a base sample sound, that then functions in repetition with the engine for processing, rather than a whole set of samples trying to run as little in memory as possible at any given moment...)


*(it made up for that by level design, story, and VO that was top tier at the time, and still holds up... not sayin it was ♥♥♥♥ or anything, but it's shooting and controls were almost a step back from the first game.)

***(insurgency and the stand alone most definitely had this, if only it had ballistics, that game might have been near perfect for what it was trying for... annoying as ♥♥♥♥ they seemed opposed to the idea.. all games should have em, and given how many vets were on the team I really didn't get it, anyone that does any shooting knows bullets are not laserbeams, it's kinda impressive how long it takes for them to get down range depending on the round...)