Finally got around to playing Half Life 2 and I now see why every modern FPS is the way it is. It's good but it's sometimes too limiting and every other company took a wrong lesson away from HL2 and ran with that. I was critical of HL1 being dull after the first third and having more of a series of rote actions than an actual plot.
But it's easy to read too much into a game which is in the end, just a bunch of devs throwing together stuff to meet a deadline. #STALKER has one of the best environments ever made, but a dumb plot ruined by showing its cards when it never needed to. I suspect Valve is more restrained in this regard