I like both but what I don't like are the extremes: mindless shooting is fun but boring and story driven games can be heavily scripted and full of (dramatic music) QTEs to a point where you play sequences of gameplay between a cutscene and something else.

Quake engages you not only with shooting but with exploration, finding secrets and use strategy to some extent as well, games like Half Life guide you through a story that can feel like it is staged.

So for me the best of both would be two distinct type of games that don't converge into a single genere which I could choose depending on the moment.
An action game with some degree of plot and backgrund that give you some context and a reason, a sense, to what I'm doing besides the shooting and exploration mechanics, something that ties everything up.

A story-driven game which isn't on rails and I can affect the story of with my actions without making me feel like I'm just a riding a horse in a carousel.

System Shock is basically a game where generes converge with its high configurability, I still can't wrap my head around why other games don't let you choose the type of experience you want to play.

Not sure.

Only played Quake a few times in LAN parties. Got bored playing Half-Life 2 maybe midway through. Will finish it at some point, but don't really care if I don't.

Both.
What I don't like as much are arena shooters like Serious Sam or Painkiller, or extremely linear games with (almost) no exploration. That's why I prefer HL1 over HL2 by a great deal, because not only it has way better AI, it also has levels that sprawl out a bit (and sometimes there are multiple ways go get through), while HL2 is just one long tunnel with no exploration at all (at least as far as I played it - Ravenholm).

It's true that HL1 had a lot of scripted content, but it also (still) had a lot of emergent gameplay when fighting the more intelligent enemies. And it also rewarded you for exploring - like finding a scientist in an off-the-path room who, if you escort him a few rooms further, can open another room with a health station.

There's been complaints of both over the years. Some people who play only one specific sub-genre are angry that other sub-genres exist end up ranting about that and a lot of such people end up getting "burned out" without some variety. At the same time, what fronzelneekburm is referring to is the widespread meme's of "12ft wide levels + story is 'better' than more open-levels + no story" for which Half Life / Call of Duty level design was often the butt of memes / jokes for years even into the early 2010's.

I thought both Half Life's were great games, but System Shock, Thief & Deus Ex definitely had way more of a personal impact on showing me the future of what FPS's would develop into with engaging stories or RPG elements, etc, beyond the early 90's Doom / Quake "arena shooters", but also did so without having 12ft wide overly-scripted levels. I don't mean open-world games like Morrowind, but rather 'that thing' in between where the levels are still mostly linear but designed in a way that circular routes / multiples paths, ability to backtrack (vs "checkpoints of no return"), etc, made them feel more open enough to kill off the feeling of the level being 12ft wide. Games like Deus Ex (2000) and NOLF2 (2002) nailed circular design in many levels whilst even Half Life 2 (2004) continued with very "railroady" straight-line levels (canals and Highway 17 levels spring to mind).

Both have their place but heavy focus on story & immersion tends to take something away from gameplay and replay value, and in some ways these games age less well. Pure action doesn't age nearly as badly, assuming it was well done to begin with.

So I could see myself playing half-life once, maybe twice, but then I'd be getting bored with it. Knowing what's coming up, having seen all the places, shooting a handful enemies here and there feels almost like busy work.

You can try to cram both into one game but it often ends up feeling very artificial, at least given how incompetent/conservative game designers these days are. One moment you're listening to dialogue, spelunking for items, watching cutscenes, blahblah yada yada, and then you're in an arena fighting a horde of monsters. Rinse and repeat. It can be worse than if the game just stuck to one or the other.

I certainly prefer games that are more *hands off* (i.e. here's the level, everything's been placed, now go find your way and have fun) but that doesn't mean you can't have any story in it. I certainly prefer freedom (to observe, pace myself, and use the rules of the games against it) over scripts that can do arbitrary things any moment I step over a trigger point. That's open-ended gameplay.

Now StingingVelvet, how do you categorize Unreal? It's pretty open-ended, like Doom and Quake. It's got a few scripted moments. In terms of enemy count, it's closer to Half-Life.. you're never fighting more than a handful of foes at a time (then again Quake doesn't throw a lot at you at once either). It's got a story, but it's not in your face about it -- you just sort of discover and live it as you go through the levels. You can read or ignore some texts left behind by NPCs.

Unreal happens to be one of my favorites, but I think it would be better if it had more enemies (less spongy). At the same time, you can't put too many enemies in it or the atmosphere will suffer. And yeah I think Unreal is oozing with immersion and atmosphere. IMO it's way better than Half-Life in just about every respect except realism.

And how about Far Cry? It's got story bits but it's 99% open-ended shootfest.

I like both since they deliver different kind of fun. I lean on the story-based FPS camp though, especially if there's an inventory and looting involved, just like in STALKER series, and there aren't any cut-scenes involved.

I go both ways. I like both Half-life 1-2 and Serious Sam games.

I don't know if I really cared about the "story" of the Half-life games, to me it was merely a setting (HL1: aliens coming through a portal in a military complex and some military black ops conspiracy, and HL2 = fighting the oppressive leaders etc.) than some kind of intricate story with lots of interesting characters and their motives and what happened in their childhood etc. If anything, I found the whole "Alyx has a crush on you"-aspect on HL2 irritating, as much as some kind of actual story or character motives/interaction goes.

What I liked about Half-life 1-2 was some scripted sequences which lead to a new situation you needed to solve, arriving to some new place and admiring how it looked, the teammates fighting on your side which gave it a new feeling compared to Quake's "you against the world"-setting etc.

With a few notable exceptions like STALKER, I really don't like shooters focusing on story (usually abysmal) or "serious" atmosphere or anything that isn't shooting. I'm all for outright stupid, arcade-y run'n'gun mayhem, I really think first person shooters cannot be taken seriously unless they are simulators (I'm repeating myself from the Serious Sam thread, I'mm getting old :P). One dude mowing down an entire planet of foes isn't really the best way to go all... "deep" with story and such.
I don't consider Thief or System Shock shooters, despite them having fundamentally the same mechanics.

Actually, to be more general, I think "story" in videogames is just an useless added weight unless you can differentiate it from traditional, better suited media like cinema or literature: there's a huge margin to be successful in this regard, but you MUST exploit the peculiarity of videogames, interactivity. If there's not interactivity, it's just a bad imitation of the others.

What about games like Dark Forces, which play a lot like Doom, but do have a considerable amount of story thrown in?

Maybe that's because most people can't think for shit and have an even worse time trying to put these thoughts into (barely) coherent sentences,... dude.

The suggestion that "HL is teh bad bekauz it has teh story in it" is completely idiotic and seems to disregard the fact that HL's plot is little more than a minor redressing of Doom's story.

Doom: A portal to hell is opened and demons overrun a research facility.

HL: A portal to another world is opened and aliens overrun a research facility.

That's all there is to the plot as far as HL is concerned, even though a lot of morons have been goaded into thinking that there is a lot more more substance here than there actually is, thanks to some cleverly interspersed appearances of the Cigarette Smoking Man from X-Files. I mean, Gordon Freeman ended up on his fair share of "Best Video Game Character of All Time" lists, even though he's the emptiest vessel of them all.

Again, when people say "story" they mean the way the story is told (ie. through streamlined levels and scripted events).

Unreal is kind of a beast on its own because despite its time it featured double firing modes, combos, dodging, headshots and a plethora of innovative weapons which made it stand apart from the simple and brutal gameplay mechanics of the DooMs and Quake. And that different DNA has been distinctive of the each respective series along the years

I think DF is a good middle grounder like, I would say, DooM 3 has been a notable attempt in that direction and, all in all, succeded in that regard.

Both games are amazing.
But I'd have to pick Quake since I was able to play it on my Amiga. :D

Yeah. But lots of other games mix things up too so it's really hard for me to pick an FPS and categorize it as either HL-like or Quake like. It depends on what's supposed to be the dividing quality.

For me, the key thing is that HL started the influx of extremely linear shooters (where both level design and scripting leave little room for sandbox gameplay) where you pretty much proceed form checkpoint to checkpoint, while Doom & Quake would drop you into a level with varying degrees of openness and you'd choose how to tackle it and reach the exit (often via multiple possible routes and optional areas). Being story driven wasn't ever such a distinguishing quality to me, only HL managed to implement the story in a way that contributes to linearity. Having NPCs is certainly a distinguishing quality for HL, but again Unreal has NPCs too.. and so does Quake 2 (well ok, a handful of prisoners). From a gameplay perspective, NPCs can have very little or very much impact. For example, I don't think doom would be a very different game if a few of the dead humans you see lying around were actually live allies with chaingunner AI.

If we go by that criteria, then Metro 2033 being extremely linear makes it HL-like. Far Cry is rather open ended, so I find it to be more Quake-like.

Umm...no. That's called setting. Story is what happens afterward (SPOILER ALERT): :-D

Doom: I battle through the Phobos facility. Then I battle through the Deimos facility hanging above hell. Then I battle through hell and win, but - oh, no! - Earth is overrun.

HL: Experiment goes wrong, aliens invade. Need to get to the surface. Heard help is coming from outside. Damn, help isn't helpful at all, they're trying to kill me too. Must get to scientists in Lambda. Way is blocked, could take the train, but must first restore power to it.
Learned that I need to launch a rocket with a satellite to fox thing. More enemies black ops types, they're fighting each other. Damn, got captured, didn't kill me but put me into the trash. Escaped from there and found a secret facility. They knew about the aliens all along! I really need to get to Lambda. Reached the surface again - it's a warzone! Army is pulling out, they're calling in airstrikes! But I made it to Lambda. The satellite failed, because the aliens keep the portal open from the other side. I need to go there and close it from there.

Unfortunately, we got it like that, fortunately, the Floppy version is fine. Always pays to have spares!