Part one: What is the best game to come out of the 80s?
Part two: What is the best game to come out of the 90s
This is the third part of the series. This is eventually all going to get compiled into one megathread for people who want gaming recommendations from Chapos specifically. Other decades (10s and 70s) and consoles will come in sporadic subsequent threads.
Expanding on your choice is definitely a plus. I don't think we're gonna get Doom the post this time around.
Half Life 2 was one of the first games to ever use speech recognition to rig facial animations for NPCs. It was both a minor detail and a revolutionary step forward. All of a sudden, as long as you have a voice actor record a character's dialog, you could see the character speak it with automatic lip syncing. It made everything seem a lot more realistic, and made the characters you bump into seem a lot more like real people instead of just decorations.