It added more, but how did it add depth? Simply showing more of the same doesn’t add depth.
Adding weapons typically does that, especially since many of them are just slightly better versions of existing ones. Desert Eagle didn’t “add” anything to the Python, it upstaged it. They all took away some of the limitations the original weapons had & that was it. If people like the Opposing Force weapons better, it’s because they’re just more powerful weapons. But if they just used the original HL weapons instead, would people have given it nearly as much praise? No.
And it’s also one of the least liked. Again, because there wasn’t enough stuff.
I believe it added depth by showing us how low the science team at Black Mesa went with the experiments, questionable ethics.
I personally think it went further with showing the complete desperation of the situation, this is especially true in regards to the marines, and what essentially becomes a fight for survival for them as well.
It also adds to the government cover up, in regards to the black ops. We see relatively little of the science team in OP4, its story focused on the military side, thus adding more depth. So I’d disagree that it’s simply more of the same, that just seems shortsighted imo.
I like Blue Shift however it was too short, and once you’ve played both the original and OP4 it has relatively little in regards to anything new or fresh, so it becomes a more reasonable complaint. Its addition to the series is the story, but there simply isn’t enough of it, however I still think it’s one of the most solid in the series. People can dislike it all they want, it doesn’t stop my enjoyment of it.
In regards to weapons, people prefer playing a military role with military hardware, it simply fits, and with the addition of buffed enemies, slightly buffed weapons were necessary imo.
Anyway, we’re not arguing whether or not OP4 would of been better without the added NPCs and upgraded weapons, that simply clouds the point. The fact is they did add new/upgraded NPCs and attempted to do so in new ways. You can dismiss the idea the weapons were upgraded in exchange for ‘upstaged’ but I’m not about to debate something so pedantic.
What is wrong with that argument? I’m not saying for every one of them to act differently but it was highly contradictory to what actually happened in Half-Life. It didn’t make me feel like I was playing the “Opposing Force”, just a military man who has access to more firepower and man-power then freeman does.
It’s a perfectly valid argument to make, I love the game, but it’s almost a missed opportunity not showing it from the marine’s perspective in the manner that HL portrayed them. I think it would have been cooler to see the story show them actually executing their orders (and how their superiors rationalized the orders to make it easier for the soldiers to execute) and how it may have devolved into soldiers realizing how fucked up the Op is, and outright ignoring their superiors to help their chances of survival and the like.
It almost seemed like they completely skipped that in favor of adopting gameplay similar to HL1 - in OP4 the “black ops” basically served the same purpose that the military did in the original.
What if, in a remake of Op4 that wasn’t obligated to be faithful to the original, the game was about twice as long, and the first half of the game took place during what is in the final game compressed into a montage at the beginning - ie, Adrian following his orders until eventually succumbing to the alien threat and requiring medical attention from scientists; making the “Welcome To Black Mesa” sequence of the original Op4 equivalent to the end of Apprehension?
Doubling the length of the game just for that seems a bit unnecessary, considering how few scientists & guards there are in the game that you actually need.
We already knew they were going to Xen & bringing back aliens to experiment on before the incident happened.
That added a whole extra layer of unnecessary garbage to the cover-up. In the original the assassins & grunts were on the same side. In OpFor, they had them turn against each other after the orders to pull out, because they were going to nuke the facility. The soldiers said they wanted to deactivate the bomb so they wouldn’t die. By the time you get to the black-ops, they’ve already shot a soldier seemingly just to cover-up the cover-up with a suicide mission. Nobody would be able to deactivate the bomb if they just dropped it from one of the F-16’s.
I think some of my favorite Half-Life singleplayer levels ever were OP4’s xen-on-earth habitats in that zoo place. They were like the little Xen-room in Black Mesa’s Questionable Ethics, except bigger.
They’re creative weapons… They provide greater variety and range of choice, not only from a raw increase in weapon quantity.
The Pipe Wrench is worse than the crowbar for quick attacks, but allows you to prepare a big one which can knock an ichthyosaur cold. To balance that out, the Combat Knife is in the other direction from the Crowbar, attacking quickly but weakly. This provides melee options for when you’re drained of ammo.
And then there’s the Barnacle, a lovely munch-gun which weaponized one of the most basic of Half-Life enemies (the way a domesticated Lamarr brought us closer to headcrabs). This gun made it easier to go places designed for attentive players. Instead of breaking a hundred boxes for health/ammo/armor pickups, you can break a few dozen boxes and tongue-up to a few dozen hidden nooks. Again, the Opposing Force approach introduced options/variety. In multiplayer, it seems to replace the longjump module in importance, but players cannot go around insta-killing while using the barnacle… they must pick between superior maneuverability and superior firepower. This is a beautiful hybrid of choice + balance.
The Desert Eagle?.. Well, that one mostly exists to keep the standard grunt sidearm from being the same Glock which all the Half-Life civilians are using. It comes with an accurate mode and inaccurate [laserless] mode, similar options to the glock. It’s a teensy bit more professional of a pistol implementation due to the toggled nature of these firing modes.
Ah, let us not forget the SAW! For when you have to shoot every motherfucker in the room and don’t have time to dick around with things like grenade-launchers and reloading. This weapon was admittedly added for the cool-factor. It has a tiny bit of tauness to it, due to recoil: SAW-jumps can be longer/higher than normal (but not instantaneously so like the gauss rifle-- again this is a nice way OP4 is balanced).
I gleefully embrace OP4. Its weapon lineup only gets better from there.
How about that Displacer?! This gun exists for everyone who wanted to own Nihilanth-in-a-can. It damages everything in your path of fire when the orb nears them, and obliterates individuals it collides with (by teleporting them into R’lyeh or god-knows-where-- the mystery adds to this weapon’s charm). Even more, it comes with its own inter-dimensional door which can bring you to additional areas to explore for health/armor/ammo when the option occurs to you. This makes incessant box-breaking even less necessary. Map loads become an opportunity instead of a nuisance… that’s rare in most games.
Ahhh, and then there’s the Spore Launcher… You could use it normally or in a super-bouncy mode. In a way, this foreshadowed Half-Life 2’s AR2 plasma ball attack. It’s a spammer’s pleasure when you know which room you want to clear, or a danger to yourself when you’re panicked. Collecting spores for this weapon was also something good to exercise the Barnacle with.
The Sniper Rifle… was a fun addition. Since the Desert Eagle is halfway between Glock and Magnum, this rifle decided to come between Magnum and Crossbow. It’s slow to load, and rough to find ammo for, but always satisfying to use due to its proper zoom and bolt-action pops.
Last but not least, my personal favorite, the Shock Roach. It fires straight projectiles and regenerates ammunition, which sounds boring at first. But it has a number of unique traits which I adore. It causes the target to glow when hit, which is very satisfying visual feedback (almost as satisfying as the sniper rifle’s blood spurt). It also kills you and anyone near you when you use it underwater, which is a hell of a trait no other weapon matches. And then there’s the formicidaen design of the thing, which is alive and tries to bite you if you don’t have your hands free to catch it. It’s a hybrid of Snark and Hivehand. Fun fact: I use Shockroach assets as a Snark substitute in my Half-Life.
Ultimately, I find that OP4’s weaponry fills gaps left in the original Half-Life arsenal. OP4 doesn’t abandon concepts from Half-Life like some alien-organic weaponry and military-grade or experimental hardware, but expands upon them better than Dias could ever design.
I approve of Opposing Force as much as I approve of Command & Conquer: Red Alert’s “Aftermath” expansion, which I happen to approve heartily of. I love the Gonome zombie-evolution, dark tunnels still scare me because of Voltigores, and the Pit Worm fight was grand fun. 4/4 stars!
I wouldn’t say it’s contradictory at all. We don’t see marines dealing with scientists in OP4, so it’s not like we’re contradicting anything simply by not showing it. Infact OP4 does everything it can from it’s warped perspective to tell us what the military are doing. Every scientist you come across has heard rumors or is actively scared of you.
Personally I thought it was fantastic the way they handled it. Putting us in situations where we HAVE to kill the science team would be detrimental to the feel of the game, take away player choice and slow the pacing. How would you fit that into the game?
No, the way in which we’re put into a survival situation, having to utilize every asset available was the perfect way to do it imo. Having it set during the initial marine ‘occupation’ would of been a slow, rather boring affair in comparison that simply wouldn’t of added anything we didn’t already know.
Yes but we didn’t know the extent of it. Shephard finds an entire section of the facility designed around it, making questionable ethics in the original the tip of the iceberg, adding more depth.
In the original we don’t KNOW that the Black Ops aren’t with the marines. This discovery adds depth. You’l notice in HL during Apprehension that the Black Ops are CLEARLY trying to kill you, why bother if the marines have got an ambush set up just around the corner? In order to silence Freeman, again adding to the cover up.
Also, there is no proof at all that it was a suicide mission. They could quite happily drop the bomb off the truck and get out of there by the time it goes off. I don’t know where you get that from.
Also, if you were trying to destroy the facility with a nuke and do so ‘secretly’ you’d never be able to drop one from an F-16 in the regular air force. What you’d have to do is send in a Black Ops team and dismantle one of the warheads they are decommissioning on the site ( One of BMs functions ). If you couldn’t get away with the story of the nuclear reactor exploding than you’d change your tune to discovering a nuke had accidentally gone off.
I think the reason everyone hates OP4 is because you don’t get to endlessly kill off scientists with your NPC buddies, which just goes to show how little people realise how boring it’d be. I also think they hate it because they are unable to read between the lines, or fit in anything they see, which is strange considering everyone moans about the story.
the reason they had to deliver nukes by hand is because half the facility is in the form of an underground bunker designed to withstand aerial nukes. Obviously the stranded grunts were underequipped and getting desperate and not the guys to trust with such a mission once a full-nuclear-wipe was decided upon (marking the beginning of Forget About Freeman). I don’t feel grunt-killing was intentional, just incidental to their missions.
I liked deactivating the nuke only to see G-Man tinkering with it later.
You really seem to like the word depth, don’t you? We didn’t KNOW that there were two separate government branches sent to Black Mesa & that they’d be AGAINST one another because the very idea of it is stupid, confusing & unnecessary.
Not intentionally a suicide mission, but if the thing could easily be deactivated & reactivated with the push of a button it makes escaping while trying to prevent someone from coming by & simply turning the thing off incredibly difficult. And if the Assassins aren’t there to silence the soldiers who are there to silence the scientists, then there’s no reason why they couldn’t just help the soldiers escape.
They were bombing the facility by plane anyway, what difference does using one larger bomb make? The only reason the male Black Ops exist is so the soldiers have some soldiers to fight.
That would make sense… except the Combat Knife & Crowbar both do 10 damage, have the same reach & speed. The knife trumps the crowbar in pure DPS & it can also kill headcrabs in 1 hit. The replacement weapons in OP4 were designed to simply be more powerful than the ones in HL, especially the Desert Eagle which reloads quickly, can fire quickly, does the same damage as the magnum & holds 1 more round.
Yes I’m using the word depth, as it was the basis of my original point and this entire debate. Lol, is that alright?
Why is it? Because you think so? Confusing for SOME maybe…
If your destroying a giant R+D base with a nuke because it houses an alien infestation on your own soil your going to want it as low key as possible, which is VERY difficult. You couldn’t use the main military or it’d be known all over. You couldn’t use the grunts in conjunction with black ops in case they mutiny against the idea, as they’ve already been pushed to their tolerance for obeying without question already. These orders went well above the regular military.
Well if they were to get the job done, they arm it, lock it up and dump it in a corner out of sight. Something they didn’t get CHANCE to do, obviously.
Lol I don’t think you understand the destructive power of a nuclear weapon, especially in comparison to regular air bombardment. TBH that is fairly ignorant and I’m not about to explain it to you, so here’s a video instead…
Now imagine being underground during something similar, albeit probably smaller than that.
What? Two weapons are an improved reskin so your dismissing the entire array or weapons.
I’d have to agree with him. Honestly, it seems to me that unless everything is shown to you bit by bit in the most slowest, direct way you simply can’t fit things together yourself. Picking apart is oh so easy isn’t it?
Ah, I don’t remember that being the case, probably due to the knife’s puny sound-effects. I suppose it makes sense in multiplayer because everyone starts equipped with a crowbar while the combat knife must be found.
Wow, I don’t remember that being the case at all. The Python is a two-hit kind of gun and I never remember two-hitting people with the Desert Eagle. Again, maybe I underestimate its power due to the weaker sound effect.
(The sound effects aren’t bad by any means, they are simply suitable for weapons which aren’t overpowered. The crisp zaps of the shockroach, the echoey clack of the sniper-rifle, and the pitter-patter punches of the SAW are my favorites.)
I would and do. You wouldn’t have the creativity to make a semi-auto weapon more powerful or accurate than a full-auto gun. I hate you!!
With you? I’d rather not. You’ve clearly got brain problems. :fffuuu:
Well, I wasn’t entirely accurate with that. It turns out that the Deagle did 34 dmg & the Python did 40, so you don’t quite get the same bang for your bullet, but the difference in rate of fire, reload time & abundance of ammo definitely make up for it.
I agree. The sound effects were pretty good & you’re probably right that they might understate the actual effectiveness of the weapons.
Let’s see; Combat Knife & Barnacle Grapple both have better DPS than the Crowbar (& the kife can instant-kill headcrabs) while the Pipe Wrench can do as much damage as the Tau cannon with no cost or side effect, if only at short range. The Desert Eagle I already explained. The Sniper Rifle is the crossbow with an instant ray instead of a projectile & does twice the damage but only holds 15 rounds in reserve compared to the xbow’s 50, so they’re nearly balanced, but in deathmatch you’d more likely run out of life before all that ammo, single player I’m unsure which is better. Both the Shock Roach & Spore Launcher(somewhat) had an infinite supply of ammo, since the roach regenerated & the spore launcher had respawning ammo supplies. While the Tau & Gluon had fairly scarce ammo that was split between the two of them & could be wasted very quickly. My ability to compare the weapons falls apart there, but there are more weapons in OP4’s inventory, so it wins out due to being less likely to run out of ammo at the very least.
And there would have been a better chance if they had simply dropped a nuke on the place from the get-go.
No, you’d want it to be as quick & effective as possible so there’s no proof to the contrary. Keeping it low-key is pretty easy to do when the place you’re bombing is a government-funded research facility in the middle of a New Mexico desert & all it’s staff was killed.
Some say mutation, I say adaptation. Some say aberration, I say innovation. Some say brain problems, I say mind-reading resistance. But perhaps I am crazy, to consider working with someone like you. With our minds operating orthogonally, we could create a game of many dimensions.
So ultimately, because OP4 has weapons which weren’t in the original Half-Life, that makes them overpowered?
Wow, my thread has generated quite some discussion “_” but whatever, Operation Black Mesa, I’m coming
I wonder if the former or BM’s Xen releases first.
I’m afraid the feeling isn’t mutual, even if you do occasionally have insightful things to say.
No, just that having more weapons is definitively more firepower than less weapons. And it’s hardly nostalgia goggles. I first played Half-life in 2005 & immediately followed it with Opposing Force, Blue Shift, then Hl2. The difference in the strength of the weapons was pretty obvious.
Then say that. I know what it means thanks, but if you like…
I personally believe that by adding to the ‘complexity’ of the military side of the game it creates more depth within the overall story.
Your ability to compare weapons fell apart with the entire paragraph. You make comparisons between the barnacle and crowbar based entirely on damage, whilst completely disregarding it’s major function of being a grappling hook. Your comparison between the pipe wrench and the tau cannon based on nothing but damage is beyond strange.
I agree about the comparisons of the deagle and python, the sniper and crossbow, and the combat knife and crowbar. However they still have enough of a difference to keep the action fresh, and with their improvements along with the improved enemies it serves to make the action faster and to an extent more intense.
You would never be able to drop a bomb from an F-16 in conjunction with a major military operation secretly. You have the people storing the ordnance, the people readying the plane, the pilots, the pilots controllers, the logistics people, the people giving the orders and every single one under them doing the same, as well as the people on the ground watching. No, you use people off the records and you equip them on site with warheads no one is going to find missing later on. Also, when has the US dropped nuclear bombs with F-16s? Also again, you’d never be able to have a nuclear bomb go off without SOMEONE knowing about it.
This just brings me to a good point already stated by Tiki. Black Mesa was built on a missile silo complex, designed to withstand aerial bombardment from both conventional and nuclear bombs. This, also in conjunction with the newer areas which are more than likely going to be designed even better to withstand such things brings to question the effectiveness of such an idea. Proof of this could well be the marines attempt at bombardment themselves. Vast areas underground are COMPLETELY untouched, the bombardment mostly serving to cover their own retreat.
Just look at the Lambda complex, completely untouched past the surface tunnels yet teaming with infestation down below. Assurance of complete destruction would be paramount.
So you DON’T use a massive military presence that is no doubt causing an amazing stir around the country as is. You use guys off the books.
You don’t send in a nuke from an F-16 with a paper trail as long as the corridors of Black Mesa. You use a warhead being decommissioned on site.
You DO use a NUKE, placed underground precisely because you have a facility miles across and miles deep teaming with alien infestation, that is incidentally littered with the bodies of hundreds of staff, riddled with bullets by YOUR soldiers.
The place is a GOVERNMENT FUNDED RESEARCH FACILITY. You don’t think someone would notice if Area 51 was wiped off the map after a panicked military build up around the area? You do realise how completely backwards that quote is?
The only part stated as fact was that the orders went above the military, or better worded, the ‘regular’ military. That IS fact, evidence by them slaughtering US troops in order to keep the operation hush.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. People can’t put what is right in front of them together, then call BS when they get confused by it, which you’ve already admitted to.
Half-Life will forever be in my top 2 games of all time, probably first, and I consider OP4 not so much as a separate game but more like an extension of it. It is by far the best add-on to a game I’ve ever played and I find it strange so many Half-Life fans dismiss it over such trivial things, things I’ll add they just don’t seem to understand due to it not being slowly spelled out for them.
I liked Opposing Force. Mostly because I am an epic HECU fan, but whatever.
A lot of the time though, OP4 looked like it was just pieced together to show Half-Life original areas in an almost gimmicky attempt to incite nerdgasm. I’m not a huge fan of Race X. But I liked the squad mechanics, even if they did kinda suck at following me around properly. But that’s inherent to Goldsrc.
I compared the barnacle to the crowbar because the barnacle, like the knife & pipewrench is more powerful than the crowbar, being a grappling hook goes without saying. I also didn’t compare the pipe wench & tau cannon just because of the damage, but because they’re both the only weapons with charging attacks & do the same damage when charged all the way, but can’t even overcharge like the Tau, it also doesn’t even cost anything to use & it’s the first weapon you get in the game. My point being: the crowbar looks like shit by comparison.
Why would the newer areas be designed to better withstand aerial bombardment, when the new areas are mostly research facility that would have no reason for that level of protection?
Isn’t that basically what happened in the game to begin with? I mean, what I was saying was to skip the whole “panicked military build up around the area” thing & go straight to the nuke & claim it was an accident. I mean, if they can get Black-Op helicopters, then I don’t see why they couldn’t get a jet too.
This raises the point of; why weren’t the black-ops sent instead of the soldiers to being with? I mean, unless it’s because they’d then need Blacker-Black-Ops to cover them up too.
I said that it is confusing, not that I am confused by it.
Again Tiki has beaten me to it. I’ll still with my previous comment… 'Honestly, it seems to me that unless everything is shown to you bit by bit in the most slowest, direct way you simply can’t fit things together yourself. ’
Lol, what?
Read: Cold War.
Read: Top secret research facility.
Read: Warhead disarming facility.
Read: Lambda nuclear reactor complex.
There’s four.
Two completely different things with completely different levels of needs and necessities in regards to personnel and equipment, not even mentioning the ordnance itself.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
