I’ve been tossing around for a little while now the idea of a type of singleplayer map where the objective is to hunt down as many friendly NPCs as possible in various locations throughout a map and bring them safely to an elevator, evac chopper, or other safe area. There’s levels somewhat like this in Half-Life and its expansions, but to my knowledge it has never been attempted in quite the same way:
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Office Complex in Half-Life/Black Mesa allows you to accumulate quite a number of friendly NPCs as you travel through the level, but they don’t really do anything once you get to the end.
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Questionable Ethics requires the player to bring a scientist to the end of the level to open a door, but all the scientists are in one place.
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Blue Shift’s Captive Freight has multiple scientists located throughout who then appear in later levels and evacuate the facility with you, but they automatically survive regardless of what the player does.
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Decay has Domestic Violence where a security guard needs to be found and saved among many who are being threatened by enemies, but again only one is actually savable.
A dedicated ‘evac’ map style would, I think, introduce a number of gameplay elements rarely found in standard HL/Black Mesa style levels: -
Multiple Degrees Of Success: I am thinking it will be possible to technically ‘complete’ the level in the sense of getting to the end of it with all or nearly all of the NPCs dead, but the number the player saved will explicitly be tallied at the end and possibly result in additional items/dialogue/whatever. I am thinking that not all NPCs will be placed equally, with some being very easy to find/save and some being very difficult- think of it like a Metroidvania or Zelda style gamewith optional items where there’s a concept of a completion percentage and a 100% run.
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“Broad” Multi-Objective Gameplay: While there are exceptions and a fair number of side areas to explore, typically HL/Black Mesa gameplay is fairly directional and linear. I am imagining that an evacuation map will have much less of a directional quality since NPCs can be found in many different places and recovered in different orders. At the same time, there is no reason every area has to be accessible from the start without completing some secondary objective elsewhere in the map.
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Defense of Fixed Positions Or Non-Player Objectives: Escort missions are generally derided for a number of pretty good reasons, but used in moderation I think protecting NPCs from enemy attacks could be a tense, interesting element of gameplay.
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Time Pressure: I don’t think having NPCs die at predetermined intervals while the player is doing something completely unrelated is necessarily fair, but once they are in sight of the player it would be fairly easy to create a variety of situations where said player has to think quickly to kill an enemy or de-activate an environmental hazard threatening them- from simple tasks on the order of a second or two to more complex tasks involving the environment which must be done within a relatively large number of minutes.
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Secondary Objectives to Make Areas Navigable: Once the player has FOUND an NPC that may not be the end of interaction with them; the way the player got to them might not be usable as a way out, requiring additional player effort to secure a safe evacuation route.
The big obstacle I see to this sort of map is that just using their native AI the Black Mesa NPCs are not particularly adept at navigating dangerous areas or moving around in large groups, and while Black Mesa typically works around this by keeping their actions heavily scripted the scripts are not then in turn moddable.
Is this something people would be interested in playing?
