Didn’t know this was something that was ‘alternate’. Thought everyone knew about it. Figured it was just part of the game that everyone experienced.
Well you have some players like me that only got half of it, I always sniped the A-grunts with a cross bow as, as long as the player doesn’t cross those lines while they are alive the alarm never goes off.
That is probably why I never found that route. I was crossbowing everything.
You’re in the majority.
I never even considered stealth as an option in Half Life.
run and gun baby, run and gun
You must have been good at playing the mod “They Hunger”. It was all about run and gun. I was never able to finish it. It creeped me out too much! HAHA!
I was in the same boat on they hunger even now it creeps me out though not as much as in the past.
I think I got the hunted from pc gamer back when it was a half-inch thick magazine and shipped with cd-roms.
Nope, never finished it, way too scary.
Wow. I thought I was the only chickenshit on this forum! haha!
Interestingly, as of the ST update, there is that guard on the H map of Surface Tension who you sneak out of the hanger with. So there is a point in the earthbound maps where stealth is encouraged. (And this will probably be the first time players see it as a viable option).
Maybe we’ll see this design crop up in the Xenside maps too.
I felt like that section was a bit of a tutorial in stealth through minor areas.
That and it shows just how that guard survived this long.
Playing with hammer, I found that the marines can use pistols. They are missing animations but it is supported.
Does this mean that well see trapped marines in Xen?
Still it would be cool to see some soldiers on xen, maybe one or two with pistols either in some abandoned research camp or in some alien cell. We know that there where rifts and weapons that could lead one to xen, though that would lean on some Op For stuff.
Would be fun to enter some scientist camp see a marine in it, armed with a pistol with a scientist near them.
Scientist: Freeman, don’t shoot he is with us.
Marine: Like hell I am this guy wiped out a hole platoon top side.
Scientist: And that is why he is here, if anyone can stop this it is him.
Scientist gives directions marine just keeps his pistol trained on freeman, never firing it at him.
Though this would never happen.
This seems like it would be better suited as a mod, except that mods don’t tend to have voice acting which is an issue.
Yeah as I said, I know that would never happen.
Because in the story of half life the only marine to ever have been on xen was Shepard, and I highly doubt we will get a glimpse of him at any point. Hell can’t even suggest getting a glimpse of barney because by the time freeman makes it to zen barney is already out of the state.
I can understand wanting to see maybe a little marine action in Xen, but I also remember being glad that I was passed all that when I finally DID get to Xen. Also the whole feel of that chapter was alien, adding back in grunts could take away from that feeling of finally being able to see an alien world. Let the marines stay in surface tension where they belong.
What I’ve been wondering about is how the flow of the game is going to feel with Xen being so drawn out that it keeps getting referred to as “almost another game”, “as long as the whole Earth chapter”, “the first map takes as long as all of the old Xen maps” and so on. That might all be amazing when you keep starting from Xen, but I hope somebody is taking into account that it’s just supposed to be a conclusion to…the other chapters.
There are no Marines in Xen. We’re not interested in straying THAT far from the formula.
Xen isn’t any of those things you put in quotation marks. It’s considerably longer than the original, but within reason. We’ve been highly cognisant of making sure that everything flows properly and that it still feels like a satisfying conclusion to the entire game, rather than purely a standalone product. It’s been one of the major difficulties in developing it. Many players are going to play ONLY Xen. We HAVE to take that into account. Many players are going to play the entire game, with Xen. It’s a delicate balance, but I think we are there. I view it as analogous to HL2’s Episodes.
UH, bad analogy remember we never got EP3. Bad jokes aside, that only makes me more hyped for it. I mean damn the episodes tend to run about 4-6 hours in play time, and with how much you guys are expanding xen. guessing that would move the game upto a 14-16 hour play time for the full thing?
I wanted to get a sense of how big the currently-shown Xen maps are so I put some comparisons together. Shown for scale is bm_c2a5a, the first map of Surface Tension, and a good contender for the largest map in BM in terms of cross sectional area (since each Xen map is on a different scale, in the interest of preserving original image quality, c2a5a is rescaled accordingly for each comparison). They probably aren’t pixel perfect but this should give us a good estimate.
First, for bm_c4a1a:
Next for bm_c4a3a:
Finally, for bm_c4a3b:
Really? Wow. Can’t wait for xen anymore XD