Wow, didn’t even notice any aliens in that area when I played through, so I guess your point stands.
Hmm, damn. Now I’ve noticed it too. Nearly all aliens were pushovers compared to the marines. Vorts took too long and had too little health/damage; Houndeyes didn’t multiply their damage when in groups, Bullsquids were always content to stay back and spit at you making them not really reminiscent of their name-sake (a “bull” is supposed to charge towards it’s enemy), the Alien Grunts were competent but scarce, the Xen tentacle was missing from Surface Tension, and finally the Gargantua in ST attacked the tower before I was even on it. There should have been more encounters with Agrunts and Bullsquids, and the Snarks were kind of useless considering no big battles between forces needed “clean-up”.
I really hope they take this into consideration and add a little bit more into OaR, ST, and FaF. Unfortunately it sounds like making a map takes a ton of time and I’m worried they won’t bother. They were also going to add a part at the end of LC where you have to protect the scientist from Controllers pulling off pieces of the pod he was in, but they had to cut that too. Damn.
Are you sure they didn’t implement the houndeye damage multiplier. If anything I thought they were the one alien which was deadlier than before. Agree that squids, vorts and alien grunts should have been more ‘aggressive’. The damage they do is fine, they just need some AI tweaking. The squids should probably have a bit more health as its too easy to headshot them. My opinion might be a bit skewed though from playing the latest version of Sven Coop where all the aliens are absolute tanks.
Remember though, it’s not just the outside battle that contributed in the original HL1 to the military pulling out, it was also the losses they had taken inside Black Mesa.
I think, in this respect, BM shows this quite well, we see HECU marines lying dead throughout the facility, an entire squad burned alive, and dozens killed by the player. I did miss seeing the moment where a squid dragged away a marine into a tunnel, that wasn’t included from what I could see, anyway there rest is.
So it’s not hard to imagine that, combined with jets having to dogfight alien craft outside, the added effect of having dozens and dozens of squads go dark inside the facility would have made the military commanders think they need to cut their losses, therefore leading to the black ops insertion later.
The Xenian invasion is mostly showcased in Surface Tension, where you see a lot of major battles being fought between HECU and the Xen forces.
Problem is with so much of Surface Tension being cut, you don’t see much of the Xen forces engaging the army, nor do you see them ever winning against the grunts.
They definitely could have improved that, and I hope they do once the Xen chapters are released. (Even though it seems unlikely.)
Too bad we don’t hear much from it other than the rocket launch countdown. Would have loved hearing BM’s take on it a lot more since it sounds amazing.
If the tank in the helipad scene was replaced by a gargantua, I think everything would change.
I think this is a lingering problem from HL Source, where the aliens got nerfed and the marines got even more difficult to kill.
See the Garg charge the Abrams and flip it right over. That would have needed a fair bit of scripting but it’d be a real payoff to say ‘These Marines are in over their heads. Look, it’s throwing about the Abrams like it were a Power Wheels.’
I’d also be terrified at that moment and start looking for something with rockets in it. 
Hm… Now that explains that weird feeling I got in the last chapters.
There’s one scene that is a extreme, sublimed concentrate of that wrong feeling. When you dealt with the tank, go trough the gate… and then see a Manta Ray flying. This should hint that the aliens are now in control. Well, that’s what I felt when I saw it flying above the scene! …and yet you continue fighting marines after that.
Though, I think, houndeyes are a major annoyance (I played on easy). I may have forgotten… did they really, really come in such large packs in the original? Probably, that’s one more reason I didn’t felt much difference: you face houndeyes in packs of 3 and more almost from the very beginning. It’s hard to feel overwhelmed when you still have 3-5 of them later on. I remember, like, 7 or 8 of them attacking me at once as early as in “Power up”, on the staircase leading to the power generators (under the track where Gargantua is roaming about).
I think the developers could really help this problem by rearranging the enemies near the end of that level. There’s one sequence where you’re walking up a ramp to find a few vorts and grunts only just teleporting in (to attack you), and they’re pretty quickly dealt with. Once you’ve finished with that there are some marines in their place, and they’re a little more dangerous, so you pretty well come out of that thinking about the marines as the (only) enemy.
Kill (most of) those marines, have some of the aliens already there (having killed said marines), and maybe have a Manta shoot something at you to shake things up, so it isn’t just another encounter. I think that would be pretty effective for changing the tone, and easier than adding new areas. Smaller, anyway: it sort of fits in the same place as fixing the not really scary enough vorts and bullsquids.
(Granted, still easier said than done :b).
A few cents about surface tension.
-It felt quite puzzling to see the single tentacle pit and heli blasting at you before you drop down into the drainage pipe being cut - especially seeing how this part was supposed to be in, judging by the apache test video (the one with 50 cal shooting). Asa result, you did not seem really hunted by that thing.
-Mantas dropping a.grunt paras, while being rather poorly executed, hinted that xenians had organised armed forces - something not as readily evident in BM due to cuts.
-The was also extensive xenian flora present amidst the debris in original (stuff like jump pads) - more evidence of xen taking over the facility. In BM, I only seem to remember a couple places infested like that.
-And, surely, the exclusion of HECU vs Xen arenas (same matter with On a Rail). It is evident that those were not intended to be cut down as I’ve found a lot of ‘bogies alert’ sounds in the game files, yet I don’t recall hearing any of those during ST.
It is a bit… unpleasant and strange to find that those had to be cut despite the 2009 delay, as such omissions do really contrast with the rest of the mod which I was thoroughly enjoying from the very beginning.
It is, of course clear now that it was a simple case of shit happening in the dev tam. Nevertheless it was sad to hear OBE going on about OAR bits as ‘It looked like shit and played like shit’.
And no, I am not holding my breath for those omitted OAR and ST areas to be somehow reintegrated into the Xen release, leave alone via patches, seeing as to do this would mean to screw with map geometry which is already compiled and finalized.
I agree with your sentiment and feel it starts much earlier then that, when the grunts start really gunning for Freeman. It’s a very important story arc in Half-Life that feels missing in Black Mesa, get freeman, got freeman, freemans back, aliens are taking over, screw freeman time to get out of dodge.
IMO it starts to fall apart in ‘On a Rail’. Sure they wanted to cut the maze (wasnt a difficult level IMO but OK) but in the process alot of set pieces were eliminated, and this level is really where the military ramps up the hunt for Freeman in HL. This is where you really get that they are gunning for you and I did not get that feeling in BM.
So now you get caught in Apprehension, Escape and get back in the fight thru Residue Processing and are back on the hit list in Questionable Ethics, all done excellently… though I would have liked to see a little more action in the QE labs, like coming up on the grunts taking out scientists… which would really add meaning to the ambush near the end.
This leads into Surface Tension, this is the part where the game transitions from ‘get freeman’ to ‘getting thier butts handed to them’ it starts out great but doesnt transition into the aliens starting to take over. The problem as I see it, is one, the end of Surface Tension got cut and those were the grunt vs alien set pieces. Two, the grunts are way overpowered and the few pieces where they do battle the aliens, they totally pwned them.
Just my .02 but somethings I would change. Get some of those set pieces back into ‘on a rail’ the traps, bunkers and other setups to ambush freeman and get some chatter going on thier radios about getting Freeman (Im talking about the radio boxes not the grunt chatter) dont need to have different ways for the tram to go but there should be at least more of the track blocks that you had to dismount and figure out how to open before moving on. Nerf the Grunts, they are ridiculously overpowered, this will also allow more grunts to be added in certain areas and will also allow the aliens to start winning fights later on. Which leads to Surface Tension, one or two more of the cut levels back in, and way more aliens plus the nerfed grunts will really feel like the grunts are starting to lose which will flow perfectly into Forget About Freeman. Also at that point the radios should all be broadcasting that they should forget freeman and bug out.
The levels that made it into the game are absolutely fantastic, and the flow is near perfect right up to On A Rail, though I thought there sould have been more aliens spread around the earlier levels. From there it just doesnt have the flow HL did and IMO it has a lot to do with what got cut and the overpowered grunts.
I think there’s some validity in the complaints but it must suck for the devs who worked on this for 7(?) years to just hear about what they didn’t do, when there’s a whole fucking game longer than most things you buy at retail here. I can’t imagine they’re eager to make more levels when they just get nitpicked.
Now you mention it, I should add that I for one really do not mind how this works right now. It plays beautifully, after all, and at the end of the day there’s no reason for Gordon to just happen to come across a full picture of the situation. I think it’s important to remember we haven’t seen Xen yet, and it is (as far as I know) getting a pretty significant overhaul. The original Xen never gave me a good sense of impending doom as the aliens work to invade. (Just a place with lots of aliens that you kill, really). The new Xen could broaden the story very nicely here, and it could easily express that they are in fact winning, despite the earlier pyrotechnics. Perhaps with more pyrotechnics.
I have full confidence in the developers here 
This is constructive criticism, not nitpicking.
This is a well-thought-out discussion of what can be improved, not ‘OMFG dis gaem is teh suck lolololololol’.
Picklesworth has got a point. More story could be put into Xen. Like while in Xen you could see pieces from black Mesa that were teleported there, soldiers lying dead, tanks destroyed even a few jets in pieces from getting teleported into Xen and getting destroyed. It could give you the sense when the Resonance Cascade went off, not only did Xen come to you, you went to Xen along with several others that didn’t make it showing that the worlds sort of melded together briefly, Xen could show you the true size of their forces there, could even be cave sections of gargantuas, or what have you.
We only have half the game right now, for all we know the HECU could have sent squads to Xen only to find out their forces are more powerful than they expected and behind the scenes where we didn’t see they fought hard on earth at black mesa in sections we didn’t see. Like maybe the HECU got into the anonymous materials labs and found it infested with aliens that arrived after you left and thats why the two jets bombed the building in ST. There’s a lot of story to be told and as it is, we’re only seeing the strength of the HECU. in Xen we’ll probably see the strength of the Xenians and understand why they retreated.
That said, what they did with those two sequences in the game got one of the loudest “OH FUCK WHY IS THAT THERE RUN RUN RUN” moments in any game I’ve played in a loooooong time.
Well, I’m pretty sure that the developers are not going to make any significant effort to improve this issue, and I totally fine with this: they are under time and manpower constraints and would rather concentrate on Xen.
However, I think there could be a few very easy fixes to the atmosphere.
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Adding more dead HECUs as you progress.
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Adding more living aliens as you progress.
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Creating more alien-HECU fights by simply putting them in the same areas and letting aliens slaughter the soldiers.
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More snark trip-mines. Makes you feel like aliens take control of the territory.
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Introducing the formidable beast that is Alien Controller earlier into the game. Let it slaughter some marines from above.
Opinions?
I’d be happier if there was more Xen creatures around most of the chapters. With the slight reduction in the marines power and reaction times I think the balance would sort itself out with Xen maybe able to win a few more confrontations.