For me, it was more “Hahah, I hope you dumb grunts like snarks- OH GOD THEY MOVED UP THE GARG FIGHT!”
We should have, when you come to the cafeteria in the orignal you hear Vox in the orignal saying “Turret maintance report to adminstrator” or something to that extent. Vox said quite a bit on your trip to the surface. I was disappointed that we didnt hear more.
There wasnt even a tank in that scene. When you blasted that door you had two alien grunts come running out. I used to bum rush to the cannon blow the door and let the two alien grunts fight it out with the HECU marines.
If they want to add and change stuff I say like you replace the tank with a Gargantua. That would show that the HECU marines are starting to get torn to pieces.
Well that is the thing, when you create something you hear about screw ups or bad choices. That comes with the territory. If they cant handle this then they should have never under taken the project to begin with. Ive been on numerous game forums and seen people complain about this and that.
Which is why I posted a review on here of what I felt about the game playing it for the first time. The game is good but its not as good as the orignal in my book content wise. I was under the impression that we were getting new areas to explore to replace some areas that were cut. I didnt really notice any new areas but I did notice a lot more cut areas than I saw admited to in the past.
As far as being eager to make more levels, they should be cause if they leave it like this and dont deliver they will get even more back lash for releasing a un finished mod. It would have been easier on them to just admit due to team problems the mod is dead and not even release than it is to release a mod un finished and dont even finish it.
Well in the orignal the G-man informs you that the military was finishing securing the Xen border world as you see dead marines and military vehicles from tanks to apc`s. So they could easily have this content shown before your heart to heart with G-man at the end and make you wonder wtf is going on are they pulling military personel into Xen or are they invading Xen.
But I still would like to see more Xenian life vs HECU grunts on earth. I mean cmon what about the APC blasting through the wall in a storage room and letting two grunts out to fight two alien grunts and four vorts. We need to see more of the HECU getting their ass kicked by the Xenian aliens before we get to the tower before lambda complex and hear that they are pulling out. Sure they could make it like they were losing on Xen and thats why they pulled back but why would they pull out of the research facility for losing at Xen. They would pull out of the border world instead. So they need to logically put HECU getting torn to pieces by the Xenian aliens before they come out that they are leaving.
This would just make a good game better and maybe would make me change my rating of this game to be better than the orignal but as it stands I gave the orignal a 9.2 and I give this mod a 9.0.
lol I didnt even turn back I started running. I didnt find out if the marines were killed or not but I heard on here the marines shoot at the garg and he didnt even kill them he just chases you.
That was a little disappointing. I liked seeing the two marines gibbing as the garg smashes a car into them in the orignal.
I agree that replacing the tank in that scene with a Garg would really help, but at the same time, that might cheapen up the Gargantua and make the later fight less climactic. Which, admittedly, it already was, since the Garg had terrible behavior and started banging on a tower that I had completely missed.
Edit: Also, yeah, the Gargantua should really kill those two soldiers. Also, maybe add some Hgrunts, or even aliens, that approach you from the front while you’re fleeing only to get crushed by a car thrown from behind.
I doubt they will take this too personally. It almost goes without saying that anyone who is here discussing the game in minute detail is a rabid HL/BM fan anyway. If anything the nitpicking shows how fanatic everyone is.
Whilst most of us probably fit that description of the rabid Half-Life fan-person, I think dismissing this as ‘nitpicking’ is actually doing the team more of a dis-service. Black Mesa is a game that engages and fascinates, and it shouldn’t be protected from discussion and criticism. I don’t want to sound too pompous… but engaging people on that level should be the reward for creating something so significant.
Vox? Is that the modulated voice which speaks in spiced-word sentences, like “This. Facility. Now. Under. Military. Control?” I don’t remember if I heard that at all in Black Mesa, but as soon as I replayed Half-Life, I remember hearing it and how cool that was. Did they dub over those lines in Black Mesa?
I’m just saying, as it stands a lot goes on in the background we don’t see at the moment. Pretty much what I was saying the equivilent of “The marines retreated? From who and what army? looks at massive army of the Xen Aliens lined up and ready to fight Ooooh, that’s a good army.”
True a lot does go on in the back ground. Even if we saw bodies of dead HECU`s with alive Xenian aliens then that could lead to the conclusion that the invasion is picking up momentum and actually tearing the HECU grunts to pieces.
Vox is the computer system and voice of the facility. In Black Mesa you hear Vox in a friendly voice during In bound. Then later on you hear garbled start of Vox talking in a friendly voice but quickly changes to the unfriendly sounding masculine voice saying the facility is under military control. During the climb to the surface you could hear Vox talk more in Half Life 1.
Heres a video of the Vox personality from Half Life 1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdLRZzCf_kk
I couldnt find videos of Vox during the game but I can type out some of the announcements Vox makes or supposed to have made during Half Life 1.
[COLOR=‘Red’]Hello. The Automatic Diagnostic and Announcement System welcomes you to the Black Mesa Research Facility. Remember: have a secure day!
Agent Coomer, report to Topside Tactical Operations Center.
Inspection team to Radioative Materials Handling Bay.
Agent 16, report to Administration Sub-Level 2
Dr. Johnson, please call Obeservation Tank 1
Dr. West, please report to Lambda Reactor Complex.
Dr. Cross, call 729 please.
Sergeant Bailey to Topside Checkpoint Bravo.
Cryogenic Safety Crew, report status at 1100 please.
Coded message for Captain Black, Command and Communication Center
Sector C science personnel, report to Anomalous Materials test lab.
Dr. Freeman to Anomalous Materials test lab immediately.
Attention. Experimental Propulsion Lab test fire in 90 minutes.
etc, etc, etc.
The above is a small list of Vox comments before the Incident. The announcement in red wasnt used in the game but can be found as a wav file in the game.
After the incident you have Vox making these announcements. Not all of them are listed too many to list though.
Warning, high energy detonation detected in materials lab.
Attention, security personnel to Sector C immediately.
Warning, unauthorized biological forms detected in Sector C.
Warning, unauthorized biological forms detected in Coolant Maintenance Area.
Any damage control team to Sector C immediately.
Warning, Sector C elevator failure. Do not use.
Biohazard warning in Sector B and C.
Service team, check Elevator 1, Sector C.
Warning, unauthorized biological forms detected in ventilation system.
Attention. All science personnel report topside for immediate questioning.
All personnel evacuate High Security Materials Storage Facility.
Turret maintenance team to Central Command and Communications Center.
Military Personnel, prosecute Kilo-India-Lima with extreme force.
Attention. This announcement system is now under military command.
Search and Destory Froce Bravo reports secondary objective terminated.
Bravo Froce reports Hotel-Sierra-Mike facility is secured.
If we could just get a small chunk of what was used in Half Life one in Black Mesa it would really liven up the game. We could also be notified whats going on, once the military takes over Vox they start using Vox to notify other squads whats going on through Vox. Vox could effectively used as a way to convey that the military is getting torn to pieces by the Xenian aliens. Have it start out with the military doing good then you start hearing Vox announcements indicating the miltiary is starting to lose then all of a sudden you dont hear Vox anymore as the military pulls out and cuts off use of the announcement system.
Oh, that’s clever.
What about this one from HL1 that I wished I heard in Black Mesa.
Alert Topside Containment Force, use any force to prosecute Gordon Freeman. You are authorized to shoot on sight.
or
Gordon, all science personnel will be terminated until you surrender.
The second one is some kind of sick joke considering they were terminating the science personnel long before they started their own little vendetta against you.
Huh… OK, I was clearly not paying attention, then. Does Vox still talk in spliced-word sentences with no intonation? Because the original gave me the impression that the facility managers got someone to sit down and record a few thousand words, then let the system arrange them into procedurally-generated sentences to allow it to speak.
Yeah, I just made a thread about the VOX system. Please post there and ask the devs for an expanded dialogue set 
https://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?t=14251
Ram just said they will add it in a future patch. Yei!
It’s especially relevant because the devs DID pay attention to the VOX system; they made a very good change to it, the shift from a friendly famale voice to a menacing male voice when the military takes control. But since, before and after, the VOX system barely speaks, the shock is diminished.
Vox still speaks in the spliced word style of sentences.
Actually in HL1 you heard the VOX during Questionable Ethics, We’ve Got Hostiles!", and “Lambda Core”, but that’s it. It didn’t play anywhere else.
I love both of those lines and they are in the files for HL1, but they don’t actually play anywhere.
In any case, regarding the thread.
Seeing so much from On A Rail cut was kind of sad. That was always one of my favorite chapters because it was so open and had a lot to explore. It also did a lot foreshadow the HECU pulling out because you come across several marine massacres in that chapter. The last time I played it I counted all the dead marines found and there were something like 18 of them scatted all over the level. That’s not counting the live ones that I then killed or then witnessed being killed by the aliens.
As someone else said, just adding some pre-dead HECU marines to On A Rail and maybe some other chapters (and placing aliens near them) might help rectify this problem to a great degree.
Yep. Even the female VOX was still like this:
“Dr… Smith… Please report to… Science Room.”
I agree that there was a greater Marine-based presence in this mod than in the original game. I thought at first that it was because I had watered-down the experience from replaying the original so many times, but now that you mention it, the alien-to-marine ratio seems to be off.
Also, good to know that VOX will be implemented in future updates, albeit too late.
I seem to be one of the few that actually had the Xenians win a couple of the pitched battles.
Especially the last one in the underground parking area in Lambda core.
For me as a player and witness to the events it certainly seemed as if the alien forces started to become a serious detriment to the HECU starting in the Osprey Battle area. It has also been noted elsewhere that there is a lot of implied sounds of war and fighting going on throughout Black Mesa.
There is nothing against saying that the sounds of bombardment that we are hearing could in fact be a combination of Human and Xenian bombardment.
That said I would love to see a number of the ideas in this thread (lot’s more HECU bodies- more Xenian/HECU/Gordon battles- to be implemented.
As a screenwriter sometimes we have to simply imply things, sometimes we give the viewer too much information and we really need to scale it back. There’s a balance that needs to be met and it’s certainly possible that the BM Dev team erred to much to implying and not enough to showing.
However as I played through Surface Tension personally I felt that the entire situation was coming to an unravelling point for the HECU. Just the set up of the Osprey area points to this particular set piece as being a last stand by the HECU in that area.
My 2 cents.
I agree with the sentiment. The alien vs. military battles in Black Mesa feel much more slanted towards the military than they did in HL1.
The problem is having the military output an overwhelming display of force just before they decide to pull out. (the helicopter and tank part) This makes you feel like the military is pulling back due specifically to the badassery of Gordon instead of the aliens slowly gaining the upper hand in the battle. I think it would really help if the tank were replaced with a Garg (maybe modified with some form of ranged attack?) and some of the recent faction battles were skewed more towards the aliens.
I definitely agree with this. The lack of the marines/aliens fights in Surface Tension has a big impact in the flow of the story of the game.
One of the devs posted this…
I think he is missing the point. It’s not that people miss escorting the security guard, but the several marines/aliens fights that set the mood for the “Forget about Freeman” order.