The HECU in Half-Life, plot-wise, are supposed to be extremely efficient to begin with, and smash the aliens to bits, but then get overwhelmed as they progress through the facility+more xenians invade.
The HECU are stronger, but limited, the xenians don’t stop coming, and they keep sending nastier troops until eventually, between the xenians and Freeman, the HECU can’t hold their own much longer and decide to pull out and (as revealed in Opposing Force (which is /probably/ canon)) nuke the facility instead to bury the threat under rubble.
Simply put, they’re very good, but the xenians are infinite. They get overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
Which was sad. I was kinda hoping that all those scientists and guards who stayed behind to hide in closets would just be able to stay there until everything else was dead, then run for it.
Is it a general consensus that there needs to be at least twice the amount of Xen creatures about throughout the game? Especially in the later half, power up/OAR onwards?
Okay i’ve not yet finished, i’m currently on Surface Tension just after getting the hive hand but I seem to come across masses of HECU and now and then a pair of Vorts or a couple of headcrabs. Doesn’t feel like it should, considering I hear that the Xen creatures were supposed to have invaded in greater numbers and overwhelmed the HECU… Or does this happen after ST and i’ll notice it more if I keep playing?
Possibly, but that’s not entirely how Half-Life presents it, and this is lost in a lot of the places cut. Generally speaking, when the Marines are fighting as a unit and utilising their strengths, it’s an even fight (as are the many firefights seen in the original), but there are many, MANY instances littered throughout the cut sections of On a Rail where you find Marines dead with a Bullsquid standing over them, eating, or a Marine gangbanged by a zillion headcraps, or a room where Marines were holing up, but that is now infested.
As I remember from the original, the Marines aren’t totally superior to the aliens, but about even with them when the big monsters start coming out. They eventually retreat because they are suffering unsustainable casualties. And indeed, the men for whom the “Forget about Freeman!” message was intended is also dead.
I do believe that the game needs to show the soldiers getting slaughtered a lot more so as to show that they really have no hope of containing the invasion by sending more troops in. By the time we’re pulling out, we should be thinking “Yeah, it makes sense. They were getting massacred.” This doesn’t need so much critter rebalancing as it needs environment storytelling setup.
Agreed that set-pieces should do the trick, but half-life DID imply the infestation/overwhelming, by showing that the xenians could A: Teleport anywhere and B: Are being mass produced in Xen for what appears to be no cost. Even if they kept attacking in groups of five the HECU would fail to contain them.
You know, one simple enemy that should be present could solve this - a zombie HECU marine. Just as an alternative zombie skin in the late game would help to reinforce the “HECU are losing” message. That, and a couple of xen/HECU battles would solve it I think. Of course, that might be a fair amount of work now to do, I’d hardly expect it, at least not until long after Xen and maybe MP.
it definitely needs rebalancing… make hecu and xen aliens even at the beginning, then letting them dramatically loose… exactly like in the original half life.
and add a gargantua on the landing field in surface tension. or two. which appear later and attack the tank, and you have to fight them with the tow launcher. someone proposed this in some other thread. would be sweet. just an idea.
oh yes… i haven’t considered that. but then they could redesign the map a little bit, so that a gargantua could reach the player.
anyway, its just a hypothetic idea… but it would be epic and dramatic.
I also want to add, that it would be logical for the xen forces to send gargantuas against tanks, since it seems the only creature which is able to take it on with an armoured vehicle (besides the tentacles maybe…), but we never saw such an encounter yet…
Marines are okay, but they should be seen losing more often. Especially shortly before pulling out.
But a little thing I dislike about them is that, for a group of soldier trained to fight in hazardous environments, they don’t really like to wear gloves.
I think the Gargs can’t be felled by normal weapons fire in BM. They’re specifically built to die on triggers- one for being fried by the power grid in Power Up, one for the mortar strike in Surface Tension.
I am definitely enjoying Black Mesa’s version of the soldiers. I’ve adjusted NPC reaction times so their “alert” reaction time is 0.3 seconds and their “idle” reaction time is 0.6 seconds, and that’s enough to make them seem like skilled soldiers with sharp reflexes and great aim rather than inhuman aimbots.
It would be interesting to have a bit of Xen be where some anomaly has occurred and a section of the Black Mesa facility or the desert has appeared in Xen, with a few soldiers to fight.
The Half-Life 1 mod “Case Closed” implimented the idea quite well. Also at the end of Half-Life with the G-man there is a bit where you see some Earth desert that has a destroyed tank and dead soliders… underneath a Xen sky. And Forget About Freeman had Xen growrhs growing in the Black Mesa facility. It suggested some sort of merging between Xen and Earth. So either the bit at the end with the G-Man was that the Earth sky was somehow visible on Earth, or a section of Earth desert had been teleported to Xen by a random event.
I wouldn’t want to see soldiers on a mission to Xen or anything like that, but I think it would be great to see a squad of soldiers that had been warped there by accident. Probably not going to happen as it is too big a departure from the original. (Also some might think having areas of the research facility or the desert randomly appear in Xen would rather undermine the thing where Gordon had to use the enormous Lambda teleporter to get to Xen.) But still, just thought I’d throw that idea out there.
Marc Laidlaw (or some other Valve developer) stated that because of the skybox restraints in the GoldSrc engine, they couldn’t change the sky to reflect that of Earth’s when showing that segment. There’s a lot of things that were limited on Half-Life’s initial release. Another example is that the crystals in Nihilanth’s chamber were supposed to directly reflect the test specimen and not jmerely resemble it. Even the inside of Nihilanth’s brain was supposed to contain one of these crystals, to signify they were essentially part of him and under his direct control.
I found the HECU to be almost perfect. However no they should not be in xen and I agree that there should have been some hints as to them getting slaughtered closer to ‘forget about freeman’. It’s just the way things should be. To the OP no the aliens were not weak. I’m a soldier, I can tell you exactly how if I was their leader I would use their strenghts to defeat our tactics. In a real war they would teleport into our perimeters and take out our commanders, communications, and cut off our supply chains right off the bat. We would then essentially be squads of well trained soldiers with no direction, no way of talking to each other, and no way to resupply ammo, water food, medical supplies and more importantly reenforcements. Armor and airsupport would be poorly coordinated and probably cause friendly casualties fairly often. Then they could send in the gargs to cause mayhem or start sending waves of houndeyes, head crabs, and bullsquids to soak up ammo which would quickly run out with out resupply then send in agrunts and vort slave to mop the remaining grunts who are either out of ammo or fairly low on ammo. We would lose. Not saying me and the other soldiers wouldn’t fight til our dying breaths but we would lose.
But personally I agree with The Javid. And I found that though the marines were tough strategy wise, they died quicker than in HL, AND your SMG is much more accurate than it was in HL.
I only saw HECU winning fights versus vorts. I saw them lose hardcore versus Gargantua and alien grunts. HECU seem a lot stronger simply because there are too few aliens. It didn’t even feel much like an alien invasion, but rather the US army invading.
I’m hoping for the alien numbers to be doubled in the earlier stages, because other than headcrabs, the rest were pretty rare.
While we’re at it, put some dead marines next to some of the bullsquids and maybe some zombies eating marines. That would tell the story with the marines losing.
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.
