Untrained?
I know this is kind of off topic but I would like to point out that in conventional warfare we are excellent. For example, Iraqs military force fell in a few weeks with our casualties being extremely low. The rest of the time we were fighting an insurgency. Insurgencies are hard to defeat as the enemy is hard to recognize before he attacks you and usually by the time he does it’s too late because he can just disappear into a crowd of people. We decided to go the harder route of winning hearts and minds which is good, but ruthlessness is much more edfective. I can’t count how many times a civilian wanted to help but didn’t because he or she was afraid of what the insurgents would do to him or her but knew we would do no harm. My point is please don’t use our difficulties in those two fronts to compare our ability to fight a standing army that would easily be identifiable from the civilian population we would be trying to protect. I do however agree we would most probaly lose the battle against the invading xenian force if not be softened up to make a fight against the combine seem like insanity.
I don’t know why some military recruits keep referring to fighting a standing army as “conventional warfare”. It might have been conventional in WWII and before, but for more than half a century, the convention is that the opposing force is not clearly identifiable.
Look at the conflicts in Rwanda.
Look at the conflicts in Nigeria.
Look at the conflicts in Liberia.
Look at the conflicts in Lybia.
Look at the conflicts in Syria.
Look at the conflicts in Palestine.
Etc…
Hell, Viet-Nam was the closest thing you ever got to a clearly identifiable army, and you got slaughtered there (although you did slaughter as well).
The reality is that if the army wants to prepare for a realistic conflict, they have to be ready to face not clearly-identifiable targets.
You may have 10 times more destruction power than the opposing force, but it’s not the cumulative power that counts, it’s how you manage to use it efficiently. And on that level, most armies are almost just as competent as you are. In places like Somalia, you can get an AK-47 for about $20, and it is almost just as lethal as a $2500 M-16 and requires less training & maintenance.
First I’m not a recruit, I’ve served for about 6 years and counting. I’ve been to Iraq and Egypt on uncle sams behalf. You must have forgotten Desert Storm and Kosovo, 2 conventional wars. Conventional warefare is military on military. It does seem like it rarely happens for us but if we were to fight any non-3rd world country it would be a conventional war. It does, for the moment, seem like all of the non-3rd world countried are not attempting to draw us in a fight.
I think the Marines in Half-life was awesome, I mean I literally was forced to think, adapt and take my time to kill them. After finishing the original game I started playing Opposing force which gave more conclusion in the half-life massacre, I mean at the very first hour of the operation many marines died even before they were given there mission. But yup you’ll just end up being a zombie grunt as there are just so many enemies to fight with and you’ll run off of ammunition and seeing you other fellow marines get eaten or torn to pieces would make you’re morale drop significantly to the point you will want to shoot yourself.
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war and combat in general are scary as it is, especially with all the ethical issues laminating it
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The role of an inexperienced 22 year old who enlists because he has nothing else to live for is realistically achievable by any gamer and as an archetype is a tried and true classic character throughout all forms of media for this reason
Opposing Force didn’t take advantage of this and as such will probably do better as a film if one is ever made. I can’t see an easier route for a Half-Life movie than “Platoon meets The Thing”
I didn’t like the soldiers too much. Like some others, I thought they were cheap, and the voice-acting didn’t help either. I don’t know, I think the dev team needed to take inspiration from the FEAR 1 Replicas, now those guys are soldiers, some of the most challenging yet believable enemy combatants I’ve ever seen.
The BM’s interpretation feels more like from portal or team fortress than HL if that makes sense. The whole “perhaps I should be taking these guys seriously” thing just isn’t there, cause they can’t be taken seriously.
Uniforms do not make soldiers, soldiers have to deserve that uniform.
It’s hard to believe that they have passed through mental tests while half of them belong to asylum.
Them being crazy and evil doesn’t deter me, in fact I do like that they made the soldiers evil, it’s just that they didn’t make them feel like a threat, yet in game-play they were too much of a threat. Get what I mean?
Define “evil” cause they weren’t, a lawful one at best. The scientists are the bad guys in fact.
Some of those soldiers were just morally questionable, but most of them were “good”
My problem with them is lack of professionalism in behavior, weren’t they supposed to be some extra unit?
Well, evil in the sense that they’ll happily follow immoral orders. There’s only ONE soldier that questions his orders, the rest happily execute civilians of their own country, some because the government says so, and some probably because they like the blood shedding. Remember that the HECU are a Black Operations group, and in case anyone wants to debate that, look up black operation, they fall under this definition nicely. They operate more like a terrorist group than a regular efficient army force. They use scare tactics, hold civilians into custody without proper procedures, hell, they kill most civilians they see without even asking who they are. I don’t think they should be “professional” in the sense that they have proper battle etiquette, they should be intimidating. Intimidating and efficient.
The scientists’ experiment going wrong was a public threat, you wouldn’t ask questions from people that play with aliens first, would you?
Honestly, I love the difficulty boost in Black Mesa. I used to find Half-Life really challenging, but now I can just breeze through it.
Black Mesa is still challenging, in a good way. There are just some issues that need ironing out (i.e. the HECU’s amazing reaction time/accuracy).
However, I’m going to have to agree with those saying that the HECU aren’t losing enough fights, mostly in Surface Tension. They’re supposed to be getting overwhelmed, that’s part of the story - in Half-Life, this works rather well, but in BM, I’m noticing them win almost every fight.
I made a sound pack once that gives them F.E.A.R. sounds for combat. I never replaced the scripted sounds because I could never decide what I wanted to do with them and then I realised I’d probably have to edit the .VCD if I wanted to change them, and I don’t know how those work and ugh. I just never finished it :[
Alternatively, I have a simpler one that just replaces all the voices with the ‘young’ voice, which is a significant improvement in itself imo. It has the bonus of not making scripted scenes too jarring (otherwise I would totally use the FEAR version).
They weren’t really supposed to be evil though. In fact “Questionable Ethics” was supposed to make you rethink who was really the bad guy here. Of course, for some reason the Devs decided to ignore the morality issue by making the soldiers as evil as possible for this chapter (by making them sex offenders nonetheless).
Download the Surface Tension Uncut. It restores ST to it’s original HL1 length with the added bonus of watching the Military getting royally boned.
In the end, my opinion is that their design decision for the soldiers couldn’t have been worse. They took a morally questionable professional military force and turned them into evil 80’s cartoon villains with extra rape. Hopefully the backlash against it has made them reconsider their direction in the final release.
I don’t mind them being a bit cartoony. The scientists were pretty cartoony, as well as the security guards (especially the Otis class) and the aliens. I guess I probably would have envisioned them differently, I always thought of them being the mean side of the military, the side of the military that’s no more different than a terrorist faction. If I was in charge of the soldier’s direction, they would have had pretty much the same personality as these guys. Just listen to their quotes, they’re bad motherfuckers.
Are they cartoony? Yes. Likable? Yes. Badass? Yes. The BMS HECU only filled out the very first criteria, sadly.
the original Hgrunt noises from hl1 are just so hard to beat
Eh…I think the Replicas had better voice-acting than the Nightcrawlers. That video just screams “Trying Too Hard” instead of “Professional.”
Back on topic (all of them, since it seems this thread has gone a bit haywire…)
I liked the difficulty spike for the HECU. It rammed home the point that these weren’t just an army of mooks, but were actually a dangerous professional force, horrible voice-acting aside. Reaction time and accuracy could have used a bit of a tweak, though, and, while I know this has been fixed in a couple of fan mods, the last half of the game was SORELY lacking the giant HECU vs Xenian fights that were in the original Half-Life.
As for HECU on Xen? No. Reasons have already been posted. However, it might be interesting to come across the remains of research camps, like what was in Blue Shift. We know the BMRF had been sending expeditions to Xen for quite some time by the time the events of the game roll around, and it’s likely that at least some would be operating at the time of the incident.
I have both ST Uncut and OaR Uncut Alpha installed. I still don’t see them losing fights that much on regular settings (they lose more than on the vanilla BM maps, but they’re still winning most of the time).
In the extra OaR and ST maps, the Military are getting decimated though, especially the ST maps.
I liked it. They were cartoony, sure, hammy, sure, but I thought they were likeable. They didn’t give me a headache with their screaming all the time and radio filter that sounds like it’s coming from a busted mic. And I love that laugh.