My fiercest enemy was the turrets. They activated in that one hallway and it took about seven reloads before I could take them out. Otherwise, I think some of these players are trying run 'n gun tactics. You guys need to take cover more. Pop out and fire a 357 round into a soldier’s head and they are done. Don’t panic and take them out one at a time.
Game feels good to me (normal difficulty).
I completed the game on normal, and i must say: the worst enemy in this fucking game is a fuckton of hgrunts. When you face one of them, or two or three, it’s okay. But in huge fights like in the end of QE, there are 20 of them, and they GANGRAPE you with 100% accurate MP5 bursts, while YOUR MP5 is useless against them. So i just hid in the corner and shot them with the xbow, while in HL1 you can just run and shoot them with yer MP5 and/or grenades, or 357, or shotgun. For some reason none of them threw grenades until the very end of Surface Tension, and that saved me, i guess.
And how can a helicopter take 10 rockets, while a tank can take only two?
I’m just too used to HL1, i suppose, but that felt pretty unfair.
In Office Complex I was using the magnum to blow away headcrabs all over the place, there was enough ammo for me to use it on everything. I’ve only needed the ironsight for occasional bit of long-range sniping, just to get the slight bit of zoom and accuracy bonus. My only criticism of the ironsight is that the texture seems a bit low resolution - you don’t notice this normally when you bring the gun up to your face it looks a bit odd.
I don’t mind the grenade throwing - I think it’s like Half-Life 2 where the game calculates the correct trajectory for throwing a grenade, so you put the crosshair where you actually want the grenade to go, and if it is in range it should reach it.
The grunts feel OK to me, but that’s because they feel like proper special forces soldiers, they are tough and they are competent and they have sharp reflexes, they are in a combat zone and they are ready for action. In old Half-Life you had the standard videogame problem that “special forces” were not very special.
But it’s a bit of a nasty shock because the other Half-Life enemies that occur earlier in the game can still be fought the same way that they were back in Half-Life 1, while the soldiers need you to use a whole bunch of tactics and stuff that you never had to worry about before.
It might help if the MP5 did a bit more damage, or if it had the 50-round magazine it used to rather than a 30-round magazine. (I don’t mind the 30-round magazine
Worst enemy in game is… ladder. Try by quick with them on blast pit.
Oh, and how no one complain about assasins? Grunts are evil but quick-jumping-invisible-one-shoot-kill enemy is ok? 
Don’t get me wrong - i love fight with them, but they are much harder than soldiers.
OP, do you remember how hard Half Life 1 was when you first tried it.
Yeah, shut up.
The Mp5 is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to inaccurate and fast. here is how fast a Mp5 should fire:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKiNyUvB10s
I do remember how hard Half Life 1 was. But then again I’m not the OP. I don’t think the balance is too far off, I just think on “Normal” the punishment for a tactical error should be a bit smaller than it is. Those who want hard can pick hard; those who want to run and gun can pick easy. But if there are three grunts, and I only counted two, and I shoot the two, the third one makes a sloppy mess out of my hazard suit before I can even locate where he is at.
In one area I ended up restarting 15 times, with a quicksave after every death. What I’d do is step out into the open, get one-shotted off the last 25% of my health, and try to figure out the next grunt’s position. Next life, I’d try to look that direction. Third life I had a pretty good idea, so I’d ironsight the magnum. Fourth life I’d know exactly where to shoot. Then I’d F6 so I could find the next one by death reckoning. On Normal this seems just a bit excessive, to me anyway.
With that said, I’m not having problems playing it, and I’d say, on the balance, so far, (and I’m just currently on Blast Pit) the game feels OK. Just a bit tilted in the favor of the bad guys.
Don’t get me wrong, though. If you pick hard I want you going up against Navy Seal Marine Terminator Robots. That’s what you want, have at it.
Let’s not forget, though, that Half Life is a Quake. I’m supposed to be able to run-and-gun, at least if I have a relatively good idea of what’s going on. Half Life isn’t supposed to be a waist high walls cover based shooter. Yes, tactics, that’s what made it stand out in the world of Serious Sam and Duke Nukem. But you ALSO had the option to go in guns blazing and come out alive.
Half Life IS a quake? No, no, no. Half Life was make as game with more complex story and gameplay, game where player is not a Chuck Norris One Man Army. If you want to run and shoot - choose easy. That game was never made for running and shooting. Anyway - on hard i have no problems with run&shoot. Just be quick and think about what can you do, run from cover to cover until you are sure than anything in room is dead. There are places when you can fire and make hell but there is many places when you must think before pulling trigger. And yes, there is option to go guns blazing and get alive with that - easy OR more practice.
I’m not great gamer, shit, im playing on old notebook in low settings with broken mouse than sometimes disconnect in middle of fight and still hard is something between easy and medium in my opinion.
My friend play on normal and doesn’t complain beacuse he understand how to play in that game and how to save ammo.
Ehh… that’s hard to say, it really on the situation the player finds themselves in. I can handle most marines if I try hard enough, you need A LOT of cover and need to constantly move though. I play with a customized skill.cfg, it’s a HELL of a lot tougher, I do like it, but in some circumstances I had to either take them out from long range (snipe) or turn on god mode after about the 10th time of trying legitimately. LOL
I ended up playing a round of wack-a-mole with the abrams and the squad of 8 marines. Oh by was that fun, ducking in and around manholes popping out to kill 1-2 marines before going back down and hoping to god they don’t throw a frag down the hole. Did that for around an hour and a half.
It’s not too tough for me, just needs a little bit of tweeking 'n such.
Edit: AI: Marines like to run from the hive hand’s hornets. That should be fixed.
I don’t think the game is so much “too hard” as it just doesn’t feel like Half-Life. The Vortagons fire FAR too fast, I’d say easily twice as fast as in the original Half-Life. In the old game, I could hear one charge up, turn around, aim and hit it with a shotgun. I did this many times in Office Complex. Here, even if I know where it is and I have my crossbow zoomed in and aimed in his direction, I’ll still get zapped if I so much as stop to aim. It’s not impossible to deal with, it’s just annoying.
US Marines are even worse. They aren’t that bad, and they really need to throw more grenades, but their accuracy is simply surreal. I can be hiding behind crates at 100 yards with inly a bit of my head showing up so I can barely even see them, and they’ll hit me with full auto bursts reliably at that distance. I get that Gordon isn’t a trained soldier (OR IS HE?!?), but my accuracy with the MP5 is horrible yet theirs is near perfect. Why?
Marines in Half-Life were never dangerous because they can hit a fly in a hurricane. They were deadly because they were smart enemies who worked together, flanked you and flushed you out with grenades. Marines are enemies you couldn’t hide from for long, is the thing. I’d say kill their accuracy some and make their AI more aggressive. Have them throw grenades. Have them split up and try to flush me out of cover, have them play smart. Just don’t make them supermen for no reason.
I don’t really have a problem with any of the other enemies, at least not so far. Facehuggers are small and fast so they’re hard to hit, but that’s always been the case. They’re just a bit faster here. Zombies are dangerous, but they’re slow so that works. They bob their hears around a bit much, making headshots tricky, but that’s really not cheap at all. The spitter aliens, I forget what they’re called, these are actually quite well balanced. Tough, deadly, but only if you let them. It’s just the vortagons and marines I have a problem with.
And the MP5. It sounds far too loud for what it’s supposed to be. When I hold down the trigger, it makes me feel like I’m firing the Hispano 20mm… Man, what I wouldn’t give for a 20mm autocannon in Half-Life Point is, even stationary machineguns (that look like the M2 Browning) don’t sound or feel as “big,” and they’re considerably more deadly.
Side note, on ladders: I think the biggest problem with these is that you can actually walk through almost all of them. If you come at them “wrong,” you can pass clean through the ladder and there’s nothing to grab onto on the other side. I don’t know that this is the case for all of them, but I’ve fallen THROUGH enough ladders to know this is the case for at least some.
“It’s not too tough for me, just needs a little bit of tweeking 'n such.”
That’s really what I’m trying to say. It’s fun, and it’s not too hard, and that one 15-turn-life was an anomaly (my last play run through Old Half Life, I got stuck on the cliffs outside Black Mesa with one HP and a single clip of pistol ammo, which meant I burned through about 30 lives of trial and error, so that’s not really a problem).
It just feels… wrong. And I know that everyone’s personal experience is personal. “Heck, I never even played a shooter before, only PONG, and I’m doing just fine on ludicrous mode, stop your whining!” “I’m a US Marine sniper and I can’t get the magnum to work right!” Personal experience.
I think the comment that says:
"Marines in Half-Life were never dangerous because they can hit a fly in a hurricane. They were deadly because they were smart enemies who worked together, flanked you and flushed you out with grenades. Marines are enemies you couldn’t hide from for long, is the thing. I’d say kill their accuracy some and make their AI more aggressive. Have them throw grenades. Have them split up and try to flush me out of cover, have them play smart. Just don’t make them supermen for no reason.
In HL1, I’d run into a squad of marines firing their inaccurate guns at me, do the comedy routine “OH CRAP” and backpedal… right into another squad of marines. The AI used one squad to flush me into another squad that actually killed me, but the first squad’s god-bullets didn’t kill me.
Thank you for saying what I was feeling because I wasn’t saying it right.
If you want to give the Marines god-bullets on Hard, again, go ahead. That’s why we have a hard mode. I, personally, on Normal, would rather the guns be a bit less godlike and the marines a bit more tactical. As it is now simply walking into a room of three marines means all the health I’d just tanked up is worth naught UNLESS I snipe them right away with supernatural aim honed over multiple runs. I should be able to ambush THEM just as much as they ambush ME.
As it is my tactic right now is to spam the room with grenades, then dash in and mop 'em up with the SMG. Successful, yes. But not as fun.
Vortigaunts are supposed to be a really clever and sapient race, and their fast attacks show how “respectable” they are, but they indeed could be a little bit slower. Houndeyes on the other hand, can charge their sonic wave too fast, IMO. They’re very hard to kill without being hit while you are close to one. I got only to 50% of Office Complex, so I didn’t experience HECUs yet. I know houndeyes and vorts were always meant to be tougher than in HL1, but they overdid it a little bit.
Headshots with 357 - they drop like flies. Also so what you go down to 20hp - as long as you can move forward you’re good.
…
I think it’s less that they charge up too fast… If anything, they’re slower than in Half-Life. It’s that they seem to take considerably more punishment to bring down. In Half-Life, three pistol rounds to the “eyes” could take one down. Now, I don’t know how many it takes, but it’s several times more, which means you can’t take out too many with a single magazine. I don’t know that the enemies themselves are tougher, though much as I think the pistol is weaker.
Take a shotgun to their asses. That solves 'em right quick. Single shotgun blast takes one down at a decent range, and you have eight shells loaded with a decent fire rate in single-barrel. Machinegun works, as well, but its magazine is too small to deal with groups of six and up.
edit
And to be fair, “headshots with the magnum” was an extremely powerful strategy even against the original Half-Life Marines. It’s just that the sights were so damn small on high resolutions the magnum was hard to use The trouble with Half-Life was always that nearly all of your weapons are designed to work at close to medium range - shotgun, scattergum SMG, pistol, grenades, etc. The only weapons decent at long range used to be the crossbow with very limited ammo and the magnum. The pistol could actually do relatively well, but you had to be precise with it.
The trouble is that before, Marines were just as shit at long-range as you were, with their inaccurate rifles. NOW they’re accurate at range, which means the situation is unfair and you HAVE to rely on the only weapons you have. You can’t sprint from cover to cover and flank them because they’ll shoot you full of holes in the process.
I didn’t really bother through reading all the comments, but I’m playing at what ever you would start on. I’ve found most parts of the game to be pretty gosh darn easy, even with the Bull squid having sniper accuracy I find that I’m always leaving health all over the place. Ammo has ran down a couple times and sure the HECU units are hard. To me its nice, I mean after all your an MIT graduate nerd and these are fully trained bad ass mofo expendable types, I mean they don’t send in just any guys to clean out a super top secret under ground military facility. They send the best. So they are gonna be hard. Maybe you’ve just been playing to much call of duty and your not used to your pampers being soiled. These are the old days the all or nothing days, oooh I have to save and reload 19 times. Thats how games used to be, its impossible to count the times I didn’t have a close enough save game on a first person shooter and I’m running around with 5% health and 2 bullets and there is like 10 bad guys and the only way your going to get more ammo is to kill one and hopefully be able to get to him to take his ammo so you can kill the guy next to him… its intense its frustrating and when you’ve killed them all, and your sitting there still shooting the dead corpses screaming bawahaaahtrerrrgggrrr, your hair all frazzeled and your pumas scuffed up from kicking the back of your desk you’ll think what a stupid frick and frack and all that…
But when you go to bed at night you think… ya… I got you, you bastard.
That my friends is why Gordon Freeman is the John Wayne of Video games…
So what I’m really saying is ya they’re tough but thats how I like it…
I think the difficulty is not THAT bad, but on normal mode I was getting abused when 4 or 5 marines were shooting me at once. On easy mode, it’s much much easier to deal with. Although, I like playing on normal. I couldn’t imagine what hard mode is like…
But Christ, the ladders are just insanely irritating. Otherwise, the world is absolutely BEAUTIFUL. There are a few moments where I felt the soundtrack wasn’t fitting, and I’ve had my fair share of random crashes, but the game is pretty great.
Oh and the assassins… i remember them being MUCH harder to deal with. All three of them ran up to me and a magnum headshot was more than sufficient to deal with them. They didn’t even deal me any damage…
The game defaults to “easy.” If you didn’t change your difficulty, that’s what you’re playing at.
I live in the hometown of John Wayne, and he sucks, so you just said
Gordon Freeman sucks…
OK, Devs.
This is where you come in and, using math, prove that your implementation is exactly the same as HL Goldsrc, and prove us all bonkers
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.