Say, what if the plot started with Adrian doing his job and the player being ordered to exterminate scientists (which, presumably, the player could opt not to do but risk harm), and only afterward turned into a typical survival story? As it stands, we pretty much like Adrian Shephard from the beginning of the game, where the plot had the potential to make him a much more complex character. While a game following what it would have really been like to be one of the military guys could have been either really depressing or needlessly sadistic, I think it would have been interesting to at least show some sort of character arc for Adrian. We hated the military goons in HL because they were needlessly killing scientists: we like Adrian simply because he doesn’t do that due to his new survival objective. On the one hand, this story is really cool - it makes us feel a great deal of sympathy toward at least one of the brutal military douchebags Gordon had to annihilate en masse during the original Half-Life, but on the other hand it’s still kind of a cheat. As you approach the facility, however, your helicopter is shot down and mission “kill all scientists” is quickly abandoned in favor of simple survival.
Which, of course, makes Opposing Force all the more precious.Īdrian Shephard (i.e., you) are sent in with a military team to clean up the mess at Black Mesa. It’s a gimmick I thought I’d see a lot more of as time went on, but that hasn’t been the case as such. Rather than adding on some boring extra missions with Gordon as the protagonist, Gearbox decided to revisit the same incident from a totally different perspective. I bought this game when it first came out, but even then it didn’t occur to me how goddamn cool the idea was. Playing as marine Adrian Shephard, the player fights through different sections of Black Mesa and occasionally runs into some familiar faces along the way. Opposing Force, the first Half-Life single player expansion, retells the story of the Black Mesa Incident through the eyes of one of the soldiers called in to cover up the incident by exterminating aliens and scientists alike. A time when the only transdimensional alien attacks were relegated to one specific area and affected all present in totally different ways. When “Barney” referred to an entire class of security guards rather than a particular individual. When Gordon Freeman was just a lowly physicist.
I remember a simpler time in the Half-Life universe.
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