Darkside55
The Freeman
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2009
- Messages
- 12,083
- Reaction score
- 90
As far as different types of enemies goes, we saw mortar and crab synths being manufactured in the citadel. When we saw the remnants of the C17 combine forces marching across the bridge toward White Forest, it wouldn't be unreasonable to have had some mortar and crab synths in those ranks.
Also, we could've had the antlion king in Episode 2. Antlion tunnels, deep underground where something that big could be housed...
But even assuming we DIDN'T get any additional enemies, one of the biggest problems is that there is no variation in how we dispense with the enemies we have. Consider that every gunship battle is exactly the same. Every hunter chopper battle requires you to use its bombs against it, and post-gravity gun all you do is pick up its bombs and throw them back. Striders, up until the strider buster, required rockets to take down. Valve even tried to be different about how that's accomplished in Ep1, but it still ended up being the same thing.
The problem is that when you see these bosses, you know what to expect, and you're just going through the motions. Why have we never had something like...okay, when you fight the hunter chopper in Episode 2, you fight it in an area with a lot of shipping crates, right? Why not have a puzzle where you need to distract the hunter chopper, get up into a crane that's used to load those giant shipping crates, and use the crane to smash that sucker? Why do I have to throw bombs at it? Why am I ALWAYS throwing bombs at it?
Fighting against gunships, why do I always have to do the swirly-rocket thing? Why can't a bunch of us coordinate rocket shots and bring the things down? Why isn't there something like...I dunno, give me a big arbalest that fires rebar, something like Gordon's crossbow on a massive scale, to punch through these things. Better yet, how about some kind of winch and tether system, where you have to fire these 1,000lbs. test steel cables up and over a gunship, you throw a lever and the cable tightens, pinning the gunship to the ground where the resistance forces swarm on it and take it down with small munitions?
How come there's never been a section where you have to "Empire Strikes Back" tether cable the striders, like AT-ATs?
I mean there are all kinds of ways to dispense with these creatures, but we're constantly doing the same damn things. If you're going to give the player the same enemies to fight you need to mix it up beyond putting them in new locations, beyond giving them new skins (antlion guard), beyond giving you a magical one-hit-kill device against them, and beyond just increasing their number and spreading them out. You've got a physics engine, you've got a physics manipulation device, you've got a fanbase which is, for the most part, not comprised of idiots and mindless run-and-gun mentality players, and your franchise is based off of coming up with clever ways for defeating enemies! Friggin' give us something more than shooting rockets at things! Let me feel like I'm being clever for once, like I'm using the MIT-graduate brain I'm SUPPOSED to have as Gordon Freeman!
I'd disagree with you here. The antlion worker isn't better than the bullsquid because the bullsquid has a bunch of cool things it does, whereas the antlion worker spits, runs, spits, runs. Bullsquid spits, charges, bites, and whips with its tail. But a bullsquid would not fit in White Forest, as they're more suited to places like the Lost Coast.
I'd agree with you, except for the fact that the episodes have done nothing but reuse old gameplay established since HL2. And we should know what to expect, despite the games being episodic: they should be platforms for doing new things, as you said, but they aren't. They should be short games that do advance the story, but also introduce varied gameplay. There was no varied gamplay, just varied locations.
He's right, there's no honor among trolls. Everyone in here is trying to troll everyone else just as hard.Sheepo said:
