Refusal to Submit, take eleventy-billion blog - silverpower

This was our world once...

In 2008, we were winning. We numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A new world in our hearts, we battled the corporations, their state lackeys, and our ancient enemy, the fascists. Slowly at first, and then with greater speed, we started to take back what was rightfully the birthright of all sapience.

And in 2008, what became known as the Black Mesa incident occurred. Distracted, a team of Black Army operatives was able to cripple the Pentagon's command and control links, allowing us to establish autonomous areas, where people can live without being at the mercy of profiteers and bigots.

But the capitalists wouldn't give up that easily. Led by a consortium, Aperture Science was able to establish a stable portal link to a Universal Union world, and they negotiated the purchase of our home, Earth, in return for franchise rights.

In 2014, the Seven-Hour War began... and ended, in seven hours, after Wallace Breen, the man overseeing Black Mesa, was finished conveying demands to the UN. Earth's governments surrendered. We did not - this is our home, and we will not be playthings of interdimensional capitalists!

It is now 2035. The joyous cries of children are but a distant memory - the only new humans are clones, produced as stunted slaves for the Overwatch armies. The bustle of the streets has been replaced by the silence of terror. The long corridors of fiber linking our world are dark, used only to convey the most mundane of business administration matters, deaf to the culture that once thrived there.

But everywhere, there is still hope. The Sino-Soviet Union, our autonomist Marxist comrades, are valiantly defending the last untouched megacities left from the Seven Hour War, where a billion souls make their lives without interference from capitalist authoritarians. The Lambda Resistance Front has cells in every city, keeping the last flames of revolutionary spirit alive in the hearts of a downtrodden slave populace. And then... there's us.

We are the Terran Insurrectionary Black Army. Named after Nestor Makhno's army of liberation during the failed Second Russian Revolution, we fight the Overwatch, the corporations, and the roving gangs of fascists that plague our world. We give no mercy to the merciless, and expect none in return. We fight so that no one will ever have to struggle for survival again. Alongside our extra-terrestrial and synthetic comrades, we will push them back through their portals, and back into the abyss where they were spawned!

--- pamphlet found in the ruins of a City 17 resistance-occupied bunker, dated 4/29/2035, located in 1/24/2036

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Basically, you play as one of six soldiers of the Squad 187 Black Army Strikers, which is their special-ops arm. Because you're a Striker, you get priority access to the resources of the Black Army, but you have to earn them. You do this through killing or destroying Overwatch units and hostile flora, and get bonuses for major task completion. This is done because the Black Army has limited resources, so they must spend their limited procurement funds first on regular soldiers, and then special-ops units. Personal pay is the same for everybody - bounty points are only worth something in the armory or at the upgrade workshop.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot (such as it is so far), but I'm hoping to get in tank, vehicle, sniper and urban combat - not all at the same time, of course. I'm also hoping to have a structure that allows you to have a persistent character (well, actually, set of characters), complete with upgradeable stats and powered armor. Coding it should be relatively simple - it's balancing everything that's going to be tricky.

It's intended to be a co-op and SP game - AI handles the characters, though I plan on writing bot code to lay over the players in SP and to fill slots in MP. The realism level is basically semi-realism - it's realistic if you're a super-soldier wearing powered armor with active kinetic dampening and energy dispersion - unprotected humans tend to die pretty quickly in this game. Also, the suit is based on the HECU PCV technology, so it includes an item entangler, allowing you to store more weapons than the human form is capable of carrying (it has a mass limit, though, so you'll have to manage it). You'll be faced with the Combine's vast array of resources, so consider this your one concession from the developer.