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Today I had a good question in the comments section that led me to a good thinking. I'd like to share it to you, and know what you think.

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Hi everybody!

Today I had an interesting question that i wanted to share to you all. This little question led me to an interesting brainstorming.


"So, since planned forces are HECU, Black Ops and Xen forces, does thus mean Black Mesa personnel are delegated as neutrals? Will there be any BM facility flavoured new captureable structures?"



I know that when i started the project, I wanted to make a full scale epic wargame based on Half Life. A lot of things, going everywhere and nowhere. The story would have covered the Black Mesa incident, the Seven Hour War, and the Resistance against the Combine..

Thing is, that I allways loved the Black Mesa lore, and only this episode. And I wanted to make it only about that.

So all these years i learnt a lot about Half Life, thinking about the whole facility, how was it from a global scale. With all the data alltogether, this project might add someday a piece in the Hl lore.

After doing a lot of researches about the BM lore, we can say that this CERN sized facility (basically a huge town) could have hosted a lot of firefight and resistance places. We're talking about squares miles! So a lot of weapons could have been developped there.


NE AZ NW NM BMRF

(Parts of northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico, including the Four Corners Monument (FC), are shown. Some higher elevations have a dust of snow. Labeled natural features are the Chuska Mountains (CM), the Carrizo Mountains (C), Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park (MV), Black Mesa (B), Canyon de Chelly National Monument (CdC), and the Defiance Uplift (D). Labeled towns are Farmington, New Mexico (F), Gallup, New Mexico (G), Window Rock, Arizona (W), and Kayenta, Arizona (K).)

(Images from various authors about the BMRF.)




(If you have time to waste, here is a neat video to watch!)



In facts, I had some ideas about BM facility personnel and vehicles, making them playable instead of black ops. Since the whole mod will be during the Black Mesa timeline only, I was thinking that having two military like factions nearly similar wouldn't be that great, as opposed to have a Facility Survivor faction (so not only scientists). Even if scientists would have low resistance without the HEV's, they would have great firepower thanks to their weaponry developped in BM. Also automated workers (those big yellow robots and also MP robot characters could be modified for combat ;) ). And don't forget the security guards! ;)

Black Ops would be then radom encounters on the battlefield attacking everybody. Aggressive NPC's.


What about buildings?



-HECU Production Buildings would be standard camps, dropzones, Field infirmaries, etc...
-Facility Survivors Production Buildings would be then parts of small topsides areas (Security stations, Small dorms, Topside Warehouse access,Topside Generators, Facility Guard Tower, etc...), that will blend into the scenery when build, as custom neutral buildings will be worked on and imported into the game .

-And well, Xenian Production Buildings would be more Organic / Portal like. Like.... Xenos.

I know that some of y'all want me to add a lot of realistic military vehicles, army and national guard and stuff, but i would like to keep only the vanilla game protagonists, and only expand from there. Try to find interesting 1990-2000 military prototypes (as some HECU weaponry was also developped in BM).


(Credits to the Black Mesa Source dev team.)

I hope you understand what i mean, and hope that i've kinda answered your question my friend. ;)

What do you think about it? Let's get to the comments!


See you soon Commander, and keep an eye on your six!

Command And Conquer: Opposing Forces Modding Team.



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Tleno
Tleno

Hmm, afaik the entire premise of HL Opposing Force multiplayer modes, while arguably non-cannon, was that scientists and personnel in many areas put up enough of a fight to take a stand against HECU. Also I'm sure there is some place for HEV suits as elite infantry, I mean, beyond Gordon and the two characters of Decay there should be more of them, right? I imagine a hero unit or final infantry squad would be feasible, even if in reduced numbers. Another thing is energy weapons - while the gluon and tau cannons you find are implies to be prototypes, likely even one of a kind, the fact resistance of HL2 manages to develop some tau cannons as seen in Highway 17, despite lacking in resources and in possession if far fewer highly skilled researchers, so it could be argued that in HL universe, gauss/tau weapons aren't that hard to create and this could be one of weapons used by more elite researcher forces. Another thing, seeing how they had enough research going into xenobiology, they could also be using stuff like snarks or other alien creatures as weapons - though I wonder how could this be implemented - having a unit or structure launch snarks similarly to Scrin buzzer hive could be cool, in theory.

Also, black ops are really quite an enigma wrapped in a mystery - I mean, you know how they were coded to be on a same side as HECU units in original game, and were made hostile to HECU only in Opposing Force as Gearbox really needed some replacement for HECU enemies? Well, I think the questionable canonicity of third party HL games means you are free to introduce them on the side of HECU. After all, beyond the female assassins which really stand out as enemies and have unique abilities, all they have are just toughened up grunts with melee and re-skinned black versions of military vehicles of the HECU grunts - so not really anything unique, thus kinda making it a moot point to stick with Gearbox interpretation if you ask me.

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Valherran
Valherran

A better approach to this would be to make this an AU style MOD. That way you can make things make sense. For example this could take place right before Half-Life 2, and instead of the Military coming to silence the facility, they are instead there to evacuate it because they have no prayer of covering up a screw up of that magnitude. And due to the massive amounts of alien portals opening all over the planet, 2 major alien factions would be fighting what's left of the human race and each other for control of the planet. So for factions you could have:

1. Human Resistance (GDI) - Consists of what's left of the military and Black Mesa scientists.

2. Combine (Nod) - Consists of everything seen in Half-Life 2 within their faction.

3. Xen (Scrin) - Consists of all major alien enemies including Race-X from Opposing Force and maybe Half-Life 2 enemies.

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keksek
keksek

Is there place for subfactions like...

Humans
- BM survivors (scientists and security personnel, later -- Resistance)
- HECU/ general military
- Black Ops/ special forces

Combine
- Invasion Force (hi-tech ubersoldaten)
- Occupation Force (human loyalists and transhumans)

Aliens (though separate from each other)
- Vortigaunts and their friends
- Race X and their stuff)

Headcrabs and native Xen fauna would be nice to see as neutral units on maps (as well as zombifying and other stuff).

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Gnio Author
Gnio

If things goes well with this project, i might expand to the post-Black Mesa timeline. But it is already a massive amount of work, so for now I'll keep it simple. ;)

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Gnio Author
Gnio

Well, it is not only Opposing Force I'm retracing here, but the whole Black Mesa lore. From official game/ expansions, to the most skicking-to-the-lore mods ( a few are really good and adding more stories about places in BM ). Indeed the HEV scientists are planned, and when i wrote in the article that a lot of weapons are developped there, I was also referring to xeno-weaponry. ;)

About the Tau gun, well there is also a big part of scientists working underground in HL², so since the combine are already settled on earth for a few decades (20 years if i remember well), the tau plans and weaponry might have spread across the resistance so easily. But anyways, as I said earlier, I'm sticking already to the BM timeline, because it's already asking a lot of work. ;)

And well, about the Black Ops, I don't think there will be that much to tell about, thinking more about adding them as random aggressive encounters on maps. I'll have more pleasure in developping HECU stuff than a total dark overpowered assassin army. See what i mean? ;)

Hope I answered your questions! ;)

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3037
3037

heh, but BM facilty have many prototypes what make from this whole faction

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Gnio Author
Gnio

Indeed! The Base personnel is a whole faction itself!

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Forcedot
Forcedot

Interesting concept.

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ApornasPlanet
ApornasPlanet

Love this!

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