Operation Shephard story ideas Thread - Operation Shephard mod for Half-Life 2

Apologies for starting a new thread rather than posting in the other one, but this post is about 1,300 words long so I figured it deserved its own topic so that it didn't dominate the other one.

Hi, I'm usually known by the name "your evil twin", and years back I was the head of a mod project to do a sequel to Opposing Force. The mod's name was "Critical Mass". I had absolutely zero mapping/coding/modelling experience, but I was able to recruit a mod team based purely on the strength of the storyline!

It was originally going to be a HL1 mod, and we were making it before there was any information about HL2 and the Combine, so the plot was completely incompatible with HL2. . We had the US military continuing Black Mesa's teleportation projects and setting up bases in the Xen borderworld, and exploiting Xen's resources. The Race-X aliens from Opposing Force were also trying to conquer Xen, so essentially there was an ongoing small-scale war in Xen between the human military and Race-X. Back on Earth, scientists that survived the old Black Mesa disaster had formed a resistance movement to try to stop the military's teleportation and Xen exploitation. The scientist's attack of the military base went horribly wrong, there's was a new disaster and the military base was invaded by Race X creatures. And Shephard was stuck in the middle of it all.

Anyway, people thought it was cool but when the details of HL2 came out it turned out that the Earth was going to be conquered by some new aliens called the Combine and the old Critical Mass storyline was incompatible. Damn. So, I wrote a completely NEW storyline that was compatible with HL2, but essentially it was a totally new mod, and the mod team wasn't interesting in starting all over from scratch, so the mod died.

However, the team did all compliment me on the quality of the new storyline I had written (saying it was actually better than the first one), and so I put the storyline onto a forum on the internet in the hope that it might attract a new mod team to work on it.

Full storyline here: Hl-improvement.com

That was back in 2005, and while lots of people thought the story was good, unfortunately I wasn't able to recruit a mod team. So I hereby offer my services to you as story-guy. I'm not asking you to make my old Critical Mass mod according to my old storyline, but I figure that there could be some elements of my old storyline that you might find helpful, since you are looking for ideas.

Here are some of the main points about the HL2 mod storyline that I wrote:

* I figured that setting the mod DURING the 7 Hour War would be a bit pointless as in the 7 Hour War humanity gets totally defeated - what would the player's goal be? It would be lame to have a game where the player is fighting an alien invasion and for there to be no way for the player to win and stop Earth from being conquered. Also, I imagine that the 7 Hour War was some massive conflict involving huge Combine machines and humanity throwing their most powerful weapons (perhaps even nukes) at them, and Combine effortlessly defeating everything that was thrown at them. There wouldn’t actually be very much for an infantry soldier like Adrian Shephard to actually do. So, instead I set the Critical Mass mod story before the 7 Hour War, with the end of the mod being the beginning of the war.

* It is a popular (though not universal) belief amongst Half-Life fans that the Administrator Dr Wallace Breen was already in league with the Combine before HL1 and he sabotaged the experiment on purpose to allow a Combine invasion. And HL2 actually has an unused sentence in the closed caption file (closecaption_english.txt) that has Breen saying, “I'm relying on you to fail again, Dr. Freeman. Just as I relied on you at Black Mesa,” suggesting that Gordon’s screwed up experiment was part of Breen’s plan. I figured there was no way Breen could sabotage everything, screw over humanity and become Administrator of Earth without someone noticing what he was up to - unless there was a group of traitors in powerful positions that could cover for each other and countersign orders for questionable procedures at Black Mesa.
So I invented "The Foundation".

* The Foundation was an organisation set up by the former board of directors of the Black Mesa facility (including Breen) and a bunch of other important government officials, whose supposed goal was to stop the portal storms that ravaged the Earth ever since the Black Mesa disaster and were depositing Xen wildlife all over the place. In reality their goal is to pave the way for the Combine invasion, and to make humanity part of the marvellous Universal Union, with the Foundation running the Combine administration on Earth. Since it is not possible for the player to defeat the Combine, instead the player’s objective is to fight the Foundation.

* The Foundation sets up “dimensional stabilizers” in various locations around the world, based on Black Mesa technology, supposedly to end the portal storms… in fact these devices are a teleporter network. The Combine are able to tunnel from universe to universe but are unable to teleport from place to place on Earth, and that’s what these devices are for – they would allow the Combine to be able to appear anywhere on Earth. If the Combine had such a teleportation system, then in HL2 Gordon would have no chance, as Combine soldiers could instantly surround Gordon, or they could just drop an APC on his head, hehe. So although Adrian Shephard cannot stop the Combine invasion and the 7 Hour War, Shephard CAN destroy this teleportation network, and this is what allows there to be a resistance against the Combine in HL2.

* The Foundation was also an excuse to bring back the Black Ops. The mod was supposed to be a sequel to Opposing Force, and I figured there should be human enemies like the Black Ops in the game, rather than just aliens. In HL/OP4, the military wanted to eliminate the Xen aliens and regain control of Black Mesa, while the Black Ops just wanted to grab data and materials from the facility and nuke the place to cover their tracks. The Black Ops could have been sent in by whatever government agency ran Black Mesa, an agency whose members would go on to form the Foundation to supposedly save the Earth from the portal storms.

* In my storyline I had Race X from Opposing Force as being part of the Combine forces, like the Synth. This was mainly because the mod was supposed to be a sequel to Opposing Force, and I wanted to bring back Race X. I figured that since Gearbox never explained Race X, and the Combine likes to assimilate all different kinds of creatures and mixes the biological and technological, then Race X could actually be the first force that the Combine sent to Earth. This probably wasn’t a good idea though, as boss monsters like the Pit Worm and Gene Worm do not seem very Combine-ish at all, so it would be far better to have some new kind of Synth foot soldier, rather than re-use Race X.

So guys, what do you think? Even if you aren’t interested in using any of these plot ideas, I hope you can see that I’m quite good at coming up Half-Life mod storylines, so if are willing to share the story you have got so far then perhaps I can come up with some new story to suit your needs.

Oh, and I strongly suggest you click on that link to the forum post with the full storyline, rather than just reading my bullet-points. The page I linked to also includes a bunch of gameplay ideas, not just story ideas.

Oh, damn, just checked your news/updates page and discovered you have new forums. Forget this thread, I'm posting on your new forums. (I wish these moddb forums had an option to edit/delete your own posts.)