How much damage did Gorden Freemen cause to the US HECU Marines?

[FancyDarcy]

So, I've always wondered how much damage Freemen actually caused to the US Marines in Half life one. I've always wondered how things would have turned out if instead of going full terminator or Rambo against the HECU, he instead simply snuck past the marines, occasionally assassinating one or two here and there.

I've never played Half Life 1 before, although I have played the free mod, Black Mesa, a awesome modern incomplete reboot of Half Life 1, and was wowed at how many human soldiers the "hero" of Half Life slaughtered during Black Mesa (the setting of Half Life 1 is called Black Mesa). I didn't count the exact amount, but I'd say he's killed probably atleast 200-300 marines in only 2-3 days after the resonance cascade.

Of course, these marines were also heavily dug in, and were sometimes manning checkpoints, supply points, garages with vehicles and command centers and patrols, so it's not like he only killed deathsquads SPECIFICALLY targeting Freemen. This must have caused a lot of chaos with the military as they lost patrols, supply depots and checkpoints without warning all from Freemen himself, which probably led to many other units losing contact with other forces and becoming isolated and running out of bullets and supplies, eventually being killed by the aliens.

For example, a platoon of 50 guys might have a temporary, fortified FOB in a supply depot. Perhaps the commander is inside the depot with 19 other marines, with an extra 10 marines on perimeter duty and 20 other marines split into 4 fireteams outside, fighting aliens. Then Freemen appears and wipes out the supply depot and the perimeter, causing those other fireteams to become lonely and isolated, causing them to be whittlef away by the aliens after running out of bullets and being lost and cornered. Even if Freemen never meets those other four fireteams, his action of wiping out the supply depot/command post cuts off another other smaller units attached to it, potentially leading to their deaths.

And remember, Freemen didn't only kill just flesh and bone soldiers, but he also destroyed attack helicopters, Osprey VTOLs, Abrams tanks, and in Black Mesa -- LAV 25s, whilst they're Bradley AFVs in HL1. This must cause a LOT of chaos and utter confusion when the soldiers are under heavy attack by green teleporting sticks, they call for a Apache to come and blow them up, only for silence on the other end. Hmmm.. maybe he's refuelling. We'll try the command center instead. Silence. The supply depot? Nope. The rocketry outpost? Some strange growling noise... maybe the commander got a pet hamster..? How about the Osprey we're using as a command post? WTF? Where'd everyone go?!

Now, as seen in the games, against the aliens the battles are usually much more drawn out and both sides take casulties, the military usually win if they're well supplied. However, Freemen is so incredibly overpowered he wipes them out before they can call for reinforcements... Or say a word of warning to other units. Every now and then, a platoon's commander might say they're engaging a orange suited scientist over the radio... and then that platoon of 40+ marines is never heard from again. The amount of disruption of supply lines, depots and commanding of units by simply wiping out previously secured and "safe" areas and destroying armour, gunships and even traps and turreted areas (although these are designed to be much more expendable) must have been incredible. While Freemen probably 'only' "directly" killed 300 or so soldiers, the amount of dead soldiers from losing contact with command, running out of bullets or having zero support because Gorden 'Rambo' Freemen did a Terminator on all their reinforcements, put massive holes in their secure network must have numbered more than 900 - 1300, which is a lot considering the HECU unit was probably quite small, at perhaps the size of a normal marine expeditionary unit.

[FancyDarcy]

This trope actually appears pretty popular with video games today, another good mention is Issac Clarke in Dead Space 2 and 3, where in the former. Issac does a terrorist attack on the government of the Sprawl space station who are only trying to do research on the Marker probably in an attempt to find a cure or effective treatment for the marker zombie/mindcontrol disease so that thet're able to use the Marker to save humanity from extinction as the Markers are infinite sources of energy.

Anyway, the story is that the Sprawl has come under attack by a large force of terrorists who are slaughtering innocent civilians everywhere and turning them into zombies by exposing them to the Marker's transmission radiation which turns the Sprrawl into a civil war zone, with the government and the terrorists fighting it out across the Sprawl. On one hand, the terrorists are turning as many people into zombies as possible, OTOH, the government is evacuating as many civilians as possible, locking down bulkheads to seal away the zombies and doing the best they're able. Eventually, Issac is questioned by the police as to answers about the necromorph zombies, but Issac just babbles and pretends to be insane instead of giving them serious answers onto how to best contain the zombies.

Eventually the terrorists must blow up a door or something and the hospital is invaded by zombies, killing many of the staff, while the government sends highly trained security forces to save as many people as possible and rescue Issac who is just calmly walking past dozens of doctors, patients and nurses being slowly devoured by zombies while giggling to himself and offering zero help. He even spots some government soldiers up ahead who tell him to stop and try to detain him, but terrorists release zombies into the roof, who ambush the soldiers and unfortunately kill them while Issac stands back and does nothing.

Throughout the game. Issac sees several civilians being murdered by zombies and does nothing to help them except watch them getting torn apart. Meanwhile, the Earth Government is sending fire trams of soldiers to execute key terrorists and evacuate civilians whilst Issac just watches his own ass and shoots zombies, which is still helpful, I suppose

However, later on in the game, Issac evolves into a truly evil bastard who shoots down a police rescue/fighting helicopter which was fighting giant zombies and probably spotting key locations and terrorist hideouts and just shoots it down, killing a bunch of hapless cops who were just trying to reduce the threat and hopefully bring the space station back under the control of the government. Issac sees this, so he throws a bomb at it, blowing it up and blowing up a giant zombie growth on the side of the hull. Anyway, the best part is when Issac drills through the government main station or skyscraper, a heavily armoured building invincible from the zombies and terrorists, until Issac drills a massive hole into the skyscraper with a mining drill into the structure, breaching it and allowing a zerg rush of zombies into the building.

Luckily, the cops manage to secure the inner skyscraper with a steel door, and when Issac arrives, they try to arrest him by pointing flashlights at him and tells him to surrender. So what does our great protagonist hero do? Well, obviously, he unplugs the battery holding the steel door, causing the zombies to come inside and run amuck, killing hundreds of soldiers, scientists and possibly civilians. You know, instead of just surrendering himself to the government after all those innocent people he's slaughtered... hmmm..

I just find it strange how these characters like Gorden Freemen, Issac Clarke and even Prophet and Alcatraz from Crysis/2, both of which kills hundreds if not thousands of Korean soldiers and CELL, a private policing corporation, who was actively fighting the Cephaloid aliens. Again, instead of just sneaking around guard posts and avoiding contact, he delibrately goes full Rambo and kills hundreds of CELL police, destroying about NINE heavily armed strykers or whatever IFVs they were using, and if I'm remembering correctly, about seven or eight attack helicopters, crippling the CELL police force, apparently leading to the full blown invasion of the Cepaloids, now that CELL was badly crippled.

[bilateralrope]

For Half Life, the soldiers were sent in with orders to sweep the place and kill all the scientists. So Freeman had two choices:
- Hide in an unfamiliar part of the Black Mesa facility until the soldiers managed to find him.
- Continue with his goal of ending the alien invasion. When soldiers tried to kill him, he killed them in self defense.

Or and whatever damage Freeman did to the military would have been erased by Black Mesa getting nuked (opposing forces).

[TheFeniX]

I can't speak for the other games, but as stated: The Half-Life soldiers will try and kill you at any given opportunity. There are no non-hostile soldiers that I can recall. While it may make sense they open fire on the heavily armed Freeman, it's not so excusable they immediately open fire on scientists screaming "help us!" Where they found so many soldiers willing to murder their own civilians is a much better question than "why does Gordan kill them in self-defense?"

Not to mention that at one point they decide to capture you for no good reason, then throw you into a trash compactor for (another) no good reason.

Imagine there was a disaster at a nuclear plant in "Smalltown, Somestate" and the orders were "kill everyone you see to prevent contamination." You'd be hard pressed to find a whole lot of soliders who would follow said orders. In fact, those are illegal orders to begin with. Even more laughable about HL1 in particular with the excuse of "alien invasion from another dimension. So shoot everyone..... for reasons. Those reasons being we want to cover the whole thing up." Honestly, I love HL1 and 2, but what soldier involved honestly thought they wouldn't be "covered up" (read: murdered) after the fact to make sure the lid was kept on the incident?

The idea is like being annoyed Kyle Katarn has to (or can) mow down loads of Stormtroppers in Dark Forces. Blame poor writing for delivering loads of no-faced evil mooks to gun down, not the character for doing so to save his own skin.

[Q99]

One, I don't think he directly killed hundreds. A noteworthy number, but the game isn't *that* full of enemies.

Two, I think we can safely assume that were it not for his actions, humanity's military force would've been intact enough to easily throw off the invaders between games, rather than being stomped and rapidly conquered.

(No, not really)

[FancyDarcy]

I can't speak for the other games, but as stated: The Half-Life soldiers will try and kill you at any given opportunity. There are no non-hostile soldiers that I can recall. While it may make sense they open fire on the heavily armed Freeman, it's not so excusable they immediately open fire on scientists screaming "help us!" Where they found so many soldiers willing to murder their own civilians is a much better question than "why does Gordan kill them in self-defense?"

Not to mention that at one point they decide to capture you for no good reason, then throw you into a trash compactor for (another) no good reason.

Imagine there was a disaster at a nuclear plant in "Smalltown, Somestate" and the orders were "kill everyone you see to prevent contamination." You'd be hard pressed to find a whole lot of soliders who would follow said orders. In fact, those are illegal orders to begin with. Even more laughable about HL1 in particular with the excuse of "alien invasion from another dimension. So shoot everyone..... for reasons. Those reasons being we want to cover the whole thing up." Honestly, I love HL1 and 2, but what soldier involved honestly thought they wouldn't be "covered up" (read: murdered) after the fact to make sure the lid was kept on the incident?

The idea is like being annoyed Kyle Katarn has to (or can) mow down loads of Stormtroppers in Dark Forces. Blame poor writing for delivering loads of no-faced evil mooks to gun down, not the character for doing so to save his own skin.

Honestly, I think it kind of makes sense. The military wanted the facility under their control, their full mastery and control. Of course they didn't want scientists running amuck around, this is a common trope in movies as well. A movie that comes to mind is that spider movie, where giant spiders got loose in a facility, and the military sent several elite troopers to kill everyone, but the soldiers died instead without killing a single spider. I think SCP sometimes does this as well, or at least they might kill all D-level personnel and some scientists here and there to contain secrets if there is a breach. I seem to recall a third fairly well-known sci-fi series or thing that does this same thing, was it Resident Evil or Alien or something else?

That's right, it was Murkoff from the Outlast series. When the containment breach happened on Mount Massive, they sent in several MRAPs filled with elite soldiers to kill everyone inside the facility. It seems to work well, because you find a LOT of dead guards and patients inside.

One, I don't think he directly killed hundreds. A noteworthy number, but the game isn't *that* full of enemies.

Two, I think we can safely assume that were it not for his actions, humanity's military force would've been intact enough to easily throw off the invaders between games, rather than being stomped and rapidly conquered.

(No, not really)

Probably you're right in the original Half Life 1, the 1998 variant, but in Black Mesa, I distinctly remember killing a LOT of HECU in that game. The first encounter is a single soldier shooting near a scientist, which the player kills, then takes an elevator to another floor, killing another five or six soldiers, then another five, five, and another final five before continuing. There are a LOT of these five-man fireteams roaming around in the early-mid game levels, and most importantly, they all occupy important areas. For example, the train tunnels under the rocketry base were all heavily locked down by the military... or were, before Freeman came along.

He then clears out the rocketry base, blows up a rocket or launches it. After that, he clears out several more high-impact areas, such as the Questionable Ethics research lab, the underground maintenance tunnels, he forces the military to bombard their own checkpoint, then he finally surfaces and begins hacking away at Apache gunships, managing to heavily damage one and destroy another before destroying a Abrams tank, a LAV, another tank and LAV, more soldiers, and even when the military finally start retreating, he still destroys ANOTHER tank and several soldiers, a Osprey VTOL, and in the last military area, he destroys a final, damaged tank and several soldiers. I'd say he destroys a LOT of high-value locations, cuts off many supply routes and destroys friendly armoured units even when they're running away.

If only Freeman had managed to bypass the military through vent-crawling, teleportation and the like, I bet the military would have still had everything under control by the time Freeman destroyed the Nilanth, instead of the facility 100% occupied by giant fleas by this time. And the be honest, a human enemy is almost always better than a inhuman enemy of giant leeches and fleas with laser eyes.

[Mr Bean]

Not to mention that at one point they decide to capture you for no good reason, then throw you into a trash compactor for (another) no good reason.

They do give you a good reason, orders were to take him alive at that point in the game. The soldiers who staged the ambush tell you as they are dragging your concussed self away that you killed a lot of their friends and they are not going to take you in alive. Then they dump you in a trash compactor and turn it off because the resulting mess won't be ID'd as you for quite some time.
Neat battlefield justice that goes astray due to crowbars and vent covers.

[TheFeniX]

They do give you a good reason, orders were to take him alive at that point in the game. The soldiers who staged the ambush tell you as they are dragging your concussed self away that you killed a lot of their friends and they are not going to take you in alive. Then they dump you in a trash compactor and turn it off because the resulting mess won't be ID'd as you for quite some time.
Neat battlefield justice that goes astray due to crowbars and vent covers.

Granted, but the game takes a hard shift at this point and the whole thing is really just an excuse to reset your weapon progress. Right before the ambush you fight those super-sniper-ninjas who will murder the shit out of you. Once you've been "detained" there's really no reason they don't give you a few more swift hits to the head (or even a bullet) as the trash compactor would (as they said) take care of any evidence. Also, removing the Hazard Suit would go a long way towards making the body unidentifiable, but they don't bother.

The military in HL1 are basically "Evil McArmy doods" to give you some faceless HUMAN mooks to off to even out the gameplay and have someone who had a "good" reason to kidnap, but not kill, you and remove all your fancy guns. I always was of the mind they weren't actually military, but mercenaries.

[bilateralrope]

If only Freeman had managed to bypass the military through vent-crawling, teleportation and the like,

Teleportation tech wasn't able to teleport people from one location on Earth to another until years later in Half Life 2.

As for the vents, convince me that enough large vents exist for them to be an option.

I bet the military would have still had everything under control by the time Freeman destroyed the Nilanth, instead of the facility 100% occupied by giant fleas by this time.

Half life:Opposing Forces ends with Black Mesa being nuked by a nuke the military bought there. The plan was always extermination.

I've got a question for you: Why are you trying to defend the soldiers when they were quite willing to kill everyone ?

Everyone includes the unarmed scientists.

There are no non-hostile soldiers that I can recall.

There is one: Sheppard from Opposing Forces.

Who was unconscious when the "kill everyone" orders came down. So he never disobeyed any orders he was given.

[bilateralrope]

Remember: The soldiers had free will. They chose to kill the people working at Black Mesa.

The Vortigaunts (and possibly other aliens) had no such choice. During Half-Life they are being controlled. Sometime between then and Half-Life 2, they side with humanity. Oh and they are a hive mind. The first experience they all have of humanity was Freeman killing them.

They are worthy of far more mercy than the soldiers. Though Freeman didn't have much choice.

[Q99]

Probably you're right in the original Half Life 1, the 1998 variant, but in Black Mesa, I distinctly remember killing a LOT of HECU in that game. The first encounter is a single soldier shooting near a scientist, which the player kills, then takes an elevator to another floor, killing another five or six soldiers, then another five, five, and another final five before continuing. There are a LOT of these five-man fireteams roaming around in the early-mid game levels, and most importantly, they all occupy important areas. For example, the train tunnels under the rocketry base were all heavily locked down by the military... or were, before Freeman came along.

I mean, Black Mesa is a mod. I'd take the original more as what 'really' happened, while BM is more for-the-challenge.

[Zixinus]

You are overthinking the main reason stuff like this happens in video games: so you have enemies to fight.

So, I've always wondered how much damage Freemen actually caused to the US Marines in Half life one. I've always wondered how things would have turned out if instead of going full terminator or Rambo against the HECU, he instead simply snuck past the marines, occasionally assassinating one or two here and there.

It would not have been much different. Because without the destruction Freeman did, even if they were really hundred of soldiers and many valuable vehicles, was nothing that the actual invading aliens did. Remember them? They were killing soldiers too, probably more than Freeman did total.

You are also assuming that sneaking around and being non-lethal was a possibility. You can't really do that in Half-Life. Which is not surprising, because it's a bit difficult to sneak around fully-alert soldiers that are actively searching for things to kill. This is not to mention that the soldiers thought that Freeman was responsible for the invasion, somehow.

In Crysis, you CAN do that (one of your suit's power in all three games is invisibility and in the first you are even given a sneak-dart addon that you can use) and that's entirely up to you. In the first game, there are a few spots where you have to kill enemies but other than that, you are not forced to. It wouldn1T have made much of a difference because the aliens wiped out the Koreans anyway.

You are also ignoring the fact that Freeman was fighting his way through to STOP the alien invasion, which he managed to do in the end. We are not even sure why the hell the soldiers were there. Hell, according to the wiki, not even the SOLDIERS knew why they were exactly there other than "clean up".

I just find it strange how these characters like Gorden Freemen, Issac Clarke and even Prophet and Alcatraz from Crysis/2, both of which kills hundreds if not thousands of Korean soldiers and CELL, a private policing corporation, who was actively fighting the Cephaloid aliens. Again, instead of just sneaking around guard posts and avoiding contact, he delibrately goes full Rambo and kills hundreds of CELL police, destroying about NINE heavily armed strykers or whatever IFVs they were using, and if I'm remembering correctly, about seven or eight attack helicopters, crippling the CELL police force, apparently leading to the full blown invasion of the Cepaloids, now that CELL was badly crippled.

You are aware that these guys are also responsible for the shitty things happening, right? In Crysis, you were literary there when the Korean general wakes up (even more) the alien spaceship with explosives and have to deal with the woken-up aliens that result (although the aliens were already partially awake). The later private corportion that you're fighting? Also partially responsible for the situation, especially so in Crysis 3. To be fair, in Crysis 2, it was a case of mistaken identity initially.

In Dead Space, the government was responsible for putting a Marker in the middle of the populated space station. After they known what the thing did. The sheer stupidity cannot be done without a serious moral disregard for the population there. Why did they not make it in a space station that was isolated from everything?

This is not getting into the Unitologist subplot about them infiltrating everything, which I can barely recall other than they WANTED the disaster to happen because the Marker was subtly mind-controlling them to make it happen. You are literary cleaning up after their shit.

Honestly, I think it kind of makes sense. The military wanted the facility under their control, their full mastery and control. Of course they didn't want scientists running amuck around, this is a common trope in movies as well.

Which they could have done WITHOUT killing the scientists. In fact, if they wanted full control, they should have been SAVING the scientists who actually know what is what around the facility and getting them to do work for them. And why WOULDN'T the scientists cooperate with the soldiers sent to save them and stop the catastrophe that was their fault?

I think SCP sometimes does this as well, or at least they might kill all D-level personnel and some scientists here and there to contain secrets if there is a breach.

SCP is a whole different kettle of fish (that's an universe where you can be incurably turned just by hearing certain memetic words) and you must also remember that there is no real canon policy for SCP (the D-class stands for "disposable"). What the military task force does and acts in an SCP story depends entirely on the writer of that story, which vary.

That's right, it was Murkoff from the Outlast series. When the containment breach happened on Mount Massive, they sent in several MRAPs filled with elite soldiers to kill everyone inside the facility. It seems to work well, because you find a LOT of dead guards and patients inside.

That's because the fully-infected patients are unkillable (or close). That is the guy in the armor tells you right on the first level. Remember him, warning you while dying due to being impaled?

You are also forgetting that the patients themselves, that have mutated, were also killing off people left and right.

[qutoe]If only Freeman had managed to bypass the military through vent-crawling, teleportation and the like, I bet the military would have still had everything under control by the time Freeman destroyed the Nilanth, instead of the facility 100% occupied by giant fleas by this time. And the be honest, a human enemy is almost always better than a inhuman enemy of giant leeches and fleas with laser eyes.[/quote]

That is an incredibly optimistic assumption of yours and nothing else.

Now, as seen in the games, against the aliens the battles are usually much more drawn out and both sides take casulties, the military usually win if they're well supplied.

If the writers wanted that. If you would have played Half-Life 2, you would know that the Combine (the force behind the alien invasion) had more than sufficient slave-military to throw at humanity. All Freeman did was buy time. Or attract the force behind the invaders. HL plot is deliberately unclear.

But the military isn't always able to fight off the alien force. Again, this is up to the writer.

However, Freemen is so incredibly overpowered he wipes them out before they can call for reinforcements... Or say a word of warning to other units. Every now and then, a platoon's commander might say they're engaging a orange suited scientist over the radio... and then that platoon of 40+ marines is never heard from again. The amount of disruption of supply lines, depots and commanding of units by simply wiping out previously secured and "safe" areas and destroying armour, gunships and even traps and turreted areas (although these are designed to be much more expendable) must have been incredible. While Freemen probably 'only' "directly" killed 300 or so soldiers, the amount of dead soldiers from losing contact with command, running out of bullets or having zero support because Gorden 'Rambo' Freemen did a Terminator on all their reinforcements, put massive holes in their secure network must have numbered more than 900 - 1300, which is a lot considering the HECU unit was probably quite small, at perhaps the size of a normal marine expeditionary unit.

Yes, that's a horrible loss of life on the military's part. But then, why did the military target civilians?

I mean, I remember when first encountering soldiers in the game and thought "wow, maybe I'm saved?". I was hoping that I'd get new NPCs to interact with, like the security guards. Instead they shot scientists on sight for what? It was never explained why they were killing civilians other than "clean-up".

If it is a plot hole, yes, it is and a big one (as others have pointed out).

[FancyDarcy]

You are overthinking the main reason stuff like this happens in video games: so you have enemies to fight.

It would not have been much different. Because without the destruction Freeman did, even if they were really hundred of soldiers and many valuable vehicles, was nothing that the actual invading aliens did. Remember them? They were killing soldiers too, probably more than Freeman did total.

The aliens, vortiguants and grunts were weak and fragile whilst very strong, not. No, a soldier was easily more stronger, whilst taking cover and well supplied. The Vortigaunt was armed with claws and a musket with shorter reload times and infinite ammo, and was VERY fragile, probably weaker than a unarmored human. The alien grunt was tough and coated in invincible armor and was armed with a weak, low velocity pistol that slowly recharged it's ammo and a tank smashing punch. The Soldier was armed with generous armor and a high damage SMG that shot quickly with limited ammo.

Almost all the fights with soldiers and aliens you see in game has the soldiers win easily. Any fights where they lose, for example the Uncut mod for Surface Tension is really actually fake news because they still win easily. The reason they are all dead is because the developers made them less powerful. For example, the LAV 25 with its beefy 25mm cannon, how much damage does that do in BM? ONE DAMAGE. SCIENTISTS, unarmored humans have FIFTY hitpoints. The LAV cannon is useless and the LAV itself can be killed with four alien grunt punches. Completely unrealiatic. In fact, I found that if I turned up the damage values from 3 pershot on the SMG to about 40 per shot and 500 for the LAV, the soldiers annihilate everything no problem, this is the more realistic setting, how they were actually working in real life. That is not cheating, BM was cheating by making them artificially weak for no reason. Even with the gaunts being a one hit kill, their muskets just don't add up to modern troopers.

You are also assuming that sneaking around and being non-lethal was a possibility. You can't really do that in Half-Life. Which is not surprising, because it's a bit difficult to sneak around fully-alert soldiers that are actively searching for things to kill. This is not to mention that the soldiers thought that Freeman was responsible for the invasion, somehow.

Well, there are plenty of power tools, closed vents and doors which Freeman is afraid of property damage charges to force them open, I am certain that any number of those would have led to the surface where he could have climbed up the dunes and away! You see many ramps blocked by a jeep or a few planks of wood or a garage sheet metal door that almost certainly led to the surface.

In Crysis, you CAN do that (one of your suit's power in all three games is invisibility and in the first you are even given a sneak-dart addon that you can use) and that's entirely up to you. In the first game, there are a few spots where you have to kill enemies but other than that, you are not forced to. It wouldn1T have made much of a difference because the aliens wiped out the Koreans anyway.

Unfortunately, the game does not take the amount of soldiers killed by the player into account; inside the mines, the general still complains about you wiping out his whole army and the strength of the Ceph still remains the same, even if you had killed only the KPA frigate and nanosuits.

To be honest, I'd say that the KPA military was actually quite a bit stronger than the US military, based on how the invasion goes down, it seems as though the US side are 100% reliant on the super nanosuiters to clear away the worst threats, such as the AA flak turrets and the frigate, which was parked at a dock, and required a nanosuit to manually board the frigate and disable it's radar before some airplanes could strafe and sink it.

Not only this, but the US Air Force was rendered completely helpless by some AAA flak and machinegun mobile turrets and multiple jets were shot down by flak/MG guns. Even in the tank section, most of the US tanks are destroyed by the time they reach the train station unless the player is really invested in helping them.

And yet, the US navy ships were still able to put up a fierce resistance at the end of the game, nuking the alien mountain which woke it up and initiated a full invasion, to which the carrier and navy wiped out a good portion of the alien military before the carrier went underwater after a alien ship crashed intop of it.

In Dead Space, the government was responsible for putting a Marker in the middle of the populated space station. After they known what the thing did. The sheer stupidity cannot be done without a serious moral disregard for the population there. Why did they not make it in a space station that was isolated from everything?

Well, they were probably wanting to see its effect on irradiating a larger population. I mean, it was enclosed by lasers and steel, so the effects weren't nearly that bad as the Ishimura where anyone could just gawk away. Plus pethaps some of earthgov higher command were accidentally exposed to the transmissions from the marker which was telling them to expose a large population.

What bothers me is when Tiedeman is clearly the good guy, trying to bring the station under control, and keeps contacting Issac theoughout the game, talking to him like a close friend only for Issac to brutally murder all his comrades at the end because he couldn't be bothered talking. There were more than TWO HUNDRED soldiers present in the Government sector, and I'd say probably an additional 50 scientists and probably 100-200 civilians seeking refuge from the fighting. Then Issac just unplugs a battery and has them all brutally devoured by zonbies.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3BGWj5UH3I&app=desktop

This is not getting into the Unitologist subplot about them infiltrating everything, which I can barely recall other than they WANTED the disaster to happen because the Marker was subtly mind-controlling them to make it happen. You are literary cleaning up after their shit.

SCP is a whole different kettle of fish (that's an universe where you can be incurably turned just by hearing certain memetic words) and you must also remember that there is no real canon policy for SCP (the D-class stands for "disposable"). What the military task force does and acts in an SCP story depends entirely on the writer of that story, which vary.

Well, while the fanarts and fiction is very loose and inconsistent, some things are somehow dalek-level whilst being contained by normal modern soldiers, I am talking about the SCP video game. This is a far more realistic and grounded story, and the SCPs can be reliably contained by modern soldiers.

That's because the fully-infected patients are unkillable (or close). That is the guy in the armor tells you right on the first level. Remember him, warning you while dying due to being impaled?

You are also forgetting that the patients themselves, that have mutated, were also killing off people left and right.

Actually, the bog standard patients during the outbreak were just normal hollywood stsndard insane humans without any special powers. It was the big pig man who killed the SWAT team, but it is unknown how he was able to do this, as he was only big and fat like a pig, not invincible or anything. At the end of the game, the big pig is getting thrown around by the walrider, a hive mind of nanobots resembling a single mind, and is visibly wounded by the brute force impacts.

The second SWAT team is also seen killing the big standard patients with ease, hell, even the player kills a patient with an elevator and other patients are killed with knives and batons, so there's no reason at all to assume they ALL were indestructible. In fact, I'd say that the first SWAT team were unlikely either unprepared or just plain incompetent when they were killed by the big pig.

If the writers wanted that. If you would have played Half-Life 2, you would know that the Combine (the force behind the alien invasion) had more than sufficient slave-military to throw at humanity. All Freeman did was buy time. Or attract the force behind the invaders. HL plot is deliberately unclear.

But the military isn't always able to fight off the alien force. Again, this is up to the writer.

Yes, that's a horrible loss of life on the military's part. But then, why did the military target civilians?

Well, perhaps they were confused by the headcrabs at first and thought that if the headcrab zombies are attacking the soldiers, then all the scientists ate zombies?

I mean, in Undertale a thing that confuses me is that all the enemies except papyrus are ALL using deadly force against you, and WILL KILL you DEAD. Even the cow woman is using deadly force against what she considers her own child, WTF? And worse yet, all these creatures, even the frogs, are all capable of humanish thought. So the game is teaching that it's okay to murder people for no reason, but self defense against the insane murderers make you a horrible monster. What? I won't bring up the characters age since the game doesn't bring it up, but that's still not okay.. And if it IS okay in the videogame world, then Freeman, Issac Clarke, and Prophet/Alcatraz,
and all the rest should have just asked all the human enemies capable of lethal force to just offer forgiveness and give them an ice cream cone )) . Of course, an important thing to note is that the player character is ALWAYS more powerful than the human enemies in all of the above examples, just like Undertale.

[/quote]

I mean, Black Mesa is a mod. I'd take the original more as what 'really' happened, while BM is more for-the-challenge.

Eh, BM doesn't make the silly amatuer mistakes of having 10000 enemies all bundled into one tiny room as many mods do. Each enemy encounter feels natural and organic and how it should be. Vortguants, grunts and marines aren't simply spawned en masse into 30 strong groups without any care or thought, they are carefully placed and occasionally with scripts to support them.

Lots of mods have the modders making big long maps a hundred or so enemies just PACKED into the map and ammunition and powerups EVERYWHERE without any regard or thought at all, that mod taking place on the ship with dozens of soldiers and vortigaunts all at once comes to mind. BM has very nice enemy placement similar to HL2, where each enemy has a reason to exist, there's no obvious signs they're only there for the player's amusement.

[TheFeniX]

I mean, in Undertale a thing that confuses me is that all the enemies except papyrus are ALL using deadly force against you, and WILL KILL you DEAD. Even the cow woman is using deadly force against what she considers her own child, WTF? And worse yet, all these creatures, even the frogs, are all capable of humanish thought. So the game is teaching that it's okay to murder people for no reason, but self defense against the insane murderers make you a horrible monster. What? I won't bring up the characters age since the game doesn't bring it up, but that's still not okay.. And if it IS okay in the videogame world, then Freeman, Issac Clarke, and Prophet/Alcatraz,
and all the rest should have just asked all the human enemies capable of lethal force to just offer forgiveness and give them an ice cream cone )) . Of course, an important thing to note is that the player character is ALWAYS more powerful than the human enemies in all of the above examples, just like Undertale.

Toriel would rather you die there than become another SOUL to break the seal as she doesn't feel the monsters/Asgore deserve to get back to the surface via the means they are trying to. And at that point, she's about fucking done as so many children have come, gone, and died. You either kill her (suicide by child) or you die then and there. NOTE: from her perspective until you (hopefully) prove her wrong.

Also, it should be noted that Monsters are SO FUCKING WEAK in Undertale, their biggest badasses can be annihilated by a small child. Grind enough EXP and you can one-shot most every monster, even Undyne.... who then has to call upon "gameplay mechanics" to continue to exist after this. They didn't kill a single human in the original war. That's how weak they really are. Or really, how powerful Determination is.

Further, most monsters you fight don't understand they are attacking you. They are really just trying to communicate, but this is damaging to human SOULs due to IIRC their emotional content. Once you placate them, they seem to understand this and control it better. Some/Many such as Undyne, the guard dogs, ghost dummy, etc DO know they are trying to kill you.

However, massive SPOILERS here but if you haven't played Undertale yet you're unlikely to at this point: As a deconstruction of video games, the player has no excuse to kill anyone because if Frisk (the player character) does die, the player/CHARA has enough Determination to load a previous save and correct his/her fuck-up. That's the whole point of the game. Meanwhile, this same gameplay mechanic exists in Half-Life (save/load), but is not storytelling mechanic. This is an important distinction to remember.

Canonically, there is no "player" to reload a save if Freeman dies. He dies, he dies. This is the same for many video games. Master Chief didn't die and reload 10,000 checkpoints in Halo to finally beat the game on Legendary difficulty and save humanity. MC just fought through long odds, killed all the bad guys, and saved humanity (all life in the galaxy really). This is because Word of God is that the "canon" difficulty of Halo is Legendary, and the MC is that much of a badass.

But Frisk is essentially immortal because you, the player, will never give up on him/her or the game. The game is very well aware it's a video game and those vidya mechanics exist in the universe.

Sans even totally calls this shit out if you're sadistic enough to fight him. He KNOWS he can't win, because you'll just keep LOADing and retrying. He's just trying to frustrate you (the player) into quitting. That's the only way he can save reality: having the player say "fuck it" and just ALT-F4 /SPOILERS

[TheFeniX]

I was tired and failed to point out: WRT to Toriel, she's not actually trying to kill you. As your HP drops, her attacks start deliberately avoiding you. You actually have to go out of your way to get hit and die. If you manage to do so, her sprite changes to one of shock as the screen fades to black.

[Zixinus]

The aliens, vortiguants and grunts were weak and fragile whilst very strong, not. No, a soldier was easily more stronger, whilst taking cover and well supplied.

Seriously? You are basing the condemnation of Morgan Freeman for killing soldiers (following illegal and obviously immoral orders) in self-defense based on game statistics? Have you considered that the developers may have simply not developed the aliens' AI to help with the difficult curve (you meet alien soldiers before human ones) and because that's how the project development turned out?

This is not even getting into your assumption that the alien grunts are true analogs to human soldiers. Alien grunts are canon fodder, literary manufactured in pods and likely usable as little else. It is entirely in the realm of possibility that the entire force you saw through the game was nothing more than a probing force, meant to shock the enemy and gauge their strength. It is entirely possible that Nihilath was just zerg-rushing Earth and had the numbers to do it. This is not to mention that Nihilath had capabilities like TELEPORTING (that the wiki says he had control over, so he could teleport to anywhere he wanted) and possibly other abilities.

Well, there are plenty of power tools, closed vents and doors which Freeman is afraid of property damage charges to force them open, I am certain that any number of those would have led to the surface where he could have climbed up the dunes and away! You see many ramps blocked by a jeep or a few planks of wood or a garage sheet metal door that almost certainly led to the surface.

This is moronic assumption and you know it. There are closed areas that you can't get through because the game is made to follow a linear path. There are points where you do crawl around vents and other such things because the game is made that way. If there was the option to stealth through a soldier encounter, it was because the developers allowed it.

But even aside that, I actually recall that you got to the surface at least once during the game (I'm pretty sure that you do so several times). Guess what? It was teeming with soldiers and/or aliens every time you saw a bit of sunshine. You had to fight your way through them to get where you needed to go.

This is not to mention that the surface was the MOST likely place for the military to be plentiful. If you wanted to avoid military casualties, staying underground was actually the best bet.

Well, perhaps they were confused by the headcrabs at first and thought that if the headcrab zombies are attacking the soldiers, then all the scientists ate zombies?

Are you seriously saying that it is reasonable for soldiers not to be able to tell the difference between a civilian yelling for help in coherent English and a headcrab zombie gargling about? This is a serious level of schizophrenic double-think apologism you are doing here.

They were clearly ordered to kill civilians. Even in Opposing Force, your squad-buddies will automatically kill any scientists and security guards they see by AI default.





But seriously, this is moronic and you arguing in the position of blaming the victim for not acting perfectly. Gordon Freeman, a scientist that knew how to use a gun and a suspiciously-good-for-combat HEV-suit, already braved all possible odds and reasonable expectations just by surviving. And managed to stop the invasion from Xen from a trynical alien overlord in the process.

Yet here you are, saying that he was supposed to out-stealth (EVERY TIME!) well-trained soldiers out for blood in an environment teeming with hostile lifeforms and hazards (AT ALL TIMES!). Well-trained soldiers that were set to kill him.

You honestly expect him, given the situation, to stop and evaluate the incoming alien forces that he has obviously incomplete grasp of and then evulate the strength of the incoming military soldiers (who are also trying to kill him for no reason), and think "gee, maybe I should do everything in my power to help the tide of battle of the humans who are trying to kill me instead of the aliens trying to kill me, even if it means endangering my life (that already required several miracles for him to keep) instead of doing everything I can to stem the invasion at its source". Would you seriously think that in that situation?

This is ignoring the fact that if things were taken out of the the lens of a video game and given some realistic consideration, this is what Freeman would have been avoiding and hiding from soldiers anyway simply because that would have been safer for him. Not to mention that realistically, the soldiers should have been HELPING the scientists, not killing them on sight.

Unfortunately, the game does not take the amount of soldiers killed by the player into account; inside the mines, the general still complains about you wiping out his whole army and the strength of the Ceph still remains the same, even if you had killed only the KPA frigate and nanosuits.

Easily chalked up to the other nanosuited American soldiers (it's not like the Koreans can tell the difference who shot which corpse) and the Ceph flying-thing stalking about. But it's splitting hairs anyway.

If you want a game that rewards you for no killing, play Dishonered.

Well, they were probably wanting to see its effect on irradiating a larger population.

So you admit that they were deliberately using innocent civilians as unwilling test subjects? The entire fucking station worth of people? And you find that excusable?

I mean, it was enclosed by lasers and steel, so the effects weren't nearly that bad as the Ishimura where anyone could just gawk away.

THE THING TURNED A SPACESHIP FULL OF PEOPLE CRAZY AND THEN INTO MONSTERS BY ITS SHEER PRESENCE! It created the necromorph virus, it controls minds and gods knows what else. The thing is an actual nightmare-engine and you thought that a couple bits of steel and lasers are somehow sufficient countermeasures?

They could have put the research station straight between two star system with no life for light-years. But no, they put the research station on a mayor, inhabited habitat home to thousands of people. In one of the most populated solar systems of humanity. Considering what happened in the first game and just how much unknown alien super-technology is involved, there is no way that either complete negligence was not taken into account or the deliberate decision to count thousands (how many did the habitat house?) peoples' lives as disposable.

What bothers me is when Tiedeman is clearly the good guy, trying to bring the station under control, and keeps contacting Issac theoughout the game, talking to him like a close friend only for Issac to brutally murder all his comrades at the end because he couldn't be bothered talking. There were more than TWO HUNDRED soldiers present in the Government sector, and I'd say probably an additional 50 scientists and probably 100-200 civilians seeking refuge from the fighting. Then Issac just unplugs a battery and has them all brutally devoured by zonbies.

I actually remember that bit. If you do approach and try to surrender (don't do anything), they'll just shoot you (IIRC). So it makes sense that Isaac did not surrender, because they were gunning for him from the start of the game. As they wanted to do from the beginning of the game, remember? You were on the list of people to be terminated on sight because of how Isaac was involved with the project. Tiedeman actually justifies himself and supposedly even apologizes for doing that but I don't remember that part.

Well, while the fanarts and fiction is very loose and inconsistent, some things are somehow dalek-level whilst being contained by normal modern soldiers, I am talking about the SCP video game. This is a far more realistic and grounded story, and the SCPs can be reliably contained by modern soldiers.

That's because most of the SCPs in the game were the kind that could be contained, as logical for being set in the containment facility (not to mention you encounter ones you can actually dodge). There are lots of SCPs in the wiki that cannot be contained (that's what the Keter level is for), with soldiers or otherwise. Or require extensive excessive force or outright other SCPs to contain (that is what the Thaumiel class is about).

Then there is the fact that for a time, it was a requirement for making an SCP entry that the SCP itself could be contained on some level. Something that still persists.

[TheFeniX]

Seriously? You are basing the condemnation of Morgan Freeman for killing soldiers (following illegal and obviously immoral orders) in self-defense based on game statistics? Have you considered that the developers may have simply not developed the aliens' AI to help with the difficult curve (you meet alien soldiers before human ones) and because that's how the project development turned out?

Most of what you run into early on is seemingly more just local wild-life from Xen. As the game progresses, they seem to understand what is going on and start shipping in weak fodder (such as the Vortiguants, who will flee and cower if pressed hard enough, but are still dangerous). It's toward the end-game you start seeing more soldier types.

The problem is the same thing with other fiction and even real life: expecting someone there in the moment to have information they shouldn't or even ACT on that information when it would likely be deadly to them.

The Grunts in Halo are essentially a slave race, treated like garbage waves of trash to be throw at the enemy. If you kill the "Leader" Elite with them, they will flee in fear, jabbering something in alien-ese. During Halo 2, their dialog is in English and it's apparent they are mostly terrified of fighting, especially when confronted with "The Demon."

However, they are still equipped with armor and deadly weapons and are shooting at you. The... dog aliens you meet early on in Half-Life 1? They will kill you. You CAN however hit some of the hanging meat in the freezers and they will instead eat the chunks, then ignore you (unless you attack them).

I didn't notice this because it was "the thing wants to kill me! CROWBAR TIME." That's me as the player. It's even harder to chastise Freeman since he's the character and you can't exactly expect him to understand the alien thing by him is just hungry or scared or hungry AND scared.

All the things want to kill you by nature of the genre. Protagonists like Freeman, Master Chief, Frisk, any innumerable protags from games and fiction don't have good information, a support system, or people really there to back them up. That and they are usually fighting against ridiculous odds just for their own survival, not including what will be lost on top of that if they fail.

As mentioned: blame the writing, not the character. It's easy to forgive Half-Life in this regard because they weren't pushing any of these angles. The big problem I had with Spec Ops The Line was that they WERE but the only option you were really given was "just don't play the $60 you bought." This is unlike Undertale (and others) where the game chastises you for killing because it gives you very clear options to avoid it if you so chose.

And sometimes it just falls apart, such as with Vampire: Bloodlines where you can Charisma/etc you're way through most the game, then the final dungeon is a murder hallway because they had a release deadline.

So... this is basally a long-winded "me too" post.

[Zixinus]

Sending in wild animals makes a twisted sort of sense if you were probing defenses and aiming to cause chaos.

A thing that the wiki notes is that the alien grunts were seen eating the corpses, either yours or others. Which implies that they too were so animalistic or the entire realm was on the edge of starvation (which makes sense as a civilization trying desperately to stay out of the Combine's reach in the edge of known dimensions).

The only thing that never made sense to me is how killing all the scientists was productive to the "cover up". Killing specific members that would have published results might make sense, but the soldiers were shooting on sight. Which boggles the mind, as the scientists would be the second-most valuable assets in Black Mesa after the computer data stores. Which either was transferred out or was destroyed in the general cataclysm. You are destroying all the investment that went into the place and crippling your future ability to reproduce (and avoid) what was archived.

Which, if you are the G-man, you might want. It was never clear what the hell was the G-man's agenda.

[Jub]

For HL1, if that happened in real life the military would have a contain and quarantine policy until it was clear that such a policy wasn't working or created undue risk. So you'd have soldiers coming in, escorting scientists to holding areas, possibly in handcuffs and likely only killing aliens on sight. Shoot on sight would also likely apply to head crab infected scientists as well, but that is less certain.

What is certain is regardless of your end goals, it's easier to have the scientists trust you and allow themselves to be escorted to a holding area than it is to search and clear the facility while shooting at and wasting ammo on terrified scientists who would very likely follow any reasonable order given to them.

[bilateralrope]

If you want a game that rewards you for no killing, play Dishonered.

Pity that a lot of the non-lethal ways to eliminate targets are very cruel.

The big problem I had with Spec Ops The Line was that they WERE but the only option you were really given was "just don't play the $60 you bought."

What I took from the white phosphorous decision was that you'd already screwed things up so badly that your in-game choices were:
- Use it
- Let the enemies kill you. Which would have been the moral decision.

The only thing that never made sense to me is how killing all the scientists was productive to the "cover up". Killing specific members that would have published results might make sense, but the soldiers were shooting on sight. Which boggles the mind, as the scientists would be the second-most valuable assets in Black Mesa after the computer data stores. Which either was transferred out or was destroyed in the general cataclysm. You are destroying all the investment that went into the place and crippling your future ability to reproduce (and avoid) what was archived.

I see two possibilities:
- The "no witnesses" approach in a lot of conspiracy fiction. Which means that the soldiers that survived were also likely to be killed off later.
- In Half-Life 2, we find out that the person in charge at Black Mesa has pleased the Combine so much that he's now ruling Earth. If the Combine viewed the scientists as a threat, wiping them out might have been what got Breen favoured by them.

[Sea Skimmer]

Sending in wild animals makes a twisted sort of sense if you were probing defenses and aiming to cause chaos.

A thing that the wiki notes is that the alien grunts were seen eating the corpses, either yours or others. Which implies that they too were so animalistic or the entire realm was on the edge of starvation (which makes sense as a civilization trying desperately to stay out of the Combine's reach in the edge of known dimensions).

It's pretty abundantly clear in the game that some of the aliens were just animals, and some were sentient beings, the later being totally confirmed in Half Life 2. But the whole transfer between realities things didn't strike me as being a totally controlled event either, and certainly it wasn't foreplanned so I'd caution against applying too much reason to the tactics or forces sent.

The only thing that never made sense to me is how killing all the scientists was productive to the "cover up". Killing specific members that would have published results might make sense, but the soldiers were shooting on sight.

What the hell sense would it make to murder some people in cold blood, but not others? How do you cover up anything if you leave witnesses to the fact that you intentionally made the situation even worse? Killing everyone is the only way it makes any sense, at least then the only witnesses left have blood on their hands and aren't likely to speak. Scientists could only only squeal about the massive disaster ect.. and the killings but also flee to foreign countries with whatever they know.

Which boggles the mind, as the scientists would be the second-most valuable assets in Black Mesa after the computer data stores. Which either was transferred out or was destroyed in the general cataclysm. You are destroying all the investment that went into the place and crippling your future ability to reproduce (and avoid) what was archived.

I'm sure they had off site backups, that's trivial. But as for replication, we don't know what the end goal even was, but we know what they were trying to accomplish caused a massive disaster and alien invasion, which strikes me as a pretty good reason not want to replicate the results.

Which, if you are the G-man, you might want. It was never clear what the hell was the G-man's agenda.

You aren't supposed to know and I'm sure Valve doesn't either. But given that the events led to the Combine invading earth, and the G-man and whomever was behind Black Mesa and its enormous budget might have known a lot more then we do, it does not strike me as hard at all to come up with reasons for a coverup. Humans scientists can flee and tell anyone else anything. The entire plan all along was probably to nuke the place I think, the Marines were just sent in to make sure nobody got away before the nuke went off, without knowing they were going to be sacrificed. That way the marines can't talk either, though at least they'd have a strong incentive not to talk in the first place Certainly the human side of the equation had a long time to think and plan for this, given how elaborate Blue Shift and Opposing Force show the creature labs to be. They'd brought back a human material of material from Zen already.

Really a better question might be why the nuclear option wasn't a literal tactical nuclear weapon on a missile somewhere nearby ready to go on 5 minutes warning, but that may have presented practical problems of security and concealment. A step too obvious I guess. One assumes the 'public' plan would just be to claim it was all some kind of accident at the end of the day.

The fact that the special marines existed in the first place though says a lot about what was going on. They may well have been preparing to invade Zen once a method was devised to transport a large enough force.