gearbox not to make hl2 expansions

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egon

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for me its the best bit of news to come from e3. makes me sick to remember the mess gearbox made in opforce. it was a bad game and as an expansion to hl it was criminally awful. lbue shift was decent because they reined in their 'creativity' and didnt put their own new creatures etc. into it. not a patch on half life though.
 
I liked Opposing Force very much so, but I am glad that Valve are doing the expansions themselves - they're guaranteed to be of the same quality of the original game.
 
Interesting opinion there.

Most people would say that Blue Shift is the awful one and Opposing Force is the better one. I personally think that OpFor had a lot more about it than Blue Shift because it was longer, more in depth, pretty true to the original storyline.

Blue Shift was way too short, not immersive enough and not as good as it should have been considering the concept.

You'll find a lot of people refer to it as "Blue Shit" :/

Welcome to the forums :)
 
Op4 was great and blueshit was just wrong... 4 hours. 4 freaking hours.
 
Op4 was good, i loved raceX, sad they won't be there anymore, but with VALVe , we're sure no one will mess the storyline...
 
The gearbox products was not bad, not bad at all... But as Abom says, with Valve doing the future expansions, it'll only get better.
 
I like OpFor but still had sort of the same opinion, i thought it could have been done better, even though Blue Shift was shorter and was definatly not as good, although i like the atmoshphere of it.

But valve doing it is great, they know exactly what they want us to have, and they know what is good.
 
BS is bs.

Opposing Force was pretty good. I personally like it when the creators keep creative control over their...creations. Because when other people start exploiting the franchise then questions of authenticity come into play.

As you all know non red-blue-green lightsabers feature prominently in non-official games/books etc. Before episode 2 the diehard star wars fans believed there could only be red, blue and green sabers...until Mace Windu had a purple one. As you can imagine there was a great outcry as the hardcore fans cried fowl at this symbolic desecration of their RGB theories....

If you just read that you have now reduced your own intelligence. I am sorry.
 
blue shift was way tooo short. I agree.
however imho in of they tried to change a lot of things from hl, and screwed up everything. the new weapons which compleetly upset the balance of half life, and the hl weapons were way cooler.
eg the desert eagle for the magnum, the sniper rifle for the crossbow. and valve seem to be realize as a lot of people say that most weapons from half life are back.
then the newer enemies which i simply hated, again removing cool stuff like the assassins which you unfortunately see only twice in the original game.
one particular sequence I remember was battling a series of huge aliens in a dark underground path using those awful night vision goggles. and the aliens were one shot killers, so it basically consisted of kill one, save, kill next and reloading each time the alien managed to get at you.
I know most people disagree with my opinion of OF, I remember the only review I agreed with was from CGW which gave it a 2/5.
In blue shift iti was like old times with same weapons, and aliens. that was what made it a nice game to play.
Most people would say that Blue Shift is the awful one and Opposing Force is the better one. I personally think that OpFor had a lot more about it than Blue Shift because it was longer, more in depth, pretty true to the original storyline.
Click to expand...

OF hardly stayed true to the original storyline. with a new race of aliens, enemies weapons and what not.

I hope valev ignore the OF story and carry on from where hl ends. infact I've dashed off a mail to them asking that. dont think theyll reply :(
 
The new race and so forth that were added in Op4 were planned out with the approval of Valve and Half-Life's original writer. The whole point of Race-X was that it could play into the storyline (there are dimensional rifts, and more than just one race is trying to use them to break into our dimension) without contradicting or interfering with the main storyline. Op4 is self-contained in that way: a separate problem crops up in the midst of the main disaster, and Alan Shepard takes care of it (hope that's not TOO big of a spoiler, but yes, in Op4, you fight and ultimately win).
 
meh, just becuase theres new weapons and aliens, doesnt make it bad imo.
a story doesnt really involve what weapons and what aliens are used, but more on what goes on in the game. I think they did a good job of what goes on in the game, as far as story is concerned.

havent played blueshift.
 
one particular sequence I remember was battling a series of huge aliens in a dark underground path using those awful night vision goggles. and the aliens were one shot killers, so it basically consisted of kill one, save, kill next and reloading each time the alien managed to get at you.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that was the toughest sequence of the game. Pretty scary though, no?

Op4 had:
-new squad AI allowing the marines to follow and fight better alongside you
-enemies that changed things up a bit
-some GREAT maps with some really well done action sequences
-couple of fun scripted scenes
-couple of cool eastereggs of areas and even scenes from the original game
-neat new alien weapon concepts (barnacle gun, recharging weapon, alien grenade launcher, etc.)

What's not to like?
 
ok first post i make and get flamed :p. I knew I was in a minority but I didnt kno it was this bad. gotta defend myself.....

Yeah, that was the toughest sequence of the game. Pretty scary though, no?
Click to expand...

no. pretty stupid more like it. how can you be scared of something that looks green n grainy. the blind tentacle in hl now that was scary.

squad AI was nothing to write home about. I ended up doing most fights myself since the idiots would just rush and get killed. hell the barneys were more useful.

not a single memorable scene, nothing to remind you of scenes in halflife that stick in your mind. eg the helicopter dropping unlimited marines in we've got hostiles, the gauss gun scene (overcharge? what do you mean overcharge?), the air strike on the gargantua, the whole of blast pit.

hornet gun > recharging gun
rpg > alien fish spitting out yellow globs.

since I've started the final boss omigod anybody eevr seen something so incredibly stupid in a game?

a multi tentacled green slug with conveniently mounted guns and a health pool nearby, whom u shot in the eyes which made his tummy open to show a pink ball which u shoot with the aforementioned coincidentally conveniently located laser guns? to call it ocntrived is an understatement.
 
Don't worry, you won't be flamed. I'm keeping an eye on everyone :p
 
I loved both of the expansions, though I prefer OP4.

I certainly hope they took OP4 into consideration when they wrote up the HL2 story...
 
I haven't been terribly impressed with ANYTHING that Gearbox has done (not just HL). They do an "ok" job, but it is never as good as it should be. (I could go look up examples I suppose, but it all started for me with the fiasco that was CS b5.)
 
Apos said:
in Op4, you fight and ultimately win.
Click to expand...
Well, not really as the G-Man traps you in the border world for your efforts.

As for Blue Shift, it was originally being developed as a bonus for the ill-fated Sega port of Half-Life.
 
OP4 was great i loved all the weapons and i thought it was great learning what happed to other people you meet/pwn in the game :D i loved the m60 :D and the new alians was good fun
 
OP4 felt like a dumbed down HL.
The guns were bigger, the enemies more stupid (that "superzombie" was plain silly) and the humour was cheaper (that fat "barney", for example).
 
Chris_D said:
Interesting opinion there.

Most people would say that Blue Shift is the awful one and Opposing Force is the better one. I personally think that OpFor had a lot more about it than Blue Shift because it was longer, more in depth, pretty true to the original storyline.

Blue Shift was way too short, not immersive enough and not as good as it should have been considering the concept.

You'll find a lot of people refer to it as "Blue Shit" :/

Welcome to the forums :)
Click to expand...

Chris i think u said that quite nicely.

with that said, i still am not sure if Gearbox should be handling the expansions for the HL series anymore (and am glad they aren't :) ). if anyone has played Opposing Force online, they will know how brutal a job Gearbox did over the last 6 or so years of patching up the game, fixing obvious bugs... it was it was amazing they patched up the game as many times as they did.

anyway, im glad Valve is handling the expansions themselves.. tho, this does mean more work for them on top of TF2 and other titles they may already have in the works.
 
Apparently, (according to an interview with marc laidlaw) the stories behind Opposing Force and Blue Shift were written originaly as part of the original HL1 story, but due to gameplay limitations and the way things went, they were removed, and later returned in the 2 expansions.
 
Brian Damage said:
I loved both of the expansions, though I prefer OP4.

I certainly hope they took OP4 into consideration when they wrote up the HL2 story...
Click to expand...

i hope so too :)

the storyline was pretty good in Opposing Force.. i hope they don't totally ignore that part in HL2... and of course all Adrian Sheperd fans wanna see him in HL2 in some form :E
 
I seem to remember that the sniper rifle in Op4 was quite satisfying... :)
 
Ooooooohhhhhhh, yeah.

I don't think that they added any weapons for Blue Shift, did they? I always thought that that was a slight oversight... Barney should at least have had his own melee weapon...
 
This isn't really surprising, considering Gearbox is working on their own games these days.
 
Brian Damage said:
Ooooooohhhhhhh, yeah.

I don't think that they added any weapons for Blue Shift, did they? I always thought that that was a slight oversight... Barney should at least have had his own melee weapon...
Click to expand...


Blue shift was actually quite fun. Only it was really limited by the short play time. The lack of newer weapons hurt too.
Originally it was Dreamcast exclusive though, so I'm just happy that we got to play it at all.

Anyways, Op4 was good because it added a lot to the story, and elaborated some stuff.
Like how in HL1, some marines had sniper rifles, but Gordon never got ahold of one. Then, Shephard did.
Also in HL1, marines would call out for medics when killed. Op4 added those missing medics.
All the black ops were female. Not anymore.
etc.
Plus, I consider the Shock Troopers to be the coolest deigned enemies yet. Pit Drones are tied the vortigaunts with second best, and Voltigores third. That pitch-black underground tunnel sequence did suck though, and the bosses were a bit rubbish.

The only part of Op4 I outright disliked was the night vision. It sucked, and I hope that the source remake utterly revamps it.
 
egon said:
for me its the best bit of news to come from e3. makes me sick to remember the mess gearbox made in opforce. it was a bad game and as an expansion to hl it was criminally awful. lbue shift was decent because they reined in their 'creativity' and didnt put their own new creatures etc. into it. not a patch on half life though.
Click to expand...


I agree with all of this!!!!!!

I'm not so sure about Blue Shift though, I still haven't played it. I herd it was even half the length of Op4 and that was half the length of HL.

I'll be happy when Valve gets everything onto Source. I so hope HL2 comes with the other games ported to Source. I'd so play through HL1 before I played HL2.
 
This isn't really surprising, considering Gearbox is working on their own games these days.
Click to expand...

yeah porting games to ocnsole n churning out crap like nightfire. to mention gearbox in the same breath as valve is sacrilege.
 
Opforce boss contrived? And there was that HL1 ending.
Exit random Alien factory into big boss of the whole thing. Whose only fatal weakness is his head opening up, and he stays in a room with handy bounce pads that allow you to get above him?

I liked Opforce. I hold gearbox in high esteem for their expansions and their Halo Conversion (althought custom edition took a little to long to appear). Tho yeah I'm glad Valve are doing expansions, I find it perfectly acceptable to use the same adjectives to describe both Gearbox and Valve :p
 
wasn't gear box one of the many companies that worked on condition zero?

I enjoyed OpFor's SP more than HL's.
Click to expand...
what!?!?!?!, sorry but did you really really really abhor xen or something?
 
OP4 had the best MP that no one ever played. There is still a very small community of players. I remember the three hour wars in OP4CTF when it was all the players againt the Gearbox boys. Those were fun times!
 
Sai said:
wasn't gear box one of the many companies that worked on condition zero?


what!?!?!?!, sorry but did you really really really abhor xen or something?
Click to expand...

No, I liked Xen actually. I liked all of the original Half-Life's SP. I just enjoyed OpFor's more. Dunno why really, it just flowed better or something.
 
I will buy HL1 and OP4 source maybe Blue shift if it's cheap.

Oh and hl2 of course.
 
Soundwave said:
No, I liked Xen actually. I liked all of the original Half-Life's SP. I just enjoyed OpFor's more. Dunno why really, it just flowed better or something.
Click to expand...
Yeah, same for me, I loved playing as a soldier, and the Black Ops were really cool :D
 
That's ok that gearbox isn't gonna be making any of the expansions on behalf of valve since I don't really have the highest opinion of them. They did halo pc version and its performance was horrible. Not that really mattered anyways since the game was really lame.
 
DrJones said:
That's ok that gearbox isn't gonna be making any of the expansions on behalf of valve since I don't really have the highest opinion of them. They did halo pc version and its performance was horrible. Not that really mattered anyways since the game was really lame.
Click to expand...
Halo was absolutely amazing and kickass when it came out, I still play Co-op with my bro in law every now and then when I go down to Santa Cruz, it belongs on the XBOX though.
Halo PC was really crappy though..... I just didnt get into it.. it was horrible.

I thought Opfor was awesome though, and I enjoyed playing through it again recently.
 
Mechagodzilla said:
The only part of Op4 I outright disliked was the night vision. It sucked...
Click to expand...
In some instances, the night vision effect actually gave you less visibility which I found rather annoying.
 
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