Opposing Force and Blue Shift - Essential parts of HL lore?

[Foebane]

First of all to the admins: I KNOW this isn't really HL2, but it is surely part of the HL storyline as a whole and thus counts, surely?

Anyway, I was wondering how important these two ADD-ONS were to the whole franchise, a bit like the Quake and Quake 2 add-ons were moderately impressive but ultimately forgettable. How essential are these two then?

In terms of the stories involved, I would've thought Blue Shift had no importance at all - I mean, G-Man is not interested in the security guard you play at all, and he is able to escape fairly easily (and shortly).

In Opposing Force, the G-Man seems to take an interest in Adrian Shephard at the end, even nuking Black Mesa in front of him to make a point; but how is A.S. anywhere near as important as Gordon Freeman to the G-Man?

These two are mission packs I've had since they were first on sale, if only because they showed different parts of Black Mesa, which happens to be my most favourite virtual domain in computer games as a whole. But like the Quake mission packs, are they really THAT important to the whole HL story?

 

[Blakeb155]

Naah. They don''t really affect much in HL2. HL/HL2 are games about Gordon Freeman, those two MODS were made by Gearbox to expand the storyline a bit with two other characters POV.

 

[Cypher19]

Unlike (apparently) a lot of the fans, I feel that BS and OF are important not to the HL2 storyline, but to the world created in the games. BS sheds an INSANE amount of detail on what was going on at BMRF in relation to teleportation technology prior to the resonance cascase incident (Mossman actually refers to some of that in her opening speech to Gordon, or at least advancements made that directly stemmed from the prior research explored in BS). OF however adds some more details to the G-Man, one critical portion being that the G-Man activated the nuke to blow up the BMRF, which I'm sure will all make sense to us in the course of...well, I'm really not, at liberty to say.

 

[CREMATOR666]

OPfor is a fine expansion pack, BS is not. (unless you want to know what Barney's been up to in the past )

 

[dogboy73]

Opposing force also introduced another race of aliens. Obviously from the developers point of view this was all about giving the player some new enemies to fight & adding their own stamp to the mission pack/Mod. But in the grand scheme of things you could imagine that this race was most likely another slave race under Combine control.

In any case Op Force was an excellent mission pack for HL. Never played Blue Shift though. I was put of by several decidedly average reviews.

 

[Foebane]

Hello? Anyone else going to post on this? I did actually create this topic to determine if I should throw away Opposing Force and Blue Shift! Well, I'm throwing away Hexen and Quake tonight so it does not matter to you lot anyway.

 

[<RJMC>]

I heard OP4 history dont affect he original HL storyline at all

for example I heard marc laidlaw let gearbox create the race x just to make a new for op4 and they dont involve in the HL storyline

 

[Asknoone]

Originally posted by <RJMC>
for example I heard marc laidlaw let gearbox create the race x just to make a new for op4 and they dont involve in the HL storyline

You heard right.

Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
Hi, Solver, I'm assuming whatever I tell you is going to get posted somewhere, so I'll be very careful in answering.

I will not talk about the meaning of the game or clear up stuff that has yet to be clarified or revealed; it only makes sense to do this in the context of the games themselves. Stuff that hasn't been revealed is that way because we're not ready to reveal it. Everything that's there is there for a reason; ditto for everything that isn't there. I can only say, "Stay tuned."

Race-X was Gearbox's creation, and likely would only be continued if Gearbox were to do more episodes in the HL universe. There were gameplay modes they wanted to explore, and their designers wanted to make some new monsters; Race-X was a great way for them to do this. The universe is expansive enough to allow this without conflicting with the core story. Remember, these are games first and foremost, and the story really is there to open up and extend (rather than shut down) possibilities for fun gameplay. We did coordinate overarching story elements with Gearbox, but left a lot of the details for them to explore and invent according to what worked for their design process. As for whether Shepherd was put on ice before or after the Nihilanth's demise, it's really hard to say, since Gordon's time in Xen and in the Nihilanth's chamber may not be mapped directly against the timeline of events at Black Mesa.

The gman mumbles sound fairly close to what I remember him saying...strangely enough, I can't find the script for that exchange.

Thanks for taking such an interest in the story. Before HL1 came out, it was tough to convince outsiders that FPS players would care at all about having any kind of story in their game. Obviously, given the wide range of reactions, they care quite a bit. The debate over HL2's content is much more varied.

Yours,
Marc Laidlaw