Opposing Force Half Life Download
Elly Garnand
The Gearbox Software of today is barely recognisable as the fresh-faced Texas developer that launched in 1999. The studio did its stint in the WWII shooter genre with Brothers in Arms and is best known for its firepower delivery chute, Borderlands. Yet, for its first six years in the industry, Gearbox mostly supported existing series. It's honest but undervalued work that's kept many a company afloat over the years. Like Valve Corporation, Gearbox was founded by a rag-tag team of expats from another workshop. Where Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington were straight outta Microsoft, the Gearbox founders had cut their teeth at 3D Realms and Bethesda. This was a young, independent studio with roots in both FPS engineering and narrative dreamweaving. It had plenty in common with Valve, and so it was a logical choice to write the Half-Life expansion packs.
Released in '99, Half-Life: Opposing Force was the first of these two supplements. In it, we play Corporal Adrian Shepard, one of the US Marines sent to Swiss Cheese the resident researchers and alien invaders at the Black Mesa Facility. The DLCs of the last five to ten years have rarely changed up the protagonists of their stories. Plenty of modern games are based around one character that you continuously upgrade over time. So, if the developer has you switch perspective, you lose all your pretty trinkets. Half-Life is more about the journey rather than a growing protagonist or the spoils of war. This allows it to migrate you to a new avatar without it feeling like it's robbing you of your riches. Although, who your protagonist is still counts for a lot.
While Gordon Freeman was thinly drawn, he was fun to roleplay because he was perhaps the only scientist in action games doing scientist stuff. Gearbox's invitation to be a soldier in an action game is one that could have been sent to you by thousands of other interested parties. But this expansion is remembered for subverting through other means, for flipping the script of the heroic empowerment fantasy and letting you embody the villain. It shouldn't be. Officially, you play a Marine sent to perpetrate war crimes, but when it comes to the grisly business of killing civilians, Opposing Force gets squeamish.
As you arrive in a Black Mesa employee's workspace, they have to know they're face-to-face with the reaper, but there's never a flicker of discomfort from them. During the first act, a Isaac Kleiner-type guy lets you know he's aware of rumours soldiers are rubbing out scientists, and he still treats you like you're there to fix the photocopier. And never are you directly ordered to end someone's life, half the reason the government sent you to this boiler room in the first place. There are more opportunities to kill physicists in the base Half-Life, where you are a colleague to the researchers, than in Opposing Force, where you are their state-assigned executioner.
It's not that there's an article of storytelling that rules Shepard has to obey his superiors when they say he must murder. But if he's disobeying them and the writers don't state firmly that he made that choice, they're not communicating the plot to their audience. The game also casts you in a benevolent light through the gel of moral relativism. You might be a bad guy, but the real bad guy is the "Black Ops" who are at the labs to carry out an even more dire duty. It's hollow because, for most of the expansion, it's unclear what separates you from the Black Ops besides the colour of your fatigues.
An uncomfortable question arises for Opposing Force, one that it's stimyed when trying to answer: If Shepard is not a harbinger of death, then who is he to Black Mesa? Gordon Freeman's goals were to escape his bunker, pull the breaker on Xen's organising intelligence, and close the portal. Barney Calhoun is the protagonist of Blue Shift, the second Half-Life expansion. He is entrusted with protecting the facility's scientists and, later, smuggling a small group of them to safety. What's Shepard doing? Hanging out? He can smoke some aliens while he's in town, but we know he ultimately can't halt the Nihilanth's ingress because Gordon's already got that covered.
In Opposing Force's eleventh level, "The Package", we learn from a cowering researcher that the Black Ops are in the facility to arm a plutonium warhead. Again, Half-Life puts the topic of nuclear disaster front and centre. After receiving this disturbing news, we walk to the other side of the car park, find the bomb in the back of a flatbed, and disarm it with a single button press. The time between alarm and all-clear and the ease with which we disable a nuclear payload means it could be one of the jokes from Jazzpunk. "Press E to defuse nuke" is a primordial "Sit down to hear intense news". But Opposing Force isn't laughing, and to the extent the defusing does give Shepard some status in the mythology of Black Mesa, it comes in Chapter 11 of 12. It won't make any difference in the grand scheme of things anyway. The facility still explodes.
I'm not even sure what Opposing Force's Black Mesa is to Black Mesa. In Gordon's Half-Life, you can invest in the research facility as a location because each level is one of the departments that operate the place, and there's plenty of evidence that those areas act towards their stated aims. Opposing Force is an industrial madlib. All the right props are there: fans, furnaces, pools of radioactive goop, but it's always a flip of the coin whether the expansion encases them in a cohesive pipeline. Therefore, it becomes difficult to believe that scientific illumination is happening here.
In the environmental and interaction design, Gearbox is trying to put you in the headspace of a military officer. Freeman was posted in the labs, where a scientist would be of the most use, and with his PhD in physics, he knows how to find scientifically-backed solutions to problems like turning on reactors and launching rockets. But control panels and sensitive instruments aren't of much use to a soldier. Shepard's world is one of gritty on-the-ground militarism. He's crawling the tunnels, skulking in the warehouses, and crouch-jumping like he's still at boot camp. He's more likely to use his agility, brute force, and the chain of command to solve a problem rather than academic knowledge.
The level Crush Depth has this wonderful communicator of who Shepard is: there's a malfunctioning x-ray machine we must pass through, and it's lit up with arcing electrical charges. Here, Freeman would reroute the power or find the off switch, but as Shepard, we unblock the route by blowing up the electrical relay with a gun. There's another such moment in Friendly Fire: You need to give your squad access to an indoor car park, but the buttons to open the shutters are damaged. Undeterred, you detonate some mines to destroy the debris blocking a door and let your team use the side entrance.
The X-ray machine and mines aren't the only setpieces with which the developers have fun. There's the board room in Friendly Fire where a Vortigaunt bursts through a projector screen as if it were a movie monster come to life. There is the return to the tram ride from the original game in "We Are Pulling Out". This time, you find incendiarised, stationary cars, letting you know that you're joining the party long after the fire was started. And there's the teleporting alien encounter in Vicarious Reality. Vicarious Reality is effectively an alien zoo, and in one enclosure, you see a trail of dead bodies and an open door. The subtext is clear: the alien killed its captors and fled. You run to the end of the corridor overlooking the enclosure only to find the exit is locked. So, you turn around and make your way back, but aliens zap in in front of you, breaking the glass of the exhibit. When you jump through the hole in the glass, it turns out that despite the unlocked gate, the Voltigore is still home, and it materialises in front of you. Here, environmental storytelling is a form of misdirection.
But while those filmic sequences have a certain wow factor, being a non-scientist in this scientific facility, we cannot have a conversation with it. Spaces in Opposing Force also generally feel barer than in the erstwhile Half-Life. Then, there are the localised design flubs. Pit Worm's Nest is a store-brand version of Half-Life's sixth section, Blast Pit. Without even leaving one expansion between the original operation and itself, Opposing Force exhumes the concept of a gaping hole with a leviathan rising out of it. In Pit Worm's Nest, as in Blast Pit, that abomination slices at you with razor-sharp scythes. It's not just that centrepiece that's bootlegged; it's also the mission flow as you must, again, flip switches in two tangential departments and then return to the main chamber to vanquish the monster. If that's not derivative enough, Opposing Force's stage also has Blast Pit's airlocks. I don't know why we're going back to the well already or why we'd want to do it with suffocatingly thin corridors or an excess of acid-spitting enemies. I'm tempted to ask if a single expansion pack needs three different aliens with corrosive projectiles.
If it's a glut of the same encounters you want, there's also Chapter 10, Foxtrot Uniform. Foxtrot Uniform is proud of its waffle of concrete tubes infested with Voltigores. Voltigores are elephant-sized and can shoot lightning orbs and charge like bulls. This combination of enemy and environment means you can be walking into a black veil only to have a ball of energy or a fleshy beast come flying out of it and annihilate you. This is one of many locales in which you must activate your night vision goggles, Opposing Force's equivalent of the flashlight. Filling your screen with console green, the goggles are visually offensive every time, and even with them, the draw distance in the tunnels is myopic. When you can get a bead on the Voltigores, you're given little elbow room to avoid their charges or the explosions they let off when they die.
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