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Tuesday, January 04, 2005

The Many Deaths of Gordon Freeman

An idea for a Half-Life 2 mod came to me as I finished up the game on Friday (is there a myth about finishing games before the New Year? Hrm, nevermind - I still have Genesis games to finish) which would be essentially the inverse of your normal singleplayer.

In a normal single player, you play a single person who battles against multiple enemies trying to make it through maps with the most amount of health/items remaining.

In The Many Deaths of Gordon Freeman, this would be reversed. You would play multiple opponents against a single enemy (our man Freeman) trying to keep him from completing a map too successfully. The plot events would be the same, the puzzles would be more or less the same, but it would be all told from the POV of the enemies that Freeman fights against.

It would definately be technically challenging. First you would need to have an AI Freeman. Not an easy task since he has the most complicated actions in the entire game. Next you would need to make player versions of the major villians and the various weapons they have. Finally the SP maps would need to be altered to handle this reverse and all HUD/Control functions would have to support it.

Perfect Dark had a similar coop twist like this, I believe. One player would play the main character and the other would play the enemies. Course, this would also be an option to remove the need for a smart AI Freeman script but would introduce a whole new problem of multiplayer code. A multiplayer version could also quickly descend into a hunter gametype, with many players against one (being Freeman). Course, that might not be such a bad thing either.

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