Are we missing anything? Oh right, new weapons. How about some gimmicks? Everybody loved waiting for an NPC companion to open a door for them, so let’s do that again with more wisecracking and standing around tapping your feet. Don’t worry about explaining away why they weren’t in the original game, I’m sure nobody could possibly get worked up enough about the canon to care. Let’s put in some new enemies people are probably getting tired of bludgeoning the same cloned headcrab zombie’s head in by now.
There’s a reason expansion packs were occasionally called ‘mission packs’ around this era, after all. So, you start with a new story, with new areas to match. If you’re lucky, that new content will integrate so seamlessly that people will unanimously agree that the base experience isn’t complete without your work if you’re unlucky, you’ll end up like the F.E.A.R expansions on Steam, thrown in as a freebie that sensible people rightfully steer clear of. Your goal is to feed new content into it while building off an existing set of systems and mechanics. Let’s put you in the shoes of somebody planning an expansion pack for a moment. The big one, which I’ve more or less made up on the spot here, is weapon indecision. Erik Wolpaw-a man who might know a thing or two about Valve games, just a hunch-wrote that it “sets a new standard for quality for future action-game mission packs”, and while he was probably right, there are a couple of things Opposing Force does that nearly every expansion pack of the time was guilty of. It even managed to effectively expand on the idea that the HECU marines were really just as out of their depth as everybody else caught up in the Black Mesa incident, even if it had to fabricate an entire internal conflict just so you’d have some hitscan grunts to shoot at.
Alright, it trod familiar ground in more ways than one, and towards the end it swan-dived so hard it’s a wonder that the final boss didn’t just give up and sulk off the stage midway through the fight, but it had some wonderfully memorable moments and when all’s said and done it’s hard to turn down six more hours of Half-Life goodness, whatever the source may be. No wait, I’d write an elaborate cringe-inducing fanfic where the G-Man has to use his extradimensional powers to thwart the alien invasion and save crucial characters fated to die.įortunately Gearbox kept their heads and we were blessed with Opposing Force, an expansion pack that fared about as well as anybody could’ve possibly hoped, if not better. Imagine Gabe Newell walking into your office lobby, amidst piles of empty cardboard boxes and discarded packing materials, and asking you to follow up one of the most phenomenal first-person shooters of all time with a side-story or two. Just hold onto that prospect for a moment.
KELLY BAILEY HALF LIFE OPPOSING FORCE SOFTWARE
It’s been hard to feel sympathy for Gearbox Software as of late, what with its recent track record consisting largely of an insufferably self-satisfied co-op shooter and a series of fan-angering whoopsies it insists on valiantly defending, but if you ever wanted to feel sorry for a triple-A game developer-something that people on various unnamed forum boards seem to find incredibly easy for some reason-imagine what it must’ve been like in 1999 when the freshly-formed studio was approached by Valve to take on the daunting task of making Half-Life expansions.
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