#i'm not really opposed to the idea necessarily of the protagonist NOT being a survivor it's definitely interesting

[moonsidesong]

played the fangame danganronpa another with a friend and i didn't really like the ending but i very much enjoyed mekaru bc she's just woman byakuya togami. i'm going to talk a lot in the tags now

[ohnoitsz1m]

It him 👍

Furry Adrian Shephard :]

He's a sheep (mouflon x navajo churro)

Ramble below

So to be honest I really didn't like Opposing Force. It was kind of a chore and it's really not that well designed from just like a gameplay perspective. And to be fair neither is blue shift but blue shift is poorly designed in a way that's just kind of boring and lets you breeze through the game without much of a challenge- Opposing Force has the complete opposite issue at least in my opinion. Opposing Force has such a strange difficulty curve and really struggles to communicate concepts to the player.

But I did like one thing about Opposing Force. I like the silent protagonist. He gets so much characterization most of which I think is probably unintentional and me just reading something interesting into an uninteresting character. But like hear me out.

The game opens up with Adrian Shephard on his way to Black Mesa while the other people in his unit talk amongst themselves about how much they want to kill something and how irritating it is that they don't have their orders yet. Their helicopter is taken out and Shephard is now the sole survivor out of his unit. Following this he is saved by a Black Mesa scientist- had Shephard received his orders and made it to Black Mesa he probably would have had to kill this dude. However he doesn't know he's supposed to be killing scientists and security guards and is later forced to accept help from Otis a Black Mesa security guard 🎉 so already he's kind of doing the opposite of what he's supposed to be doing. Later in the game you start picking up little alien guns and whatnot and use them to get through the game, one of these being the spore launcher. This thing really made me open to the idea of caring about Adrian- I'm really fatigued by the whole army man shit. I like war movies don't get me wrong but there's only so many times I can watch full metal jacket before I get tired of it. So anyways. There's an idle animation that sometimes happens while you're holding the spore launcher where Adrian will pet it. And it responds to him. They didn't need to do this. Like they really didn't need to do this, but it adds so much to Adrian as a character that he's just.. compelled to pet this weird little alien that he's been using as a gun since he found it.

I just think like conceptually he's really interesting. Like this game demands you to rely on everything that you were primed to kill going in. Like in Half Life and in Blue Shift you have to kill soldiers, in Opposing Force the main like thing that makes this game special is that you are a soldier and you have to rely on other soldiers to help you through the game. Well okay you're a soldier so that means you're going to be killing scientists and security guards right? Not necessarily. Your first encounter with a scientist is him saving your life and trying to save the life of your comrades, your first encounter with a security guard is him opening a door for you after you run away from a zombie completely unarmed

So those are my thoughts on Adrian Shephard 👍 I think he's strange and very interesting