What made the combine such appealing enemies?

What made the combine such appealing enemies?

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the death sound was cool

Nothing. They're shit.

This, plus their suits are pretty neat.

Everything about them is awesome.

they're not

they're fucking shit

half life 2 is shit!

SHIT!!!!!!!

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something about the Combine's whole design I really hate

URGHHBEEEEEEEEEEP

BLOOPBEEPBOOP

UNIT DOWN, SECTOR 6C, CONTAIMNENT UNIT DELAYED.

BLOOPBEEPBEEP

Cool death sounds
Cool voices
and all around creepy dystopian city and look in half life 2

>half life 2 came out 13 years ago

Why do they wear the mask?

Looking back the Combine masks look super autistic. A normal looking Gas mask would have been fine.

...

>half life 2 came out 13 years ago

it would be extremely painful to take it off

So they have no identity.

Sup Forums contrarian starter pack

The sounds in the game were top notch. When I got the pistol at the start I had a blast just listening to it pat-pat-pat on combine police.

The gas mask is a hold over from the original story line where earths atmosphere became toxic from the portal fuckery. That and its supposed to emphasize the alien influence and connect the troopers and metro cops with the synths

sound/dialogue design is probably valves best aspect

The combine masks are literal copies of a real style of Russian gas mask.

I remember I told my dad I was after HL2 a few days before. He used to play Sonic and Desert Strike with me on the odd occasion and liked to chat about upcoming games with me and he'd watch me play them and be awed by the graphics. One day at about 9pm he came home from the local pub with a copy of it. Turns out one of the regulars down there ran the local EB Games (before Game bought them out) and he gave my dad a copy to give to me.

Those were the days.

They actually make a lot of sense as aliens. A headless interdimentional/intergalactic confederation-conglomerate thing, with hundreds of different species synthesized and modified to suit every possible need.
Plus, very unique architecture.

Thanks Victor Antonov!

...

Lore and sound design.

They had no explanation in game, you just saw moments of them doing things for reasons you can't understand. Half Life 3 would probably ruin them by revealing too much in the same way that Mass Effect's reapers became dumb space robots by the third game.

It de-humanizes them

But that pistol is one of the weakest ones I've ever heard.

Good design, especially soundwise.

It's supposed to dehumanize them.

Jesus imagine fighting Gordon. He took down their entire operation in 3 days, after the resistance barely did fuck all for 20 years hes like doomguy with a crowbar

>They had no explanation in game, you just saw moments of them doing things for reasons you can't understand.

They're an interdimensional empire conquered earth because they want more resources, cannonfodder and more importantly they're after the portal technology humanity invented, it's as basic as it gets

It's a weak pistol. What's the issue here?

Humans invented a two-way portal. The Combine don't have this technology, they only have one-way portals which require fucktons of energy to open and are inconvenient as fuck. They wanted this tech and that's the reason they hunted Eli and Kleiner for so long.

The only flaw with the combine was that they had too little enemy types. If they showed off the crab/mortar synths and implemented the combine supersoldier exoskeleton it would have been better

nice headcanon, fucktards

>headcanon
LOOOOOOL

It's all confirmed in game you would know this if you actually played them.

I believe one of the themes of all games is Gordon doesn't fight alone. Whether it's GMan influencing the situation or teammates, he always has help.

But he is a fucking murder machine.

...

They literally tell you multiple times that they're after the portal technology Black Mesa invented, and you're just silly if you couldn't gleam that they're assimilating earth's resources and populace

they arent just meming. it is literally in the game. the exact explanation they gave.

its direct dialogue too its not some hidden backstory shit.

[citation needed]

It's only one side's theory. The combine themselves don't tell you why they are there. Look at the reapers in Mass Effect, they tell you outright why they are there and it's stupid. The myster of the Shivans in Freespace made them great too.

[citation needed intensifies]

I think how enigmatic they are. I think the designs were top notch especially the synths.

The overall feel of the combine is just weird and alien.

Sorry forgot were I am. half life is shit bro XDDD !!

I liked the part where the walls of the city suddenly crawl inwards

Half life 2 was pretty good

WOAH

That's absolutely fair to say and we can argue that the characters are imperfect narrators that may be wrong about the combines motives. But the only person to speak for them is Breen who is 1. Dead 2. A cunt 3. A figurehead and an empty suit.

All we have to go on is what the characters in game told us, and the things the combine have done which we can more or less verify independently like the "no ones allowed to have kids ever" business. When the order of business is suppressing ALL HUMANS FROM REPRODUCING I think we can accept that they genocidal. So the next question is why are they trying to kill off all humans. Are we a threat? Probably not. Do we have something they want?

Yes.

I think we can all agree that the pistol and SMG are shit tier weapons, it certainly doesn't help the game that those two are the ones you start off with

Nah kid, established facts readily available to anyone don't need citation. We're not making some outlandish unbelievable claim here, were reciting basic plot elements clearly outlined for you in a game that's been out for over 10 years.

You don't say "citation needed" when somebody tells you that 10x10=100. You either know that shit already because you're not an idiot and learned it when everyone else did, or you pull out a fucking calculator and find out for yourself.

this

le upvote

>But he is a fucking murder machine.

>that moment when Alyx sees you take down a gunship single handedly
>it was the fifth one you kill by that point
>not even hard

What the fuck were they even doing before Gordon arrived to fuck shit up?

@363987465
fuck off retard

>It doesn't help that you start with the weapons that are best used for taking down starting enemies
Don't make games.

Nothing. HL had better enemy design.

The pistol and SMG sound weak and feel anemic in comparison to the other weapons, I didn't say anything about their utility

>12 years and 2 months = 13 years

They sound weak because they are weak starting weapons. This isn't rocket surgery.

>starting weapons shouldn't sound or feel satisfying

Don't make games.

>they're after the portal technology humanity invented
>can teleport an entire empire
>wants teleportation technology

hmm...

Theirs is far more inefficient in comparison and that's why they're after it, they literally spell this out

they have no local teleportation and are reliant on gigantic infrastructure for it

Why are you trying to argue the plot of a game you've clearly never fucking played? Their tech required too much energy and was only one-way. They wanted our two-way high efficiency methods.

>game only has little gun variety compared to predecessor
>a few of them also sound and feel like shit
>b-but they're starting weapons
Why are you doing this
Just admit that Valve fucked up in this regard

The voice acting is charming. They're human+. They have mystery. They're cunts, but not outrageously so. They ragdoll. They're traitors, so you feel no remorse. Their design screams "authoritarian". They are secret police.

they can only teleport between universes and it's incredibly inefficient

human teleportation tech is basically instant and free

aside from breen, they didnt really have a face. they were an entity, rather than a single evil person doing evil things.
i mean the greater 'combine' in general, not just their enforcers. they didnt go around doing specifically evil things, they just had shit to do and if humanity got crushed underfoot, well, that didnt really matter to them.

Forget the combine, nobody here remembers what an obnoxious peice of shit Steam was when the game originally came out.
>Mandatory updates from slow as shit servers
>Encryption out the ass to rebuff piracy
>Waiting 20+ minutes for said encryption to decrypt once the game was allowed to play
>Getting kicked out the second somebody else logs in
People forget that gaben is ex-Microsoft

they tell you this when you teleport at the start in elis lab

This, plus their ingame chatter to what you're doing is pretty neat.

youtube.com/watch?v=BgBBmyF-1sQ

Shame they're not all that fun to fight.

They're so fucking bad, and they make that SMG the work horse weapon of the game.

I like HL2 but fuck me if that wasn't a shit design choice.

I never found myself using the SMG (besides its alt fire) later on when you've got proper weapons, the pulse rifle in particular obsoletes it and actually sounds/feels fun to shoot

>bait

pulse rifle is fuck-all accurate and doesn't carry much ammo

But yea I agree, the smg feels very weak.
Does in hl1 (and black mesa) too

Should have specified, it's not (much) more accurate than the smg

Like you said, they fill the same role. I'd really wish the pulse rifle was better on range

Because they're the unknown.

Nobody knows anything about them. Where they came from, how they work, how they got here. But they're right here on Earth, controlling the government, turning humans into drones, sterilizing the population.

The worst terror is always the one we don't understand, but is right at home.

The pulse rifle only holds like three magazines in its ammo pool, the SMG holds like 200+ rounds and has the most common ammo type found in the game.

Also it's genuinley disgusting that the pulse rifle has like similar spread to the SMG, it should have a really tight grouping on the first 3 shots and then spread off from that, but it just doesn't and it ends up just feeling like a stronger SMG.

That's another issue HL2 has, all the guns feel almost exactly like their HL1 counterpart. Almost every weapon is a direct port from HL1 but you end up fighting armored enemies with hitscan weapons at range for most of the game, so it's pretty goddamn frustrating. Soldiers in HL1 were hard enemies, but they weren't exceedingly common, so using explosives or high damage weapons on them was completely viable. Combine Soldiers in 2 are everywhere and you're pretty much forced to deal with them while using weak guns.

It's an issue that Doom had solved. Hitscan enemies should be able to be killed quickly.

>it should have a really tight grouping on the first 3 shots and then spread off from that
Are you retarded?
Have you even played the game?

If you fire off single shots, the shots follow the same recoil pattern as if you held the trigger down.

I liked their warped voice and the radio signal noises but I got severel confused when I saw their dropships move like animals, I still don't get what the fuck they are without reading wikis and shit so the fucked up that part

not an argument

It's based of a real mask pic related

>A normal looking Gas mask

Combine masks were literally normal soviet gas masks.

stefan pls

the dropships are like striders

striders are obviously some form of biotech monstrosities, probably severely edited versions of alien creatures

the combine basically find a world, turn the populace into cyborgs and recruit them into their army. their vehicles and shit are all robo-alien things

i wonder why valve didn't make any combine vortigaunts though.

the combine probably only takes what it needs, so either the vorts didn't have time to be synth-ized, or the advisors already fulfill the role of the combine psychics and they don't need the vorts

Really bums me out that there wasn't more alien foot soldiers though. The fucking Hunters in episode 2 were so awesome, yet all we get in HL2 is just marginally modified humans.

Yeah, same. They should have put these guys in and given them some ridiculous superscience BFG.

Make the combine foot soldiers a tiny bit weaker (or more prone to stumbling on hit) and add in some heavier characters with dodgeable attacks and you end up making HL2 a better game.

Reading the cut content for half life 2 makes me wish it actually came out. Despite being very long the story seems really interesting

There is no recoil pattern or anything, clicking once has exactly the same accuracy as holding down which makes it feel exactly like the SMG but with slower rate of fire and higher damaged. In actual DPS it and the SMG very close.

For me it was two things:

Most had to be human (at least to starting out) because if the aliums could just transport millions of their own military to the Earth they wouldn't need the resources they would be extracting.

Second, I always wondered if the humans who volunteered were mutated in some way afterward.

How did the combine win the 7 hours war? Did they just use synths and monsters or did some humans volunteer? And how did they volunteer for the combine

During the game there's a few bits where you see people being transhumanised.

ARE YOU RETARDS FUCKING TROLLING ME OR SOMETHING?
the AR2's entire schtick is that holding the fire button down for more than ~5 shots it gets insanely inaccurate, but those first ~5 shots are much more precise than the SMG1
I mean - what the fuck? Do I need to record myself and upload this as webm?

They weren't. Aesthetically and conceptually they're cool. But, in practice they were just stupid bullet sponges that felt notably lacking compared to the more animated enemy offerings in halo at the time.

Sorry man, you're really remembering this incorrectly.