Stoney Mason said:
You mean you were scripted to fake die. In a sequence where people infinitely spawn out of the hills. And your teammates says they are out of ammo even though you can magically always refill your ammo from them. (so why are they out of ammo?) And then the magically scripted calvary rides in to save you.
This is incredibly reductionist to boil down what is going on and how the player is reacting to a series of scripts and some attempts by the developer to not break the game. First off, you can refill your ammo from your teammates because--in the event you actually did run out of ammo-- you would not be able to finish the level. What is the alternative? That this should be a chokepoint where you can game over? Something out of Steel Battalion? I admit the scene lost something because the characters' sense of desperation does not match what is going on mechanically, but they do have other tools at their disposal.
I don't understand scripted to "fake die". As opposed to real die? The game is scripted to make you feel like you are going to die. And it does a very effective job of that, regardless of whether or not you can get ammo from your teammates saying they are out of ammo.
And the enemies do not infinitely respawn. If you sit back and pick them all off, you complete the level. That is not infinite respawning.
If you thought you were going to die there you only thought so because the scripting was obviously trying to put you in a non-winnable situation via scripting. There was never any real sense of danger there anymore serious than any other part of the game. Now you may have felt so because the clock timer for the script was invisible. Which is a viable design call. But that is what you are responding to. Not any case of great mission design overall. Because it wasn't.
No, I was responding to my teammates telling me we were out of ammo, a ton of soldiers rushing on a fixed point, and some effective visual and audio cues letting me know there was real tension. It's not the same as every other encounter in the game. This is a different script. I don't understand why you'd point out that the designers were trying to make me feel like the situation was unwinnable. Of course they were...I think they were successful. That's the crux of what I'm saying.
That people are saying they responded differently to this scene indicates to me that there is something unique about this scene. There
is a real sense of danger in the scene that is more present than in other scenes.
I think Edge says it well:
Though it paints a broad picture of an invasion force conducting itself with appropriate military rigour, this is still a heavily scripted, linear shooting gallery in which hordes of enemies bundle towards you without any thought of of self-preservation. But the game turns this crude tenet to its advantage in missions where retreat becomes essential; several key moments deal in simple survival, as the numbers of enemies overwhelm, whittling down and working around your remaining cover.
There's something about the way that scene is composed that makes it feel different. And, yes, it could have been better.
