Hello. This will be my first post, but nobody gives a shit about that. Now before we start this thread proper, I want to set the mood. Look at this here link:
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http://gifsound.com/?gif=img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090606002006/half-life/en/images/b/bd/Gauss_l.png&v=izGwDsrQ1eQ <<<
That feel you're feeling is that of passionate and tragic forbidden love. Look at that gun.
Think about that gun. The piss-colored bouncing lasers, the nailbiting windup of the alt-fire charge beam, the jubilant jiggling of freshly ragodoll'd corpses as they arc with electricity. The coastline levels were really just a scenic infinite ammo Tau Cannon romp with a side-order of Jeep. As a naive young Valve-sperg on their virgin voyage through the game, I couldn't wait for the campaign to find an excuse to macgyver the Gauss gun off of that car and into my antlion-stained embrace. But then came Lighthouse Point, and as that one goddamn dropship carried the Dune Buggy off into the horizon, I could physically feel that youthful glimmer in my eyes die out that day.
Now I've seen some folks throw around the idea of an equippable Tau Cannon, and incase you haven't surmised from literally any part of this thread yet so far, I am balls deep in the "yes" camp. To me, one of my major faults with Half Life 2 and the episodes has always been the utterly lackluster arsenal in comparison to the predecessor games. I mean, sure, back in 2004 the Gravity Gun kind of made up for it in spades because of that newfangled physics engine Valve was throwing around, but now that gaming has grown up a little more, the unfortunate and inherent bore-factor in the rest of the guns really stands out. If the fine and fair devs of this mod consider adding any new weapons at all, a portable Gauss should be at the top of the list. I don't even think I need to explain why, I mean it's already technically in the game; you'd hardly have to change much to fit it in compared to any other major addition I can think of.
In fact, I think I know exactly where to fit it in, with a little bit of expansion to accommodate it optimally. Now if someone has posed an idea similar to this before somewhere on this site or over on Facepunch, I apologize in advance, but I figure this here is worth posting anyhow and more importantly I utterly cba to flip through the weighty FP threads to make sure my concept is original
THE ACTUAL IDEA ALREADY:
Ideally, the portable Tau Cannon comes at the apex of a certain sequence coming at the terminus of HL2's dune buggy road trip. We all know the original scenario I am assuming: You come to Lighthouse Point, stow the buggy in their garage, walk out and help them fend off a couple waves of dropships before a big fuck-off gunship appears and you have to shoot it down from atop the actual Lighthouse. A decent climactic burst of pacing before winding down for some "floor is lava" platforming.
This addition seeks to hit 2 birds with one stone, because I always found this segment really easy and bare-bones as well. Basically, we're taking this concept and making it BIGGERER. When you get there and park the jeep, perhaps there is a rebel with some engineering equipment in the garage. If the mod garners some voice acting, perhaps the rebels could mention they're going to try and unhook the Tau Cannon from the Buggy and rejigger it to work off of ammunition instead of the jeep's battery. Or some shit. At any rate, unlike in the original game, the new engineer character locks the garage door behind you, and various TINKERING NOISES can be heard in the garage as the battle begins. The battle itself will play out differently, lasting for longer and escalating in difficulty (much like the antlion/strider defense segments in ep 2), and the music that accompanies it normally will not play at its start. Starting with just one dropship at a time, after a couple waves you'll have to tangle with waves of two simultaneous dropships unloading troops, then a couple three-dropship waves, with mine-dropping runs in-between all the while.
And then, the Christmas Miracle occurs: after several triple-ship waves, in a brief lull in the action, that engineer from earlier emerges from the garage, holding the Tau Cannon in hand and running to you. As you equip the portable Gauss Gun, a massive wave of dropships appear, one for each scripted drop zone, and
then the music originally designated for the segment starts to play (hurr durr it was also the song that played when you got the gun in HL1 iirc). With the player's ammo reserves drawn thin after exhausting the finite supplies present at the base in fights prior, they will naturally rely on the Tau Cannon as it comes loaded with maxed out ammunition. Then after all that noise, it finally culminates in the Gunship fight, which may or may not be kill-able with the Tau Cannon.
In terms of the Gauss weapon itself, I might perhaps suggest it deals more damage in the player’s hands as opposed to mounted on the buggy (like say, 15 damage per hit as opposed to 10), which can just be handwaved as the actual ammunition for it being more potent stuff than the power source it was drawing from on the car. As for the ammo itself, I am personally torn between either a new ammo pickup for the Tau Cannon (a combine-ized version of the HL1 gauss pickup perhaps) as a rare find, or the cannon drawing on HEV suit armor as fuel (kinda like that lasergun from SMOD, which I thought created an interesting dynamic between survivability and killing priority targets super hard).
Well, that’s pretty much it. Bring the Tau Cannon back as a gun you can wield, then make the Lighthouse Point fight a bigger thing and include it there. Man, I spent way too much fucking time thinking about this in the shower. If this seems like too steep a series of additions, I understand, I just thought this seemed like a good place to put my professional ideas-guy skills to work
Oh also put the Tau Cannon in slot 6 so the bugbait isn't lonely anymore :(
Topic: God Save the Tau Cannon, and the battle of Lighthouse Point (Read 12090 times)