How does not run out of ammo?

[VeryShyPerson]

I don't think I can remember in Freeman's Mind him ever running out of ammo. Maybe I forgot though. Is it just really good guessing of how much is left or something like the givecurrentammo command? Just wondering.

[Alyxx Thorne]

He picks up a lot of ammo during the game.

[danielsangeo]

He does run out of ammo in Episode 38.

 

0n5oJ9D86Fo

 

Advance to 5:30 for context.

[Ross Scott]

He's getting pretty low where he is in the game currently. It balances out, most enemies take less shots to kill, but I don't smash open every crate the way you do in HL normally.

[VeryShyPerson]

Yeah the lack of crate-smashing is what led me to wonder. When i play Half-Life i tend to literally break every crate i see. Half-Life: Crate Smashing Simulator.

Which is funny because crowbars are meant to open crates!

[Arkady]

He doesn't use cheats for ammo?

[BTGBullseye]

Not that I've seen... He's come close to running out a few other times, but there's an awful lot of ammo laying around in this game.

[Alyxx Thorne]

A lot of low ammo kills, the enemies leaving larger quantities of ammunition that he picks up. To me it balances out.

[Twilight Sparkle]

Yeah, there's a bunch of ammo laying around, but a lot of the enemies Freeman runs into these days take a lot of bullets to kill.

 

Speaking of which, why do Freeman's weapons seem so much weaker recently? Even the alien grunts didn't take that many shots back during the Questionable Ethics episodes.

[kingkolton9]

He's getting pretty low where he is in the game currently. It balances out, most enemies take less shots to kill, but I don't smash open every crate the way you do in HL normally.

 

Huh. I could have sworn that you used infinite ammo to make filming easier.

[Arkady]

He's getting pretty low where he is in the game currently. It balances out, most enemies take less shots to kill, but I don't smash open every crate the way you do in HL normally.

 

Huh. I could have sworn that you used infinite ammo to make filming easier.

 

Me too.

[Seattleite]

He's getting pretty low where he is in the game currently. It balances out, most enemies take less shots to kill, but I don't smash open every crate the way you do in HL normally.

 

Huh. I could have sworn that you used infinite ammo to make filming easier.

 

Me too.

 

I think that's what all the faster kills are for. I mean, they're certainly not for realism because they're not realistic at all (except for the head crabs), so it's the only other thing that makes sense.

[GordonFreeman]

Arguably, the "faster kills" make sense. It isn't required to shoot someone 10 times before they fall over, even if they are wearing body armor. Assuming you're using something with more stopping power than an airsoft gun. Which an mp5 certainly is.

[Seattleite]

Arguably, the "faster kills" make sense. It isn't required to shoot someone 10 times before they fall over, even if they are wearing body armor. Assuming you're using something with more stopping power than an airsoft gun. Which an mp5 certainly is.

 

Nonsense. The human body can take a fairly incredible amount of damage and continue functioning. Even without armour, gunshot wounds are rarely incapacitating and many times in the rush of combat people don't even notice them right away. Not even multiple gunshot wounds, head wounds, or sometimes even multiple head wounds prove immediately incapacitating. That doesn't mean they aren't fatal, mind you, but it actually takes a LOT more damage to stop somebody right away than it does to kill them down the road. A gunshot wound that will ultimately prove fatal might not have any noticeable effect on the victim until they have time to bleed out. That's why the standard protocol for self-defence is to aim for the chest and keep shooting until the target goes down or you run out of ammunition.

 

With body armour, pistol rounds are completely and totally ineffectual. They can't penetrate, and all they can do without penetrating is leave bruises less severe than you'd normally receive playing paintball. You'd need to either shoot them where they have no armour, which is extremely difficult, or shoot them until the armour breaks down, which would take dozens of shots as kevlar is fairly durable and it's enough even after the inlaid plate breaks to stop a pistol round. Even from the long barrel of an SMG.

 

This is made worse with the shotgun, a genuinely useless weapon against body armour, as the individual pellets are too weak to even bruise through armour from any significant distance and they can't damage it even a little bit. You could stand at ten metres and shoot a military vest hundreds of times and not penetrate it once. The magnum isn't much above the pistol, either. Sure, it'll leave a much bigger bruise and maybe crack a rib, but that's not incapacitating. The crossbow... Yeah, I don't need to say that a tranquillizer gun won't penetrate armour, do I?

 

The only weapons freeman even has that we know could realistically stop the soldiers through their armour are:

The RPG, which would shatter their entire ribcage, flatten both their lungs and send a molten jet of copper flying through their chest leaving a hole in them rather smaller than you'd think but still more than enough to do the job and then some.

 

The 40mm grenade, although actually their armour contains a layer of chain that makes the shrapnel here completely useless and you'd need the shockwave, which isn't very big due to the small charge and has a tiny radius so this weapon is unlikely to do it unless you get a more or less direct hit or more than one attempt.

 

The hand grenade, although it suffers the exact same issue as the 40mm if a bit less so, and would need to be fairly close or very lucky. (Lucky enough that the shrapnel hits where there isn't any armour.)

 

The crowbar. The crowbar is a blunt weapon. Blunt weapons perform great against armour because they don't need to penetrate it. The crowbar could cave in their skulls, break their limbs, collapse their lungs and piece them with their own ribs, and many other grizzly injuries actually quite a bit worse on your immediate combat effectiveness than a gunshot wound, and best of all the armour does fuck all to prevent it. And since it's the only weapon on this list that isn't an explosive, it'd actually be the most practical... if you didn't have to run up to them to use it, which would be a problem if Gordon didn't have an impenetrable armoured hazmat suit. (Kinda the reason we don't use melee weapons anymore.)

 

Although for many enemies you have a point. Specifically, all the ones that are small and not armoured. The headcrab and houndeye, maybe the vortigaunt and bullsquid depending on where you hit them. The alien grunt is probably about right.

[VeryShyPerson]

Maybe the HECU got the cheapest body armour available and it barely worked? But then there's the PCV from Opposing Force....

[BTGBullseye]

You didn't mention what the armor would do against the new "looks like plasma" gun that Freeman just picked up...

 

We already had a thread dedicated to the firepower realism of Freeman's Mind, and we conclusively determined that it's totally pointless to post walls of text about possible real-world situations that might be comparable to the game.

 

Just accept that the videos are fun to watch, despite the unrealistic physics, building layouts, weapon physics, armor physics, textures, imagery, etc, etc.

[VeryShyPerson]

Just accept that the videos are fun to watch, despite the unrealistic physics, building layouts, weapon physics, armor physics, textures, imagery, etc, etc.

 

Or just invoke this.

[BTGBullseye]

Indeed.

[Seattleite]

Guys. I only brought it up because I figured that's what he was doing to speed up filming, not using infinite ammo. I went into detail because one guy thought it was realistic, which was utter nonsense.

 

And that "plasma" weapon, the gluon gun? Not real, can't say for sure how it'd perform, so I said nothing.

[VeryShyPerson]

I don't even think you come across any HECU grunt safter you get the gluon gun anyways.