In the stealth section there are static guards and patrolling guards. At the bottom of every turn the players pull from a deck of cards which says which of the patrolling guards will move and also a special event- this can be the meter towards the alarm ticking down, some of the guards reversing direction of their patrol, or reinforcements prestaging just off board.

During stealth if a dead guard or a player character is spotted by a specific guard, it will shout alerting other guards inside a certain radius and act according to the combat logic. At this point the stealth section will likely shortly end because of all the negative stealth modifiers.

In the combat section, enemies will move towards and fire at whatever spotted player character is nearest. The combat is very simple, which is balanced by it being very difficult for the players to survive, which means you want to delay combat as long as possible.

Mechanically I don’t think anything changes with the number of players, since you always have 4 player characters no matter how many players.

I personally don’t think it would be as fun solo. You would have more control and precision which might appeal to certain people, but for me the chaos of having other people doing things and having to negotiate a plan where everyone is constantly inputting was part of the fun.

The box comes with 9 different missions, and there are expansions with more missions and player characters. I’ve only played just this once so far though.

The tiles are double sided and I don’t believe we even used all the provided ones for this scenario.

Took me about 7 hours but I was poking around and going back for screenshots. It should probably take about 6 normally.

Why did that scientist say it like that? What was his problem?

1 - It has been difficult, time consuming, and expensive to depict aliens as other than people in costumes. Aliens in scifi novels of the even of the past were often much more non-human appearing than the on screen counterparts.

2 - Many stories featuring aliens have elements of morality plays or other abstractions of human interactions which are ported to a scifi setting for the purposes of abstracting them.

3 - Some stories with humanoid aliens are wholly unconcerned in exploring the aliens as something truly alien, so aliens are simply different people more or less.

I’ve been working my way through Half-Life Opposing Force. It is harder than the base game, but I do enjoy it. It has a lot of ideas like the squad mechanics that would be great to see reworked.

A lot of comments in this thread are really talking about visual design rather than graphics, strictly speaking, although the two are related.

Visual design is what gives a game a visual identity. The level of graphical fidelity and realism that’s achievable plays into what the design may be, although it’s not a direct correlation.

I do think there is a trend for higher and high visual fidelity to result in games with more bland visual design. That’s probably because realism comes with artistic restrictions, and development time is going to be sucked away from doing creative art to supporting realism.

My subjective opinion is that for first person games, we long ago hit the point of diminishing returns with something like the Source engine. Sure there was plenty to improve on from there (even games on Source like HL2 have gotten updates so they don’t look like they did back in the day), but the engine was realistic enough. Faces moved like faces and communicated emotion. Objects looked like objects.

Things should have and have improved since then, but really graphical improvements should have been the sideshow to gameplay and good visual design.

I don’t need a game where I can see the individual follicles on a character’s face. I don’t need subsurface light diffusion on skin. I won’t notice any of that in the heat of gameplay, but only in cutscenes. With such high fidelity game developers are more and more forcing me to watch cutscenes or “play” sections that may as well be cutscenes.

I don’t want all that. I want good visual design. I want creatively made worlds in games. I want interesting looking characters. I want gameplay where I can read at a glance what is happening. None of that requires high fidelity.

Visuals are very important in games, but Nintendo pursues clear and readable designs. Their games are easy to look at, and they age more gracefully than games pursuing realism.

This might be something to think about since I’m contemplating making videos I promote directly to Lemmy and/or to my blog subscribers. I want to have a page, but I am not concerned about growing and audience for the profit.