: I'm one of those people. :) When we encounter the shade
: Mazzarin during The Watcher, he's at half-health. If
: that particular shade were just seeded on the solo
: level as an encumbrance to the 'zerk horde™, there's
: no good reason why that shade would be at half-health.
: Rather, it must have been intentional, and the fact
: that it happened to be a shade named
: "Mazzarin" must mean it's a part of the
: story line. IMHO. :)
Conversely, I think it's probably not a part of the storyline because there's nothing *else* unusual about the confrontation. (There are good reasons why the Shade's at half-health--it allows the level designers to a) fine-tune the difficulty level, b) up the realism a bit by showing that the survivors of the recent attack on The Watcher weren't completely unscathed, and c) scare the sh*t out of the player before you go "Phew, he's badly hurt already." :-) I think they probably intended to have some big plot point there originally--"Hi, I'm Mazzarin, look what the Watcher did to me, I'll help you anyway/hurt you and feel bad about it"--but they decided against it and didn't manage to cover all the traces.
I guess it's basically the same sort of dispute as The Deceiver's death. On the one hand, we actually see the thing; on the other hand; the rest of the game never mentions it and GURPS denies it. Wouldn't you think just one Zerk would say, "Hey, we killed the undead corpse of the greatest Light archmage in history today?" That's like a man appearing in a movie for ten seconds, being identified as Napoleon, and then getting shot. Which probably happened somewhere in Monty Python, now that I think about it.
--SiliconDream
