: 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.
Actually - as I keep screaming and hammering into people's heads until they get it - the first shade was supposed to teleport, and the second was supposed to be his reappearance. There's still a teleport action in there, rather hard to trigger, but possible; if you occupy the first shade long enough while the rest of your units run across the map and fight and get to the second one, the first disappears right as the second beams in.
: 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
