Recently a new Combine group I was involved in went to war against an experienced group of Daleks. A battle on friday night was immensely interesting and gave a lot to reflect on.
The chaos started straight from the briefing, as we were trying to communicate through voice changers in-game and also with regular mic input in Discord. There were about 50 of us, so we had a leadership structure to break us into teams, headed by a player that had experience with military re-enactment events. Despite our best efforts there was trouble with miscommunication. That many voices going through different channels in a battle with voicechangers was a challenge.
The battle itself was even more chaotic, as we tried to figure out what was going on and where our efforts were best focused. After the first shots had been fired the code system and radio was pretty useless, we were all in the meat grinder with the weapons doing much of the talking. Still, it was helpful having a Discord call simulating the role of dispatch, and the time invested in the briefing helped as we had some idea of what we should be doing beforehand in terms of team roles.
Inspecting a captured Dalek
The debriefing was unique, as it was a sudden change of pace (and a big increase in framerate) to be out of the fighting and get a sense of what had happened. The briefing had provided anticipation for the battle, and the debriefing helped give it meaning. As we turned our voicechangers off we could better hear eachothers accents again. We're a bunch of guys and girls from all over the world, but the voicechanger makes us all sound the same, which speaks to the design of the character as it completely masks your personality to dehumanise you.
My mind went back to the
Dalek Invasion of Earth story where the Daleks had brainwashed some humans to act in a role that draws similarities to what the Combine had done forming the Overwatch Transhuman Arm and Civil Protection forces.
Likewise in
Day of the Daleks they again used humans (this time through recruitment) as a security force, alongside Ogrons, with the story involving time travel, capture, and resistance likely inspiring Half-Life 2 as
Planet of Evil may have inspired Half-Life to an extent.
I still miss the character roleplay you get in a Gmod server, but found it no less interesting in VRChat.
