With a brain like that he probably knew Earth's help wouldn't mean shit against the Combine, or that G-Man wouldn't allow humans an alliance against the very events he's pushing. He probably wasn't too happy about them kidnapping/stealing his resources beforehand either.
this >CIA shadow government glowies send glowie agents to take shit from your asteroids and kidnap your fellow combine refugees/forced workforce >make new tech from it and try to master teleportation >teleportation tech with no oversight from him could be a beacon to the combine >step in since otherwise glowies and black mesa would have colonized Xen
Black mesa and the US government weren't researching Xen for peaceful tech. They were making weapons and super suit's like Freeman and trying to master teleportation to allow the glowies unlimited power. If he didn't invade the US glowies in time would have become the proto combine
the titty bounce and eyes are NOT in the original game
5 months ago
Anonymous
>the titty bounce
that actually is removed in opposing force
5 months ago
Anonymous
make sense why I misconstrued this then, I am as a matter of fact the greatest opposing force speedrunner and the world record holder. *I know, I know, hold your applause please, Im flattered really. Really you're too kind
The Resonant Cascade is what caused the Combine to be able to hop to Earth, and that was the G-man's doing, not the Nihilanth. Since humans had already entered Xen, he probably just found the Cascade a good opportunity to either stop humans from entering Xen or he wanted to conquer the planet.
Why did resonance cascade even happen? Because freeman pushed a cart into the beam? Come to think of it, why do they need a person to push this thing into the beam, it looks like it could've been automated easily.
>Come to think of it, why do they need a person to push this thing into the beam, it looks like it could've been automated easily.
Because for a game it's more satisfying to actually have the player push the cart rather than simply push a button that makes a machine move the cart into position, plus an excuse for the player to be directly next to the machine when everything goes wrong rather than in a separate observation room with the button.
>Why did resonance cascade even happen?
The pure Xen crystal the G-man gave to Breen was put in the Anti-Mass Spectrometer, which hit the crystal with EM pulses or something of some frequency, which caused the crystal to resonate with Xen, which forcibly began the Dimensional Merge which started dumping Xen onto Earth and vice versa. >Come to think of it, why do they need a person to push this thing into the beam, it looks like it could've been automated easily.
As a 1990s industrial laboratory, it's likely that the lab was cutting edge and not production-level equipment, so something jury rigged like a sample stapled to a cart is not really unrealistic. Even modern massive equipment still has people doing work on basic b***h cranes and platforms.
I'm an engineer and when I was newer I had to do shit the senior engineers didn't want to do and technicians didn't have the knowledge to execute correctly like run protocol studies using specific or jury rigged equipment fixtures on engineering samples. Gordon was the young new physicist who's job was to flip a switch and move a cart because he had the least amount of responsibilities.
5 months ago
Anonymous
How was the work? Cozy?
5 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, it was mostly just me sitting at a work bench with some fixture and instructions on what to do, putting in some sample, getting some reading from an Instron or other gauge, writing down the value, repeat for all samples, then write a report saying if the samples passed and if there were any statistical capability problems or not. Not too intellectually challenging, but like I said, too high level for a grunt and not important enough for a senior engineer.
it used to be a slave of the combine before escapeing with a handful of xenians to xen. If you pay attention to its model you can see the combine metal chains still on it
The Combine rolled over humanity using a fraction of its resources, if Epistle 3 is still accurate they're a Kardashev 2+ civilization with at least one Dyson Sphere and thinking humans can "stop" the Combine is like an anthill "stop"ping all of human civilization
I don't think Earth in necessarily doomed, it seems that the resonance cascade's portal storms allowed the Combine to insert themselves onto Earth, and without the Citadel and/or Aperture portal technology they can't come back to Earth at any reasonable speed.
There are also other players in the universe, the Combine may be a smaller fish to some other civilization for all we know, it takes a shitload of Combine technology strapped to Vortigaunts to merely imprison the Gman who is capable of teleportation and time manipulation, things the Combine lack and humans can barely do.
Not necessarily. Humanity might be incapable of directly harming the Union, but there are clearly other interested parties to which humans are useful, and to whom they are being directed in some way to cause events to occur. The setting may be as intentional as Gman pulling persons of interests under him and using them in the right place and time. There's also the Vortigaunt's potential independent capabilities that are sometimes even above what the Gman can influence, and the Borealis' potential usefulness. In any realistic terms, though, the world is scarred heavily by the effects of the 7 hour war, infestation of Xen creatures and matter, and the damage done to the Earth in general by the Combine occupation such as the sea level dropping dramatically. Mass desertification is probably occurring globally, the majority of North America is likely a dead place full of hostile aliens, the human population has been controlled to a fraction of its former height, and even if the combine are ousted from the Universe, the other unknown parties may still prove to be a problem. Humanity may survive, but they are definitely fricked, and will at best be scrappy and resilient, but not close to what they were before. Or, who knows, maybe with the alien technology and the help of benevolent powers, they can make a comeback. The glimmer of hope against insurmountable odds is kind of the series' theme, no reason to call it doomed.
Humans will reverse engineer the sterilization field into the fertilization field and Combine resource harvesting and construction infrastructure can be utilized for human resource harvesting and housing construction, I think once the Combine is properly ousted they can turn it around quickly.
There's a lot of science and technology to learn from the Combine's leftovers, I could easily see humanity using those lessons to terraform Mars and just teleport there if Earth isn't salvageable (which would also explain why Aperature wasn't reclaimed by hundreds of years in the future, most humans bailed).
I like the idea, but if we're talking even somewhat realistically, the combine haven't fricked up Earth so badly that Mars would ever be the easier, more likely or preferable options. If humanity can get that kind of tech together, they could more readily fix Earth's biosphere and make at minimum a walled garden for themselves. Unless they manage to leverage their portal technology to somehow find a more habitable planet, Earth is the best known option for human life under virtually any circumstances, simply due to our planetary mass, atmosphere and magnetic field. I would say Aperture remaining undisturbed may be due to its location being unknown and outside of "the wall" if anything.
>reverse engineer the sterilization field into the fertilization field
>a single drop of pre-cum is enough to fertilize a woman >distinguished Resistance members get to join "replenish the humanity" drive
Kek the doujins write themselves
The caveat being that teleportation technology is cutting edge tech that basically makes you kardashev tier-3 in setting. IMPORTANT FACT: The Combine has actually lower tech than Nihilanth's forces. They won because because they are ridiculously large and could basically ambush the entire planet in a single movement.
But that army left and now Earth can effectively kick the Combine out of their dimension permanently if they blow up the teleporters on their side.
I'm pretty sure the endgame of the Combine plotline was simply to cut off contact to the greater combine collective (accomplished in episode 1) and to kill off the now stranded Combine forces on earth.
Without a line of communication to earth-bound forces the combine wouldn't be able to find the earth again and it would remain safely hidden in the vast Infinity of space. Not defeating the combine but successfully avoiding being conquered by them.
he didn't. Episode 1 and 2 happen because the G-Man lost control of Freeman, allowing him to help the rebels shut down the Combine super portal.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Wouldn't he be a little bit madder then? Or mentioned it in the Heart to Heart in the episode 2 and, you know aimed at stopping the rocket and not just delivering Eli a jumpscare?
He set up the combine invasion to test his new hires aka soldiers he’s been pocketing away. It was all a show to see if Gordon has what it takes and I don’t know what purpose Gman has for his heroes later on. At end of HL2 the combine was not defeated but Gman was satisfied enough with Gordon’s accomplishments and was just about to stash him away again.
Does Gmans employers know about this or is he stashing away heroes with cosmic luck on their side in order to take control of things?
the thing is that the Combine has definitely learned enough about teleportation tech from Judith to make it on their own. They have already built one in Nova Prospekt before Gordon blew it up. Earth will never be safe again. At any point the Combine might invade another time.
that was for inter dimentional teleportation. They need to tunnel through from their staging ground in uni A to uni B where earth is. The transmitter for opening that portal was the citadel and originally the out of control resonance cascade when nihilanth died. After ep2 they dont have the access anymore
why would the Combine bother invading Earth again?
There's nothing of interest left on it.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Local teleportation technology, the main reason they were sticking around in the first place. They know how to rip open portals between universes if they can find an opening for said universe (which the Resonance Cascade created), but they suck at teleporting within a universe.
The Nova Prospekt portal was the closest they got, which was only possible by Mossman feeding them information on Eli and Kleiner's own work. But since she's not one of the original geniuses behind the design, the Combine's imitation was very rough. Took a while to charge up, the actual teleportation takes a couple of weeks to complete, and when pushed to teleport consecutively within a short timeframe, it completely self-destructed, taking Nova Prospekt with it.
5 months ago
Anonymous
If Mossman had turned traitor for that long, why didn't they take Eli or Kleiner sooner?
5 months ago
Anonymous
She'd convinced Breen that they'd more efficiently finish their work outside of captivity and it's quite likely they would've outright refused to continue their work in captivity. Forcing their minds to do it may have also resulted in subpar results or outright failure.
Freeman returning made Breen antsy so he pulled the trigger earlier than Mossman wanted him to on the Black Mesa East raid. Which Mossman also argued resulted in Freeman getting away.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>the actual teleportation takes a couple of weeks to complete
This was more probably due to the combine elite blasting the teleporter with an energy orb. Eli and Judith were clearly in the Citadel for a while.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Maybe, the portal was audibly and visibly barely holding on before the Elites rushed in. That Elite definitely got permanent offworld assignment if that was the cause
Actually, it probably died in the teleporter's explosion.
that's how it feels playing HL2 then HL1 when it became free. I cant imagine how much of a kick in the dick HL2 must've felt with how vague HL1 ended they told you jack shit at the end
Yeah but the Vortis and Nihlanth are pretty powerful.
With humanities teleportation tech
And the Vortis having the power to legit stop the Gman.
They can be a formidable force.
Stopping an entity like the Gman is no easy feat especially when the Combine view him as a major threat yet the Vortis managed to do so.
And that's where Humanity comes in. Freeman and Alyx freed them.
So every race has their merits they just got to work together. But apparently big brain Nihlanth couldn't see that
Dude was most likely heavily experimented and jaded from the combine torture. It may be that he didn't want to take chances with a world sending scientists in super hazmat suits to take over Xen
Resources.
Water, work force, minerals some other shit they deem valuable. They didn't wish that Dyson sphere into existence. It's made out of hundreds of Earth-type conquests.
They're tech scavengers. As soon as a civilization makes itself noticeable on the grander scale, such as by causing a resonance cascade, the Combine swoops in to assimilate their tech and then the whole species (because why not).
>why they even bother bothering Earth at all if they are so big and powerful.
Portal tech.
Their own portal tech only work well for massive, long-range, costly wormholes.
Mankind finding a way to make small, cheap, wormholes would be a game changer to their arsenal, and is the main reason they are living Earth half-functional instead of zombifying everyone. They want the monkeys to produce that technological aberration again so they can reverse engineer it, but since it was an accident everything stay stuck.
So he invades another universe and draws a frick ton of attention it catches the Combines eye leading to the 7hr war? What was he thinking?!?!?
He had no idea the Combine even existed. He wasn't hiding from them afaik. His fall is orchestrated by G-Man's "Employers" who are not the Universal Union.
The only candidate ever hinted for are the pre-combine psionic Grubs species from the BreenGrub ARG. Who'd now would be basically psionic mind-viruses hiding in the corners of reality.
It's really something that the first is a very American game set in Nevada about monsters in an over the top research lab. And the sequel is about overthrowing a borderline unrelated alien occupation in Eastern Europe. I genuinely think it worked out super well but it's just such a strange sequence.
This, I don't get why anyone bothers arguing or trying to string together stuff from HL1 when it's all nonsensical bullshit made up for HL2
What a homosexual take.
The developers clearly intended for the events of HL1 to be larger than they appear in the game itself - HL1's ending is impossibly cryptic and there was clearly always gonna be a sequel that followed up on it.
Whether the Combine was something they had in mind back then or if they wrote them around the first game is another story, but that's irrelevant anyway.
Aside from one super capable scientist in an orange hazard armor slipping in the back door with incredible luck and timing, why would he think humanity would be a valuable ally? Xen was thrashing HECU.
The idea is the combine invasion force is just fricked up compared to half life 2. Its like when the 7 hour war happened they just outnumbered the earths force to a comedic level and what they have left on earth is basically a skeleton crew and cut off from the homeworld which is how rebels even stand a chance.
Imagine the Gonarch alien from Half life 1 that needed twenty plus rockets to put down. Now Imagine an army of that with mounted super plasma guns and artillery. Striders for humanity are dangerous threats. For the universal union they are sentry dogs. Combine invading forces most likely had a better version of Freeman's suit but made for combat.
Yawwnn, Give me something cool like planet buster or something, Invasion is such lame trope
5 months ago
Anonymous
>doesn't get the fact that having a dyson sphere means planet busters are easy to make and use >use a planet buster when it's more beneficial to annex the planet for resources and tech
anon
5 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, for being fricking "Multiversal" Threat, They're fricking lame by sucking planet dry instead whole fricking galaxy
5 months ago
Anonymous
you seem like you're about 14 brah
5 months ago
Anonymous
They're content to proceed at their own pace, you shouldn't presume their size necessarily equals extreme consumption tendency in crudest ways possible.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Galaxies are around 3,000 - 300,000 light years, and our galaxy that's 100,000 light years wide has around 400 billion - 3.2 trillion planets, and the Combine may lack FTL travel outside of portals so they have to travel the slow way, so they need to manage the harvesting and processing of every planet they're sucking up. Harvesting even thousands of planet's resources is still managing a shitload of mass, and if near-peer civilizations are also limited to sub-light speeds, there's no rush to harvest literally everything all at once.
5 months ago
Anonymous
If anything the combine forces benefit from long term subjugation as it means more troops
Combine isn't a race or a faction, it's a process. It's a chain of entropy. There's no clear leader of the combine, no clear origin or clear goal, it's all just an incomprehensibly huge "empire" constantly consuming and assimilating. The process of fighting the combine successfully is effectively becoming them, to the point that you're indistinguishable from any other alien "combine" race mercilessly harvesting planets and enslaving races.
It's interesting that beating the Nihilanth probably hurt Earth's chances.
If the Nihilanth took over Earth, after the Combine show up and predictably slaughter everyone, there could be controllers and grunts that would help a lot with the resistance down the road.
Depending on how things play out, the Nihilanth could've taken Breen's position in 2 and give his own Nihilcasts with his shitty slow way of speaking. >17... welcome to city 17 >Chosen... you have chosen or have been chosen
4) The long game is more important than the short game, and not necessarily the order of things either.
The defeat of the combine happened *when* it was possible. When their pants were down. They were baited. The Earth was bait. They are the competition in the way. It was all part of the plan.
I think he assumed that humanity wouldn't just accept him as a refugee and would experiment on him like they experimented on pretty much everything they found on Xen, but the planet was nicer than Xen and undiscovered by Combine, so he hoped to quickly wipe out humanity and close the portal before Combine would discover either Xen or Earth and get cozy on Earth.
Or maybe Combine made him so afraid of any existence outside of his control that he simply wanted to eliminated any witnesses of his existence.
Assuming he wasn't a combine asset to begin with why would he? They fricking steamrolled the planet in hours, if Xen couldn't do something similar they should've left asap which is why i always assumed they were indeed glowBlack folk for the combine
because even before the incident human scientists were going to xen and capturing creatures and experimenting with them, almost the same way as the combine plus, when the invation happened the first thing that humans did was shoot them
They were always meant to be bio weapons even from their concept. They're produced in the factory. They're stored in the capsules that they pop out of being hauled around.
The only inconsistency is the thornet gun. They were supposed to shoot them out of their own limb but then they made the weapon for the player and stuck them with it. The first agrunt you see still shoots thornets but doesn't wield the thing that launches them.
>Valve fricked up a patch and now all the vorts have the Easter egg vort dialog in their interacts
>Also using the steam overlay integration of the commands forces you into controller mode so the weapon dropdown menu gets removed, making changing the weapons ass >Rebinding all the commands to keyboard buttons prevents entering the controller mode, but then the ladders completely stop working with the analog stick input
I cheesed this fight making the teleporting orbs dissapear by hidding behind the pillars. Anyone else did that?
Frick those platforming sections with tough enemies.
He is an actor for competing powers against the Combine. Humanity isn't his concern beyond what they can help him accomplish, nor are Vortigaunts or the other sentient lives under Union subjugation. He's not likely even the true puppet master, but he can tug the right strings to set his own machinations in motion to serve his employer's interests. A few notable individuals prove themselves capable of being uniquely useful, and so he tugs their strings, and uses them to meet his unknowable ends. The fact that such an entity, as powerful as he seems to be, isn't even calling the shots, shows just how high the powerscaling goes in the multiverse. The Union itself may just be serving their purpose to a higher authority.
I like the G-man a lot more when he were more removed from the plot. Like, he can show up and influence shit, he can even be cheeky and 'human' in his own ayy lmao way, but him getting directly involved with Vance family drama was a meh turn for me.
I want to pretend the dude's got a million other things going on and Freeman's story is just his 5 o'clock appointment. Everything from ep 2 forward makes it clear he's personally invested in what happens and that's kinda lame.
Every worker needs to show results. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the Vances are clearly integral to whatever plot he serves, so he applies the necessary grease. Also, he can manipulate time and space. He could suspend people indefinitely, or be in any place at any time, and so is likely manipulating many others similarly, but we get the micro, humanity-centric perspective in the game. There's clearly a high level of coordination in what he does; he probably even had a purpose behind being "caught" if anything. Arguably he's more interesting a character than any other in the series, not just for the mystery around him, but the bigger picture he sees an serves in the multiverse. There's clearly a scale that we can only speculate in which such a being is somewhere in the middle, potentially above the Union, but certainly below some unknown third parties.
>he probably even had a purpose behind being "caught"
That's obvious, to recruit Alyx and for Eli to prepare for "unforseen consequences" which they had a deal back from HL1 when Gman ported Alyx out from Black Mesa, her mother sadly wasnt part of the deal.
>Everything from ep 2 forward makes it clear he's personally invested in what happens and that's kinda lame.
Being annoyed at stuff not going his way 100% is probably natural for someone whos used to just hopping in and out of time and space.
>the combine is so powerful that they defeated all of earth's forces in 7 hours using inconceivable technology! >play hl2 >all the combine have fairly understandable and advanced technology but nothing too crazy >they're almost identical to humanity in firepower, even
what the frick? how did the combine take over earth so quickly? am i missing something?
Yeah, the majority of their army was pulled out to do invasions on other planets. You're fighting an occupation force.
And it's not that they won a 7-hour war. Breen just surrendered on the planet's behalf because he was the only one who could communicate with them.
>Yeah, the majority of their army was pulled out to do invasions on other planets. You're fighting an occupation force.
that doesn't answer why they don't have the incredible technology that everybody says they do when they're on earth >Breen just surrendered on the planet's behalf because he was the only one who could communicate with them.
how was he able to be the only person that could communicate with them?
But they do. All the shit you see from them bioweaponary, energy weapons, roller mines, citadels, the interdimensional teleporters, the fricking suppression field? Do you even phantom the tech that remotely stops the whole city and its surroundings from breeding? And keep in mind you're essentially Australia to GB, this is like a musket and a canon beating the shit out of aboriginals.
Keep in mind that Earth has been suffering an invasion from Xen too when Combine attacked. >how was he able to be the only person
No one knows. Which is why it's sometimes inferred that he knew what was going to happen when he ordered the experiment.
>All the shit you see from them bioweaponary, energy weapons, roller mines, citadels, the interdimensional teleporters, the fricking suppression field? Do you even phantom the tech that remotely stops the whole city and its surroundings from breeding?
seriously? that's it?
i thought they would have had some insane technology that people today couldn't even imagine, like some device that, when deployed, makes every single person on a continent become unconscious or something >No one knows. Which is why it's sometimes inferred that he knew what was going to happen when he ordered the experiment.
dr. breen was in charge of black mesa and ordered the resonance cascade experiment? i never knew that
he's probably related to the g-man in some way by the sounds of it
>that doesn't answer why they don't have the incredible technology that everybody says they do when they're on earth
They do, but, since the majority of actual alien forces aren't needed here (save for some synths, which are more like drones) they also don't need their best tech here. Humanity are less than caveman tier primitives to them, and the damage they're capable of is inconsequential. The single thing humanity has to offer of interest is localized teleportation tech, for which the Union invests whatever force they think is necessary to capture. Otherwise, aside from a portal into our universe, Earth isn't uniquely resource rich or significant to invest anything substantial.
>how was he able to be the only person that could communicate with them?
He was administrator of Black Mesa, very qualified and intelligent, and likely had access to channels of communication, or unique insight in how to communicate with them due to his pedigree and position.
Efficancy. Humanity oppresses and occupies its own well enough with our own tech. Just repurpose and use it against them to occupy the planet using a global force of brainwashed soldiers and some dregs from other worlds on off world reassignment
You're fighting the fricking Dirlewagner Brigade of the Combine. The synths and grubs who failed on some assignment and are now on off world reassignment.
It's like how Germany used the Dirlewagner Brigade. A Brigade made up of criminals, the mentally insane, and those too stupid to do regular tasks in a regular division
head canon, the slugs are just local reps. unless hl: alyx states otherwise, there's no indication they're lackies. freeman is being supported by g-man, so if anything they're getting their ass kicked by g-man.
The reason humanity wasn't instanuked was so they could 'ascend' as in, become part of the combine. The striders and the scanners and all other ayy lmaos were probably races like humanity that got annexed. Likewise, humanity will become just like them in the form of soldiers and stalkers. What we're seeing in HL2 is the 'test run'. If augmented humans are good enough at keeping peace on earth, we can use them.
The invasion proper was all ayy lmaos.
I genuinely don't get why volvo cut this from Alyx. People have been BEGGING for an insight at the invasion forever and we were so fricking close to having an official look of it.
>The striders and the scanners and all other ayy lmaos were probably races like humanity that got annexed.
so if all of the different species within the combine are not combine, then what exactly ARE the combine? is there a "core" combine species that all other species take orders from?
You should dig into the lore and the Breengrub stuff. Basically the Combine is just the human branch government of the Universal Union, which is actually an unknown species that took over another species that had immense psychic power and used their bodies as hosts and their abilities for their own purposes. The advisors you see in the form of the grubs are the bodies of that subjugated species with the minds of the Union species. Their true and original form is unknown. They invade other universes/dimensions and planets to harvest resources and exploit the local lifeforms, sentient or otherwise, into forms to which they're most useful to the Union. The Combine is to the Universal Union as a franchise store is to a corporation. It also refers to how humanity is being "combined" with the Union and shaped into whatever forms they're most useful, being combined with the Union's biotechnology.
>what exactly ARE the combine? is there a "core" combine species that all other species take orders from?
No. And if there even was an original species that started 'expanding' it's long since been bastardized into something unrecognizeable through billions of years.
Even the grubs, that look like they act like Breen's 'bosses' are just another subjugated species that got turned into glorified memory sticks if you take Breengrub, Laidlaw's funny twitter project as canon.
Half-Life barely digs into it, because Valve is autistic about the gameplay and the lore is pretty much an afterthought and set dressing, but the combine is supposed to be incomprehensibly big. If you've ever dealt with bureaucracy, like on a public service or something, imagine that clusterfrick where nobody really knows anything and just doing what they think they're supposed to be doing on a cosmic scale.
The food the combine give people is a good example of that. Some alien waaaaay across different universes got an order that an entire species needs food. He gave a cursory glance at the data provided to him from another ayy lmao, both of whom have never seen what a human even looks like, about what nutrients humans need and what their 'natural' food is, and just made this.
>imagine that clusterfrick where nobody really knows anything and just doing what they think they're supposed to be doing on a cosmic scale.
Oh man, it's just like Valve but on gamedev scale before they even knew it. What biting satire.
Not even VNNing here. But isn't it just all but confirmed that in 2010s Valve just lost all drive and never could lift a project off the ground because no one could settle for one concept for more than a couple of years?
Nah. Valve's consciously like that. It's not a clusterfrick when you can afford to frick around in fun little experiments that go nowhere with few of your buds and never deliver results. My take is that if steam got nuked tomorrow, like, the CCP lobbies it out so only Epic can be used in the US and EU or something, and suddenly valve needed money to pay the gas for Gabe's yacht, they could pump out games like they did again because judging by everything they made after 2020, they still have the 'spark' literally no AAA studio has had in 15 years.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>and suddenly valve needed money to pay the gas for Gabe's yacht
kek
>Valve is autistic about the gameplay and the lore is pretty much an afterthought and set dressing >and the lore is pretty much an afterthought and set dressing
with the amount of theories and discussions on the topic, that doesn't seem true >also that pic
mm-mmm sloppa
>and we were so fricking close to having an official look of it >official
The story and the setting people are discussing here were not made by volvo corporate logo, they were made by a person, who left that company many years before they even started making HL:Alyx. He released writing he had upon leaving, there is no indication that wrote anything else.
People here are basically discussing unfinished novel author of which is as good as dead in regards to it ever being finished. Fanfic written by different people will have absolutely nothing to do with it, even if it would come out under the same logo.
And even then the Combine Overwatch in 2 wasn't the first iteration of the process, which was a neat insight Alyx provided. The Ordinal is the only one that's truly like the soldiers in HL2, all of the other Combine units in Alyx seem to have considerably more personality retained.
The Vault incident may have been what pushed them to make the majority of the transhuman force to be like the Ordinals.
that games was great but the had to ruin the story with their marvel tier bullshit time travel ending, i will always be mad at that game just for that ending
5 months ago
Anonymous
One of the most lauded aspects of the game made you mad? It's not even as simple as time travel. The game's narrative is still complex, there is no clearly defined moment where the "cracks" from this change appear. Did he take an Alyx from a single specific permutation of the world? Is alyx still a member of the rest of the story of the other games? It doesn't say, and doesn't need to. They will absolutely answer these questions with whatever they do next, but its a much better cliffhanger than what obviously left them in a creative corner for 13 years originally.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Is bullshit regardless because they retconned one of the most iconic and hard hitting deaths in vidya for a cheap MCU cliffhanger.
Lick my nuts valve
5 months ago
Anonymous
And were obviously stuck due to that shock value. The legends of the started/aborted iterations for a third game are infamous. Iconic? Yes, but painted themselves into a corner they couldn't get out from. Alyx ended in a way that was cool, played to the strengths of their most mysterious character with one of his best speeches, and revitalized they ending of the main game. Eli's death was tragic and shocking, but was it done for the sake of that shock and left them with nowhere to go? Now they have a road to follow.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Epistle 3 showed a perfectly fine way to continue. The game didn't revolve around Eli, most of HL games are spent alone. It was an important point in developing Alyx which has been robbed now.
This reeks of talentless hack writers too scared to write a story with new characters. It's basically the exact same cliffhanger too except they swapped Eli for Alyx. Frick Alyx, ruined a perfectly fine ending
5 months ago
Anonymous
Besides how the hell is the plot gonna work?
The main important thing is saving the Earth by finding the Borealis. Once you handle that though you gotta go hunt down Gman and get Alyx back.
The whole Combine showdown we've been waiting 16 years for is just going to be a subplot
5 months ago
Anonymous
Exactly, G-man was a morally neutral character, willing to flip and manipulate events on both sides, now he's in direct opposition to the player. That shouldn't be the focus when the combine are still players in this game, thats like HL3 material.
>It was an important point in developing Alyx which has been robbed now.
I don't think so. She moved time itself to save her dad. She was given the ultimate opportunity, and the unexpected consequences of that choice are yet to be seen.
>'s basically the exact same cliffhanger too except they swapped Eli
But it isn't. That ending still happened. Eli still died. Then a splinter happened, somehow G-Man was drawn into the Vault. Trapped with time to think. He offered a young Alyx, a person he knows will do great things and that he has personal interest in, a choice.
>That ending still happened. Eli still died
No it fricking didn't, the character being brought back and the consequences of that event have been replaced with another retroactively. The writers weren't interested in the story being told and resurrection is a one way ticket to shit writing. I bet you clapped with that awful MCU cliffhanger too.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>G-man was a morally neutral character
He caused the resonance cascade
5 months ago
Anonymous
He also helps stop the Combine, Xen and opposing force aliens despite causing it in the first place. He's not good or evil, he's self-interested and hence morally neutral.
Alyx still does that but puts him in direct opposition to the player as opposed to his imposing indifference when he lets Gordan go in ep 2
5 months ago
Anonymous
self interest at the cost of billions of lives is pretty evil you moron
5 months ago
Anonymous
>The writers weren't interested in the story being told and resurrection is a one way ticket to shit writing. I bet you clapped with that awful MCU cliffhanger too.
I see way too many people legitimately clamoring for episode 3 to end with Gordon going back in time to undo the resonance cascade
That'd be such a lame copout
5 months ago
Anonymous
>It was an important point in developing Alyx which has been robbed now.
I don't think so. She moved time itself to save her dad. She was given the ultimate opportunity, and the unexpected consequences of that choice are yet to be seen.
>'s basically the exact same cliffhanger too except they swapped Eli
But it isn't. That ending still happened. Eli still died. Then a splinter happened, somehow G-Man was drawn into the Vault. Trapped with time to think. He offered a young Alyx, a person he knows will do great things and that he has personal interest in, a choice.
5 months ago
Anonymous
What the frick are you talking about. Eli's death had nothing to do with the failures of developing a new game, which are well documented and all boil down to various practical reasons related to game development. We already have insight into the direction they wanted to take the story without Eli. Stop with this headcanon bullshit.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>Eli's death had nothing to do with the failures of developing a new game
Speculation on my part but I feel that routing out dealing with the Death of Eli caused significant hurdles in development.
5 months ago
Anonymous
NTA, but I don't see how. Gordon is a mute, so that fixes most of the problem. As far as Alyx is concerned, you have her give a few lines of dialogue, come up with a reason for her and Gordon to split up for a bit, and move on. You could also set Episode 3 a little bit after Episode 2 to give them time to "grieve"... especially since it has also been so long between games for the players
5 months ago
Anonymous
They could choose to haphazardly continue Laidlaw story without Liadlaw railraoding themselves into a framework no one could possibly have any passion for or they could retcon Episode 3's set-up and do their own thing. It's time to choose.
5 months ago
Anonymous
I love how smug GMan is when he says you wouldn't need all that to imprison Gordon Freeman
5 months ago
Anonymous
pure cope, im really fricking sick of this multiverse nonesense, because now nothing matters since now we now they can just change time, im fricking calling it now the vortigaunts are also going to be able to do some stupid shit like that and thats how they defeat the combine or something lame like that
5 months ago
Anonymous
We don't even know what effect that is going to have on the actual HL2 timeline (and we'll probably never know kek). I don't know why you're so quick to trust GMan. Maybe it's a lie. Maybe Eli is alive, but only in other timelines. Maybe the whole thing is a monkey's paw and Eli dies 10 minutes into the next game anyway as a "correction" of Gman's interference
5 months ago
Anonymous
Then he'll get resurrected in half life Alyx 2 by an even younger Alyx. The whole thing is just Gman's carefully orchestrated plan of making a harem.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>The whole thing is just Gman's carefully orchestrated plan of making a harem.
I'm going to frick that old man?
5 months ago
Anonymous
I hate underage morons that think all time travel is marvel
get a new hate outlet zoomie
The combine is a gigantic multidimensional and bureaucratic empire, for this example let's say they are like the US. Imagine from their perspective Earth is like the Sentinel Island (we're actually even more primitive from their perspective). They send a basic force consisting of a US marine platoon with air support and they're able to conquer the island in 7 hours. After subjugating the locals, they determine that the marines are too expensive and advanced to keep them guarding the local cavemen, so instead they recruit some of the locals to enforce their rule, providing them with some scraps of tech (think some shitty high point guns and aliexpress kit). The combine Overwatch on Earth consists of those locals with shitty gear.
>all the combine have fairly understandable and advanced technology but nothing too crazy
I guess it's the same reason prison guards don't run around with guns. It causes more harm than good. Bonk the guard on the head, and suddely the prisoners have a gun.
But now imagine a super space gun that can kill a whole army in a second. Wouldn't want that to get in the hand of the humans. Better to be underequipped than risk your shit getting into the hands of prisoners Also: gameplay, duh
They have inter-universal teleportation but not within the same universe, for which they do likely have normal ships; of course different universes may abide by different physics, so it's impossible to speculate how that would look. Regardless, off-world to them may actually mean off world in our universe with ships, or more likely it also means trans-dimenional/universal. One of their other worlds (or simply a station or depot) is visible through the portal before city 17 is destroyed.
No joke I had Ganker open one day while my mom was visiting and she saw this image, or one just like it, and said "aww that's so cute! Look at the little babies!" and I was like "mom, look closely..."
>some obese basement-dwelling neckbeard autist specifically went out of his way to "explain" a Bing AI-generated slop tradcath shitpost image about dead babies to his mother
Man this is some serious fricking projection. Just how terrible is your relationship with your mother that the thought of explaining something to her fills you with such bile?
Normal person reaction: >uh yeah sure mom
(Or just not being moronic enough to let your mom see Ganker AI shitposts in the first place)
(You)r reaction: >MMMMOOOOOOOMMMMM YOU DON'T UNDERSTAAAAAAND ACKSHYUALLY THE IMAGE IS ABOUT ALL THE ABORTIONS THAT IMPURE DEGENERATE SNOWFLAKE ROASTIE HAD SEE IT'S TOTALLY FRICKIN EPIC I USE IT TO OWN THE LIBS ALL THE TIME ON Ganker UGH GOD THIS IS JUST LIKE THE TIME I SHOWED YOU GOATSE AND HAD TO EXPLAIN IT TO YOU NOW WHERE ARE MY CHICKEN TENDIES
Man this is some serious fricking projection. Just how terrible is your relationship with your mother that the thought of explaining something to her fills you with such bile?
So who hired Gman to plop Gordon down in City 17?
A couple threads ago someone brought up the theory it was Eli and I'm starting to buy into it. The whole taking Alyx as payment thing really gives it some credibility, seeing as even back as far as Episode 1 the "Alyx usurping Gordon" plotline seemed to be taking the stage, even before Epistle and Alyx VR. Though at the same time with Eli being intimately familiar with Gman and how he operates, it's not totally out of the picture that he made a deal with him to get Alyx out of Black Mesa which would also lead to her getting shanghai'd.
not really. Alyx writers are pretty respectful to the old lore written by Laidlaw. They only added time travel to Alyx because Laidlaw did it first during the opening of Episode 1.
Gman's employer is Valve. He's a meta level being like Featherine and his prime directive is to make a good story for the players so Valve can sell more copies.
They just interpreted him different like the rest of Xen, on purpose. Valve proved they have their definitive look for Xen with Alyx.
Nihilanth looks a bit like a mutant combine advisor. It's also a slave to the combine.
His personality is much better due to the fight imo. Lil baby is sperging out, unleashes everything he can and genuinely feels like a cornered slave desperately fighting for his life.
I never got that message. Looks like an amateur rough draft they shat out because they ran out of time, and it's an amateur project.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Really? Bullet hell attacks, him constantly screaming and opening portal to crush you with shit, completely unaware that there are supplies in the rooms he's ripping from Earth, terrain manipulation. That's much more "all out" than orbs and teleporting orbs from og. He is much more desperate in the remake even if he looks like shit.
5 months ago
Anonymous
I was only speaking about the quality of the model. The added personality was fine, but I like the wise eldritch horror mystique of the original guy
BM did a lot of things right but imo they missed the mark on Xen, even if it was much more fun overall and had some nice visuals, it didn't capture quite the same creepy hostility of original Xen imo
Original Xen made me feel depressed and isolated, BM Xen made me excited to just keep exploring more and more, made me feel like I was in this cool alien world.
yeah, it may sound weird but I think original Xen was going for exactly that sort of feeling of desolation and I really liked it. one of my favorite atmospheres in games is still when you get to that factory-like area (just before nihilanth I think?). it's really difficult to describe, it's like there are recognizable futuristic patterns buried under weird growths, kind of like the place was repurposed or really ancient, and the whole vibe is just very cold and evil and alien. I'd really take that over Avatar glowy jungle any day
Original Xen made me feel depressed and isolated, BM Xen made me excited to just keep exploring more and more, made me feel like I was in this cool alien world.
yeah, it may sound weird but I think original Xen was going for exactly that sort of feeling of desolation and I really liked it. one of my favorite atmospheres in games is still when you get to that factory-like area (just before nihilanth I think?). it's really difficult to describe, it's like there are recognizable futuristic patterns buried under weird growths, kind of like the place was repurposed or really ancient, and the whole vibe is just very cold and evil and alien. I'd really take that over Avatar glowy jungle any day
its been said before but that's because black mesa Xen looks like an alien world, whereas original Xen was supposed to be the result of alien dimensions colliding thanks to portals frickery, nothing but extremophiles should thrive in such hostile dimensional broken environment
>missed the mark on Xen
they hit it out of the park with xen and no amount of contrarian puritanism is going to ever convince anyone that was not the case. Original xen was smashed together in something like two months while trying to jump start multiplayer mode on the side as demanded by contract with sierra. And it shows. HL1 might as well ended with the gordon jumping into the xen portal and that would have been a more satisfying ending to the game then the beta level jank xen ended up being
those posts are about aesthetic choices, not gameplay. in fact the post you linked even agrees with your overall point and specifically says the issue is not with gameplay. I mean, it doesn't get more contrarian than agreeing with a post and then complaining about something else anyway, right?
5 months ago
Anonymous
Atmosphere is more important than gameplay. There, I said it
The guys in charge of Xen were more interested in building their portofolio, Aliens worlds are excellent to show how creative you are, so they overhauled xen and the nihilanth
so creative that they literally just made xen from an alien looking landscape to a generic "alien" landscape but with a few more plants and this that are just earth ants but an unusual color
They hired on the wall worm guy and then the wall worm guy used it to shill his software at Autodesk. It was necessary or Xen would never be finished, bsp can't do organic shapes easily and Worldcraft/Hammer had no tooling for it.
I wonder who actually arted and animated their Nihilanth, because my assumption is that theirs was left over from early BM: Source days and they never remade him because that guy left the project at some point. He was done early and they either didn't have a character artist to remake him or they just couldn't be arsed.
>I wonder who actually arted and animated their Nihilanth, because my assumption is that theirs was left over from early BM: Source days and they never remade him because that guy left the project at some point. He was done early and they either didn't have a character artist to remake him or they just couldn't be arsed.
That kinda reminds me of a strange thing about the HEV Suit
Originally they had a completely different voice actor for it. She sounds pretty good she actually died about a year after Black Mesa came out
In the final game, they used the same guy who voiced the HECU and just pitched his voice up for some asinine reason. Once you know that, you can never not notice how the retail HEV really does sound like a guy's voice pitched
Is that an ad-hoc'ed light bulb screw with tacked on gizmos there?
heh
Well, they won't arrest me if I tell them that I, hah, TURNED OFF THE LIGHT, HAHA
I feel like they missed the mark on the jaundiced-Frankenstein vibe of the original, it looks like he's sitting on the machine instead of the base being inserted into him with the stitching to make sure his skin doesn't rip apart from having a machine shoved up his ass
I really enjoyed that random shit from Black Mesa teleports and drops to the ground throughout the fight. It really gave it the feeling that some serious shit's going down and that hopefully there's still an earth you can return to.
> second version has less eyes, no mouth anus, no forehead wrinkles, no chest staples, no nipples and doesn't, skin color is off, doesn't have the sockets-for-eyes, tech looks more wolfenstien than alien
That about covers it. The thing that bugs me is the mouth/face is clearly a reference or at least inspired by Flukeman on the Xfiles and it has a much fleshier appearance and complexion that makes it more in line with HL2 assets like the Stalker, which may have been intentional. But those two things specifically make it look like a giant baby, which may have been how some people interpreted the original, but I don't think was the intent.
I will say it looks much better in context with lighting from
I'll take the black mesa version
It's an actual boss fight
Still not perfect, but gets across the idea of it clow3r to the original much better than just a ripped model.
They're definitely aware. Any that have talked about it have probably just given the usual "it's nice to see the community do stuff" answer, since even if any of the devs dislike it, they're not going to be so crass as to publicly express that.
Casali in his replay of Half-Life on youtube actually pauses for a sec in Questionable Ethics where Black Mesa added the surprise ambush, so there's that too.
god why'd they have to drop the ball so hard on xen?
the earth levels were near perfect! they had their flaws of course but they really felt like an HD version of 1
I like it. The Xen life in the Quarantine Zone seems to be primarily the most virulent and dangerous growth that can't be easily terminated by incineration teams. I'm fine with Xen being a verdant and hostile ecosystem filled with the garbage of all dimensions.
I thought Black Mesa was really good for a fan project, but I still wish Valve had the developmental capacity to remake the first game and for it to be a good remake.
Valve is never remaking anything. I can't imagine anyone there wasting time on repurposing ideas from 20 years ago to create the same game only this time with sauce 2.
factors that matter: >demand for a remake >development costs >projected revenue
factors that don't matter at all: >we made this 20 years ago
here's your voter registration card and your sex offender registration card for your 17 year old girlfriend, welcome to the adult world
factors that matter: >demand for a remake >development costs >projected revenue
factors that don't matter at all: >we made this 20 years ago
here's your voter registration card and your sex offender registration card for your 17 year old girlfriend, welcome to the adult world
valve doesn't remake games except new versions of CS since it's MP and it's a cash cow. the factors of the creator's of half life's intentions matter a whole lot to what gets made. zoomers really can't get enough remakes huh? you got black mesa get over it.
HL:S isn't a remake, remaster, or anything. It was a proof of concept to show that you could port GoldSrc engine based games to Source Engine and that they would function.
what if the combine's goal was to enslave the vorts and so they took whatever Nihilanth was and twisted it into something that passed for one of them. GMan is their human equivalent, and his name is Gordon Freeman
wiener? Doctor Freeman?
Is it really wiener sucking time again? It seems... as if... you only just sucked.
You've sucked a lot of wiener in a small time span... You've sucked so much in fact that, I've received some interesting offers for your blowjobs. Ordinarily I wouldn't contemplate them but... you suck extraordinary wiener, hmm? *inhales* Rather than offer you the illusion of free semen, I will take the liberty of cumming for you... if... and when your wiener sucking time comes round again.
I do apologize for what must seem to you an arbitrary suck, Doctor Freeman *cums internally* I trust, that it will all make sense to you in the course of... well...
sucking my wiener
Kinda off topic here but does anyone else think that the new Cloverfield lore copies Half Life too much?
>Old Clover lore: >the organism is an ancient lifeform that was awakened by a deepsea drilling operation sponsored by the Targruto company which was harvesting a substance called "Seabed Nectar" for use in its trademark soft drinks >Additional note: The creature also has extra mouths on its arms that it uses to vacuum people up, though the scene that shows how they work was cut from the film.
>New Clover lore: >an accident with a particle accelerator onboard the Cloverfield space station causes an infinite number of parallel realities to collide causing untold chaos across the entire multiverse >the creature presumably crawled out of a rift between dimensions but is unable to find its way back
Mere pop culture misusage. Actual theory is a valid one. But in a sense, the word is somewhat crude, universe already encompasses all in it, in a sense, and also carries select theological connotations.
It's not hack-ish per se, but, well...
That's just plain not true. >technological limitations
For the longest time their human grunts were just reskinned Combine soldier AI and they were fricking lame. After 10 years they fixed them, but half of their aliens are still borderline broken, but to them it's "good enough"
I replay both Half Life and Black Mesa at least twice a year. I enjoy both versions greatly. I think the reason for BM's success is that they didn't copy the game 100% but instead focused on the "feeling" of how fricked the entire incident is. It definitely feels more grim and unsettling seeing the people and the place break down over the course of the game in Black Mesa and the wordier scientists and security guards sell the "end of the world, but nobody realized it yet" feeling well.
Also new Xen is fine, even if it's a little bit too much. But the opening parts of Xen feel great, seeing all the human equipment around feels neat and the research outposts were my favorite. The HEV suit voice freaking out not sure if user is dead or dying for THOSE guys was sick as hell.
>replaying episode 1 >notice how eli is subtly surprised gordon's back
considering that eli knows about gman, it seems like he expected after everything was done with breen, gordon would just disappear potentially for decades more.
i wonder how gman intended the combine situation to go during the episodes since gordon wasn't supposed to be able to help at all. without gordon to escort alyx to white forest, the combine surely would've shown up to earth, steamrolled everyone, and nothing would've really gotten accomplished from 2
>i wonder how gman intended the combine situation to go during the episodes since gordon wasn't supposed to be able to help at all.
i don't think he cares. the entirety of hl2 was just a contract.
>i don't think he cares. the entirety of hl2 was just a contract.
Yeah but like, what did you actually accomplish in 2? You help the rebels but they'd get steamrolled after without you.
The only things I can think of is either the client wanted the Combine to be distracted with Earth, or some alien just REALLY wanted Breen dead
if eli did contract him, i assume he monkey pawed him or something. told him gordon would stop dr breen and nothing else.
if Eli has a contract with him is about keeping Alyx alive
>i don't think he cares. the entirety of hl2 was just a contract.
Yeah but like, what did you actually accomplish in 2? You help the rebels but they'd get steamrolled after without you.
The only things I can think of is either the client wanted the Combine to be distracted with Earth, or some alien just REALLY wanted Breen dead
I go along with the theory that the humans and the nihilant are mere proxy wars against the combine to keep them distracted, humanity was getting fricked beyond the point of return and Gordon coming back and bringing down the citadel pulled it back from the brink to the "status quo", but since he wasn't supposed to go further and actually deal as much damage as he did you get the unforseen consequences scene and Eli's death that gives every information of the resistance to the combine to balance it out once again.
Now all of that fricks off royally with the new ending.
>i don't think he cares. the entirety of hl2 was just a contract.
Yeah but like, what did you actually accomplish in 2? You help the rebels but they'd get steamrolled after without you.
The only things I can think of is either the client wanted the Combine to be distracted with Earth, or some alien just REALLY wanted Breen dead
Overthrew one of the main strongholds of the combine (do other cities have Citadels?), took down suppression field and cut off the Combine garrison on Earth from any real reinforcements. >they woulda been rolled after
They probably didn't expect the covenant to regroup so fast and set up the new Overwatch voice and everything.
Also while we're speculating, if the contract just ended the Citadel woulda gone kerblam way earlier without Captcha and those advisors would not have been able to leave fast enough. Maybe then they wouldn't have been able to regroup and make counter offensives so fast. >some alien wanted breen dead
Can you imagine if the entire thing was because a slug got sent off the Earth and out of corporate politics spite paid for this
You destroyed their primary method of interdimensional travel and in the episodes you stopped their backup plan attempt at a superportal.
The real question is why Overwatch didn't request stronger reinforcements once the fighting broke out in City 17 while they still had a portal.
They probably underestimated the threat Freeman's resistance posed. Consider that, aside from mobilizing some synths out the door, everything is relatively calm inside the Citadel until you start tearing things apart.
The C17 resistance had been underground and doing guerilla tactics for most of its existence, and as long as the resistance didn't get into the Citadel it really didn't matter. This assumption was proven to be faulty because Gordon does his thing and kills shitloads of troops and synths right into the front door of the Citadel, and by chance he keeps his weaponry past the security barrier and continues doing his thing inside and all the way to the top. Also, the Nova Prospekt teleporter was destroyed before the Citadel raid, so any reinforcement would have come from other Cities the slow way.
I meant from the Dark Fusion reactor's portal within the Citadel, not Nova Prospekt's.
Its portal starts to open just before we stop Breen from escaping, it's actually where the 2 gunships in the fight come from.
It only took the dark fusion portal about 5 minutes to begin opening, so they can probably pull through some actual reinforcements from it. But as you said, the advisors probably weren't taking the rebels or Freeman seriously until it was too late.
its because G-Man ain't around to name the segments of your life
It's really creepy with the only death message for episode 1 because G-Man acts professional and in episode 2 the vortigaunts are mystical, but this is likely just Gordon's titlecase thoughts as the blunt "Alyx Died"
So assuming that HL3 is happening because of HL Alyx's ending, what was the point of retconning the end of Episode 2? Did they write themselves into a corner and just wanted to do something totally different than whatever drafts they may have had from 15 years ago?
Wait. HL:Alyx events were just Alyx's dream made by G-man, so she was much more agreeable to make a contract? Or was it time travel/pocket dimension? That would explain how Combines were able to catch him.
he let himself get caught to psyop Alyx into get hired. I don't know what or why they did it, everything is speculation with the new ending and there's too much that could be possible to not pull out something out thin air on with every theory
My headcanon is that G-Man allowed allowed Eli to die so he could show it to Alyx in her dream/pocket dimension and trick her into becoming his sex slave. The only thing I'm wondering about rn is what exactly happened to her after she was taken away. Did both of her Ep2 version acquire the memories of her dream version or vice-versa? Because I highly doubt there will be 2 Alyx Vances running around in the next HL.
So, let's think about a few things:
1) The Lambda team had been to and collected specimens from Xen before the resonance cascade. Teleportation had been done already at black mesa in their secret-secret facility.
2) In Endgame we have the line "The border world, Xen, is now under our control thanks to you." In the background we have exploded tanks and dead marine grunts in Xen. We come across neither on our journey to Xen. We can assume that not only had the Lambda team been to Xen for research, but that an expeditionary assault unit had been sent to Xen in the past.
5) "I aM tHe lAsT. i Am tHe LaSt."
The last what? Well, if Xen has been invaded and not the reverse and the boarder world is under control when you destroy him, you can assume there were more and they were killed by the marine forces sent to Xen.
3) While people argue about the canon-ness of OP4, the idea of a nuke going off has been part of the concept since early design documents as shown in Dario Casali's recent videos. Along with cut lines alluding to Freeman's complete destruction of the races in Xen. What could this mean? Did Freeman necessarily kill every Xen creature with his bare hands?
Well, not really. He caused the resonance cascade which sent them all to a radioactive death at Black Mesa, leaving Xen in the hands of the "employers"/government.
We can very easily assume that the Nihilanth, while clearly not a benevolent being as they were a slaver, was acting in self-defense and not against the combine.
He didn't team up with you because it wasn't even a choice.
Perhaps, we humans have reinforcements lying in wait in xen. So, at an opportune time they can return, clear the remaining combine and xen, then reestablish government.
>So, at an opportune time they can return, clear the remaining combine and xen, then reestablish government
The CIA Black Ops showing up towards the end of all this and deposing of the ragtag resistance and establishing firm order upon humanity when they're already so weary of authority would be a great plot twist
I was actually thinking the other day that humans could've theoretically just reproduced normally in Xen as the Supression Field wouldn't reach there so they probably could've made a whole extra generation of humans
Then is becomes Combine vs Human Xen vs 3rd alien empire.
The ending being that the 3rd Alien Confederation is tired of fighting the Combine and they create a device that would stop interdimensional travel, but that would not be beneficial to either Gman or Earth's future.
>Rise and shine Mr. Freeman
He's like one of those waifu alarm clocks that wakes you up! But Gordon is a trained professional so he prefers that as a wake up instead of a genki OHAYOOOOOO~ alarm type.
In universe, he's the equivalent of an office worker for a race so advanced it's magic, he just does whatever maximizes the value out of Earth and the Combine
Narratively, he represents Valve as the outside force that makes sure the games happen and they're interesting by driving the plot
It would be so kino if in EP3 Gman did something seemingly out of line and gotten replaced by an almost identical employee type person with very little to no aknowledgement from the game
Honestly it sounded underwhelming. For a game series that started between two worlds we've been stuck in the same dystopia for 2 (emphasis on two) long
I wonder what Half Life 3 would've been.
1 and 2 are completely different and it sounded like they wanted to move onto a brand new setting for 3, but with the episodes and the fact we've been in the combine era for 20 years has permanently associated Half Life with the setting from 2.
The original point of Half-Life 2 Episode Three was to finally get us out of that stuck state and leave a blank canvas for Half-Life 3. But because Valve couldn't get their shit together, Half-Life may now forever be stuck as a Combine world.
I thought the same looking at the shape. It's pointless unless you're planning on channeling the energy in a direction, and we already know the Combine love to frick over lesser civilizations.
>HL3/HL2:EP3 ends with Gordon riding the Aurora to the Combine's dyson sphere >the boat is loaded with several thermonuclear explosives >Combine Harvest starts playing >music swells once the boat floats into the opening >you see the enslaved star inside along with several billions of ships and megastructures >Vorts manage to pull Gordon just before the bombs go off >the resulting explosion dwarfs the tsar bomba by several levels >It barely does any damage and accomplishes nothing
This thing makes me sad after learning more about Half-Life 2 lore.
I decided to look this up and enough enough:
https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Nihilanth > the Nihilanth's homeworld was invaded by the Combine long before the events of Half-Life, prompting the migration and takeover of Xen by the Nihilanth > It was also said the Nihilanth, the Vortigaunts, and the Alien Grunts were all from the same world.
It was being enslaved by the Combine and it looks like a grotesque monster because it was mutilated and tortured. Whatever his species was, they didn't look like that.
Depends on what you mean by "boss", it's very possible there isn't one individual at the top, just increasing layers of bureaucracy with increasingly more complex species, maybe it's just some giant biotechnology-based planning/optimization machine that takes in data from across the Union and outputs what each branch should be working towards with little agency of its own.
There is no boss >The "Combine" is a name for a large organization of different species (including humans) working (or forced to work) together. So asking if the advisors are the combine is like asking if a roman senator is the roman empire. There's no one creature called the Combine.
Gman has a hyper specific fetish about taking people who can stop an alien invasion and stripping them down to their boxers, so much so he’s willing to end worlds over it.
He’s a very twisted individual
I do miss the days when Valve created video games regularly (DOTA does not count, they did not create it), but I understand that Gabe's focus has always been on innovating upon PC capabilities, just looking at most of the peripherals they previously put out.
>Half Life 4 >Gordon, Chell and Heavy TF2 are fighting the Combine leader >Combine boss crushes all moon rock surfaces and puts the moon dust into Heavy's sandviches, eliminating both of them and leaving only a wounded Gordon left >"Time cut in Half of Life, Mr Freeman" says the Comboss and he readies his space katana >suddenly portal.mp3 plays in the distance >"Hehe, I am Opposing of that idea..." >Commander Shep and a huge army of Race Xers teleport in >"...FORCE!!!"
Post yfw
It's a matter of where the least amounts of Xen encroachment is and the availability to house human stock, that anti-science mockup cut cutscene implies that they had Tentacles just spawning in the middle of American cities and I'd imagine building Citadels would be difficult to construct in such a location.
Echoes is great and all but if you told me Field Intensity was Opposing Force before I played it (and without taking the voice acting into account) I would have 100% believed it came out in '99 and was official.
It also has the comfiest Black Mesa out of every mod I've played so far, I just want to hang out in the laundromat all day.
the tech stuff that has been grafted to the bottom of the nihilanth looks a lot like combine tech
was this planned or did they just take inspiration from that when designing the combine aesthetic for the second game?
Not exactly planned, but some of the internal notes shared by Marc Laidlaw shoes that there were rough ideas of there being some multidimensional empire that the Nihilanth was running away from.
>no, we have not had Half-Life's story fleshed out since day one. We had ideas, inclinations, and concepts but certainly nothing distinct or concrete. For example, we knew that ultimately, sequel or no sequel, something far worse lay beyond Nihilanth, and we very subtly highlighted that on several occasions throughout the game. But make no mistake; we had no idea that it was going to be the Combine that would be that greater foe. So no, we had not worked out any particulars beforehand. You might recall that Half-Life 2 went through a number of design iterations before we managed to solidify its narrative.
cool
but im almost certain that the nihilanth mechanical ass inspired the way combine stuff looks
it must have had an impact on viktor antonov and other art directors
>Teleportation has been mastered by a chain of superintelligent (compared to us) aliens. Mainly, they use it to exploit and enslave the races they encounter; their exploitation may be open or it may be extremely covert, involving political manipulation of the worlds they control. It all depends on what they want out of the species they intend to dominate.
>The civilizations which are potentially the most dangerous—and also the most useful—to them are those which have independently arrived at the creation of a teleport technology which could surpass their own…for as in all things, even advanced alien superscience is bound to become obsolete, and the drive for a more powerful technology is unending.
>Earth is at exactly this point. We made a few strong experimental forays into the science of teleportation, began to discover the practical underpinnings of the art, and then succeeded against our wildest dreams—stumbling into a weird dimension whose properties defied our understanding of natural law. Nor were we alone in this realm, which we named Xen—for that which is forever alien and inexplicable.
[..]
>The cause of this was a certain element, found in Xen, [..] it was imported to Earth by a devious route, involving several of the aforementioned superintelligent alien races. By steering us to Xen, they immediately forced a confrontation with a troublesome race which would either annihilate us or force us to show our mettle. If the former were the case, then they were rid of a pest. If the latter, then they would further shroud their presence in secrecy and work their manipulations deeper into the fabric of our society, in hopes of harnessing us from within.
>The G-Man is [REDACTED].
>Teleportation is only the first of many new empowerments for humanity.
[...]
Based on the narrative here, the idea is that the G-Man either is of or works for a superintelligent race, and the Combine is one of these races.
>no, we have not had Half-Life's story fleshed out since day one. We had ideas, inclinations, and concepts but certainly nothing distinct or concrete. For example, we knew that ultimately, sequel or no sequel, something far worse lay beyond Nihilanth, and we very subtly highlighted that on several occasions throughout the game. But make no mistake; we had no idea that it was going to be the Combine that would be that greater foe. So no, we had not worked out any particulars beforehand. You might recall that Half-Life 2 went through a number of design iterations before we managed to solidify its narrative.
It was silly to see the metrocops directing all the male arrivals towards Nova Prospekt to be turned into stalkers. Why bother relocating them and making them switch trains instead of taking them straight to it?
Why do we have to sometimes have to switch trains or even planes? Why can't every train station or airport be directly connected to each other with no intermediaries?
Combine have [vehicles with worse capacity and fuel efficiency and more fatal error states and capabilities needed for higher-priority military missions] that can be used to transport captives.
>Load up like 10 people into a cargo container attached to one of your presumably limited aircraft >Or just stick 500 people into a train in one shot
Efficiency, baby. There's a reason the concentration camps had rail lines going right into them instead of an airstrip. Inefficient extermination IS NOT the interdimensional German way.
humanity cannot win against the combine, there is only one happy ending that could happen in half life and thats if gordon travels back in time and makes absolutely sure the crystal never gets pushed into the beam and thus the combine do not notice the existence of earth.
There's no need to win against the larger empire, you just close and lock the interdimensional door to Earth and wipe out the remaining occupation force.
The former is already accomplished by Episode 2 and can remain accomplished if a followup ensure the Combine force left on Earth doesn't get their hands on the Borealis' portal tech.
Scary how they just rolled up, stole their ocean, steamrolled them in 7 hours and the only way to stop them is to lock them outside the house and throw away the keys
As long as humanity never gets overly ambitious with portal tech again the door should stay locked, too.
But what are humans if not destructively ambitious.
They would've continued their research in teleportation tech, most likely at a faster pace than before.
Remember that even if they evict the combine off earth, humanity is still stuck on a post-resonance cascade earth. The soil is filled to the gills with antlions, headcrabs still roaming near and around cities, oceans full of leeches and ichthyosaurs.
>oceans full of leeches and ichthyosaurs
Ideally these little shits shouldn't be able to survive in a new planet but off they go. It's the same sea they had back in home.
>They would've continued their research in teleportation tech, most likely at a faster pace than before.
I see it going in the opposite way. Once the Combine's gone, people will be so hesitant of technology that they'll probably go into a self-inflicted dark age.
Also, while the Science Team of Kleiner, Magnusson, and now Eli saved them, they are also responsible for all this in the minds of the public. I definitely see them getting lynched when all is said and done
5 months ago
Anonymous
Breen is the true one at fault for the Resonance Cascade. It's one thing for GMan to have provided the unstable sample, but Breen is the one that pushed them to overclock the spectrometer to get an immediate conclusive analysis and still pushed the test to be done after the science team voiced concerns about both the sample and the settings.
Eli states in Ep2 he should've aborted the test, which implies he had some say in stopping it from happening, but from step 1 the Anomalous Materials team was being pressured by administration to do something they shouldn't.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>but from step 1 the Anomalous Materials team was being pressured by administration to do something they shouldn't
Sounds familiar
5 months ago
Anonymous
Were the major details of the Chernobyl Disaster's cause public knowledge by 1998? Valve very well could've taken some inspiration from that if so.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>Breen is the true one at fault for the Resonance Cascade
Well yes but for everyone on Earth who had just been through 20 years of hell and their planet irrevocably damaged, I can't see people caring about how "technically the black mesa staff aren't at fault, they were just indirectly assisting in it"
People do irrational things when stressed. Hell you already see people in Episode 1 complaining about why Kleiner just gets to be in charge
The funny part is we know that human and Combine teleportation is chump change when there are teleporting, multi-bodied, time travelling ayy-lmaos walking around laughing at the apes fighting the calculators stapled to slugs
God I wish Half Life got more worldbuilding and whatnot, even if HL3 is never ever happening it's a damn shame to have such a god tier series in permanent limbo
>God I wish Half Life got more worldbuilding and whatnot
I dunno. Seams like 70% of the staying power of HL. Was that the world was...there while you were dOing your own stuff.
You are told there was something but since it is not importan to the plot of the game they did not include it.
TL;DR:So since the world is so vage you cann add your own stuff without lore breaking.
Am I crazy or is there surprisingly little fps combat in hl2 for an fps game? There were shades of that in hl1, where you could spend a big chunk of time just doing platforming and physics puzzles, but it seems like hl2 does that even more. Am I imagining it?
Why did Valve stop comissioning spinoffs/third party games and expansions after HL1?
I know there were two separate episodes in development with one made by Arkane and the other by EA, but Valve cancelled them one day for no reason. Gearbox expansions were a success, so why not have more?
They realized that Half-Life 2 Episode Three was in development hell and that it would look very VERY bad if they failed to release it after a bunch of third party spin-off episodes were released.
Who knows the truth. Who really knows the truth? Nobody knows... the only person that knows the truth is me. And the truth shall set you free... the truth, shall set yo-
Bringing this guy back... It's such dogshit writing why the frick did they even do it? That cliffhanger was pretty much perfect. Alyx will be motivated to take on the combine, audience will be motivated too but here we are. Valve decided to literally take a shit in their own story.
Why did Alyx need any more motivation to take on the Combine? What does Eli dying actually add to the story narratively?
It was GoT writing to kill him for le epic cliffhanger death
It leads Alyx without a father figure, blinds her with vengeance leading to potential conflict with Gordon and Judith Mossman and allows her to grow in a world without her father.
Easy meaningful character development
My guess is they didn't want to continue whatever story Laidlaw was working on. So, they decided to do something completely moronic instead.
If you believe the official story given in the Final Hours of Half-Life Alyx and by Erik Wolpaw in the interviews he's given, it's only because they wanted Half-Life Alyx to feel like it actually mattered to the overall story and this was the only idea they could come up with.
Exactly, the second you start disgracing your own story is the second i'm not going to pay attention. It's cowardly and disrespectful to the fans and the original writers
Shitting up the story is the only idea they could come up with? I don't believe that. Figuring out how gman got captured would've made an interesting story, it would've been just that. HLA takes place 5 years before the ending of episode 2, why the frick is gman even talking about eli vance's death to Alyx? It's so contrived.
>buzzword
What buzzword did I use? Audience is willing to suspend their disbelief in a science fiction story until it gets too stupid like HLA's ending. What's your point even?
>time elapsed between 7 hour war and beginning of HL2: ~20 years
What the frick were the combine doing for 20 years? Isn't the whole point to take the resources and steamroll another planet? How much time do they need to suck-up some water and metal?
Back in the day, while 2 gave you a power trip as everyone worshipped you, the episodes gave you a girlfriend who flirts with you nonstop. These definitely appealed to the target audience.
Though I can't really see a character like Alyx coming out in a game in todays political climate. In episode 3 she was presumably going to keep up the flirting whenever she wasn't grieving but I can't help but wonder if that might be part of why she was retconned out
I don't see Valve retconning Alyx being wet for Gordon but the chances of them ending together might not be so safe. Who knows really.
He also helps stop the Combine, Xen and opposing force aliens despite causing it in the first place. He's not good or evil, he's self-interested and hence morally neutral.
Alyx still does that but puts him in direct opposition to the player as opposed to his imposing indifference when he lets Gordan go in ep 2
Dude, he caused the apocalypse and humanity's decline. He's definitely evil from a normal point of view at the very least.
Guys, there's no grand conspiracy against Epistle Three. Valve has always taken a make it up as you go along approach to story because the story is only to serve gameplay. They only killed off Eli in the first place because Gabe told Laidlaw et al the game needed to end with a big dramatic death to set up Episode Three. Erik Wolpaw insists that bringing back Eli was only because he was having a random conversation with one of the animators about how hard it was to come up with a satisfying consequence for releasing the Gman and the animator just suggested saving Eli's life.
What exactly is the Universal Union, guys? And i'm not talking about the Combine but saying another name, i'm talking about what preceded the Combine, the Shuulatoi and all of that.
The Shuulatoi aka the grubs are a culture of kaijus from a radioactive planet that are only sapient in their sessile larval stage. They are mild psionics, strong enough to do telekinesis but not ridiculously OP like vorts are.
Existing only as telepathic sapiences made them kinda special, and they have all kinds of weird shit including their own "mind virus" pathogens.
According to Breengrub, the Shuulatoi managed to leave their larval bodies and escape when the Combine arrived to their planet, and some may have even manage to survive combine-ification and exist within their system, very pissed off and plotting revenge.
Apparently Combine computers are sapient and controlled by software derived from Shuulatoi mind viruses
Breen's admiration for them seems to imply that the could be candidates for the G-man's famous employers.
Why the frick didn't he just work with Humanity to stop the Combine?
he never thought of that
Really? With a brain like that?
With a brain like that he probably knew Earth's help wouldn't mean shit against the Combine, or that G-Man wouldn't allow humans an alliance against the very events he's pushing. He probably wasn't too happy about them kidnapping/stealing his resources beforehand either.
this
>CIA shadow government glowies send glowie agents to take shit from your asteroids and kidnap your fellow combine refugees/forced workforce
>make new tech from it and try to master teleportation
>teleportation tech with no oversight from him could be a beacon to the combine
>step in since otherwise glowies and black mesa would have colonized Xen
Black mesa and the US government weren't researching Xen for peaceful tech. They were making weapons and super suit's like Freeman and trying to master teleportation to allow the glowies unlimited power. If he didn't invade the US glowies in time would have become the proto combine
I feel so bad killing them. Actually I feel bad killing any female enemies
Like based mold host Ross Scott used to say, cave man brain is wired to not kill hot women. You are supposed to rape them.
Oh, that Carnival video. He even made another one trying to explain himself again, but it's actually looked even worse.
I always get a hard-on killing female enemies
this is not a half life character
Look at the leg braces
It's the ones
anon...
the titty bounce and eyes are NOT in the original game
>the titty bounce
that actually is removed in opposing force
make sense why I misconstrued this then, I am as a matter of fact the greatest opposing force speedrunner and the world record holder. *I know, I know, hold your applause please, Im flattered really. Really you're too kind
>gearbox was always prudish
huh
Nost of his skull is empty, so his brain can't actually be that big
Maybe he realized the Combine can not be stopped once they are aware of your universe.
So he invades another universe and draws a frick ton of attention it catches the Combines eye leading to the 7hr war? What was he thinking?!?!?
he was on their hitlist and wanted to frick shit up for another universe before he was out
The Resonant Cascade is what caused the Combine to be able to hop to Earth, and that was the G-man's doing, not the Nihilanth. Since humans had already entered Xen, he probably just found the Cascade a good opportunity to either stop humans from entering Xen or he wanted to conquer the planet.
Why did resonance cascade even happen? Because freeman pushed a cart into the beam? Come to think of it, why do they need a person to push this thing into the beam, it looks like it could've been automated easily.
>Come to think of it, why do they need a person to push this thing into the beam, it looks like it could've been automated easily.
Because for a game it's more satisfying to actually have the player push the cart rather than simply push a button that makes a machine move the cart into position, plus an excuse for the player to be directly next to the machine when everything goes wrong rather than in a separate observation room with the button.
To give the new hires some practical experience to put on their resume.
>Why did resonance cascade even happen?
The pure Xen crystal the G-man gave to Breen was put in the Anti-Mass Spectrometer, which hit the crystal with EM pulses or something of some frequency, which caused the crystal to resonate with Xen, which forcibly began the Dimensional Merge which started dumping Xen onto Earth and vice versa.
>Come to think of it, why do they need a person to push this thing into the beam, it looks like it could've been automated easily.
As a 1990s industrial laboratory, it's likely that the lab was cutting edge and not production-level equipment, so something jury rigged like a sample stapled to a cart is not really unrealistic. Even modern massive equipment still has people doing work on basic b***h cranes and platforms.
I'm an engineer and when I was newer I had to do shit the senior engineers didn't want to do and technicians didn't have the knowledge to execute correctly like run protocol studies using specific or jury rigged equipment fixtures on engineering samples. Gordon was the young new physicist who's job was to flip a switch and move a cart because he had the least amount of responsibilities.
How was the work? Cozy?
Yeah, it was mostly just me sitting at a work bench with some fixture and instructions on what to do, putting in some sample, getting some reading from an Instron or other gauge, writing down the value, repeat for all samples, then write a report saying if the samples passed and if there were any statistical capability problems or not. Not too intellectually challenging, but like I said, too high level for a grunt and not important enough for a senior engineer.
it used to be a slave of the combine before escapeing with a handful of xenians to xen. If you pay attention to its model you can see the combine metal chains still on it
He himself is a slave to the combine.
no
If so, the combine would have invaded much sooner, they already had people from the Lambda team going to Xen before the Resonance Cascade
The entirety of humanity lost to the combine in 7 hours so why the frick would he
That's false. Whatever was left of humanity lost. By the time they've invaded the portal storms had already wrecked the world beyond recovery.
The Combine rolled over humanity using a fraction of its resources, if Epistle 3 is still accurate they're a Kardashev 2+ civilization with at least one Dyson Sphere and thinking humans can "stop" the Combine is like an anthill "stop"ping all of human civilization
so despite all of halflife the entire setting is doomed, frick that's bleak
I don't think Earth in necessarily doomed, it seems that the resonance cascade's portal storms allowed the Combine to insert themselves onto Earth, and without the Citadel and/or Aperture portal technology they can't come back to Earth at any reasonable speed.
There are also other players in the universe, the Combine may be a smaller fish to some other civilization for all we know, it takes a shitload of Combine technology strapped to Vortigaunts to merely imprison the Gman who is capable of teleportation and time manipulation, things the Combine lack and humans can barely do.
Not necessarily. Humanity might be incapable of directly harming the Union, but there are clearly other interested parties to which humans are useful, and to whom they are being directed in some way to cause events to occur. The setting may be as intentional as Gman pulling persons of interests under him and using them in the right place and time. There's also the Vortigaunt's potential independent capabilities that are sometimes even above what the Gman can influence, and the Borealis' potential usefulness. In any realistic terms, though, the world is scarred heavily by the effects of the 7 hour war, infestation of Xen creatures and matter, and the damage done to the Earth in general by the Combine occupation such as the sea level dropping dramatically. Mass desertification is probably occurring globally, the majority of North America is likely a dead place full of hostile aliens, the human population has been controlled to a fraction of its former height, and even if the combine are ousted from the Universe, the other unknown parties may still prove to be a problem. Humanity may survive, but they are definitely fricked, and will at best be scrappy and resilient, but not close to what they were before. Or, who knows, maybe with the alien technology and the help of benevolent powers, they can make a comeback. The glimmer of hope against insurmountable odds is kind of the series' theme, no reason to call it doomed.
Humans will reverse engineer the sterilization field into the fertilization field and Combine resource harvesting and construction infrastructure can be utilized for human resource harvesting and housing construction, I think once the Combine is properly ousted they can turn it around quickly.
There's a lot of science and technology to learn from the Combine's leftovers, I could easily see humanity using those lessons to terraform Mars and just teleport there if Earth isn't salvageable (which would also explain why Aperature wasn't reclaimed by hundreds of years in the future, most humans bailed).
I like the idea, but if we're talking even somewhat realistically, the combine haven't fricked up Earth so badly that Mars would ever be the easier, more likely or preferable options. If humanity can get that kind of tech together, they could more readily fix Earth's biosphere and make at minimum a walled garden for themselves. Unless they manage to leverage their portal technology to somehow find a more habitable planet, Earth is the best known option for human life under virtually any circumstances, simply due to our planetary mass, atmosphere and magnetic field. I would say Aperture remaining undisturbed may be due to its location being unknown and outside of "the wall" if anything.
>fertilization field
OwO
>reverse engineer the sterilization field into the fertilization field
>a single drop of pre-cum is enough to fertilize a woman
>distinguished Resistance members get to join "replenish the humanity" drive
Kek the doujins write themselves
>the majority of North America is likely a dead place full of hostile aliens
very cool
The caveat being that teleportation technology is cutting edge tech that basically makes you kardashev tier-3 in setting. IMPORTANT FACT: The Combine has actually lower tech than Nihilanth's forces. They won because because they are ridiculously large and could basically ambush the entire planet in a single movement.
But that army left and now Earth can effectively kick the Combine out of their dimension permanently if they blow up the teleporters on their side.
I'm pretty sure the endgame of the Combine plotline was simply to cut off contact to the greater combine collective (accomplished in episode 1) and to kill off the now stranded Combine forces on earth.
Without a line of communication to earth-bound forces the combine wouldn't be able to find the earth again and it would remain safely hidden in the vast Infinity of space. Not defeating the combine but successfully avoiding being conquered by them.
But if G-Bussy wanted for it all to happen then why would he allow for humanity to hide again?
he didn't. Episode 1 and 2 happen because the G-Man lost control of Freeman, allowing him to help the rebels shut down the Combine super portal.
Wouldn't he be a little bit madder then? Or mentioned it in the Heart to Heart in the episode 2 and, you know aimed at stopping the rocket and not just delivering Eli a jumpscare?
He is mad, he uno reverso'd Alyx after all
He wanted to destroy Earth's spacetime teleportation technology while keeping it out of Combine hands, which he accomplishes in Epistle 3.
He set up the combine invasion to test his new hires aka soldiers he’s been pocketing away. It was all a show to see if Gordon has what it takes and I don’t know what purpose Gman has for his heroes later on. At end of HL2 the combine was not defeated but Gman was satisfied enough with Gordon’s accomplishments and was just about to stash him away again.
Does Gmans employers know about this or is he stashing away heroes with cosmic luck on their side in order to take control of things?
the thing is that the Combine has definitely learned enough about teleportation tech from Judith to make it on their own. They have already built one in Nova Prospekt before Gordon blew it up. Earth will never be safe again. At any point the Combine might invade another time.
that was for inter dimentional teleportation. They need to tunnel through from their staging ground in uni A to uni B where earth is. The transmitter for opening that portal was the citadel and originally the out of control resonance cascade when nihilanth died. After ep2 they dont have the access anymore
why would the Combine bother invading Earth again?
There's nothing of interest left on it.
Local teleportation technology, the main reason they were sticking around in the first place. They know how to rip open portals between universes if they can find an opening for said universe (which the Resonance Cascade created), but they suck at teleporting within a universe.
The Nova Prospekt portal was the closest they got, which was only possible by Mossman feeding them information on Eli and Kleiner's own work. But since she's not one of the original geniuses behind the design, the Combine's imitation was very rough. Took a while to charge up, the actual teleportation takes a couple of weeks to complete, and when pushed to teleport consecutively within a short timeframe, it completely self-destructed, taking Nova Prospekt with it.
If Mossman had turned traitor for that long, why didn't they take Eli or Kleiner sooner?
She'd convinced Breen that they'd more efficiently finish their work outside of captivity and it's quite likely they would've outright refused to continue their work in captivity. Forcing their minds to do it may have also resulted in subpar results or outright failure.
Freeman returning made Breen antsy so he pulled the trigger earlier than Mossman wanted him to on the Black Mesa East raid. Which Mossman also argued resulted in Freeman getting away.
>the actual teleportation takes a couple of weeks to complete
This was more probably due to the combine elite blasting the teleporter with an energy orb. Eli and Judith were clearly in the Citadel for a while.
Maybe, the portal was audibly and visibly barely holding on before the Elites rushed in. That Elite definitely got permanent offworld assignment if that was the cause
Actually, it probably died in the teleporter's explosion.
that's how it feels playing HL2 then HL1 when it became free. I cant imagine how much of a kick in the dick HL2 must've felt with how vague HL1 ended they told you jack shit at the end
Didn’t episode 3 get retconned now that laidlaw left though? Hence the alternate timeline frickery?
Yeah but the Vortis and Nihlanth are pretty powerful.
With humanities teleportation tech
And the Vortis having the power to legit stop the Gman.
They can be a formidable force.
Stopping an entity like the Gman is no easy feat especially when the Combine view him as a major threat yet the Vortis managed to do so.
Well if we're playing rock paper scissors, the Combine can enslave the Vortigaunts and their power to imprison the Gman so that means the Combine win.
And that's where Humanity comes in. Freeman and Alyx freed them.
So every race has their merits they just got to work together. But apparently big brain Nihlanth couldn't see that
Dude was most likely heavily experimented and jaded from the combine torture. It may be that he didn't want to take chances with a world sending scientists in super hazmat suits to take over Xen
That begs the question of why they even bother bothering Earth at all if they are so big and powerful.
Resources.
Water, work force, minerals some other shit they deem valuable. They didn't wish that Dyson sphere into existence. It's made out of hundreds of Earth-type conquests.
They're tech scavengers. As soon as a civilization makes itself noticeable on the grander scale, such as by causing a resonance cascade, the Combine swoops in to assimilate their tech and then the whole species (because why not).
>why they even bother bothering Earth at all if they are so big and powerful.
Portal tech.
Their own portal tech only work well for massive, long-range, costly wormholes.
Mankind finding a way to make small, cheap, wormholes would be a game changer to their arsenal, and is the main reason they are living Earth half-functional instead of zombifying everyone. They want the monkeys to produce that technological aberration again so they can reverse engineer it, but since it was an accident everything stay stuck.
he didnt know combine will find him again
he just wanted to conquer earth
He didn't think it was necessary because he never foresaw G-man meddling in his plans
He foresaw that the franchise was never gonna be finished, so he didn't bother
>tfw to intellegent
He had no idea the Combine even existed. He wasn't hiding from them afaik. His fall is orchestrated by G-Man's "Employers" who are not the Universal Union.
The only candidate ever hinted for are the pre-combine psionic Grubs species from the BreenGrub ARG. Who'd now would be basically psionic mind-viruses hiding in the corners of reality.
this is totally wrong and disproven by alien murals in Alyx. The Nihilanth and the Vortigaunts were both invaded by the Combine
>Alyx
Not canon.
He has literal combine tech jutting out of his ass.
Anything that went wrong in that universe was due to G-Man’s and his employers frickenning
here they go again! homosexual shitters making up lore that was never intended when HL1 came out
This, I don't get why anyone bothers arguing or trying to string together stuff from HL1 when it's all nonsensical bullshit made up for HL2
It's really something that the first is a very American game set in Nevada about monsters in an over the top research lab. And the sequel is about overthrowing a borderline unrelated alien occupation in Eastern Europe. I genuinely think it worked out super well but it's just such a strange sequence.
What a homosexual take.
The developers clearly intended for the events of HL1 to be larger than they appear in the game itself - HL1's ending is impossibly cryptic and there was clearly always gonna be a sequel that followed up on it.
Whether the Combine was something they had in mind back then or if they wrote them around the first game is another story, but that's irrelevant anyway.
Aside from one super capable scientist in an orange hazard armor slipping in the back door with incredible luck and timing, why would he think humanity would be a valuable ally? Xen was thrashing HECU.
Because he knows that the Combine are so large that you can‘t do jack to stop them.
>"Multiversal" invader
>Never shows feats besides city level
The more Black folk overhyping combine, the less convinced i am to the whole shtick, was there any source their own their suppose "multiversal" feats?
The idea is the combine invasion force is just fricked up compared to half life 2. Its like when the 7 hour war happened they just outnumbered the earths force to a comedic level and what they have left on earth is basically a skeleton crew and cut off from the homeworld which is how rebels even stand a chance.
So it's invasion by masses then
Continent tier, take it and leave
Imagine the Gonarch alien from Half life 1 that needed twenty plus rockets to put down. Now Imagine an army of that with mounted super plasma guns and artillery. Striders for humanity are dangerous threats. For the universal union they are sentry dogs. Combine invading forces most likely had a better version of Freeman's suit but made for combat.
>I-imagine buiding size, b-but many
Yawwnn, Give me something cool like planet buster or something, Invasion is such lame trope
>doesn't get the fact that having a dyson sphere means planet busters are easy to make and use
>use a planet buster when it's more beneficial to annex the planet for resources and tech
anon
Yeah, for being fricking "Multiversal" Threat, They're fricking lame by sucking planet dry instead whole fricking galaxy
you seem like you're about 14 brah
They're content to proceed at their own pace, you shouldn't presume their size necessarily equals extreme consumption tendency in crudest ways possible.
Galaxies are around 3,000 - 300,000 light years, and our galaxy that's 100,000 light years wide has around 400 billion - 3.2 trillion planets, and the Combine may lack FTL travel outside of portals so they have to travel the slow way, so they need to manage the harvesting and processing of every planet they're sucking up. Harvesting even thousands of planet's resources is still managing a shitload of mass, and if near-peer civilizations are also limited to sub-light speeds, there's no rush to harvest literally everything all at once.
If anything the combine forces benefit from long term subjugation as it means more troops
do you have donkey brains or what?
Combine isn't a race or a faction, it's a process. It's a chain of entropy. There's no clear leader of the combine, no clear origin or clear goal, it's all just an incomprehensibly huge "empire" constantly consuming and assimilating. The process of fighting the combine successfully is effectively becoming them, to the point that you're indistinguishable from any other alien "combine" race mercilessly harvesting planets and enslaving races.
>it's valve
It's interesting that beating the Nihilanth probably hurt Earth's chances.
If the Nihilanth took over Earth, after the Combine show up and predictably slaughter everyone, there could be controllers and grunts that would help a lot with the resistance down the road.
Depending on how things play out, the Nihilanth could've taken Breen's position in 2 and give his own Nihilcasts with his shitty slow way of speaking.
>17... welcome to city 17
>Chosen... you have chosen or have been chosen
4) The long game is more important than the short game, and not necessarily the order of things either.
The defeat of the combine happened *when* it was possible. When their pants were down. They were baited. The Earth was bait. They are the competition in the way. It was all part of the plan.
Combine didn't even exist in Half-life, it was just phoned into Half-life 2
I think he assumed that humanity wouldn't just accept him as a refugee and would experiment on him like they experimented on pretty much everything they found on Xen, but the planet was nicer than Xen and undiscovered by Combine, so he hoped to quickly wipe out humanity and close the portal before Combine would discover either Xen or Earth and get cozy on Earth.
Or maybe Combine made him so afraid of any existence outside of his control that he simply wanted to eliminated any witnesses of his existence.
The Combine is The Truth
Assuming he wasn't a combine asset to begin with why would he? They fricking steamrolled the planet in hours, if Xen couldn't do something similar they should've left asap which is why i always assumed they were indeed glowBlack folk for the combine
He'd be fine with it if humanity just submitted and accepted the role of being his bottom b***h.
Humanity wanted to top tho.
Combine 3powerful5him+humanity
humanity are ants compared to the combine dude. He just wanted a safe haven and running over a few anthills to get it was a natural decision.
Because GMAN and the US government wanted to take xen over. They didn’t know that doing so would result in earth being taken over by the combine
because even before the incident human scientists were going to xen and capturing creatures and experimenting with them, almost the same way as the combine plus, when the invation happened the first thing that humans did was shoot them
What did they mean by making a boss called the "gonarch" that is literally a walking ballsack?
Probably the same thing Mr. Friendly would've meant if it didn't get cut. pun not intended
My question is
Where did the Alien Grunts go? Did they actually avoid enslavement by the Combine?
They’re artificial beings based on Cory biology. You destroy a factory making them in Interloper.
I thought those were just clones of the OG race
They were always meant to be bio weapons even from their concept. They're produced in the factory. They're stored in the capsules that they pop out of being hauled around.
The only inconsistency is the thornet gun. They were supposed to shoot them out of their own limb but then they made the weapon for the player and stuck them with it. The first agrunt you see still shoots thornets but doesn't wield the thing that launches them.
That's Controllers, the ones that fly.
Planned expiration. They are artificial.
>The Truth.... you can ne-
*BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM*
GET EXTINCT GET EXTINCT GET EXTINCT GET EXTINCT GET EXTINCT GET EXTINCT GET EXTINCT GET EXTINCT
lel
> From *BLAM BLAM* to *PLAP PLAP*
Galunga.
>Valve fricked up a patch and now all the vorts have the Easter egg vort dialog in their interacts
>Also using the steam overlay integration of the commands forces you into controller mode so the weapon dropdown menu gets removed, making changing the weapons ass
>Rebinding all the commands to keyboard buttons prevents entering the controller mode, but then the ladders completely stop working with the analog stick input
no re
haha
I cheesed this fight making the teleporting orbs dissapear by hidding behind the pillars. Anyone else did that?
Frick those platforming sections with tough enemies.
i'm pretty sure that's what you're supposed to do
So what's gman's problem
He’s just an interdimensional wagie who really enjoys his job
He is all-powerful but can't interfere directly. You'd be an butthole too.
>all-powerful
>but
He is an actor for competing powers against the Combine. Humanity isn't his concern beyond what they can help him accomplish, nor are Vortigaunts or the other sentient lives under Union subjugation. He's not likely even the true puppet master, but he can tug the right strings to set his own machinations in motion to serve his employer's interests. A few notable individuals prove themselves capable of being uniquely useful, and so he tugs their strings, and uses them to meet his unknowable ends. The fact that such an entity, as powerful as he seems to be, isn't even calling the shots, shows just how high the powerscaling goes in the multiverse. The Union itself may just be serving their purpose to a higher authority.
I like the G-man a lot more when he were more removed from the plot. Like, he can show up and influence shit, he can even be cheeky and 'human' in his own ayy lmao way, but him getting directly involved with Vance family drama was a meh turn for me.
I want to pretend the dude's got a million other things going on and Freeman's story is just his 5 o'clock appointment. Everything from ep 2 forward makes it clear he's personally invested in what happens and that's kinda lame.
Every worker needs to show results. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the Vances are clearly integral to whatever plot he serves, so he applies the necessary grease. Also, he can manipulate time and space. He could suspend people indefinitely, or be in any place at any time, and so is likely manipulating many others similarly, but we get the micro, humanity-centric perspective in the game. There's clearly a high level of coordination in what he does; he probably even had a purpose behind being "caught" if anything. Arguably he's more interesting a character than any other in the series, not just for the mystery around him, but the bigger picture he sees an serves in the multiverse. There's clearly a scale that we can only speculate in which such a being is somewhere in the middle, potentially above the Union, but certainly below some unknown third parties.
>he probably even had a purpose behind being "caught"
That's obvious, to recruit Alyx and for Eli to prepare for "unforseen consequences" which they had a deal back from HL1 when Gman ported Alyx out from Black Mesa, her mother sadly wasnt part of the deal.
>Everything from ep 2 forward makes it clear he's personally invested in what happens and that's kinda lame.
Being annoyed at stuff not going his way 100% is probably natural for someone whos used to just hopping in and out of time and space.
he's an interdimensional cia Black person
>the combine is so powerful that they defeated all of earth's forces in 7 hours using inconceivable technology!
>play hl2
>all the combine have fairly understandable and advanced technology but nothing too crazy
>they're almost identical to humanity in firepower, even
what the frick? how did the combine take over earth so quickly? am i missing something?
Yeah, the majority of their army was pulled out to do invasions on other planets. You're fighting an occupation force.
And it's not that they won a 7-hour war. Breen just surrendered on the planet's behalf because he was the only one who could communicate with them.
>Yeah, the majority of their army was pulled out to do invasions on other planets. You're fighting an occupation force.
that doesn't answer why they don't have the incredible technology that everybody says they do when they're on earth
>Breen just surrendered on the planet's behalf because he was the only one who could communicate with them.
how was he able to be the only person that could communicate with them?
But they do. All the shit you see from them bioweaponary, energy weapons, roller mines, citadels, the interdimensional teleporters, the fricking suppression field? Do you even phantom the tech that remotely stops the whole city and its surroundings from breeding? And keep in mind you're essentially Australia to GB, this is like a musket and a canon beating the shit out of aboriginals.
Keep in mind that Earth has been suffering an invasion from Xen too when Combine attacked.
>how was he able to be the only person
No one knows. Which is why it's sometimes inferred that he knew what was going to happen when he ordered the experiment.
>All the shit you see from them bioweaponary, energy weapons, roller mines, citadels, the interdimensional teleporters, the fricking suppression field? Do you even phantom the tech that remotely stops the whole city and its surroundings from breeding?
seriously? that's it?
i thought they would have had some insane technology that people today couldn't even imagine, like some device that, when deployed, makes every single person on a continent become unconscious or something
>No one knows. Which is why it's sometimes inferred that he knew what was going to happen when he ordered the experiment.
dr. breen was in charge of black mesa and ordered the resonance cascade experiment? i never knew that
he's probably related to the g-man in some way by the sounds of it
>that doesn't answer why they don't have the incredible technology that everybody says they do when they're on earth
They do, but, since the majority of actual alien forces aren't needed here (save for some synths, which are more like drones) they also don't need their best tech here. Humanity are less than caveman tier primitives to them, and the damage they're capable of is inconsequential. The single thing humanity has to offer of interest is localized teleportation tech, for which the Union invests whatever force they think is necessary to capture. Otherwise, aside from a portal into our universe, Earth isn't uniquely resource rich or significant to invest anything substantial.
>how was he able to be the only person that could communicate with them?
He was administrator of Black Mesa, very qualified and intelligent, and likely had access to channels of communication, or unique insight in how to communicate with them due to his pedigree and position.
Efficancy. Humanity oppresses and occupies its own well enough with our own tech. Just repurpose and use it against them to occupy the planet using a global force of brainwashed soldiers and some dregs from other worlds on off world reassignment
You're fighting the fricking Dirlewagner Brigade of the Combine. The synths and grubs who failed on some assignment and are now on off world reassignment.
It's like how Germany used the Dirlewagner Brigade. A Brigade made up of criminals, the mentally insane, and those too stupid to do regular tasks in a regular division
That's why Hunanity is kicking their ass
head canon, the slugs are just local reps. unless hl: alyx states otherwise, there's no indication they're lackies. freeman is being supported by g-man, so if anything they're getting their ass kicked by g-man.
The reason humanity wasn't instanuked was so they could 'ascend' as in, become part of the combine. The striders and the scanners and all other ayy lmaos were probably races like humanity that got annexed. Likewise, humanity will become just like them in the form of soldiers and stalkers. What we're seeing in HL2 is the 'test run'. If augmented humans are good enough at keeping peace on earth, we can use them.
The invasion proper was all ayy lmaos.
I genuinely don't get why volvo cut this from Alyx. People have been BEGGING for an insight at the invasion forever and we were so fricking close to having an official look of it.
?si=b-1261DsbOOn1PEy
>The striders and the scanners and all other ayy lmaos were probably races like humanity that got annexed.
so if all of the different species within the combine are not combine, then what exactly ARE the combine? is there a "core" combine species that all other species take orders from?
You should dig into the lore and the Breengrub stuff. Basically the Combine is just the human branch government of the Universal Union, which is actually an unknown species that took over another species that had immense psychic power and used their bodies as hosts and their abilities for their own purposes. The advisors you see in the form of the grubs are the bodies of that subjugated species with the minds of the Union species. Their true and original form is unknown. They invade other universes/dimensions and planets to harvest resources and exploit the local lifeforms, sentient or otherwise, into forms to which they're most useful to the Union. The Combine is to the Universal Union as a franchise store is to a corporation. It also refers to how humanity is being "combined" with the Union and shaped into whatever forms they're most useful, being combined with the Union's biotechnology.
>what exactly ARE the combine? is there a "core" combine species that all other species take orders from?
No. And if there even was an original species that started 'expanding' it's long since been bastardized into something unrecognizeable through billions of years.
Even the grubs, that look like they act like Breen's 'bosses' are just another subjugated species that got turned into glorified memory sticks if you take Breengrub, Laidlaw's funny twitter project as canon.
Half-Life barely digs into it, because Valve is autistic about the gameplay and the lore is pretty much an afterthought and set dressing, but the combine is supposed to be incomprehensibly big. If you've ever dealt with bureaucracy, like on a public service or something, imagine that clusterfrick where nobody really knows anything and just doing what they think they're supposed to be doing on a cosmic scale.
The food the combine give people is a good example of that. Some alien waaaaay across different universes got an order that an entire species needs food. He gave a cursory glance at the data provided to him from another ayy lmao, both of whom have never seen what a human even looks like, about what nutrients humans need and what their 'natural' food is, and just made this.
>imagine that clusterfrick where nobody really knows anything and just doing what they think they're supposed to be doing on a cosmic scale.
Oh man, it's just like Valve but on gamedev scale before they even knew it. What biting satire.
>that one poster who thinks he's an insider
yikes
Not even VNNing here. But isn't it just all but confirmed that in 2010s Valve just lost all drive and never could lift a project off the ground because no one could settle for one concept for more than a couple of years?
Nah. Valve's consciously like that. It's not a clusterfrick when you can afford to frick around in fun little experiments that go nowhere with few of your buds and never deliver results. My take is that if steam got nuked tomorrow, like, the CCP lobbies it out so only Epic can be used in the US and EU or something, and suddenly valve needed money to pay the gas for Gabe's yacht, they could pump out games like they did again because judging by everything they made after 2020, they still have the 'spark' literally no AAA studio has had in 15 years.
>and suddenly valve needed money to pay the gas for Gabe's yacht
kek
>Valve is autistic about the gameplay and the lore is pretty much an afterthought and set dressing
>and the lore is pretty much an afterthought and set dressing
with the amount of theories and discussions on the topic, that doesn't seem true
>also that pic
mm-mmm sloppa
Lore is there, it's just subtle.
>Once seal is broken, consume within 9000 days
There's nothing that could be described as sustenance in that bar is there.
Technically speaking modified hardtack could last that long
Likely it is Combine OW that deals with domestic issues. Combine cannot have inefficient human bureaucratic foolishness.
>and we were so fricking close to having an official look of it
>official
The story and the setting people are discussing here were not made by volvo corporate logo, they were made by a person, who left that company many years before they even started making HL:Alyx. He released writing he had upon leaving, there is no indication that wrote anything else.
People here are basically discussing unfinished novel author of which is as good as dead in regards to it ever being finished. Fanfic written by different people will have absolutely nothing to do with it, even if it would come out under the same logo.
Are you trying to say I won't be hired to write HL3 after Gabe sees me discussing Half-life lore on Ganker?
Combine is the people's liberation army and the black mesa resistance team is the clerical elite of tibet
And even then the Combine Overwatch in 2 wasn't the first iteration of the process, which was a neat insight Alyx provided. The Ordinal is the only one that's truly like the soldiers in HL2, all of the other Combine units in Alyx seem to have considerably more personality retained.
The Vault incident may have been what pushed them to make the majority of the transhuman force to be like the Ordinals.
I'm still questioning to this day if the Vault Incident actually happened in HL2's timeline.
Hard to say but I think yes. Eli obviously has immediately intuited something has changed in the narrative at the end of Alyx.
that games was great but the had to ruin the story with their marvel tier bullshit time travel ending, i will always be mad at that game just for that ending
One of the most lauded aspects of the game made you mad? It's not even as simple as time travel. The game's narrative is still complex, there is no clearly defined moment where the "cracks" from this change appear. Did he take an Alyx from a single specific permutation of the world? Is alyx still a member of the rest of the story of the other games? It doesn't say, and doesn't need to. They will absolutely answer these questions with whatever they do next, but its a much better cliffhanger than what obviously left them in a creative corner for 13 years originally.
Is bullshit regardless because they retconned one of the most iconic and hard hitting deaths in vidya for a cheap MCU cliffhanger.
Lick my nuts valve
And were obviously stuck due to that shock value. The legends of the started/aborted iterations for a third game are infamous. Iconic? Yes, but painted themselves into a corner they couldn't get out from. Alyx ended in a way that was cool, played to the strengths of their most mysterious character with one of his best speeches, and revitalized they ending of the main game. Eli's death was tragic and shocking, but was it done for the sake of that shock and left them with nowhere to go? Now they have a road to follow.
Epistle 3 showed a perfectly fine way to continue. The game didn't revolve around Eli, most of HL games are spent alone. It was an important point in developing Alyx which has been robbed now.
This reeks of talentless hack writers too scared to write a story with new characters. It's basically the exact same cliffhanger too except they swapped Eli for Alyx. Frick Alyx, ruined a perfectly fine ending
Besides how the hell is the plot gonna work?
The main important thing is saving the Earth by finding the Borealis. Once you handle that though you gotta go hunt down Gman and get Alyx back.
The whole Combine showdown we've been waiting 16 years for is just going to be a subplot
Exactly, G-man was a morally neutral character, willing to flip and manipulate events on both sides, now he's in direct opposition to the player. That shouldn't be the focus when the combine are still players in this game, thats like HL3 material.
>That ending still happened. Eli still died
No it fricking didn't, the character being brought back and the consequences of that event have been replaced with another retroactively. The writers weren't interested in the story being told and resurrection is a one way ticket to shit writing. I bet you clapped with that awful MCU cliffhanger too.
>G-man was a morally neutral character
He caused the resonance cascade
He also helps stop the Combine, Xen and opposing force aliens despite causing it in the first place. He's not good or evil, he's self-interested and hence morally neutral.
Alyx still does that but puts him in direct opposition to the player as opposed to his imposing indifference when he lets Gordan go in ep 2
self interest at the cost of billions of lives is pretty evil you moron
>The writers weren't interested in the story being told and resurrection is a one way ticket to shit writing. I bet you clapped with that awful MCU cliffhanger too.
I see way too many people legitimately clamoring for episode 3 to end with Gordon going back in time to undo the resonance cascade
That'd be such a lame copout
>It was an important point in developing Alyx which has been robbed now.
I don't think so. She moved time itself to save her dad. She was given the ultimate opportunity, and the unexpected consequences of that choice are yet to be seen.
>'s basically the exact same cliffhanger too except they swapped Eli
But it isn't. That ending still happened. Eli still died. Then a splinter happened, somehow G-Man was drawn into the Vault. Trapped with time to think. He offered a young Alyx, a person he knows will do great things and that he has personal interest in, a choice.
What the frick are you talking about. Eli's death had nothing to do with the failures of developing a new game, which are well documented and all boil down to various practical reasons related to game development. We already have insight into the direction they wanted to take the story without Eli. Stop with this headcanon bullshit.
>Eli's death had nothing to do with the failures of developing a new game
Speculation on my part but I feel that routing out dealing with the Death of Eli caused significant hurdles in development.
NTA, but I don't see how. Gordon is a mute, so that fixes most of the problem. As far as Alyx is concerned, you have her give a few lines of dialogue, come up with a reason for her and Gordon to split up for a bit, and move on. You could also set Episode 3 a little bit after Episode 2 to give them time to "grieve"... especially since it has also been so long between games for the players
They could choose to haphazardly continue Laidlaw story without Liadlaw railraoding themselves into a framework no one could possibly have any passion for or they could retcon Episode 3's set-up and do their own thing. It's time to choose.
I love how smug GMan is when he says you wouldn't need all that to imprison Gordon Freeman
pure cope, im really fricking sick of this multiverse nonesense, because now nothing matters since now we now they can just change time, im fricking calling it now the vortigaunts are also going to be able to do some stupid shit like that and thats how they defeat the combine or something lame like that
We don't even know what effect that is going to have on the actual HL2 timeline (and we'll probably never know kek). I don't know why you're so quick to trust GMan. Maybe it's a lie. Maybe Eli is alive, but only in other timelines. Maybe the whole thing is a monkey's paw and Eli dies 10 minutes into the next game anyway as a "correction" of Gman's interference
Then he'll get resurrected in half life Alyx 2 by an even younger Alyx. The whole thing is just Gman's carefully orchestrated plan of making a harem.
>The whole thing is just Gman's carefully orchestrated plan of making a harem.
I'm going to frick that old man?
I hate underage morons that think all time travel is marvel
get a new hate outlet zoomie
Wow the writing post-Laidlaw is just not there.
The combine is a gigantic multidimensional and bureaucratic empire, for this example let's say they are like the US. Imagine from their perspective Earth is like the Sentinel Island (we're actually even more primitive from their perspective). They send a basic force consisting of a US marine platoon with air support and they're able to conquer the island in 7 hours. After subjugating the locals, they determine that the marines are too expensive and advanced to keep them guarding the local cavemen, so instead they recruit some of the locals to enforce their rule, providing them with some scraps of tech (think some shitty high point guns and aliexpress kit). The combine Overwatch on Earth consists of those locals with shitty gear.
>american soldiers
>conquering the natives in their home jungle environment
>within 7 hours
i hope you understand how silly this analogy sounds
You get the point. If you want a more apt analogy think of Blitzkrieg if the germans had super soldiers, unlimited resources and nukes
>all the combine have fairly understandable and advanced technology but nothing too crazy
I guess it's the same reason prison guards don't run around with guns. It causes more harm than good. Bonk the guard on the head, and suddely the prisoners have a gun.
But now imagine a super space gun that can kill a whole army in a second. Wouldn't want that to get in the hand of the humans. Better to be underequipped than risk your shit getting into the hands of prisoners
Also: gameplay, duh
your mouth looks like an anus, I'm going to kill you now goodbye
Mmmm mouth pussy
How does the Combine punish the Overwatch with off world reassignment if they don't have any teleportation tech or spaceships?
They have teleportation, I think you may be confused by their lack of local teleportation without the use of Xen
They have inter-universal teleportation but not within the same universe, for which they do likely have normal ships; of course different universes may abide by different physics, so it's impossible to speculate how that would look. Regardless, off-world to them may actually mean off world in our universe with ships, or more likely it also means trans-dimenional/universal. One of their other worlds (or simply a station or depot) is visible through the portal before city 17 is destroyed.
But who are the original species of the combine?
They probably don't know either.
YOUR MOTHER!
advisors, striders, gunships and dropships, crab and mortar synths and MAYBE combine elite synths and combine super soldiers
>advisors, striders, gunships and dropships, crab and mortar synths and MAYBE combine elite synths and combine super soldiers
Advisors are just vessels, the rest are other subjugated and transmuted species, and the last two are just transmuted humans.
All of those are conquered and enslaved species.
Why of course it's humans because we're special
oh I though you meant what were the pre 7 hour members of combine, nevermind
these cute lil fellas
Unknown. The grubs in
were taken over by the original species and put their minds into grub bodies. True form of the originals isn't known.
Headcrabs.
Aborted fetuses are Gods in other dimensions.
No joke I had Ganker open one day while my mom was visiting and she saw this image, or one just like it, and said "aww that's so cute! Look at the little babies!" and I was like "mom, look closely..."
She didn't get it until I explained it to her.
also my mom decided to tell me afterward that she had 2 abortions before me
How the frick did the third abortion fail
>I lived b***h
what a nice thing to say to you, it clearly must have been clawing at her conscience for decades until she just blurts it out over a picture.
truly a women moment
I don't know why you'd ever share Ganker shitposts with your mother let alone break one down for her.
Off yourself.
>some obese basement-dwelling neckbeard autist specifically went out of his way to "explain" a Bing AI-generated slop tradcath shitpost image about dead babies to his mother
Man this is some serious fricking projection. Just how terrible is your relationship with your mother that the thought of explaining something to her fills you with such bile?
Normal person reaction:
>uh yeah sure mom
(Or just not being moronic enough to let your mom see Ganker AI shitposts in the first place)
(You)r reaction:
>MMMMOOOOOOOMMMMM YOU DON'T UNDERSTAAAAAAND ACKSHYUALLY THE IMAGE IS ABOUT ALL THE ABORTIONS THAT IMPURE DEGENERATE SNOWFLAKE ROASTIE HAD SEE IT'S TOTALLY FRICKIN EPIC I USE IT TO OWN THE LIBS ALL THE TIME ON Ganker UGH GOD THIS IS JUST LIKE THE TIME I SHOWED YOU GOATSE AND HAD TO EXPLAIN IT TO YOU NOW WHERE ARE MY CHICKEN TENDIES
chill down dude
zased.... so fvking based
Man anyone remembers that chapter of Berserk where Guts kills the ghost babies?
So who hired Gman to plop Gordon down in City 17?
A couple threads ago someone brought up the theory it was Eli and I'm starting to buy into it. The whole taking Alyx as payment thing really gives it some credibility, seeing as even back as far as Episode 1 the "Alyx usurping Gordon" plotline seemed to be taking the stage, even before Epistle and Alyx VR. Though at the same time with Eli being intimately familiar with Gman and how he operates, it's not totally out of the picture that he made a deal with him to get Alyx out of Black Mesa which would also lead to her getting shanghai'd.
Tourist here, so was Half Life: Alyx an elaborated retcon device?
How many of the writers changed?
not really. Alyx writers are pretty respectful to the old lore written by Laidlaw. They only added time travel to Alyx because Laidlaw did it first during the opening of Episode 1.
Gman's employer is Valve. He's a meta level being like Featherine and his prime directive is to make a good story for the players so Valve can sell more copies.
well tell him to do his job better, he's been taking too man sick years
>Featherine
Anon, why the FRICK are you making a Umineko reference in a Half-Life thread?
🙂
They butchered my boy in black mesa source
*black mesa
The fight covers for moronic redesign. It was probably harder to make him look wrinkly in source.
They just interpreted him different like the rest of Xen, on purpose. Valve proved they have their definitive look for Xen with Alyx.
Nihilanth looks a bit like a mutant combine advisor. It's also a slave to the combine.
His personality is much better due to the fight imo. Lil baby is sperging out, unleashes everything he can and genuinely feels like a cornered slave desperately fighting for his life.
I never got that message. Looks like an amateur rough draft they shat out because they ran out of time, and it's an amateur project.
Really? Bullet hell attacks, him constantly screaming and opening portal to crush you with shit, completely unaware that there are supplies in the rooms he's ripping from Earth, terrain manipulation. That's much more "all out" than orbs and teleporting orbs from og. He is much more desperate in the remake even if he looks like shit.
I was only speaking about the quality of the model. The added personality was fine, but I like the wise eldritch horror mystique of the original guy
I agree
wtf were they thinking? How do they justify this awful as frick redsign?
BM did a lot of things right but imo they missed the mark on Xen, even if it was much more fun overall and had some nice visuals, it didn't capture quite the same creepy hostility of original Xen imo
Original Xen made me feel depressed and isolated, BM Xen made me excited to just keep exploring more and more, made me feel like I was in this cool alien world.
yeah, it may sound weird but I think original Xen was going for exactly that sort of feeling of desolation and I really liked it. one of my favorite atmospheres in games is still when you get to that factory-like area (just before nihilanth I think?). it's really difficult to describe, it's like there are recognizable futuristic patterns buried under weird growths, kind of like the place was repurposed or really ancient, and the whole vibe is just very cold and evil and alien. I'd really take that over Avatar glowy jungle any day
its been said before but that's because black mesa Xen looks like an alien world, whereas original Xen was supposed to be the result of alien dimensions colliding thanks to portals frickery, nothing but extremophiles should thrive in such hostile dimensional broken environment
>missed the mark on Xen
they hit it out of the park with xen and no amount of contrarian puritanism is going to ever convince anyone that was not the case. Original xen was smashed together in something like two months while trying to jump start multiplayer mode on the side as demanded by contract with sierra. And it shows. HL1 might as well ended with the gordon jumping into the xen portal and that would have been a more satisfying ending to the game then the beta level jank xen ended up being
those posts are about aesthetic choices, not gameplay. in fact the post you linked even agrees with your overall point and specifically says the issue is not with gameplay. I mean, it doesn't get more contrarian than agreeing with a post and then complaining about something else anyway, right?
Atmosphere is more important than gameplay. There, I said it
kinda true
The guys in charge of Xen were more interested in building their portofolio, Aliens worlds are excellent to show how creative you are, so they overhauled xen and the nihilanth
so creative that they literally just made xen from an alien looking landscape to a generic "alien" landscape but with a few more plants and this that are just earth ants but an unusual color
you shut your prostitute mouth about space baby
They hired on the wall worm guy and then the wall worm guy used it to shill his software at Autodesk. It was necessary or Xen would never be finished, bsp can't do organic shapes easily and Worldcraft/Hammer had no tooling for it.
I wonder who actually arted and animated their Nihilanth, because my assumption is that theirs was left over from early BM: Source days and they never remade him because that guy left the project at some point. He was done early and they either didn't have a character artist to remake him or they just couldn't be arsed.
>I wonder who actually arted and animated their Nihilanth, because my assumption is that theirs was left over from early BM: Source days and they never remade him because that guy left the project at some point. He was done early and they either didn't have a character artist to remake him or they just couldn't be arsed.
That kinda reminds me of a strange thing about the HEV Suit
Originally they had a completely different voice actor for it. She sounds pretty good she actually died about a year after Black Mesa came out
In the final game, they used the same guy who voiced the HECU and just pitched his voice up for some asinine reason. Once you know that, you can never not notice how the retail HEV really does sound like a guy's voice pitched
Is that an ad-hoc'ed light bulb screw with tacked on gizmos there?
heh
Well, they won't arrest me if I tell them that I, hah, TURNED OFF THE LIGHT, HAHA
Foap
I feel like they missed the mark on the jaundiced-Frankenstein vibe of the original, it looks like he's sitting on the machine instead of the base being inserted into him with the stitching to make sure his skin doesn't rip apart from having a machine shoved up his ass
I'll take the black mesa version
It's an actual boss fight
a 5 minute fight which involves slogging through their 2 and a half hour """"""""""redesign"""""""" of Xen so worth it
It's a new experience and definitely worth it.
I really enjoyed that random shit from Black Mesa teleports and drops to the ground throughout the fight. It really gave it the feeling that some serious shit's going down and that hopefully there's still an earth you can return to.
>the lambda core team teleport in a case full of snacks with a note wishing gordon good luck in interloper
>i need falshy stuff happening at all time or else i forget what is happening
I didn't say any of that but whatever. I just liked the spectacle which a final boss should be.
Absolutely ruined.
> second version has less eyes, no mouth anus, no forehead wrinkles, no chest staples, no nipples and doesn't, skin color is off, doesn't have the sockets-for-eyes, tech looks more wolfenstien than alien
Its a pretty model but like
where are the nipples
That about covers it. The thing that bugs me is the mouth/face is clearly a reference or at least inspired by Flukeman on the Xfiles and it has a much fleshier appearance and complexion that makes it more in line with HL2 assets like the Stalker, which may have been intentional. But those two things specifically make it look like a giant baby, which may have been how some people interpreted the original, but I don't think was the intent.
I will say it looks much better in context with lighting from
Still not perfect, but gets across the idea of it clow3r to the original much better than just a ripped model.
Did I miss anything?
Nipples. The one on the right has no nipples
Yea that's true thanks. Old model has nipples.
buff pecs vs manbreasts
does gaben know about the remake? did he ever state his opinion on it? (or any other og hl devs)
i think casali liked it
They're definitely aware. Any that have talked about it have probably just given the usual "it's nice to see the community do stuff" answer, since even if any of the devs dislike it, they're not going to be so crass as to publicly express that.
Casali in his replay of Half-Life on youtube actually pauses for a sec in Questionable Ethics where Black Mesa added the surprise ambush, so there's that too.
Probably, who knows what he thinks of it though. As far as any public opinions they've shown, Valve overall seems to like Black Mesa.
god why'd they have to drop the ball so hard on xen?
the earth levels were near perfect! they had their flaws of course but they really felt like an HD version of 1
I like it. The Xen life in the Quarantine Zone seems to be primarily the most virulent and dangerous growth that can't be easily terminated by incineration teams. I'm fine with Xen being a verdant and hostile ecosystem filled with the garbage of all dimensions.
wait I only read the source part and I thought you meant HL:S, lol
also want to say the obvious that his Black Mesa author completely missed the point.
I thought Black Mesa was really good for a fan project, but I still wish Valve had the developmental capacity to remake the first game and for it to be a good remake.
Valve is never remaking anything. I can't imagine anyone there wasting time on repurposing ideas from 20 years ago to create the same game only this time with sauce 2.
factors that matter:
>demand for a remake
>development costs
>projected revenue
factors that don't matter at all:
>we made this 20 years ago
here's your voter registration card and your sex offender registration card for your 17 year old girlfriend, welcome to the adult world
Then how did HL:S get made?
not a remake
valve doesn't remake games except new versions of CS since it's MP and it's a cash cow. the factors of the creator's of half life's intentions matter a whole lot to what gets made. zoomers really can't get enough remakes huh? you got black mesa get over it.
HL:S isn't a remake, remaster, or anything. It was a proof of concept to show that you could port GoldSrc engine based games to Source Engine and that they would function.
Why is he all stapled up like that? What happened to the alien grunts? Why does his head open up?
what if the combine's goal was to enslave the vorts and so they took whatever Nihilanth was and twisted it into something that passed for one of them. GMan is their human equivalent, and his name is Gordon Freeman
g man = government man (fed). zoomey/ESL-er
The whole thing is this world eating borg civilization playing 5D chess to get world bending powers from interdimensional semen
Excuse me, whose semen?
Gordon's semen, in the flesh
>be taken out from stasis just to be milked
wiener? Doctor Freeman?
Is it really wiener sucking time again? It seems... as if... you only just sucked.
You've sucked a lot of wiener in a small time span... You've sucked so much in fact that, I've received some interesting offers for your blowjobs. Ordinarily I wouldn't contemplate them but... you suck extraordinary wiener, hmm? *inhales* Rather than offer you the illusion of free semen, I will take the liberty of cumming for you... if... and when your wiener sucking time comes round again.
I do apologize for what must seem to you an arbitrary suck, Doctor Freeman *cums internally* I trust, that it will all make sense to you in the course of... well...
sucking my wiener
in the meantime...
This is when I get off.
Kinda off topic here but does anyone else think that the new Cloverfield lore copies Half Life too much?
>Old Clover lore:
>the organism is an ancient lifeform that was awakened by a deepsea drilling operation sponsored by the Targruto company which was harvesting a substance called "Seabed Nectar" for use in its trademark soft drinks
>Additional note: The creature also has extra mouths on its arms that it uses to vacuum people up, though the scene that shows how they work was cut from the film.
>New Clover lore:
>an accident with a particle accelerator onboard the Cloverfield space station causes an infinite number of parallel realities to collide causing untold chaos across the entire multiverse
>the creature presumably crawled out of a rift between dimensions but is unable to find its way back
So it seems.
The lore becomes spooky within esoteric interpretation.
>multiverse
i hate this word so much
Mere pop culture misusage. Actual theory is a valid one. But in a sense, the word is somewhat crude, universe already encompasses all in it, in a sense, and also carries select theological connotations.
It's not hack-ish per se, but, well...
not really
There's some slight similarities to the resonance cascade but that's about it.
Half Life already shamelessly stole from other things, all that matter is if it's well executed
Black Mesa is the intended experience. Due to technological limitations, half life 1 wasn't satisfactory, so they fixed it. Black Mesa was the result.
That's just plain not true.
>technological limitations
For the longest time their human grunts were just reskinned Combine soldier AI and they were fricking lame. After 10 years they fixed them, but half of their aliens are still borderline broken, but to them it's "good enough"
They're both good
I replay both Half Life and Black Mesa at least twice a year. I enjoy both versions greatly. I think the reason for BM's success is that they didn't copy the game 100% but instead focused on the "feeling" of how fricked the entire incident is. It definitely feels more grim and unsettling seeing the people and the place break down over the course of the game in Black Mesa and the wordier scientists and security guards sell the "end of the world, but nobody realized it yet" feeling well.
Also new Xen is fine, even if it's a little bit too much. But the opening parts of Xen feel great, seeing all the human equipment around feels neat and the research outposts were my favorite. The HEV suit voice freaking out not sure if user is dead or dying for THOSE guys was sick as hell.
Freeeeeeeeeeeeeemannnnnnnnn
>replaying episode 1
>notice how eli is subtly surprised gordon's back
considering that eli knows about gman, it seems like he expected after everything was done with breen, gordon would just disappear potentially for decades more.
i wonder how gman intended the combine situation to go during the episodes since gordon wasn't supposed to be able to help at all. without gordon to escort alyx to white forest, the combine surely would've shown up to earth, steamrolled everyone, and nothing would've really gotten accomplished from 2
?t=215
>i wonder how gman intended the combine situation to go during the episodes since gordon wasn't supposed to be able to help at all.
i don't think he cares. the entirety of hl2 was just a contract.
My headcanon that Eli made that contract, because he knew exactly what would happen then Gordon showed up.
if eli did contract him, i assume he monkey pawed him or something. told him gordon would stop dr breen and nothing else.
And he technically did, so G-man kept his part of the deal. But Eli should have read small text under the contract as well.
if Eli has a contract with him is about keeping Alyx alive
I go along with the theory that the humans and the nihilant are mere proxy wars against the combine to keep them distracted, humanity was getting fricked beyond the point of return and Gordon coming back and bringing down the citadel pulled it back from the brink to the "status quo", but since he wasn't supposed to go further and actually deal as much damage as he did you get the unforseen consequences scene and Eli's death that gives every information of the resistance to the combine to balance it out once again.
Now all of that fricks off royally with the new ending.
>i don't think he cares. the entirety of hl2 was just a contract.
Yeah but like, what did you actually accomplish in 2? You help the rebels but they'd get steamrolled after without you.
The only things I can think of is either the client wanted the Combine to be distracted with Earth, or some alien just REALLY wanted Breen dead
4d chess, client knew that Vorts would bring Gordon back
Overthrew one of the main strongholds of the combine (do other cities have Citadels?), took down suppression field and cut off the Combine garrison on Earth from any real reinforcements.
>they woulda been rolled after
They probably didn't expect the covenant to regroup so fast and set up the new Overwatch voice and everything.
Also while we're speculating, if the contract just ended the Citadel woulda gone kerblam way earlier without Captcha and those advisors would not have been able to leave fast enough. Maybe then they wouldn't have been able to regroup and make counter offensives so fast.
>some alien wanted breen dead
Can you imagine if the entire thing was because a slug got sent off the Earth and out of corporate politics spite paid for this
Blew up the Combine's central command hub which included the end point of the combine's teleporter
You destroyed their primary method of interdimensional travel and in the episodes you stopped their backup plan attempt at a superportal.
The real question is why Overwatch didn't request stronger reinforcements once the fighting broke out in City 17 while they still had a portal.
They probably underestimated the threat Freeman's resistance posed. Consider that, aside from mobilizing some synths out the door, everything is relatively calm inside the Citadel until you start tearing things apart.
The C17 resistance had been underground and doing guerilla tactics for most of its existence, and as long as the resistance didn't get into the Citadel it really didn't matter. This assumption was proven to be faulty because Gordon does his thing and kills shitloads of troops and synths right into the front door of the Citadel, and by chance he keeps his weaponry past the security barrier and continues doing his thing inside and all the way to the top. Also, the Nova Prospekt teleporter was destroyed before the Citadel raid, so any reinforcement would have come from other Cities the slow way.
I meant from the Dark Fusion reactor's portal within the Citadel, not Nova Prospekt's.
Its portal starts to open just before we stop Breen from escaping, it's actually where the 2 gunships in the fight come from.
It only took the dark fusion portal about 5 minutes to begin opening, so they can probably pull through some actual reinforcements from it. But as you said, the advisors probably weren't taking the rebels or Freeman seriously until it was too late.
speaking of ep1, this is really autistic but it's really annoying that the chapter titles aren't capitalized like the other ones
its because G-Man ain't around to name the segments of your life
It's really creepy with the only death message for episode 1 because G-Man acts professional and in episode 2 the vortigaunts are mystical, but this is likely just Gordon's titlecase thoughts as the blunt "Alyx Died"
Gordon's personal fail state is as blunt as that
So assuming that HL3 is happening because of HL Alyx's ending, what was the point of retconning the end of Episode 2? Did they write themselves into a corner and just wanted to do something totally different than whatever drafts they may have had from 15 years ago?
Because epistle 3 leak
non-zero chance that gaben did lose his shit over it, if his reaction to the HL leaks were anything to go by
HL leaks may have been orchestrated.
There were issues with HL2 release, more time was needed.
Wait. HL:Alyx events were just Alyx's dream made by G-man, so she was much more agreeable to make a contract? Or was it time travel/pocket dimension? That would explain how Combines were able to catch him.
he let himself get caught to psyop Alyx into get hired. I don't know what or why they did it, everything is speculation with the new ending and there's too much that could be possible to not pull out something out thin air on with every theory
My headcanon is that G-Man allowed allowed Eli to die so he could show it to Alyx in her dream/pocket dimension and trick her into becoming his sex slave. The only thing I'm wondering about rn is what exactly happened to her after she was taken away. Did both of her Ep2 version acquire the memories of her dream version or vice-versa? Because I highly doubt there will be 2 Alyx Vances running around in the next HL.
So, let's think about a few things:
1) The Lambda team had been to and collected specimens from Xen before the resonance cascade. Teleportation had been done already at black mesa in their secret-secret facility.
2) In Endgame we have the line "The border world, Xen, is now under our control thanks to you." In the background we have exploded tanks and dead marine grunts in Xen. We come across neither on our journey to Xen. We can assume that not only had the Lambda team been to Xen for research, but that an expeditionary assault unit had been sent to Xen in the past.
5) "I aM tHe lAsT. i Am tHe LaSt."
The last what? Well, if Xen has been invaded and not the reverse and the boarder world is under control when you destroy him, you can assume there were more and they were killed by the marine forces sent to Xen.
3) While people argue about the canon-ness of OP4, the idea of a nuke going off has been part of the concept since early design documents as shown in Dario Casali's recent videos. Along with cut lines alluding to Freeman's complete destruction of the races in Xen. What could this mean? Did Freeman necessarily kill every Xen creature with his bare hands?
Well, not really. He caused the resonance cascade which sent them all to a radioactive death at Black Mesa, leaving Xen in the hands of the "employers"/government.
We can very easily assume that the Nihilanth, while clearly not a benevolent being as they were a slaver, was acting in self-defense and not against the combine.
He didn't team up with you because it wasn't even a choice.
Perhaps, we humans have reinforcements lying in wait in xen. So, at an opportune time they can return, clear the remaining combine and xen, then reestablish government.
>So, at an opportune time they can return, clear the remaining combine and xen, then reestablish government
The CIA Black Ops showing up towards the end of all this and deposing of the ragtag resistance and establishing firm order upon humanity when they're already so weary of authority would be a great plot twist
I was actually thinking the other day that humans could've theoretically just reproduced normally in Xen as the Supression Field wouldn't reach there so they probably could've made a whole extra generation of humans
Then is becomes Combine vs Human Xen vs 3rd alien empire.
The ending being that the 3rd Alien Confederation is tired of fighting the Combine and they create a device that would stop interdimensional travel, but that would not be beneficial to either Gman or Earth's future.
Every time I play Episode 1 I am pleasantly surprised by it, but every time I didn't play it for a while I remember hating it.
Why is that?
You overdosed on Red >B
Gordon is Earth's version of the Nihilant. He will be the last of the species after the world has long turned inhabitable.
And Chell would be his Eve
You meant jugglers
I wanna see that famous clown show.
Tell me bros...
Whose the Gman?
Gordon STHAP [/SPOILER]
Gabe
Smoking man + Lizard man = G-Man
Everyone were a fan of X-Files back when
I think Gordon could be G-Man's past self
I don't think Gordon is G-Man
Alternatively he is really just Half-Life's CSM.
I particularly like the theory that he is like Dean Stockwell in that one 90s sci fi show
Quantum leap.
>Rise and shine Mr. Freeman
He's like one of those waifu alarm clocks that wakes you up! But Gordon is a trained professional so he prefers that as a wake up instead of a genki OHAYOOOOOO~ alarm type.
> Rise and shine Mister Freeman
> Wake up, sleepyhead
> I'm making waffles, Mister Freeman
>Wake up aaaand, sssmell the ashhhhh. Scented. Candles that I have.... Lit...
It's sandal. wood, Mister Freeman
>you have to eat all the eggs, mr freeman
powerful being that manipulates dimensions like the nihilanth
maybe gmans the nihilanth in disguise
thats why he doesnt like gordon
Ricochet TWOOOOOOOO
An independent contractor who works for the highest bidder.
In universe, he's the equivalent of an office worker for a race so advanced it's magic, he just does whatever maximizes the value out of Earth and the Combine
Narratively, he represents Valve as the outside force that makes sure the games happen and they're interesting by driving the plot
It would be so kino if in EP3 Gman did something seemingly out of line and gotten replaced by an almost identical employee type person with very little to no aknowledgement from the game
> Not alex jones has logged in
I will be forever seething that we didn't get epistle 3
Honestly it sounded underwhelming. For a game series that started between two worlds we've been stuck in the same dystopia for 2 (emphasis on two) long
I wonder what Half Life 3 would've been.
1 and 2 are completely different and it sounded like they wanted to move onto a brand new setting for 3, but with the episodes and the fact we've been in the combine era for 20 years has permanently associated Half Life with the setting from 2.
The original point of Half-Life 2 Episode Three was to finally get us out of that stuck state and leave a blank canvas for Half-Life 3. But because Valve couldn't get their shit together, Half-Life may now forever be stuck as a Combine world.
Combine are far too big to reasonably defeat and game 1 foreshadowed them
The Combine don't have to be beat, they just have to be prevented from re-invading, which is the plot of episode 1, 2 and 3.
>a fricking death star
>not moon sized
>star sized
One thing all fan art misses is that the dyson shpere was supposed to be shaped like the combine logo
Now post Marathon's logo.
>that shape
W-What if the dyson sphere is also a Nicoll-Dysom beam?
it could be a weapon, it could be propulsion for the sphere+sun, who knows
I thought the same looking at the shape. It's pointless unless you're planning on channeling the energy in a direction, and we already know the Combine love to frick over lesser civilizations.
>HL3/HL2:EP3 ends with Gordon riding the Aurora to the Combine's dyson sphere
>the boat is loaded with several thermonuclear explosives
>Combine Harvest starts playing
>music swells once the boat floats into the opening
>you see the enslaved star inside along with several billions of ships and megastructures
>Vorts manage to pull Gordon just before the bombs go off
>the resulting explosion dwarfs the tsar bomba by several levels
>It barely does any damage and accomplishes nothing
>still doesn't know how to blow up a dyson sphere
I mean, can anyone truly know why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?
i regret playing through the episodes
The color of Alyx always emanated this green vomit inducing hue, I never understood the appeal, why do people coom over this chick.
The allure of the exceedingly rare blasian chick is for high intellect individuals only and you clearly don't pass the test.
>The Truth.... you can never. know. the. Truth
May I tell you
Truth, is only perception
From way back
Just look in yourself
This thing makes me sad after learning more about Half-Life 2 lore.
I decided to look this up and enough enough:
https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Nihilanth
> the Nihilanth's homeworld was invaded by the Combine long before the events of Half-Life, prompting the migration and takeover of Xen by the Nihilanth
> It was also said the Nihilanth, the Vortigaunts, and the Alien Grunts were all from the same world.
It was being enslaved by the Combine and it looks like a grotesque monster because it was mutilated and tortured. Whatever his species was, they didn't look like that.
Who do you think the boss of the combine is/looks like? You think it’s some stitched together abomination or just some guy in a suit?
The boss fight would be Gordon driving to Earth as the Combine teleporters are set to explode. Like in Halo
Depends on what you mean by "boss", it's very possible there isn't one individual at the top, just increasing layers of bureaucracy with increasingly more complex species, maybe it's just some giant biotechnology-based planning/optimization machine that takes in data from across the Union and outputs what each branch should be working towards with little agency of its own.
Given the fact slow teleportation and time travel exists. I wouldn't be surprised if Gordon Freeman himself is the boss of the combine.
There is no boss
>The "Combine" is a name for a large organization of different species (including humans) working (or forced to work) together. So asking if the advisors are the combine is like asking if a roman senator is the roman empire. There's no one creature called the Combine.
Dr. Pavel, I'm CIA
ARRRGGGHHHHH GMAN RELEASE US ALREADY
>Gman why have you took all our clothes off?
>No reason haha back into the freezer giiiiirls
>its just pic related
Gman has a hyper specific fetish about taking people who can stop an alien invasion and stripping them down to their boxers, so much so he’s willing to end worlds over it.
He’s a very twisted individual
Think you can find body of Collete or Gina in Xen.
not canon
That's because the Half-Life writers are hacks and are just writing this shit as they go along.
Same case for games like Elder Scrolls.
I do miss the days when Valve created video games regularly (DOTA does not count, they did not create it), but I understand that Gabe's focus has always been on innovating upon PC capabilities, just looking at most of the peripherals they previously put out.
>the Cuck-bine thinks it has a chance
>voiced by randy pitchford
it was over before it begun
>literally just a fat Tentacle
RANDYYYYY
>Half Life 4
>Gordon, Chell and Heavy TF2 are fighting the Combine leader
>Combine boss crushes all moon rock surfaces and puts the moon dust into Heavy's sandviches, eliminating both of them and leaving only a wounded Gordon left
>"Time cut in Half of Life, Mr Freeman" says the Comboss and he readies his space katana
>suddenly portal.mp3 plays in the distance
>"Hehe, I am Opposing of that idea..."
>Commander Shep and a huge army of Race Xers teleport in
>"...FORCE!!!"
Post yfw
bravo vince
10/10 100/100 Best game
Emtional
Why does the Combine enjoy Albanian cities to settle?
It's a matter of where the least amounts of Xen encroachment is and the availability to house human stock, that anti-science mockup cut cutscene implies that they had Tentacles just spawning in the middle of American cities and I'd imagine building Citadels would be difficult to construct in such a location.
They just pay homage to the previous owners of Earth
?si=OHVmy6S6njEVgnwu
>just started playing HL2 in VR
>it's based
Pretty stupid that Valve never released their versions of this on VR.
Echoes is great and all but if you told me Field Intensity was Opposing Force before I played it (and without taking the voice acting into account) I would have 100% believed it came out in '99 and was official.
It also has the comfiest Black Mesa out of every mod I've played so far, I just want to hang out in the laundromat all day.
there's an ai voice acting mod that really improves it
that can
the tech stuff that has been grafted to the bottom of the nihilanth looks a lot like combine tech
was this planned or did they just take inspiration from that when designing the combine aesthetic for the second game?
Not exactly planned, but some of the internal notes shared by Marc Laidlaw shoes that there were rough ideas of there being some multidimensional empire that the Nihilanth was running away from.
cool
but im almost certain that the nihilanth mechanical ass inspired the way combine stuff looks
it must have had an impact on viktor antonov and other art directors
https://www.marclaidlaw.com/mathoms-lambda-files-c-1998/
The Nihilanth one kinda has a hint of HL2
>Teleportation has been mastered by a chain of superintelligent (compared to us) aliens. Mainly, they use it to exploit and enslave the races they encounter; their exploitation may be open or it may be extremely covert, involving political manipulation of the worlds they control. It all depends on what they want out of the species they intend to dominate.
>The civilizations which are potentially the most dangerous—and also the most useful—to them are those which have independently arrived at the creation of a teleport technology which could surpass their own…for as in all things, even advanced alien superscience is bound to become obsolete, and the drive for a more powerful technology is unending.
>Earth is at exactly this point. We made a few strong experimental forays into the science of teleportation, began to discover the practical underpinnings of the art, and then succeeded against our wildest dreams—stumbling into a weird dimension whose properties defied our understanding of natural law. Nor were we alone in this realm, which we named Xen—for that which is forever alien and inexplicable.
[..]
>The cause of this was a certain element, found in Xen, [..] it was imported to Earth by a devious route, involving several of the aforementioned superintelligent alien races. By steering us to Xen, they immediately forced a confrontation with a troublesome race which would either annihilate us or force us to show our mettle. If the former were the case, then they were rid of a pest. If the latter, then they would further shroud their presence in secrecy and work their manipulations deeper into the fabric of our society, in hopes of harnessing us from within.
>The G-Man is [REDACTED].
>Teleportation is only the first of many new empowerments for humanity.
[...]
Based on the narrative here, the idea is that the G-Man either is of or works for a superintelligent race, and the Combine is one of these races.
Combine seems more like very much overt buttholes who take everything they can. G-Man works for some ayys who are yet to be taken in by Combine.
>no, we have not had Half-Life's story fleshed out since day one. We had ideas, inclinations, and concepts but certainly nothing distinct or concrete. For example, we knew that ultimately, sequel or no sequel, something far worse lay beyond Nihilanth, and we very subtly highlighted that on several occasions throughout the game. But make no mistake; we had no idea that it was going to be the Combine that would be that greater foe. So no, we had not worked out any particulars beforehand. You might recall that Half-Life 2 went through a number of design iterations before we managed to solidify its narrative.
Has anyone ever tried to envision what humanity completely Combined into Combine would look like? The must be some unused artwork in Valve.
It was silly to see the metrocops directing all the male arrivals towards Nova Prospekt to be turned into stalkers. Why bother relocating them and making them switch trains instead of taking them straight to it?
Why do we have to sometimes have to switch trains or even planes? Why can't every train station or airport be directly connected to each other with no intermediaries?
What if emergency? Stalkers are low maintenance free labor. They are like weevils in a machine.
Combine have dropships that can be used to transport captives.
Combine have [vehicles with worse capacity and fuel efficiency and more fatal error states and capabilities needed for higher-priority military missions] that can be used to transport captives.
>Load up like 10 people into a cargo container attached to one of your presumably limited aircraft
>Or just stick 500 people into a train in one shot
Efficiency, baby. There's a reason the concentration camps had rail lines going right into them instead of an airstrip. Inefficient extermination IS NOT the interdimensional German way.
The Combine seems to be reusing the existing railroad system.
i assume at some point all of humanity would have been goopified and turned into biocomputers like the ones we see in HL:alyx
Super Soldiers are probably the closest to an evolved Stalker + Combine Soldier
Whoops, I actually meant the Combine Guard
Knowing the truth will result in permanent off-world reassignment.
kino
>IT'S TIME TO CHOOSE
5
2
2
2
Goofy homies like myself will both remember and pick 4
ACTIVATE SPEEDHACK
Half life 3 is a party RPG where you can date and frick nihiliant.
GAME OF THE DECADE
Half-Like a Dragon
Sad that half life had a HALF LIFE of only 2000-2010
It came out in 1998 and the last game was in 2020, though
humanity cannot win against the combine, there is only one happy ending that could happen in half life and thats if gordon travels back in time and makes absolutely sure the crystal never gets pushed into the beam and thus the combine do not notice the existence of earth.
There's no need to win against the larger empire, you just close and lock the interdimensional door to Earth and wipe out the remaining occupation force.
The former is already accomplished by Episode 2 and can remain accomplished if a followup ensure the Combine force left on Earth doesn't get their hands on the Borealis' portal tech.
Scary how they just rolled up, stole their ocean, steamrolled them in 7 hours and the only way to stop them is to lock them outside the house and throw away the keys
Don't mess with portal tech. It can make you noticeable to the outside.
As long as humanity never gets overly ambitious with portal tech again the door should stay locked, too.
But what are humans if not destructively ambitious.
They would've continued their research in teleportation tech, most likely at a faster pace than before.
Remember that even if they evict the combine off earth, humanity is still stuck on a post-resonance cascade earth. The soil is filled to the gills with antlions, headcrabs still roaming near and around cities, oceans full of leeches and ichthyosaurs.
>oceans full of leeches and ichthyosaurs
Ideally these little shits shouldn't be able to survive in a new planet but off they go. It's the same sea they had back in home.
>They would've continued their research in teleportation tech, most likely at a faster pace than before.
I see it going in the opposite way. Once the Combine's gone, people will be so hesitant of technology that they'll probably go into a self-inflicted dark age.
Also, while the Science Team of Kleiner, Magnusson, and now Eli saved them, they are also responsible for all this in the minds of the public. I definitely see them getting lynched when all is said and done
Breen is the true one at fault for the Resonance Cascade. It's one thing for GMan to have provided the unstable sample, but Breen is the one that pushed them to overclock the spectrometer to get an immediate conclusive analysis and still pushed the test to be done after the science team voiced concerns about both the sample and the settings.
Eli states in Ep2 he should've aborted the test, which implies he had some say in stopping it from happening, but from step 1 the Anomalous Materials team was being pressured by administration to do something they shouldn't.
>but from step 1 the Anomalous Materials team was being pressured by administration to do something they shouldn't
Sounds familiar
Were the major details of the Chernobyl Disaster's cause public knowledge by 1998? Valve very well could've taken some inspiration from that if so.
>Breen is the true one at fault for the Resonance Cascade
Well yes but for everyone on Earth who had just been through 20 years of hell and their planet irrevocably damaged, I can't see people caring about how "technically the black mesa staff aren't at fault, they were just indirectly assisting in it"
People do irrational things when stressed. Hell you already see people in Episode 1 complaining about why Kleiner just gets to be in charge
nice homeplanet combinekeks
Not pictured: the rest of the dyson sphere
The funny part is we know that human and Combine teleportation is chump change when there are teleporting, multi-bodied, time travelling ayy-lmaos walking around laughing at the apes fighting the calculators stapled to slugs
God I wish Half Life got more worldbuilding and whatnot, even if HL3 is never ever happening it's a damn shame to have such a god tier series in permanent limbo
>God I wish Half Life got more worldbuilding and whatnot
I dunno. Seams like 70% of the staying power of HL. Was that the world was...there while you were dOing your own stuff.
You are told there was something but since it is not importan to the plot of the game they did not include it.
TL;DR:So since the world is so vage you cann add your own stuff without lore breaking.
The truth is that it's just a mystery box
>Soldiers in Episode 2 are covered in dirt and mud because they had to march their asses into out C17 into the outlands
It's the little things
Am I crazy or is there surprisingly little fps combat in hl2 for an fps game? There were shades of that in hl1, where you could spend a big chunk of time just doing platforming and physics puzzles, but it seems like hl2 does that even more. Am I imagining it?
They usually had certain sections like the prison or ravenholm where you had to fight a ton of enemies
BLA BLA BLA MR. FREEMAN
Why did Valve stop comissioning spinoffs/third party games and expansions after HL1?
I know there were two separate episodes in development with one made by Arkane and the other by EA, but Valve cancelled them one day for no reason. Gearbox expansions were a success, so why not have more?
They realized that Half-Life 2 Episode Three was in development hell and that it would look very VERY bad if they failed to release it after a bunch of third party spin-off episodes were released.
Who knows the truth. Who really knows the truth? Nobody knows... the only person that knows the truth is me. And the truth shall set you free... the truth, shall set yo-
Why does no one ever talk about the Game Over screen from Ep2 mentioning a time loop?
>So thas it? What? We in some kinda...Unforeseen Consequences or somethin?!
I clapped. Bravo Epic Games.
That damn Gman's got us On a Rail!
SHEEEEEIT GAWDON DAT CRACKA MUHFUGGA DONE TOOK MUH BABY GURL WE'S GON HAFTA GO RESONANCE CASCADE ON HIM ALIEN ASS
GORDON PLEASE....WE MUST FIND MY DAUGHTER....SO YOU CAN HAVE SEX WITH HER
GORDON PLEASE HAVE SEX WITH MY DAUGHTER WHILE ME AND KLEINER WATCH, WE WONT TOUCH YOUR ASS I SWEAR
Bringing this guy back... It's such dogshit writing why the frick did they even do it? That cliffhanger was pretty much perfect. Alyx will be motivated to take on the combine, audience will be motivated too but here we are. Valve decided to literally take a shit in their own story.
My guess is they didn't want to continue whatever story Laidlaw was working on. So, they decided to do something completely moronic instead.
It's pretty bad without the original voice actor but I didn't want another game with Alyx tagging along.
Why did Alyx need any more motivation to take on the Combine? What does Eli dying actually add to the story narratively?
It was GoT writing to kill him for le epic cliffhanger death
It leads Alyx without a father figure, blinds her with vengeance leading to potential conflict with Gordon and Judith Mossman and allows her to grow in a world without her father.
Easy meaningful character development
An adult character's parent dying is character development? Lmao, and you shittalk capeshit, don't you have some house of dragons to watch?
No i'm saying it can lead to character development you moron, learn to read.
>need any more motivation
No reason to argue with you, you've no clue what you're saying.
If you believe the official story given in the Final Hours of Half-Life Alyx and by Erik Wolpaw in the interviews he's given, it's only because they wanted Half-Life Alyx to feel like it actually mattered to the overall story and this was the only idea they could come up with.
hmm how do i make my story matter? oh i know im gonna completely shit all over the original story.
genius.
i fricking hate modern writters i swear
The original story of the 5 second cliffhanger that was never continued?
Lol
Exactly, the second you start disgracing your own story is the second i'm not going to pay attention. It's cowardly and disrespectful to the fans and the original writers
Shitting up the story is the only idea they could come up with? I don't believe that. Figuring out how gman got captured would've made an interesting story, it would've been just that. HLA takes place 5 years before the ending of episode 2, why the frick is gman even talking about eli vance's death to Alyx? It's so contrived.
All plot is contrived. Can you only use buzzwords?
>buzzword
What buzzword did I use? Audience is willing to suspend their disbelief in a science fiction story until it gets too stupid like HLA's ending. What's your point even?
>time elapsed between 7 hour war and beginning of HL2: ~20 years
What the frick were the combine doing for 20 years? Isn't the whole point to take the resources and steamroll another planet? How much time do they need to suck-up some water and metal?
Back in the day, while 2 gave you a power trip as everyone worshipped you, the episodes gave you a girlfriend who flirts with you nonstop. These definitely appealed to the target audience.
Though I can't really see a character like Alyx coming out in a game in todays political climate. In episode 3 she was presumably going to keep up the flirting whenever she wasn't grieving but I can't help but wonder if that might be part of why she was retconned out
I don't see Valve retconning Alyx being wet for Gordon but the chances of them ending together might not be so safe. Who knows really.
Dude, he caused the apocalypse and humanity's decline. He's definitely evil from a normal point of view at the very least.
Guys, there's no grand conspiracy against Epistle Three. Valve has always taken a make it up as you go along approach to story because the story is only to serve gameplay. They only killed off Eli in the first place because Gabe told Laidlaw et al the game needed to end with a big dramatic death to set up Episode Three. Erik Wolpaw insists that bringing back Eli was only because he was having a random conversation with one of the animators about how hard it was to come up with a satisfying consequence for releasing the Gman and the animator just suggested saving Eli's life.
What exactly is the Universal Union, guys? And i'm not talking about the Combine but saying another name, i'm talking about what preceded the Combine, the Shuulatoi and all of that.
The Shuulatoi aka the grubs are a culture of kaijus from a radioactive planet that are only sapient in their sessile larval stage. They are mild psionics, strong enough to do telekinesis but not ridiculously OP like vorts are.
Existing only as telepathic sapiences made them kinda special, and they have all kinds of weird shit including their own "mind virus" pathogens.
According to Breengrub, the Shuulatoi managed to leave their larval bodies and escape when the Combine arrived to their planet, and some may have even manage to survive combine-ification and exist within their system, very pissed off and plotting revenge.
Apparently Combine computers are sapient and controlled by software derived from Shuulatoi mind viruses
Breen's admiration for them seems to imply that the could be candidates for the G-man's famous employers.