What the hell was The Vault supposed to even be? Was it around in the original timeline? Does Alyx even have its own timeline or does it not? How did The Combine manage to imprison G-Man? It's not like he was just staying there waiting for Alyx to find him, she really did rescued him so he really was imprisoned. My head is fucking boiling.
Half-Life 2 was never well written. It basically shits all over everything that worked about the first game to try and become Halo.
What problems do you have with 2's writing plus the episodes? Alyx is its own thing with shitty lore that nobody cares for.
Everything.
>rather than Black Mesa having a portal opened to a possibly alien dimension we now have an alien empire
>this alien empire is so powerful it can defeat humanity in 7 hours
>please dont ask any questions with regards to how this is possible nor the logistics of such a feat, just understand that every nation somehow got in touch and agreed on one course of action in less time than an average workday
>the alien empire is now in total control of earth
>they do this because they want to... drain the ocean for water (despite space containing infinitely more water molecules within it)
>also rather than harness existing human infrastructure for anything productive, such as building the citadels and other technology they clearly require to be a threat, they just erase all human development
>also humans no longer breed and this last generation of them will be soldiers; I guess humans have no worth whatsoever
>no the only thing that has any value is ocean water
>not power grids or research into nuclear fusion or weaponry that would probably supplant the foot soldiers who rely on 5.56 ballistics spitting out of the worst rifle ergonomics in the universe
>just ocean water
>also kill off all the animals as well
>also ensure the human beings live in deliberately badly-designed and abusive conditions, they will surely not resent us for that and use their fatalistic pointless lives to interrupt our attempts to steal all the ocean water (we neglected to actually destroy anything they might use for this purpose, such as guns and explosives and vehicles powered by gasoline)
>NOOOOOO OUR HYPER-ADVANCED OPERATIONS TO STEAL OCEAN WATER WERE BLOWN UP BY OUR RESENTFUL SLAVES
>HOW COULD THIS BE, AAAAAIIEEEEE DEPLOY THE SPIDER TANKS THAT FIRE 5.56 OUT OF A SINGLE MOUNTED TURRET AND ARE EASILY DESTROYED BY EXPLOSIVES
>NOOOO OUR HYPER-EFFICIENT GALACTIC EMPIRE, HOW COULD THIS BE, FLOATING RETARD BABY SAVE US
>please dont ask any questions with regards to how this is possible nor the logistics of such a feat, just understand that every nation somehow got in touch and agreed on one course of action in less time than an average workday
You honestly have to be retarded not to understand the Combine invaded and started shooting at everything that could shoot back, cleaned up every military in the world in 7 hours and only stopped when Breen intervened because he was the only person on Earth who knew enough to talk to them
>the alien empire just had its alien soldiers appear with rudimentary assault rifles and shoot everybody on earth
not exactly dispelling the assertion that HL2's story is drivel
this is not what happened retard
any sci fi alien story has to have the aliens weak to something / unaware of x technology or simply on par with human technology otherwise the story literally cant take place, or would be too depressing for normies (which they tried with the beta) deal with it homosexual
>any sci fi alien story has to have the aliens weak to something / unaware of x technology or simply on par with human technology otherwise the story literally cant take place, or would be too depressing for normies (which they tried with the beta) deal with it homosexual
human race being rendered obsolete by combine is literally the original ending of Half-Life universe you retard
>is literally the original ending of Half-Life universe you retard
until you, the player, as gordon preeman, steps the fuck up.
>giving a baiting retard a (You)
on a related note, it's too bad we can't have decent HL threads that don't instantly devolve into HL vs. HL2 shitflinging/HL2-bashing anymore.
the Combine forces left on Earth are a shitty little garrison for keeping the peace. They're not ready for an all-out war because every credible threat beyond a gaggle of beanie-wearing morons was ground into hamburger years before HL2 takes place.
>and started shooting at everything that could shoot back, cleaned up every military in the world in 7 hours
Literally impossible.
Do you even know how many nuclear weapons existed in the 2000s? The answer is over 10k. The governments of the world would happily press the nuke their shit button if an ayylmao invasion happened. It would take over 7 hours just to reorganize after getting your shit nuked unless you were completely immune to the effects of a nuclear bomb and the resulting radiation.
A more realistic timeframe would be about 6 months for a dominant and nigh unstoppable ayylmao force, and the result would be a shattered and nigh unusable world in a nuclear winter.
If the war was won in 7 hours, suffice it to say whatever firepower the combine had rendered nukes useless
president keemstar announced it on the dot at 7 hours; didn't you hear?
Nukes shot at what target exactly? The Combine had no base on Earth, it was all a massive invasion force with visibly no logistics required since portal storms were doing all the transportation stuff all over the globe. Synths do not require food nor ammo, only repair when damaged as evidently shown during the game (no mouth nor recharge station for synth).
Only posthuman soldiers required some kind of hq in appartments of C17, soldiers that naturally were added to the force /after/ the invasion.
Truth is, Combine arrived, shot dark energy/pulse weapon projectiles all over the globe, assblasted every human center/military base of every nation with little for them to organize an effective answer and Breen intervened since as BM's administrator he knew about the other universes, how to talk to them, and maybe even had prior contact with them.
you obviously dont know the lore but the latter half about combine millitary being hillariously uneffective is true
The Combine really doesn't have any coherent motivation at all and the plot really suffers for this. They seem to destroy things and subject still-living people to the worst conditions possible for seemingly no reason. There's occasional illusions of motivation, such as giant devices draining the oceans, but since there's so much more water just floating out in space one can only assume they aren't even using this harnessed water and are just draining it to be humongous senselessly violent space naggers.
Like actually sit and think about this shit, think of some other alien races in other video games.
>Metroid's space pirates
Motivation is in the title, they are pirates and plunder for technology and stuff. Yes they are violent but it's in service of greed. You may see them using stuff they plunder to fuel research into more effective plundering or demonstrably valuable stuff like biological engineering.
>Halo's covenant
A giant intergalactic pyramid scheme where space israelites in floating chairs use their subservient alien samurai to force other, lesser races into worshiping their cult. Anyone who does not join will die. Also humans are "owed" more by ancient space ruins than them, so to prevent this info from reaching their subjects they order humans be wiped out in a space jihad.
>XCOM's aliens
Actually do what the Combine were probably meant to do. They plunder resources, want to assimilate the Earth into their annexed space territory and even begin abducting humans to transform into biological weapons.
Giving the Combine a real motivation (something Valve neglected to do) is so easy I will do it right now as an example.
>human beings rank very high on the Combine's super-advanced projections of race advancement
>they rank so high they could threaten the Combine's current leading alien race
>humans are exterminated so they obviously cannot advance, reach space and become worthy rivals
>The Combine really doesn't have any coherent motivation at all and the plot really suffers for this
Combine motivation of their expansionism is a part of the lore that we simply don't know, just like we don't know 90% about them. Doesn't mean theres no motivation if we don't know it. Maybe it's to catch israelite-man, since he's able to persist in any universe possible or something, but that would be a fan theory
Anyway I haven't read your post past that sentence
I'm not surprised Gankeriggers don't read anything and are illiterate and just swallow the slop without hesitation. I'll just accept your begrudging concession that the Combine are incredibly poorly-written bad guys as "we just don't know!" really can't be called good writing, as it's an absence of writing, as Valve never fucking thought of it and doesn't care compared to basically every other example of aliens you can find in video games. It doesn't take much more than asking simple questions such as
>Why did the hyper-advanced alien empire decided to stop humans from breeding, deliberately torture them and sew the motivation for a rebellion that interrupts their efforts?
The answer will be some hand-wave like
>i-it was just a garrison, the REAL combine would do it better
but we have no reason to believe this the same way we are given no reason to believe the Combine had anything that would defeat the entire Earth in a span of seven hours. We aren't given anything. We are given a bunch of art assets Valve figured would look cool, and then nobody bothered to think about anything beyond that. It is symptomatic of Valve's laziness.
its a bad idea and a waster of resources to spit out a wall of text to someone that previously claim he doesnt read your posts
This isn't hard and he's not going to be the only person to open the thread. Unless that guy is (You) in which case you're a homosexual for trying to save face while also implying nobody but you is paying attention, stupid retarded nagger.
be nice, he's obviously retarded
>exactly 1 reply timer apart
>IP count didnt go up
The combine seem to lack innovation and imagination. What they excell at is adapting existing technology and biology into their own tech tree. All human teleportation technology is way ahead of theirs despite coming from a technological inferior species.
Best guess is that the whole resource draining of earth is just a "while we are here" thing that they just do whenever they gain access to a new planet, maybe to put pressure on the resistance to further their research but that feels like it gives them too much credit.
well humanity managed to make portal technology really compact, which the combine cannot do. They require the whole human population enslaved just to make a proper cominbe portal.
Meanwhile some old dude made a better version in his basement. Not to mention it all began in black mesa
I actually think the mysterious nature of the combine is part of why there were mysterious and ominous for me. they seemed like a vast machine that barely cared what actually happened on earth, in fact human's ability to resist them seemed due only to the fact that after their initial conquering, they wrote off earth as a done deal and pretty much neglected whatever was left since it was likely less than a speck in their interstellar machine. that vast, uncaring mechanical nature of it seemed creepier to me than understanding them would have
>human beings rank very high on the Combine's super-advanced projections of race advancement
>they rank so high they could threaten the Combine's current leading alien race
>humans are exterminated so they obviously cannot advance, reach space and become worthy rivals
I feel like this goes against the spirit of both Half-Life and Half-Life 2. In both games, the narrative theme is built around the general idea of "universe is vast and we are so small and understand so little of it in comparison."
This is also why I dislike the most common "fan theory" as to why the Combine keeps humanity around being "because we humans are super special to have mastered teleportation better than them" and vastly prefer the more obscure and not nearly as popular fan theory "physics varies between dimensions and the Combine only keep us around because our science is obviously optimized for the local physics compared to theirs"
It's obvious the word Combine is their motivation, it's in the title as you say. They want to combine, that's all they do. They combine all species to create the apex civilization with the most domination. There is no need to seek a deep goal or anything. It's just absorb, absorb and absorb to grow and ultimately any of its component become meaningless in face of the size of that organization.
Well it's true and false at the same time. Combine do see something in mankind, like their did in all the apex species in their worlds: adaptation. Combine employ post human soldiers because the human mind is highly adaptive to its environment. They adopted many human technologies like vehicles, weaponry, equipment. Synths are probably too specific to be deployed in many cases unless they want to ravage the area, but Combine soldiers can be deployed on any front with various equipments. That and the fact that they are also after Black Mesa and Aperture's transportation technologies. But yeah despite that human quality that is adaptation, ultimately mankind is nothing but a small and non vital cog in the machine. Posthumans were threatened to be removed (death) from the Overwatch at Nova Prospekt if Freeman wasn't stopped.
Reminder that most of the retarded shit that went down is exactly because the combine don't really give much of a fuck about earth.
They basically have a skeleton crew handling the entire "earth" situation while the actual brunt of the combine forces go on and do more important galactic empire shit.
>rather than Black Mesa having a portal opened to a possibly alien dimension we now have an alien empire
The combine is an empire whose expansion relies heavily on the existence of Xen as a borderworld between universes. They exploit Xen's status to identify civilizations advanced enough to discover interdimensional travel. Nihilanth's dialogue and cybernetic enhancements also hint at the existence of another, greater force even in HL1
>this alien empire is so powerful it can defeat humanity in 7 hours
>please dont ask any questions with regards to how this is possible nor the logistics of such a feat, just understand that every nation somehow got in touch and agreed on one course of action in less time than an average workday
The Combine used the portal storms to send massive firepower to Earth, and blasted every single major city center. There wasn't necessarily any agreement between all the major powers, only that Breen managed to make contact and represented the UN. This surrender also doesn't necessarily need to imply that there was a collective ceasefire around the world
>the alien empire is now in total control of earth
>they do this because they want to... drain the ocean for water (despite space containing infinitely more water molecules within it)
Draining the natural resources is only one aspect to it, and they do it because they can. Their primary goal before the surrender was to absorb humanity's knowledge and steal any technological advancements. it's safe to say that, like the goa'uld, they're incapable of innovation. In the case of humanity, intra-universal teleportation is something that the Combine has wanted for a long time but has never been able to achieve.
1/
>also rather than harness existing human infrastructure for anything productive, such as building the citadels and other technology they clearly require to be a threat, they just erase all human development
Did you even play the game, you dumb nagger? Combine make extensive use of existing infrastructure as evidenced by Nova Prospekt, the railways, even the kevlar and weapons the soliders use. With post-Soviet countries being the least affected by the Resonance Cascade and the 7 hour war, they've made do with what exists there.
>also humans no longer breed and this last generation of them will be soldiers; I guess humans have no worth whatsoever
The Combine doesn't want or need a human population in the millions. The occupation force doing the bare minimum to ensure that Black Mesa East is able to finalize local teleportation so that they can steal it, and then finish converting the rest of humanity into stalkers or mediocre soldiers. It's perhaps a flaw that the organization doesn't recognize the potential of humanity to develop great things, but their haste to kill the golden goose certainly isn't bad writing.
>not power grids or research into nuclear fusion or weaponry that would probably supplant the foot soldiers who rely on 5.56 ballistics spitting out of the worst rifle ergonomics in the universe
don't need it when you have dark energy reactors the size of a fridge
2/
>outgun every single country on Earth with multiverse galactic empire
>wtfff how did they make everyone kneel in 7 hours?
Retard.
>durr they treat people bad and didn't expect rebellions they're so retarded
They split families and friends apart and shuffled them at random intervals, and tortured then killed suHispanicious people. You're told that as soon as you start the game and the only reason Gordon even survived was because he met a friend.
The "Rebellion" only even worked because G-man was there, and they had a couple of Vortigaunts, plus they basically had a skeleton crew left on Earth.
>muh human tech
What the fuck do they need from us? We're breaking atoms to boil fucking water. WATER. That's the peak of our technology.
The only other thing they wanted was the teleportation technology.
>implying they even realized they lost control of a couple of cities on Earth
They would just come back with some soldiers and just go through another genocide when someone bothers.
>also kill off all the animals as well
they're not intelligent and not in possession of any technology they want
>also ensure the human beings live in deliberately badly-designed and abusive conditions, they will surely not resent us for that and use their fatalistic pointless lives to interrupt our attempts to steal all the ocean water (we neglected to actually destroy anything they might use for this purpose, such as guns and explosives and vehicles powered by gasoline)
Every weapon the resistance uses is scavenged from the Combine. They don't give a shit about the resistance, and Breen admits that the Combine Overwatch could have crushed the resistance whenever they wanted. They had absolutely 0% of success before Gordon. Why would the occupation force indulge the population when an iron fist is working perfectly fine?
>NOOOOOO OUR HYPER-ADVANCED OPERATIONS TO STEAL OCEAN WATER WERE BLOWN UP BY OUR RESENTFUL SLAVES
>HOW COULD THIS BE, AAAAAIIEEEEE DEPLOY THE SPIDER TANKS THAT FIRE 5.56 OUT OF A SINGLE MOUNTED TURRET AND ARE EASILY DESTROYED BY EXPLOSIVES
>NOOOO OUR HYPER-EFFICIENT GALACTIC EMPIRE, HOW COULD THIS BE, FLOATING RETARD BABY SAVE US
Mall cops
3/3
They hate him because he told the truth.
The post-Half-Life 1 lore is pure nonsensical bullshit.
Things worked pretty quick during 9/11. Only problem back then were comms issues on AF1. If world powers were all invaded at once today and was enough of a threat for everyone to surrender it wouldn't take that long to get everyone on a call.
I wouldn't necessarily chalk it up to incompetence, but rather a combination of extreme alien bureaucracy and the multiversal empire being too big to really give a fuck.
all true but I want to believe that the dyson sphere episode would have explained it all
>to try and become Halo
????
You haven't played any of those games
>to try and become Halo
it does fucking what????????
Half life 2 episode 1 time speech is the best piece of videogame writing there is.
Hang urself
>Half life 2 episode 1 time speech
Isn't that the Half Life 2 ending?
Maybe. Been a minute since I last played it.
HL Alyx is based in a different parallel universe to Half Life 2 and is not canon
>and is not canon
the multiverse is very much a part of Half Life though, Breen mentions it. the combine empire spans different universes. perhaps the Combine control multiple different earths and in this universe things went a bit differently. convenient way to retcon the series.
I don't think it's multiverse but time altering shenanigans. Ep1 already showed this by the Vortigaunts undoing G-Man stealing Gordon away and altering Gordon and Alyx away from the explosion. G-Man has altered time by getting Alyx to work for him as that's what he always wanted. Having Eli die would be the motivation to maker her take the deal to change history and save her dad from having his brains eaten by an advisor.
Yeah it's more accurate to say it's time shifting/altering and not exactly "multi-verse." If anything, when they create a new timeline/path, the old one is destroyed, making it in essence a single timeline/universe. There's no going back to Gordon/Alyx dying at the Citadel or Eli dying and Alyx mourning him.
You guys are all retards
The vault is just gmans combine jail cell, so of course its not in hl2 because hes already on the loose.
The alyx in hl2 is the same one from hl:a, thats why she randomly says unforeseen consequences twoards the end of ep2, shes being controlled by the gman
I don't really care about writing in HL2. It's enough for me to simply have a generic alien bad guys to go on a mass killing spree while screaming "I'm from Black Mesa and I say kill'em all!"
But what I do care about is that lots of cool enemies and weapons were cut from the game, making it feel very shallow. I mean, 80% of the game you fight combine soldiers, which is just a dude with a gun. It's fucking boring.
>How did The Combine manage to imprison G-Man?
By setting a trap, obviously. The vault is surrounding a random bit of an apartment building. They lured him there and sprung the trap. How could you not have put that together?
I don't know, neither does Valve. They don't try anymore just like everyone else. Why put forth effort when you can always make more money by being a piece of shit? If they actually gave a fuck about Half Life they would make Half Life 3, but they don't. They just want money. So who the fuck cares?
So who was the mysterious lady talking to an advisor about stopping you from freeing Gman towards the end of Alyx?
I only know that she was previously a cut main antagonist from the previous version of the game
Imagine if the Combine is just Aperture Science from an alternate universe in it's heat death stage, with Cave Johnson alive as an ai or a grub
>multiverse shit
So is that alpha Gman in the vault or is it an offshoot Gman in this timeline being contained? Or is it more like alpha Gman's influence is being inhibited in this timeline? Why would he care about this particular branch? Is this branch important to the whole time stem? This is the kind of shit you have to deal with when you get into 5d chess with multiverse time traveling bullshit. Half-Life 3 is going to have to flesh out a whole Rick and Morty cosmology to make this make sense except it's worse because not even Rick and Morty wants to fuck with time shit because that increases the workload exponentially. The series can't go anywhere. Everything else in the universe is better off left unsaid.
there's only one Gman, and as he state himself he work for clients and keep the most essential subjects in some weird ass time loop to only free them when he need them for a contract.
Alyx became one at the end of HL: Alyx, gordon was one and is now free until the contract is completed, adrian Sheperd is also one and his fate is unknown.
the combine have surely made shit tons of enemies with their expension on multiple universes and they knew that someone would call in Gman to ruin them (like they probably used Gman to ruin others)
>and they knew that someone would call in Gman to ruin them (like they probably used Gman to ruin others)
it's funny that vorts are the only ones that can go up gman's own shit, was it because of vort fan reception or a trope that the slave is powerful yadda yadda?
Reminder that the Combine plot was inspired by their legal fight with Sierra to keep them from trying to whore out their IPs and Gabe's personal experience with Microsoft, it's basically one big anti-publisher narrative.
The (corporate) Combine (Sierra, Microsoft, etc.) exploit humanity (Valve) and they only keep them around so they can figure out how to seize their unique IP(s) (local teleportation).
HL alyx is not canon. So it's not supposed to be anything but a load of shit.
>So it's not supposed to be anything but a load of shit.
Despite the fact that it directly sets up Episode 3?
alternate reality created by G-Man and induced in Alyx the moment Eli dies. The entire game is in her head until she frees G-Man and he shows her reality.
>bro why didn't the Unstoppable Alien Empire equivalent of Ugandan mine guards armed with off-the-shelf police firearms just call in the rest of the empire to halt an uprising of less than two hundred proles, are they stupid?
breen does tell that terra's biosphere is lethal to combine and vice versa.
The reason why Uganda was invaded by the brits was because of resources. Makes no sense for the Combine.
The Combine have literally drained the oceans and are chewing up cities with gigantic crawling walls, stealing our novel technology for local teleportation is just one of the reasons they set up a garrison on earth.
Why would they drain the fucking oceans when there are fucking gigantic planets made out of water out there?
Because they don't have the ability to locally teleport, and Earth has a supply of water and a native population to work to death.
If you invade a neighboring country, do you just leave all their gold lying around just because your country has bountiful gold mines?