Half Life thread - Discussions about Valve's FPS magnum opus(es) and any related content (spin offs, expansions and etc)

[Slav Power]

That moment when you realise that Valve only finally made another Half Life game for the sole greedy purpose of selling VR headsets.

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The thing about Half-Life series is it was always a sort of tech demo. Half-Life 1 showed off innovations such as bone animations, extremely rudimentary lipsync and it also showed that you can create a FPS game that also tells a story. Half-Life 2 showed off next gen graphics, as well as top of the line face animations and physics engine. Remember: Half-Life 2 got released in the same year as GTA San Andreas and Far Cry. It was truly ahead of it's time. Then Valve experimented with the episodic format, ran into a wall with that third episode and ended up scrapping the entire project. Half-Life: Alyx was once again a showpiece of how advanced and polished VR games can be, since VR is a brand new beast that lets design games in a radically different way. And Valve really couldn't make the same breakthrough as they did with HL2 if they stuck to the traditional style of gaming, so that's why HL:A is VR only.

TBH, I love how fucked up HL2 looked in the leaked beta. The long train ride at the beginning originally showed an incredibly desolate world that had mostly been drained of its resources. In general it seemed like Valve really wanted to hit people over the head with an unrelentingly oppressive atmosphere. Other things like the air being poisoned to make humans dependent on Combine aid, child labor camps, and the oceans being emptied also come to mind.


I believe it's called Uplink.

I fucking adore the HL2 Beta, the absolute darkness and hopelessness of the early designs was awesome. Retail HL2 doesn't make you feel like humanity is completely fucked and there's no hope for a better future, it just lacks that sense of urgency. There's this mod that aims to bring back the aesthetic of the Beta while at the same time keeping the retail story, since it's easier to do than to recreate the original concept.

Speaking of Half-Life 2 mods:
MMod - This is a pretty neat mod that improves on the visuals, gameplay and enemy AI while at the same time not pulling a FakeFactory where City 17 is a jungle and Alyx has a FULLY MODELED you know what. It makes the game different, but at the same familiar to what you know.
Half-Life 2: Update - If you've followed the development of HL2 episodes, you might know that with them Valve also introduced visual improvements to the game. Half-Life 2: Update basically takes the original Half-Life 2 and gives it that episodic overdo for extra pizazz. Playable with MMod.

Also worth mentioning some Half-Life 1 mods:
Full Audio Remaster - This absolute mad lad managed to clean up the original HL1 audio where it doesn't sound all crusty anymore. Yes, that means all voice lines are kept original but at the same time sound better. Requires either MetaAudio or Xash3D.
MetaAudio - This mod brings back proper EAX and HRTF sound to Half-Life 1, which makes a major difference. Due to it being a .exe hook however, do not use it while in online mode or you may risk a VAC ban.
Xash3D - This is actually an entire source port, completely independent from Steam version of Half-Life. I do not think it has MetaAudio's improvements, but it does allow you to load more advanced mods such as texture upscales.

 

[Übertroon]

and Alyx has a FULLY MODELED you know what.

You say that like it's a bad thing

 

[Slav Power]

You say that like it's a bad thing

There's a time when you want to play a cool game and a time when you want to jack off to a game. I prefer to have these separate from each other.

 

[Hazel Motes]

There is a quote by Samuel Johnson discussing Paradise Lost saying, "one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it was." I feel this way about Half Life 2. I enjoyed playing it years ago, thinking it had a lot great moments, but I have no interest it replaying it. I start that intro and feel empty.

Conversely I have played Half Life 1 numerous times over the years and that spilt screen add on the ps2 with my younger brother. And this not a boomerism. I played the second first.

Portal was the best game on the Orange Box partly due to length.

edit: I do think 2 was a great game btw.

 

[God of Nothing]

i played half-life for half an hour and got bored, so i went to play something good

 

[Übertroon]

There is a quote about Samuel Johnson discussing Paradise Lost saying, "one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it was." I feel this way about Half Life 2. I enjoyed playing it years ago, thinking it had a lot great moments, but I have no interest it replaying it. I start that intro and feel empty.

Conversely I have played Half Life 1 numerous times over the years and that spilt screen add on the ps2 with my younger brother. And this not a boomerism. I played the second first.

Portal was the best game on the Orange Box partly due to length.

edit: I do think 2 was a great game btw.

I think there's a lot of replayability to Half Life 2, I enjoyed playing through the game dozens of times. But nowadays it doesn't feel right because the game ends on such a wet fart and there's no conclusion. Half Life 1 is a finished product, Half Life 2 is one of those good movies with a sequel hook that never got resolved

 

[Coolio55]

humanity becoming slug like galactic conquerors,

This is technically extra lore of dubious canonity but the combine advisors aren't actually the combine themselves, just a race of hyper intelligent beings that the combine have enslaved for tactical knowledge.
All the combine technology (most of which has been modified for humanoid use) is interesting but I don't think that the valve designers left enough vestigial bits to speculate on what the combine actually look like. I'm pretty sure that they haven't got a design for them internally or it would have leaked already.

 

[WULULULULU]

I think the best way to think of the Combine is that the organization as a whole has no "original" self. Like they have no species of their own. Look at all their designs/synths, heavily borrowed from another species to be created with something else. They borrow species but never have something that represents their first race.

 

[Dojima's Dragon]

This is technically extra lore of dubious canonity but the combine advisors aren't actually the combine themselves, just a race of hyper intelligent beings that the combine have enslaved for tactical knowledge.
All the combine technology (most of which has been modified for humanoid use) is interesting but I don't think that the valve designers left enough vestigial bits to speculate on what the combine actually look like. I'm pretty sure that they haven't got a design for them internally or it would have leaked already.

Wasnt there a theory that g man was one of the non enslaved advisors

 

[The handsome tard]

humanity becoming slug like galactic conquerors

Isnt that basically ripping off Dune?

 

[Übertroon]

Isnt that basically ripping off Dune?

Everything is ripping off something

 

[Coolio55]

Wasnt there a theory that g man was one of the non enslaved advisors

I remember reading a theory that G-Man was part of some other enslaved species that's hiring agents from other worlds to do their bidding. That would explain his uncanny appearance and strange method of speaking; he's not actually Human, just an alien presenting himself as one.
Similar events apparently happen in another Marc Laidlaw work. Not sure which but I think it was the 37th Mandela.

 

[Dojima's Dragon]

I remember reading a theory that G-Man was part of some other enslaved species that's hiring agents from other worlds to do their bidding. That would explain his uncanny appearance and strange method of speaking; he's not actually Human, just an alien presenting himself as one.
Similar events apparently happen in another Marc Laidlaw work. Not sure which but I think it was the 37th Mandela.

Would recommend the max derrat video about g man that goes further about the theory

 

[Absolutetense]

HL1 was ok until xen and the giant ballsack. Valve literally had you kill their balls.
HL2 i played the opening and right at the beginning when you come across a playground me and a buddy played with the physics in this game. Simpler times, etc.

When opposing force released we played the normal multiplayer like crazy in between cs-beta rounds. It had an alien-gun that you fed ammo and pet. It’s not made by valve but it’s a GUN THAT YOU PET! Fucking awesome.

Also:
Action-hl
The specialists (bullet-time during multiplayer matches)
Natural selection
They hunger
Sven-coop
and of course counterstrike.

The fact that even official released expansions were that awesome and holy cow the mods, it’s unbelievable with the game industry nowadays.

Whenever mods in half life were getting bigger all of a sudden you had dozens of mods for quake3.
Did I mention I’m old? As you couldn’t already tell by the names I listed.

The legacy of Half Life is that it does not get a final part for two reasons:
- it would have to cure cancer and eliminate world hunger for it to be considered a worthy sequel.
- the writers being so fucking incompetent to introduce time traveling so amateurishly that I considered not watching the end credits on YouTube (VR is a gimmick that won’t stay much longer)

 

[The handsome tard]

- the writers being so fucking incompetent to introduce time traveling so amateurishly that I considered not watching the end credits on YouTube (VR is a gimmick that won’t stay much longer)

The funny thing is that, ironically, Hunt Down The Freeman was the one that introduced G-Man have time travelling powers (not shown but its implied he at least can "know" how things will turn out to a comical level of precision by using Mitchell for over 20 years and literally nothing didnt go according to plan)

Seriously, when I saw the Alyx ending I was like "oh so that means there are literally time travelling and alternative timelines to complicate things even further?!"

 

[Übertroon]

The funny thing is that, ironically, Hunt Down The Freeman was the one that introduced G-Man have time travelling powers (not shown but its implied he at least can "know" how things will turn out to a comical level of precision by using Mitchell for over 20 years and literally nothing didnt go according to plan)

Seriously, when I saw the Alyx ending I was like "oh so that means there are literally time travelling and alternative timelines to complicate things even further?!"

Time travel was always implied though. How else does Gordon Freeman appear in the future without having aged a day? Stasis? Laidlaw's outline for episode 3 confirms that the Borealis can travel through space and time in an instant. Time travel would help explain the near omnipotence of the G-man.
Alternate timelines is where shit gets fucky.
That's why in my suggestion for Half life 3 I just went with the rule that changing the past creates separate timelines, it's the one that creates the least questions and confusion

 

[Fwiffo]

Time travel was always implied though. How else does Gordon Freeman appear in the future without having aged a day? Stasis? Laidlaw's outline for episode 3 confirms that the Borealis can travel through space and time in an instant. Time travel would help explain the near omnipotence of the G-man.
Alternate timelines is where shit gets fucky.
That's why in my suggestion for Half life 3 I just went with the rule that changing the past creates separate timelines, it's the one that creates the least questions and confusion

I don’t recall time travel being heavily implied in official releases. Gordon being in stasis for 20 years is actually explained in the 2nd half of HL2. When you escape with Alyx from Nova Prospekt’s teleporter it gets all fucky during the final charging sequence. When they materialize in Kleiner’s lab only an instant had passed for Gordon, but Kleiner informs them that they’ve been gone for two weeks, and that they accidentally discovered a kind of “very slow teleport”. It’s implied that Gman simply used a version of this process to nestle Gordon out of the way.

 

[Übertroon]

I don’t recall time travel being heavily implied in official releases. Gordon being in stasis for 20 years is actually explained in the 2nd half of HL2. When you escape with Alyx from Nova Prospekt’s teleporter it gets all fucky during the final charging sequence. When they materialize in Kleiner’s lab only an instant had passed for Gordon, but Kleiner informs them that they’ve been gone for two weeks, and that they accidentally discovered a kind of “very slow teleport”. It’s implied that Gman simply used a version of this process to nestle Gordon out of the way.

"Very slow teleport" sounds like time travel fuckery not gonna lie. In fact it was through teleportation technology that the Borealis began flickering in and out of the past

 

[The handsome tard]

How else does Gordon Freeman appear in the future without having aged a day? Stasis?

Its implied that when you are "hired", you are placed in some sort of dark void, basically "frozen" in time. I wouldnt count that as time TRAVEL tho. Simply that they can keep you from being affected by time by being in some sort of "pocket" dimension unbounded by the rules of physics of our own reality.

Laidlaw's outline for episode 3 confirms that the Borealis can travel through space and time in an instant.

Yes but in that way, it would fit better given the nature of the Borealis and the people that made them. It would also be cool to have a literal time travelling ship, wouldnt it? Its like, the problem isnt the idea of time travel but the way its introduced...and because time travel as a concept is always a headache to write since its such a theorical concept that there is no "true" way to do it.

Time travel would help explain the near omnipotence of the G-man.

The problem is that you can buy that in HL1 but once he legit gets stopped for a moment in 2, thats where this implies that he has limits, assuming he does have those powers. Or else how he didnt see that coming? It did show the G-Man isnt as powerful as he wants to make himself be, which was a good thing because it also implies he can be stopped and even bested somehow.

We can ignore the Hunt Down the Freeman stuff but there its implied he can see into the future and know how shit will turn out perfectly. Which raises a lot of questions but, hey, non canon right? Which leads to...

The problem is with the shit that Alyx introduced, so apparently the G-Man not only can see into the past, present and future like fucking Dr Manhattan but he can ALTER the future as well (one can say thats a borrowed power from his employers that he has the "liberty" at using ocassionally but it opens more questions than actually answering anything).

It all feels like the new writers forcing the G-Man to retcon the ending of Ep 2 to build suspense and show things have "changed"...all to pointlessly keep us hoping for more than will never come.

Alternate timelines is where shit gets fucky.

To be honest, it gets difficult to explain how Alyx ties to the events of Ep 2 without alternative timelines.

Like the Alyx timeline isnt the same as Ep2's, so when that Alyx changes shit in the "main" timeline, it causes "Main" Alyx to be taken by the G-Man and Elli to be spared. At least thats how I see it. Either way you see it, there are holes and it is confusing.

 

[millais]

I think that Ubertroon's idea of revealing the Combine to be far future human civilization is not too difficult to execute. There was a recent Anglo-French miniseries adaptation of HG Wells's "The War of the Worlds" that is based on the same premise: the invading aliens turn out to be an invasion force of time-traveling far-future humans, who have physically degenerated to the point of relying on alien-like drones to execute their conquest of the modern day world.