I got a lot to say since this is one of my favorite series and I don't want this to just be a "fuck Valve" post but I do have a hard time talking about Half-Life because of the genuine level of heartbreak I feel about what happened with the series and Valve in general, the fact that we've been left on a cliff hanger for almost
15 years is completely unreal.
I got really, really invested in not just Half-Life but Valve in general, the original Portal blew my mind so much, I remember playing it for the first time like it was yesterday, I felt like they were the best thing video games had going by the end of the 2000s, as tough as it was to watch other series I loved go to shit or dry up I always used to say to myself "at least there's Valve" and the fact that they then buzzed off from game development for so long and I still don't have the means to play their latest game yet (VR still doesn't seem like a good investment yet imo) is really hard to take, it's flat out cruel for them to do to their fans what they did, people have an obligation not to do your fanbase as dirty as they've done.
But let's not be all negative, my introduction to the series was actually the PS2 port in 2001, which I think was a respectable way to be introduced, I remember later gawking at Opposing Force and Blue Shift on the shelves at K-Mart and being sad that I didn't have a PC that could play them.
So right from the start I was pretty hooked on this series, it just really struck me as something special when compared to other FPS games, I remember how jaw dropping the footage of Half-Life 2 I was seeing in 2003 and 2004 was, I was so green with envy of PC players, sadly the first time I played Half-Life 2 was the 2005 Xbox port which unlike the PS2 port was a less than ideal way to play it, I wish I waited for at least the Xbox 360 Orange Box but I had no idea that was coming at the time.
But yeah, Orange Box on 360 was how I first played Portal, Team Fortress 2 and the Half-Life 2 episodes, however in early 2010 I finally had a gaming PC and went back and replayed Half-Life Source, Half-Life 2, Episodes 1 and 2 and Portal all in HD for the first time, but that was the last time I've been able to play Half-Life 2 or the episodes since because I don't know if I can deal with getting invested in the story again unless we have confirmation for Half-Life 3, which I honestly have no clue if it will happen.
I haven't touched the series at all since 2013 when I played the original version of Black Mesa and then finally played Opposing Force and Blue Shift, again, I don't if I could revisit this series and get invested all over again, it's still a pretty sore subject for me.
Problem is that the people that made HL what it is are also the same ones that left HL 3 on its current state.
Marc Laidlaw did share what his version of HL 3 would have been like by using "legal proof" replacement names for the characters but he also kind of made it obvious who they were meant to represent.
And it kind of ends in a tad bleak manner. I wonder if the writing was one of the many things holding this game back
It was a tad bleak, if that's where the series ended instead of Episode 2 we would have still been left hanging and wondering what happened next, but it still wouldn't have been as brutal a cliff hanger as Episode 2 and would have made it a whole lot easier for Valve to pick up from there for a Half-Life 3.
Valve fucked up by having Half-Life and Portal happen in the same universe, if they didn't wrote the whole Borealis/Aperture Science plot-point, they wouldn't have ended on a corner in where they don't know what the fuck to do next.
It seemed like a cool cross over at the time but yeah, I'm sure it was another factor that overcomplicated things.
I'm sure it raised the question of giving Gordon a Portal gun, but that would have been a nightmare to try to design.
I actually loved his ideas and wish we had gotten this ending.
Also Half-Life 3 will probably never happen or if it does it’ll suck.
His ideas were really interesting, especially
Alyx recognizing the G-Man.
What in the world was up with THAT?
As for some speculation about Half-Life's overall story myself,
it seems pretty obvious to me that the G-Man is some sort of interdimensional being playing the long game of taking down the Combine, what he is exactly and why is a mystery though.
It's also heavily implied Gordon is also possessed by some sort of alien force, which is why he never speaks and why he has such great fighting skills despite supposedly being an average dude at the start of the first game.
The Borealis was featured in the alpha version of Half Life 2 has the leaked source showed. I think the episodic gaming format is what really hurt them. Instead of thinking of a game from start to finish, they thought of it in installments and got themselves in a hole.
I think them betting on the wrong horse with the episodic model was one big factor, but I think another factor was the fact that the AAA PC exclusive market dried up*, everything also had to come out on consoles at the same time and Valve lost interest when they could debut an all new Half-Life on an all new engine on PC first and then port it later, that's I think one of the main reasons that no one talks about.
It's only now with VR did releasing a PC exclusive become viable again.
*there's literally not been a AAA action adventure PC exclusive since Crysis in 2007, which was when Episode 2 released, after that the market radically shifted and I think that's one of the biggest reasons why Half-Life stayed dormant for so long.
