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

HL 3...is it still happening?

  • No and anyone that still thinks that it will is delusional

    Votes: 240 47.5%

  • Yes, they just need a few more years to perfect it so it can another game changer in the industry

    Votes: 136 26.9%

  • Shouldnt it be called "Two Lives and a half" instead?

    Votes: 82 16.2%

  • Half life is overrated, you neckbeard homos

    Votes: 47 9.3%
  • Total voters
    505
So here are my jumbled thoughts.

HL1 and Opposing Forces are my favourite of the franchise. I enjoyed HL2 but the whole 'surviving tooth and claw during a man-made disaster/horrors beyond my comprehension' was a much better backdrop of a story. HL2 is good, but OG is the best. Black Mesa is pretty damn good and happy I own it.

Sheppard IS Cannon and Valve's lack of using him is weak sauce. My hope is that they use him in an HL:Alex VR game that has Pavlov/Boneworks energy thrown in. I would also take a Back Mesa-style remake of Opposing forces. That would be Kino. I know there is a Blue Shift mod for BM being worked on.

Valves' biggest problem in terms of making new games is Steam. Very hard to be motivated to get over the finish line when you are getting a corporate tier monthly tug boat. Their flawed management system and organizational deficiencies resulting in countless cancelled games can only be sustained by the constant injection of steam money. If steam had flopped (or just not took off bigly) in the mid 2000's we would of seen HL2-ep3 and even HL3. Instead, Valve is only motivated to push out games it feels it needs to put out (HLA being good, but really just a VR showcase to push the Index). Lots of talent is being squandered by Steam's success, very sad.

Lastly, the HL mod scenes will never die. Lots of talent, especially those trying to create OG OG halflife 1 and 2 (from the demos and beta leaks). Personal shout out to the SIGNAL LOST demo. A to-be full game based on the old HL beta and demos that feels more half-life than half-life at times.
 
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Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
I thought both episodes were shitty and prefer to believe that the Half-Life story ended with 2 with Alyx dying and Gordon stuck in limbo until the next time the universe needs him.

Alyx surviving actually takes away the huge emotional moment at the end of 2, kinda like how BJ surviving in Wolfenstein: The New Order ruined the bittersweet personal sacrifice story.
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I felt the episodes had their moments.

Episode 1 was tarnished by the opening level of returning to Citadel and magically getting the gravity gun back; easily the biggest sin of the franchise. However going through City 17 and helping the resistance out as the Citadel gets worse and worse in the backdrop was fun. They did a great job in the gameplay to keep things fun and all the NPC dialog was great to make up for setting reuse.

Episode 2 was an expansion of Half Life’s Chapters 7 and 8. Get in a car and get to a destination to participate in a memorable fight. I felt the levels could of been better. There wasn’t a lot of combine to fight, the only new enemy was the hunters that were either easy to kill when you had ammo or you were panicked in finding objects to hurl at them with the gravity gun. I found myself enjoying Episode 1 more than 2 as Valve made the levels and challenges better where as the only challenge in 2 beyond ammo conservation was transporting the gnome to the rocket (somehow I lost the gnome on the final stretch).

I think if the Episodes were more like the original Half Life expansions and they dealt with a different character, then they would been better received and given Valve some creative headroom.
 
ellroy said:
I think if the Episodes were more like the original Half Life expansions and they dealt with a different character, then they would been better received and given Valve some creative headroom.
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That might have been the plan at some point, apart from Episode 3 there was also going to be an Episode 4, at first developed by Warren Spector's Junction Point studio, and then given to Arkane before it got cancelled, it was centered around Ravenholm, with Adrian Shepard as the player character.

Valve also had plans for an episode centered around Alyx and Dog, i guess that eventually evolved into HL Alyx.
 
I am so glad a thread like this finally exists, Half life is a brilliant and revolutionary franchise that ended tragically unceremoniously. Like literally any other fan I would love to see some eventual conclusion, but considering how long the series has stagnated and how people’s expectations are now higher than the stratosphere. I’m not sure any ending Valve could give would live up to the hype. In some ways I am kind of ‘grateful’ that the games died at a point and remained at such a consistent fantastic quality throughout, so it did leave a ‘beautiful corpse’ of a franchise and was never run into the ground like so many franchises have in the 2010s. Imagine if EA had control *shudder*

I do wonder what actually happened during HL3’s development, maybe Valve initially were going to release it and actually got far into production yet development conflicted with other games and updates at the time.So work was put on halt time and time again till thé games initial design was scrapped and they kept trying from scratch over many years before throwing in the towel in 2017. When one of the official staff basically said there probably wouldn’t ever be a HL3 sequel since most of the OG team have left and Valve have moved away from episodic distribution model for games. Claiming there was never any promise and effectively mostly ending any hopes for a true Finale for the series.

Whatever the case Valve have clearly moved onto other projects focused on sucking up more money on Steam and coasting on that as they sit upon their mountains of Gold whilst gamers wait endlessly for some kind of finality. Half Life Alyx has given me some hope since there has been renewed interest in the series after so long, but whether we’ll ever get an official end to this story in game form is anyone’s guess. I would love ther to be one, but if there isn’t I can somewhat be content with the legacy that’s been left behind.
 
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HL3 will never happen because Steam makes too much money.

First of all, the big creators have moved on. They're old, they have fuck-you money, and it's not worth it to them. Gabe Newell is almost 60 and a billionaire. He has fuck-you money. You know what 60-year-olds don't do? All-night crunch time to push a game out the door that will increase their net worth by 0.5%. Half-Life 2 sold ~12 million copies. If Half-Life 3 does that, how much money ends up in Gabe Newell's pockets? Fifteen million dollars is literally 0.1% of his net worth.

Second, the people who loved Half-Life are old as shit. Nobody cares about it any more. It's old crap for old people. If you were 18 when Half-Life came out, you're 41 now, not exactly a prime gaming demographic. If you're 18 today, Half-Life is a game your dad was into when he was your age.

Third, Valve Corporation itself makes cargo barges full of money from selling games. Making AAA games just doesn't bring in money like running a storefront does, certainly not if you haven't gotten a monetization scheme set up.
 
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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.
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We know that there are multiple alien races because the combine have collected and enslaved a bunch of them. So why wouldn't G-Man be an alien representative from an unknown race or a collective of races? There might be similar versions of him on other worlds doing similar work.

But why is he seemingly alone and acting indirectly? Maybe the race(s) he represents are powerful and a real threat to the combine so no direct intervention is possible or the combine will just close up shop. If they do that they sever earths connection to the main nexus/world/whatever whose location is unknown(the universe is a big place, add in different dimensions and it is even bigger). Maybe the G-Man's are enabling locals, such as Gordon, on different worlds to do their work for them. That work is to eventually get a Gordon in a position to sniff out where RaceX needs to go because them smashing the combine on earth doesn't do much in the grand scheme of things.

And Gordon can't have the portal gun because he takes fall damage.
 
I think HL3 will happen eventually , but as it stands valve seems to be very scattered brained when it comes to projects , HL:A and Desk Job only got finished because of a need to make a tech demo and were both built off the backs of 4+ canned/put on hold games. HL3 will only happen when valve starts getting new management , when the old timers leave and new blood enters , which while a very scary idea , is the only way we will ever see anything new from valve in a reasonable time frame.
 
Half-Life and Kiwifarms? Reminds me of some truly insane lolcow on 4chan who goes by the nickname Alf. He has been completely unhinged for years, hating this game as if it touched him as a child or something.

As a matter of fact, a thread is up right now as I am writing this.

It's not difficult to find the threads by just searching for the right keywords.

This is every encounter I have had.
 
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Fwiffo said:
I honestly don’t think it’s any of that (who controls Gordon). It’s simply that the gman puppets Gordon around and other characters like Breen remark on it. To me, one of the really great twists in HL2 and the episodes was the distinct revelation that others are indeed aware of the gman, and are similarly wigged out by him.

I honestly can’t wait to see where Valve takes the lore for him. The little snippets we get in HL: Alyx reveal a whole new slice of the gman, and make me rethink a few of gman’s key traits.
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Episode One is pretty weak overall but the beginning where G-Man is about to talk to you about his usual G-Man shit and the Vortigaunts stop him is one of my favorite moments in a game. Half-Life 2 in general made G-Man speaking to you really cool with how the developers manipulated perspective by having a black screen with the actual environmental footage be in G-Man's face.

I'm of the opinion that Laidlaw's proposed Episode 3 sounded pretty meh. It was just an outline and it probably was going to be refined, but the general gist of it didn't entice me much. I can't say I like Alyx's ending much either, though. Maybe it was just impossible to live up to Episode Two's ending.
 
HeyYou said:
Episode One is pretty weak overall but the beginning where G-Man is about to talk to you about his usual G-Man shit and the Vortigaunts stop him is one of my favorite moments in a game. Half-Life 2 in general made G-Man speaking to you really cool with how the developers manipulated perspective by having a black screen with the actual environmental footage be in G-Man's face.

I'm of the opinion that Laidlaw's proposed Episode 3 sounded pretty meh. It was just an outline and it probably was going to be refined, but the general gist of it didn't entice me much. I can't say I like Alyx's ending much either, though. Maybe it was just impossible to live up to Episode Two's ending.
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Yes, absolutely! Seeing gman as vulnerable — or at the very least fallible — for the first time is really cool. And how the vortigaunts can basically keep him gone for extended periods of time (he has to wait until they are distracted trying to save alyx’s life).

I’m still miffed that they ditched Lou Gossett Jr as the vortigaunt voice in episodes 2 and 3 though…
 
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The Ugly One said:
HL3 will never happen because Steam makes too much money.

First of all, the big creators have moved on. They're old, they have fuck-you money, and it's not worth it to them. Gabe Newell is almost 60 and a billionaire. He has fuck-you money. You know what 60-year-olds don't do? All-night crunch time to push a game out the door that will increase their net worth by 0.5%. Half-Life 2 sold ~12 million copies. If Half-Life 3 does that, how much money ends up in Gabe Newell's pockets? Fifteen million dollars is literally 0.1% of his net worth.

Second, the people who loved Half-Life are old as shit. Nobody cares about it any more. It's old crap for old people. If you were 18 when Half-Life came out, you're 41 now, not exactly a prime gaming demographic. If you're 18 today, Half-Life is a game your dad was into when he was your age.

Third, Valve Corporation itself makes cargo barges full of money from selling games. Making AAA games just doesn't bring in money like running a storefront does, certainly not if you haven't gotten a monetization scheme set up.
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At least the modding/fan-game community is really strong... Signal Lost was a great one if you didn't get the chance to play it.
 
I miss Half-Life and all the mods that came from it. Playing Sven Co-op and Natural-Selection with my friends are some of the fondest gaming memories I have. Simpler, happier times.
 
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On the subject of Half-Life 2, there's an upcoming mod that replaces Alyx with a certain Blue Space Vixen that all furries coom to; more importantly is the fact that it doesn't just replace her image, it replaces her voice as well, with a surprise performance from the VA of Krystal from Star Fox Adventures. Here's an (archive of the) article that covers this development (https://archive.ph/5w4P):

Andy Chalk said:

Star Fox actor comes out of retirement for a Half-Life 2 mod that replaces Alyx with a sexy blue fox​

By Andy Chalk published 1 day ago
Estelle Ellis, the original voice of Krystal, hasn't voiced a game character since 2005, but came back for this mod.


If you've ever thought to yourself that the one thing that could make Half-Life 2 better is a sexy blue fox in place of Alyx Vance, you've probably played Gagnetar's Alyx Replacement mod for Half-Life 2 that swaps out Eli Vance's daughter for Krystal, the primary heroine of the Star Fox series.

The mod was originally released in 2017 and got a significant upgrade in early 2018, but now it's taken an even bigger step into the big-time with the addition of original Krystal voice actor Estelle Ellis, who is doing "a complete rework of Alyx's lines" for the mod. It's an especially remarkable get because Ellis hasn't done any videogame voice acting for close to 20 years: Mobygames lists her most recent credit as Perfect Dark Zero in 2005.

Despite the long time away, she apparently didn't miss a step. "In spite of doing virtually no voice acting work for well over a decade, she sounds quite natural as Krystal in this fan mod," says the Krystal Archive, a fan site dedicated to "everyone's favorite blue vixen."

"For that extra bit of polish, Gagnetar even took the trouble to rewrite some of the lines to fit better with Krystal as a character in the game world, rather than simply doing a word-for-word recreation," the archive says.

The whole Starfox-meets-Half Life thing is kind of a weird mashup, but it does look, and sound, quite good, in both the Kleiner lab demo above, and the Eli lab demo below:


As for how Gagnetar was able to convince Ellis to reprise her role for the mod, he said in the comments on the Kleiner video that he's been talking with her on and off for years, and "decided to just get her a decent microphone and we worked from there." He also said she requested a reduction in the model's "chest physics," which is why some aspects of Krystal's movement are more restrained in the Eli lab demo video than they are in the Kleiner clip. (I don't see much difference, to be honest.)

The Krystal Archive makes a point of being an all-ages celebration of Krystal, who first debuted in 2002's Star Fox Adventures. To that end it has a strict "yiff policy," and is "strongly against 'adult' depictions of Krystal, be they written, drawn, or animated." A look at the mod offers a clue to why such a policy might be necessary: the original version of the character model was very much NSFW.

Gagnetar said the new release of the Alyx Replacement mod will have other new features, but they won't be revealed until it's released. That's planned to happen on the 20th anniversary of the release of Star Fox Adventures, which if we go by the North American release date puts it on September 23.


Andy Chalk


Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.
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Little more about the mod here (https://archive.ph/TK4Dg):

Falemirous Half-Life 2 Alyx Mod: Version 2​


In this Half-Life 2 Mod by Falemirous (or Gagnetar, or Maziblux), Krystal replaces the secondary companion character Alyx Vance. This version is a significant upgrade to the original Half-Life 2 mod, which used an older version of the Warfaremachine rig.


Features​


  • Uses high quality Warfaremachine Krystal Rig V2
  • Facial animations, tail physics, and various jiggle bones
  • There are 4 variants:
    • Adventures with Gatling Gun
    • Adventures with Blaster
    • Assault with Gatling Gun
    • Assault with Blaster
  • The EMP tool is replaced with Krystal's Staff, now with improved Mikiel2171-based model (with more accurate textures), glowing effects for the crystals, and open/close animations
  • Enhanced textures, and new normal maps, for both the Gatling Gun and the Blaster
  • Gatling Gun has proper animations and is held more naturally
  • In-game TVs showing animations of Alyx have been replaced with Krystal animations, both for Adventures and Assault outfits
  • Krystal now holds the Gravity Gun correctly
  • Many other minor edits to the rig

Compatibility​


  • Half-Life 2
  • Half-Life 2: Episode 1
  • Half-Life 2: Episode 2
  • Synergy (Free Multiplayer Half-Life 2 mod)

Instructions for installing and using the mod can be found in the download's readme.txt file, and in the Tutorial Video below.


Credits​



Download​


The mod's size is rather large (almost 1.8GB). This is due to the textures and rig system being relatively large combined with four different variants. To deal with the massive duplication of data, and get the download size to a more reasonable 54.5MB, we had to use 7zip compression. If you don't already have it, you can download 7zip for Windows or use Keka for Mac OS X. (The Unarchiver for Mac does not correctly decompress this 7zip file.)


Download Half-Life 2 Alyx Mod: Version 2


Falemirous gave full permission to host this mod here on the Krystal Archive.


Video​

Introduction Video​

Tutorial Video​

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The model that the game uses was developed by Warfaremachine, or Victor Suares (https://archive.ph/hi41e), an Argentine furfaggot who designed the Krystal model for SFM porn; here is his reaction to this news (https://archive.ph/JqvuY)
 
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How the hell do you convince someone that once had something of a VA career to do the voice over for an obscure mod for an ancient game that exists solely for furry fetishists?

I love HL2 but I wish it had one more usable weapon, one that was a bit more out there in it's design and usage. If you ignore the gravity gun the rest of the weapons are all very safe and standard. And another enemy type would have been great (either a returning Xen creature or something new). A shame that some of the interesting beta content never made it to the final game.
 
Forsaken Wanderer said:
How the hell do you convince someone that once had something of a VA career to do the voice over for an obscure mod for an ancient game that exists solely for furry fetishists?

I love HL2 but I wish it had one more usable weapon, one that was a bit more out there in it's design and usage. If you ignore the gravity gun the rest of the weapons are all very safe and standard. And another enemy type would have been great (either a returning Xen creature or something new). A shame that some of the interesting beta content never made it to the final game.
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Some of the supposed beta ideas like the Combine Guard and Hydra feels too gimicky like the Hydra would make the supposed Canal levels a bit of a slog and the Guard's attacks (imagine a faster Strider cannon that is near pinpoint accurate). While it is true that the beta had interesting features, it sometimes feels like a "throw shit in till it sticks" philosophy.
 
WULULULULU said:
Some of the supposed beta ideas like the Combine Guard and Hydra feels too gimicky like the Hydra would make the supposed Canal levels a bit of a slog and the Guard's attacks (imagine a faster Strider cannon that is near pinpoint accurate). While it is true that the beta had interesting features, it sometimes feels like a "throw shit in till it sticks" philosophy.
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True there was a lot of things that probably never would have fit, such as the ice picks (what would they do when you already have a crowbar?) and I think they even had an AK47 there at some point (stolen from CS?). While the Hydra may have sucked I think one blast silo type set piece could have really tied the game together. Originally they were going to show a world that was full of Xen creatures and quite toxic to humans, where as in the finished game we don't know what the "natural" life is like outside of the city other than the coastline wildlife and the nest in HL2 EP2.
 
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