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
G-man saying Alyx is so heckin kewl she could replace Gordon had all the meta subtlety of a brick. A sequel post-HLA was always going to be about getting rid of Gordon for the "superior" protagonist ala Last Jedi. Seeing as HLfags are so desperate they accept any fucking trash, case in point HLA turbo retconning Eli dying, which is as big a fuck you to people waiting for Ep3/HL3 as it could possibly get, they will happily lap up any slop that shits all over Gordon as long as they get a new game.

I half expect the Borealis to be the tutorial level that never gets mentioned again, just to get rid of that vestigial plotline as fast as possible.
I still think that it's going to be good but you gave me a vision of horror beyond words for a bit there.
If Half-Life 3 is crap, I'll just have to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Pathalogic and Brigand: Oaxaca like everyone else and pretend that they're leaked PS2 spinoffs.

Do you think that it would be like Star Wars Episode 1 where there's pure cope for a year until everyone finally admits that it's shit? I can't even fathom what would happen. Star Wars at least had the EU.
 
Do you think that it would be like Star Wars Episode 1 where there's pure cope for a year until everyone finally admits that it's shit? I can't even fathom what would happen. Star Wars at least had the EU.
The gap between ROTJ and TPM (16 years) is now shorter than the gap between HL2:EP2 and now (17 years). Let that sink in.
 
If that's the case, it's Ross Scott or bust
That or Duke Nukem. Gorgeous Freeman was some weird shit but Gordon sounding like the Duke fit surprisingly well.

I know people jerk off Valve a lot but I'm still impressed to this day what they achieved with Half Life 2. Such a major shift from the first game in so many ways, yet it stuck the landing and everyone loved it. Graphics and gameplay still hold up to this day, and the story is intriguing for how little there really is of it.
 
Star Wars at least had the EU.
This is the fundamental problem with the half life series. Lack of material.

They wrote themselves into a corner with the combine. They're cool and the vibe of half life 2 is great in its own right, but it's too different. The Xen/RaceX aliens were more interesting to fight and the grounded 90s military feel of the humans fighting them was kino. Both of those things were essentially discarded for half life 2 in favor of a totally different enemy, ally, power dynamic, and setting.

The following half life games after 1 should have been about earth's forces all over the world fighting back against Xen portal invasions in a decades long war. We could have had shooters, RTS games, all of it. The 7 hour war basically forces the setting to skip all of that and go "nah, the story is about rebellion now". Half Life 1's setting never got a chance to shine because it was relegated to a matter of days in the cannon then replaced by something totally different.

Opposing force remains the best thing to ever come out of the series.
 
What makes Half Life special and memorable and one-of-a-kind is that it's simply not anything like these fucking franchises you dimwit retards. It's everything wrong with gaming. Milking. Furthermore you can just make half life style mods for other games and your own campaigns with source. What's the point? All the extra material we got ended up as dogshit and only Gearbox did decent jobs. Decay is dogshit. The extra material we have isn't anywhere near as interesting as the games themselves.
This is the fundamental problem with the half life series. Lack of material.

They wrote themselves into a corner with the combine. They're cool and the vibe of half life 2 is great in its own right, but it's too different. The Xen/RaceX aliens were more interesting to fight and the grounded 90s military feel of the humans fighting them was kino. Both of those things were essentially discarded for half life 2 in favor of a totally different enemy, ally, power dynamic, and setting.

The following half life games after 1 should have been about earth's forces all over the world fighting back against Xen portal invasions in a decades long war. We could have had shooters, RTS games, all of it. The 7 hour war basically forces the setting to skip all of that and go "nah, the story is about rebellion now". Half Life 1's setting never got a chance to shine because it was relegated to a matter of days in the cannon then replaced by something totally different.

Opposing force remains the best thing to ever come out of the series.

I think Opposing Force isn't the best thing to come from the series but that's because I don't see Half Life as a normal FPS series but rather a weird hybrid of simulator, puzzle, platforming and FPS.
 
I know people jerk off Valve a lot but I'm still impressed to this day what they achieved with Half Life 2. Such a major shift from the first game in so many ways, yet it stuck the landing and everyone loved it. Graphics and gameplay still hold up to this day, and the story is intriguing for how little there really is of it.
Half Life 2 is a phenomenal achievement, especially on the technical side, and the only people downplaying it are retarded zoomers who weren't alive when it came out.
 
This is the fundamental problem with the half life series. Lack of material.

What material are we missing? I think there's plenty enough, not even counting the community's contributions. The only time I would say HL is missing content is in relation to
- Maybe a comic, which isn't a possibility since the guys doing the 2008-9 era Valve comics probably don't work there anymore.
- Episode 3, which is now a pipe dream that only the community can parch.
- Another HLVR game which'll never come.
- HLX which at this point is a certainty.
3/4 of these are unobtainable, and the only that IS is the one that truly matters.

Also OP4 being the best thing to come out of the series? Really? Good sure, but c'mon man, the Episodes are far better.
 

What material are we missing? I think there's plenty enough, not even counting the community's contributions. The only time I would say HL is missing content is in relation to
- Maybe a comic, which isn't a possibility since the guys doing the 2008-9 era Valve comics probably don't work there anymore.
- Episode 3, which is now a pipe dream that only the community can parch.
- Another HLVR game which'll never come.
- HLX which at this point is a certainty.
3/4 of these are unobtainable, and the only that IS is the one that truly matters.

Also OP4 being the best thing to come out of the series? Really? Good sure, but c'mon man, the Episodes are far better.
If nothing else, OP4 scratches that very real itch of the plucky humans fighting back against the superior alien vibe that the other games in the series do not. I actually wished we had something similar for HL2 era games, but I can understand why they didn't make it. (Organized resistance that isn't the City 17 underground rebels or the White Forest Base is apparently not a thing anymore.)
 
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What material are we missing?
Just something of any kind. I can beat the entire half life gauntlet of HL > OPFOR > Blue SHift >HL2 > Lost coast >Ep1 and 2 >portal 1 > portal 2 in five days even if i'm taking my time. Could probably do a glitchless speedrun of it all in 15 hours.

I'm not saying more is always better, but for 27 years worth of content that isn't much. Valve's "don't release anything that isn't absolutely 1 billion percent perfect" goes from being an asset to a hinderance at some point. The cut content from half life 2 all looked so cool. The other extreme: ie disney star wars releasing truckloads of dogshit, sucks as a well but i think there's a middle ground.

Also what I was really getting at was the impossibility of even potential stuff for the half life 1 era specifically. From what we know it seems to be relegated to 2 days at black mesa which has been explored to death, then the rest was the combine invasion. We know the 7 hour war was extremely one sided and then nothing ever happened(tm) until gordon came back 20 years later. I think this is why they're having to dip into alternate universe nonsense.

Half Life is essentially two completely unrelated (both really damn good) settings with a shared protagonist. I've always wanted more from the vibe half life 1 had and due to the way the story was written we will never get it. Xen was genocided and the remaining aliens are feral or on the human's side.
Also OP4 being the best thing to come out of the series? Really? Good sure, but c'mon man, the Episodes are far better.
OOooooofffff I loved the episodes when they came out because I was a thirsty teenager desperate to see what happenned, and I was impressed by the cinematic technical moments. But there's 0 new weapons, only 3 new enemies, the new mechanics are largely gravity gun gimmicks... The majority of people who push the "hl2 is just a tech demo" are massive cunts about it but they're not entirely wrong.

Opposing force on the otherhand perfected the level design, took out a lot of the more obnoxious aspects of HL1, added several new weapons and enemies, had allies play a more crucial role... it was so much content for an expansion pack. I also love the military feel of opposing force, 90s military hardware killing aliens with a mixture of sci-fi guns is just awesome.
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It had the element of okay now that i've played this i can never go back to vanilla half life 1 and the episodes do NOT outprioritize vanilla hl2 in that way.
 
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Speaking of Half Life supplementary content, what are your thoughts on Black Mesa? I know they removed some things like Einstein scientists, but they added a whole bunch of new content as well like entire extra sections/longer levels and a completely redone Xen. This on top of better graphics makes me wonder if this is the best way to play the game today, especially if you didn't experience the original back in the day.
 
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