As the title suggests, Ravenholm would’ve taken you back to the zombie-infested town, accompanied by the mysterious Father Grigori. Documentary house Noclip provided a look at the canceled game as part of a larger video on Arkane back in 2020, and now a full hour of footage has been made public “as part of Noclip’s mission to document and preserve the history of video games.”

Ravenholm was being developed in the same Source engine as Half-Life 2, but Arkane was building new mechanics to expand on the original game’s robust physics systems. You’d be able to more easily knock zombies back with quick melee strikes, for one, pushing them into spiked walls or other traps.

Likewise, a nail gun would let you pin enemy limbs to the floor, and you could use those nails to conduct electricity throughout the environment. Build a trail of nails leading from a broken electrical box to a puddle, for example, and you’d get electrically charged water you could use as a trap for incoming zombies. The same mechanics would be used for puzzles, too. Later in the game, you’d pick up a charge gun that could suck electricity from power sources and electrify water or metals.

Even though this build of Ravenholm is very incomplete, as Noclip host Danny O’Dwyer is quick to note, it’s clear that Arkane was looking to build a game even more open-ended and systems-driven than Valve had with Half-Life 2. Both puzzles and combat encounters appear to have numerous solutions, and it seems Arkane was already tinkering with the types of systems it would eventually make use of in Dishonored and Prey, even when Ravenholm was canceled in the late ‘00s.

Oh, and one more note for Half-Life fans – we might just have an idea of Father Grigori’s ultimate fate here. Valve hadn’t yet signed off on final story details by the time Ravenholm was canceled, but it seems Grigori would’ve slowly grown addicted to the Headcrab blood injections he was using to stave off the zombie infection. Ultimately, those injections would’ve turned him into a monster, and while even now Arkane seems reluctant to share details about the ending, it seems plausible that he might’ve been Ravenholm’s final boss.

For more of the best classic PC games, you can follow that link.

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The Noclip documentary follows Arkane, the developer of Prey and Dishonored, through two decades of history and several canceled projects. Looming largest is Ravenholm, a Half-Life 2 episode that was never officially announced (opens in new tab) and was just as quietly canceled, despite a sizable portion of the game already being made. You can see the project for yourself starting at 33:00 into the video.

Thank you @noclipvideo, for this amazing documentary. You guys made me feel emotional as I watched it today. https://t.co/ZfvgPqX9YcMay 26, 2020

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It’s a lot to take in; Father Grigori injecting headcrab blood, experimental monkeys that hate the light (and you), a nail gun that can be used to carry an electric current and to pin zombies’ feet to the floor. Why would Valve leave Half-Life off at Episode 2 for so long when all this was sitting on a hard drive in Arkane’s offices? “Frankly, I just think it was business,” studio founder Raf Colantonio explains in the documentary.

Valve was working on ways to make its new episodic approach to Half-Life financially viable, and one approach was to work with external studios. Arkane was promising (and relatively cheap), so Valve gave the studio a shot. Both Valve and Arkane tried to make it work, but as Colantonio said, “we were late.”

“The thing you’ve seen was really cool. But to finish it, to bring it to completion, we’d still probably have to spend another year, and maybe at least the same amount of money, or a little bit less. But then you look at how much it is now that it costs, and when it ships it doesn’t make so much sense any more.”

It’s pretty weird learning that we almost had another Half-Life game, seeing it in action, then realizing we’ll almost definitely never get to play it ourselves all in the space of a week. Still, it’s not all gone without a trace. As art director Sébastien Mitton points out, Arkane took many lessons from Ravenholm forward into games like Dishonored and Prey – and even into the future, with Arkane’s next project Deathloop.

Learn how the Half-Life series finally returned with our look at the making of Half-Life: Alyx. 

The post Half-Life 2: Ravenholm emerges in new documentary footage appeared first on Game News.

If you really want to dive deep into Half-Life with one complete package, there’s another fantastic Steam (opens in new tab) deal (thanks Wario64 (opens in new tab)) you might want to consider. The Half-Life Complete collection includes Half-Life 1 and 2, the enhanced Half-Life: Source, the Half-Life: Opposing Force expansion, Half-Life: Blue Shift, Team Fortress Classic, and Episodes 1 and 2, all for just over $6 (about £5).

Of course, this is all in anticipation of the hotly-anticipated Half-Life: Alyx, a full-length, VR-exclusive prequel to Half-Life 2 coming March 2020. Naturally, the decision to limit the game to VR platforms saw mixed reactions, but it’s still very exciting to see a proper return for the Half-Life franchise after the most recent entry, Half-Life: Episode 2, released way back in 2007.

If you are looking forward to Half-Life: Alyx, it’s worth mentioning that it’s 10% off on Steam (opens in new tab) right now at $53.99. It seems Valve is doing everything it can to make returning to Half-Life as financially feasible as possible, which is wise considering you’ll need at least 12 gigs of ram (via TechRadar (opens in new tab)), not to mention a VR setup, to run the game properly.

Speaking of cheap games, keep an eye on the best Black Friday game deals (opens in new tab) to keep the savings coming. 

The post Prepare for Half-Life: Alyx with Half-Life 1 and 2 for $1 each appeared first on Game News.

“It helps if you don’t have expectations that might make it hard to hear the reactions you are getting,” says Gabe Newell, Valve’s co-founder and figurehead, when we ask if and when he knew the company had created something special. Such evasion would normally strike you as false modesty, but Valve is a company of unorthodox methods – a company without job titles run like a school for the gifted, a company with such a close commitment to its community that it reads every email, a company that, with the slow gestation of Steam, has become something of a saviour of PC gaming with seeming reluctance. 

Its decisions are often unfathomable, veering from The Orange Box’s incredible value, through the endless care and attention given to the Team Fortress 2 community, to the more difficult proposition of selling two Left 4 Dead games in quick succession. Valve is outspoken and perhaps even eccentric, Newell’s own proclamations on the “total disaster” of PS3 or on Microsoft’s indolent support of PC gaming provoking headlines. Externally, its catalogue may appear near-infallible – but these triumphs have been hard won. The original Half-Life was scrapped and revised over a period of 12 months before release. With its publisher threatening to drop marketing support shortly after the game hit shelves, Valve was not guaranteed to even recoup its investment until it persuaded Sierra to release a Game Of The Year edition. 

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Half-Life 2’s development was similarly rocky, most frequently waylaid by Valve’s own towering aspirations – and perhaps this is why Newell is reluctant to sing its praises, even after the fact. Nothing is certain in game development, not even at Valve. Newell himself nixed the scheduled appearance of the game at E3 2002 when the proof-of-concept reel failed to blow him away (he had consciously distanced himself from the project in order to maintain an unbiased first viewing of it). Then the game missed its much-trumpeted September 30, 2003 ship date – a debacle which saw the company lose internal momentum as well as public face, and has solidified Newell’s commitment to avoiding specific dates whenever possible. The disaster was shortly followed by a security scandal in which a German hacker leaked the not-even-nearly finished code, causing further dismay at a studio already spending $1 million per month to complete the game. 

Even as the final pieces fell into place, a legal battle with publisher Vivendi Universal Games threatened to scupper Valve’s efforts. Originally, Valve had sued Vivendi, claiming the publisher had illegally distributed Counter-Strike licences to internet cafés. Vivendi’s counter-suit was the thing of nightmares: Valve had not, Vivendi alleged, been diligent in finishing Half-Life 2; it felt that the creation of Steam undermined its right to publish Valve’s games. 

There were worries that Vivendi would refuse to release Half-Life 2 until six months after it had gone gold. Vivendi relented and the courts ruled in the studio’s favour – but it’s proof that Valve’s alchemical triumphs are the result of a little serendipity as well as perseverance and talent. It may have had the benefit of self-funding, its founders’ ample reserves accumulated during the ascendency of Microsoft, but it took brass balls to see the making of Half-Life 2 through without compromise. Perhaps this is also why so few games have managed to surpass Half-Life 2’s achievements. As Newell says, “Making games is hard, and every team has to pick their battles carefully.” 

Creating one of the greats

Valve’s chosen battle was simply to make the greatest PC game of all time. Its vectors of attack were multiple: skirmishes which saw the medium as a whole gain ground in the implementation of physics, develop new ways of telling stories in interactive spaces and, most fundamentally, aspire to a higher level of maturity. 

Half-Life 2’s characters are engaging both dramatically and in action: they are a tangible presence in the world which help or hinder the player directly. And the world itself, with its Eastern Bloc urban austerity and sense of abandon in its rural desolation, is a fictional construct considerably evolved from the first game’s satirical shlock – a coherent place which, regardless of the player’s narrow corridor of progress through it, never once fails to convince. “There was a period when the first-person genre was relegating the experience to that of a shooting gallery,” Newell says. “There have been plenty of games that point to a much broader range of options – environment and character development, storytelling, gameplay, tone – and Half-Life 2 was part of that.”

That part being the vanguard, presumably. But it wasn’t that it got there first – Half-Life 2 isn’t just an important iteration in the onward progress of the first-person shooter, it remains a high-water mark in many respects. At the time, the presence of the handheld physics toy, the gravity gun, was thought to be the most significant addition, but, even though Valve’s brilliantly playful implementation was a great differentiator from games past, the physical manipulation of the environment was an inevitability in the industry, an advance born of the unstoppable sweep of technology. The game’s aspiration of communicating a grown-up narrative, through engaging with its characters and setting, was as much a product of imagination as it was technology, and it is this credential which has proved much harder for other games to match. Even BioShock, with its smart meta-commentary on the freedom of the player, follows a little meekly in the footsteps of Half-Life 2, in which your nemesis mocks your popular calling as “The Free Man” and asks if you can really do anything but destroy. 

It is still, of course, a story about alien invasion, largely articulated through the exchange of gunfire. But Half-Life 2 showed, more profoundly than other shooters of its decade, that narrative wasn’t just the backdrop to action, but spawned by a constant interplay with the 3D interactive space. The germ of this sophistication was evident in the game’s predecessor, from its ostentatious scene-setting on the Black Mesa transit system, to Barney the security guard offering to buy you a beer after work. Although the scientists and guards were little more than props to be sucked into air vents or diced by haywire lasers, it was easy to anthropomorphise them. 

The game’s laboratory environments, too, despite the occasional pools of glowing green gloop and whirling hi-tech gizmos, were conceived with the trappings of credible working places. Nonetheless, the earlier game underwent a more organic process of development than its sequel, as Valve found its feet as a developer and grew its team. This did not always create the kind of wholly coherent world that would be necessary for its sequel, particularly evident in the disparity between Chuck Jones’ tendrils-and-talons monster design and Ted Backman’s more adult, eerie creatures. Half Life 2 sees Backman’s sense of uncanniness now pervading the entire project – an aesthetic unity that grew out of a new approach to production. 

“There was a large-scale difference between the two projects,” Newell explains. “That meant there were organisational and process changes we had to make to accommodate that. Trees are organic, but there are reasons why they don’t grow to be as tall as skyscrapers.” 

The team was broken up into cabals, each working on separate areas – but this time art was applied to the levels after their essential geometry had been laid out, with the game’s writer, Marc Laidlaw, ducking between groups to ensure everything fitted into the overall fiction. The result was the more cohesive sense of place and tone, which was vital to the projection of Half-Life 2’s narrative, and which took a much darker turn than that of the original game. 

“This came naturally out of the design of the world,” Laidlaw says. “There was no point at which we didn’t see the universe as being essentially dark. As long as we were trapped in the confines of Black Mesa, we didn’t have to deal with the world beyond those walls, but that didn’t mean we pictured a positive, nurturing environment. When the world of Half-Life 2 started coming into focus, we tried to be consistent in tone – but this wasn’t a matter of being selectively darker or more sophisticated. It simply meant we had to be vigilant about introducing elements that might inadvertently break the spell we were trying to cast.” 

There were tonal aspects of Half-Life’s world that needed to be reset, however. Although Dr Kleiner and his pet headcrab provide comic relief, HL2 is a much more consistently grim fiction, avoiding the more obvious satirical elements of Half-Life’s sci-fi. “We found that satire or parody was too limiting as a fundamental principle for creating a universe rich with possibilities,” Laidlaw says. 

Half-Life: Alyx

The first Half-Life: Alyx trailer (opens in new tab) is the closest we’re gonna get to Half-Life 3

Dr Breen, the human stooge of the oppressive Combine, could easily have been a caricatured tyrant, all monocles and Gestapo gloves – but instead his snake oil philosophy is presented in unsettlingly reasonable, measured terms. Even as Breen persuades the occupants of City 17 to reject their base instinct for procreation, his creed is never presented with tongue overtly in cheek. Equally, the casual black humour with which scientists were reduced to offal in the first game is replaced with a much sadder sense of macabre – there is little humour to be found in the cremated corpses lying in gnarled heaps beside derelict coastal buildings. The many and grisly ways in which the player is encouraged to dispatch zombies allows for grim amusement, but elsewhere the humble headcrab is used to tell poignant stories of failed resistance – and the demented wail of a zombie carrying a payload of poison headcrabs is surely one of the most chilling noises in video games. 

Did Valve always intend its sequels to mature with the game’s audience? Surprisingly not, according to Newell. “That isn’t something we think about except as part of each project needing to respect the fact that simply repeating the past isn’t going to have the same impact now as it did then,” he says. “I feel like we’ve gotten away from genuinely scaring the player more than I’d like, and it’s something we need to think about, in addition to broadening the emotional palette we can draw on.” And now, as the future players of Episode Three start having families and hitting middle age, what horrifies them more than anything else? “The death of their children,” says Newell. “The fading of their own abilities.”

Avoiding cliché

The maturity with which Valve approached its world can be seen not so much in the broad strokes of its plot but in the credible drawing of its environments – instilling a strong sense of place while compounding the game’s bleak tone. Though the moonlit zombie-filled Ravenholm makes plenty of knowing nods to the horror genre, Half-Life 2 largely resists the more obvious opportunities to deploy cliché. The bold decision to scrub early ideas for a globe-trotting plot and concentrate the action in a nonspecific eastern European country provided Valve with a fresh and idiosyncratic palette. Nonetheless, the first designs for City 17 and the surrounding wasteland saw them endure the stormy night skies of Gothic horror. The former then had the air of Blade Runner – nocturnal, rain-swept and with the dense entanglement of old and new accelerating decay. Yet the crisp sallow daylight of the final game transforms the environments into something unlike any of its inspirations. The stately plazas of the eastern European city are beset by technology which seeks to order the world as it consumes it, quite apart from Blade Runner’s depiction of entropy under flickering neon lights. The towering, angular Combine structures themselves have a fascistic flavour to them – but their alarming asymmetry, impossible distribution of mass and unknowable materials, dark and iridescent, mark them out as something entirely Other. 

The wasteland, too, sidestepped scorched-earth cliché and instead opted for a melancholic emptiness. The quiet wood buildings of the coast, like so many of the environments in Half-Life 2, hold stories that unravel as you explore, their hastily assembled possessions and broken makeshift barricades telling of the panic of the occupants’ final few minutes. In cooperation with the player, the architecture of the levels themselves becomes narrator, guiding the player through little dramas that expand upon the world’s fiction in bullet holes and spraypaint. Prior to Half-Life 2, environments had largely served as prettified backdrops: Quake 2’s imposing metal halls and gantries had unsurprisingly little to say about life on Stroggos. Half-Life 2 championed a form of efficient, wordless storytelling that could only work in video games – a medium allowing for that explorative interaction with a 3D space. 

It’s another boon of this mode of storytelling through the level’s physical structure that you need never notice it. Though the coastal sections invite you to stop and wonder at the desolation, it’s quite possible to screech through them in your buggy, bouncing from battle to battle. This is necessarily so: the game’s successes elsewhere would have been for naught if it was a limp shooter. 

Half-Life 2’s mechanics may feel out of place among the more weighty, embodied shooters of more recent times, but the actual pace of the game and structure of the firefights is still brilliantly conceived. Scripting describes many of these encounters, enemies popping up to harry you during your flight to Black Mesa East, but as the tables turn the player often finds himself engaging the enemy on his own terms. These are fascinating AI encounters: the Combine soldiers flank and probe your defences in ways that are credible yet defeatable. The tripodal Striders hunker down to peer under your cover and, in later episodes, acid-spitting antlions constantly shift their position around, just out of range – AI behaviour which is predictable enough to be countered by a little thought, but organic enough to never feel prescriptive or obvious, dangerous enough that each battle teeters on the limits of your control. 

Half-Life 2 manages a sense of ever-increasing empowerment by creating a constant see-saw between threat and your ability to overcome it: mounting the pulse cannon on to the airboat allows you to finally deal – violently, cathartically – with the chopper that has harassed you through City 17’s canals; the gravity gun transforms the zombie menace into a grisly playground full of physics-enabled buzz saws and petrol canisters; the antlions go from being a lethal nuisance to your willing minions; and, of course, just when you think the game has stripped you of all your weaponry, it turns the gravity gun into a device of awesome power, able to rip the Combine consoles depicting Breen’s face straight from the walls and toss them into a unit of soldiers. 

The dynamism of these battles has increased as the episodes have gone on, escalating through the frantic scraps with the dog-like Hunters to the climactic defence of White Forest at the end of Episode Two. But Valve has always been able to manipulate the width of the linear path the player takes. Along with the convincing world-building, it’s that balance of moment-to-moment freedom with the urgent motivation to keep moving that prevents it from feeling as confined and claustrophobic as other corridor shooters. Momentum is driven either from behind, by pursuing forces, or by hanging eventual goals on the horizon – making your arrival there that much more significant.

The creation of Alyx

Valve’s creatives are masters of understanding how drama can work in an interactive world, in a navigable 3D environment, from seeding narrative into the architecture to carefully guiding the player’s eye towards details of significance. But Valve was also among the first developers to breathe life into the people who occupy the place. “We wanted to try our hand at adding real characters to the story, rather than caricatures,” Laidlaw says. “Advances in animation, and the people we were luring in from the film industry, spurred us to try for a broader emotional range.” Admittedly, Valve’s approach to cutscenes has become more obtrusive as the drama it wishes to convey has grown more complex – players can opt out to a degree (Dr Kleiner’s laboratory provides many distractions for those uninterested in the plight of Lamarr), but by and large you are confined while the dialogue plays out. Yet it’s in your companionship with the characters outside these scenes that they grow on you the most – becoming active participants in the action. 

The technical advances have continued, but still only a small handful of video game buddies are as good company as Alyx; an even smaller number of female characters in games have been as appealing (and an even smaller number aren’t Caucasian). Alyx is something of a video game Suffragette, to whose efforts the Elena Fishers of the world owe a debt. Certainly, there’s a palpable frisson of love interest, but the highly capable, geeky Alyx is speaking to an entirely different audience – one for whom romantic aspirations have evolved beyond locating dad’s Playboy stash. Was there ever any doubt at Valve about whether the audience was ready for a female role as something other than pixellated titillation?

“We never argued about Alyx,” says Laidlaw. “In a lot of ways, the personality of the character in the game is just a refined version of our initial vision. Every discussion was about giving her more depth, more believability; we were all moving in the same direction from the start. Just as we wanted Gordon to be easily distinguishable from the typical video game heroes of the day, we wanted Alyx to stand apart from the video-babe clichés.” 

While Alyx and the supporting cast have aged well, going back to Half-Life 2 now, one of the few things that feels a little quaint is Freeman’s inability to speak. Latter-day games, even shooters, either tend to impose vocalisations upon the protagonist or give the player some options for expression. But would Valve ever want Half-Life 2’s hero to speak? “Gordon Freeman, whatever his strengths and weaknesses, is defined entirely by his design constraints,” Laidlaw says. “Silence is the keystone of his character. I know it doesn’t work for everyone, but fortunately there are plenty of games with talking protagonists. We don’t have to turn Half-Life into one of those. 

That said, the ‘strong, silent type’ jokes are way past their expiration date. Even the very first and freshest one was slightly curdled.” Newell seems more open to the idea. “We’re not philosophically opposed to this,” he says, “but we don’t have good reasons to do it. Right now making your companions more interesting and compelling seems a more fruitful avenue to explore.” But Newell’s less enamoured by our suggestion that Gordon might one day get a greater sense of embodiment – to become more than a floating hand and crowbar: “We haven’t had a reason to change that. Most of what I’ve seen to date has been gimmicky and is entertaining for just a minute or so.” 

Despite such assurances to the contrary, we wonder if Valve’s dogmatic insistence on producing episodes, rather than an outright sequel, has left it strapped to conventions that it would rather leave behind. But even if it resists any mechanical change for the upcoming Episode Three, the series will still stand as the high point of what the first-person shooter has achieved in terms of narrative and world-building, its aftershocks still rattling through any game that attempts to tell a story within a 3D space. But it’s more than understanding how to use the medium: when we look back and smirk at how gaming’s early days were bootstrapped by puerile fantasy and thoughtless violence, when the first-person shooter finally involves considerably more than just shooting, it will be Half-Life 2 to which everyone owes the debt.

This feature first appeared in EDGE (opens in new tab). For more excellent articles like the one you’ve just read, why not subscribe to the print or digital edition of EDGE Magazine at MyFavouriteMagazines (opens in new tab). 

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• How indie developers finished Half-Life 3 (opens in new tab)

***This article was originally published on August 25th, 2017 and has been updated to include a link to the Epistle 3 game jam – see above – where indie developers made their own version of Half-Life 3 based on Marc Laidlaw’s plot outline*** 

Dubbed “Epistle 3” and penned by Dr. Gertrude Fremont (a gender-swapped version of Dr Gordon Freeman), it tells the exciting story of her travels to Antarctica and the discovery of a powerful device capable of traveling through time and space called the Hyperborea. Dr. Fremont and her companion, Alex Vaunt, fly the Hyperborea into the heart of enemy territory, where they intend to detonate it. Just before that happens however, a sinister figure, Mrs. X, steps out of the shadows and steals Alex away. It looks like Dr. Fremont is doomed, but is then pulled through dimensions by the Ghastlyhaunts and saved. We’ve broken down the major plot beats into questions below, if you don’t mind spoiling a game that will never exist:

Where has Gordon been?

Lost in other dimensions, unable to respond to our calls. Or rather, Marc Laidlaw has been busy working on other projects and now, more than 18 months since it was announced he was leaving Valve, he’s been able to pen a letter from Dr. Freema… we mean Gertie Fremont. 

Did they find the Borealis? 

Indeed, but not without some trouble. It turns out that the location discovered in Episode Two was not so much definitive coordinates for the ship’s placement, but its likely re-entry point after flitting in and out of time and space. 

What was the connection to Portal?

It’s all about travelling between spaces, as it’s one of Aperture Science’s greatest interests. The Borealis was equipped with a Bootstrap Device that was supposed to allow it to travel inside a generated field from anywhere to anywhere instantaneously. However, when it was activated prematurely to keep it out of Combine hands, it turns out it also travels to any place and time as well. The ship is therefore stretched between its starting location and Arctic destination through time and space. 

Do they find Judith Mossman?

Yes, Dr. Mossman helps Gordon and Alyx aboard the ship having pleaded her case as a double agent working with the Resistance against the Combine. Alyx still blames Mossman for her father’s death, however. 

Do they destroy the Borealis?

It was a matter of great debate whether they should or shouldn’t, but Alyx, determined to carry out her father’s dying wishes, insists the ship must be destroyed. When Dr. Mossman threatens to shoot them and rematerialise the ship in the Arctic for the Resistance forces to retrieve, Alyx shoots her and decides with Freeman to use the ship as a missile by crashing it into a Combine staging area that they keep seeing as the ship flickers in space. 

Did G-Man’s plan for Alyx get revealed?

Yes, having suggested to Gordon that he had plans for Alyx, he turns up just in time to grab her from the Borealis before Alyx and Freeman send the ship hurtling into a Combine invasion force. Gordon Freeman is left alone contemplating the futility
of this plan as the enormity of the challenge becomes clearer through the bridge windows. 

Any surprises?

The BreenGrub! It turns out the Combine retained some portion of former Black Mesa head Wallace Breen’s consciousness from before he was killed and transplanted it into a grub creature, now seemingly in command of Combine forces in the Arctic. However, the BreenGrub is terrified of Freeman and ultimately begs to be killed, ending its miserable existence. Alyx refuses to help and Gordon’s choice remains ambiguous in the text. Pop fact: In 2012, Marc Laidlaw, using the Twitter handle @BreenGrub, started sharing background info on the Advisors. These terrifying psychic beings are, he claims, deliberately inhibiting their growth into adulthood and not all of them are evil. You can read more about the @Breen Grub info on the Advisors (opens in new tab) right here, although the tweets have never been confirmed as canon by Valve, obviously. 

How does it end?

Gordon Freeman is saved from the crashing ship by the Vortigaunts just in time, but has apparently been returned to Earth at a much later date. He speaks of the terrain having changed and people not recognising him anymore, but the Resistance lives on. He signs off, saying he leaves it to us to finish the story and to expect no further correspondence as this is his ‘final episode’. 

Of course, I’m no Marc Laidlaw, and my summary hardly does the story justice. You can read the original version (opens in new tab) of the letter on his site, or read a version where the names and places have been changed to match the Half-Life series characters on Pastebin (opens in new tab).

Laidlaw referred to the story (with what I can only imagine as the biggest wink-and-nod in human history) as “fanfic” on Twitter (opens in new tab), calling it a “a genderswapped snapshot of a dream I had many years ago.” And while it’s true that this isn’t officially what happens to Alyx and Gordon, it sure seems like this is the direction Valve was going at one point. Laidlaw’s account even matches well with some supposedly leaked concept art for Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (opens in new tab), which appeared on the web in 2012.

The terms “Half-Life 2: Episode 3” and “Half-Life 3” have been used interchangeably to refer to the next, highly-anticipated chapter in the Half-Life saga. And while we may never get a game bearing either of those labels, I’m okay with treating Laidlaw’s account of what happened as the final nail in the coffin. Rest in peace, Gordon Freeman. You done good.

Half-Life 3 appears unlikely to see the light of day but you can follow its tumultuous unofficial development history (opens in new tab) right here.

The post Half-Life 3: Ex-Valve writer shares fan fiction thats as close as well get to a Episode 2 sequel appeared first on Game News.

Freeman, you see, is the perfectly engineered observer and vessel. Here is a character so flimsy that his silhouette slips away from your mental grasp like soap in the bath, leaving behind only a crowbar, a pair of glasses and a HEV suit. Even his face is a disturbingly literal interpretation of the everyman, based on a recombination of male Valve employees (he has no full in-game model). He is silent so that Valve’s world can speak. He is transparent so that your immersion in its action and its story remain uninterrupted.

And what a scenario you are drawn into. Freeman is brought out of stasis after his take-it-or-leave-it job offer at the end of the first game to find that Portal storms have ravaged the planet and Earth has surrendered to the otherworldly Combine following total defeat in the Seven Hour War. Humanity’s reign is done, as you can clearly see etched into the faces of the cowed peons that filter through the dilapidated train station you alight into. All that’s left is to stick one in the fat folds of your new telepathic slug oppressors.

Even this initial shot establishes how Valve intends to relay its fiction: by showing first, and with telling a distant second. You don’t need a chunk of exposition to clarify the dynamic between the gun-cradling Civil Protection officers on one side of a cattle cage and the gaunt, dirty humans that shuffle these halls (though you can talk to the denizens to better understand their misery). And while you can’t avoid the omnipresent face of Dr Wallace Breen, Earth’s administrator, delivering the first of his ‘Breencasts’, nothing forces you to stop and absorb details of this suppression field.

So whether you’re here for a story or just want to blow away some aliens, Valve does what it needs to with curt efficiency, by setting up an Orwellian regime of brutal intolerance couched in double-speak (“our benefactors”), demonstrating the stakes and giving us a villain to topple. But then the big V goes one step further and makes it personal. Before you’re given any means of reprisal, an officer casually knocks a can from the top of a bin and demands that you pick it up. Disobey and he’ll knock you about with his stun baton. In part, it’s a small tutorial on how to work with the Source engine’s physics, but nothing reinforces the jackbooted cruelty on display so much as being subject to it yourself. It also draws out a primal urge to punish those who make you suffer. Expertly manipulated or not, It’s hard not to draw some grim satisfaction the first time you bury Freeman’s crowbar in one of those stupid, masked faces.

Freeman has his signature weapon, but Half-Life 2 has its own: the Gravity Gun. (Yes, okay, we mean the Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator. Nerd.) This gun-cum-physics tool distorts the fabric of the game, to the point that headcrab-zombie-infested secret city Ravenholm – Half-Life 2’s sharp left-turn into horror film territory – was transplanted out of intended sequence so Valve could justify us flinging circular saw blades and flammable canisters at its possessed inhabitants. The Gravity Gun has other combat purposes, such as returning a grenade to its sender, but it speaks loudest about Valve’s intentions. According to the dev’s managing director, Gabe Newell, one of the team’s key design goals was to make Half-Life 2’s world feel more interactive and less like a stage. In the Gravity Gun, Valve grants itself a licence for physics puzzling and comedy, as well as a rare sense of physicality.

Comedy? Yep, because long before the ragdoll anarchy of the Gravity Gun’s supercharged form, Half-Life 2 lets you paint an onrushing enemy with a lobbed can of white paint, or batter them ineffectively with a cardboard box. Far from undercutting the grim future the game depicts, this humanises its harder sci-fi edges and makes it more effective. No one needs a little laugh more than those whose future is darkest, after all.

Despite how marvellously effective physics is as a binding agent for both atmosphere and gameplay, there was a time when Valve considered it an incredibly risky gambit to include at all. Before Half-Life 2 came out in 2004, the last well-known game to pin its hopes on a more physical game world was 1998’s Trespasser. This spin-off of Jurassic Park was no clever girl, but a critical and commercial failure for the ages, due to its weightless objects and interminable box-stacking puzzles.

It’s not that every physics element in Half-Life 2 is a winner – weighing down a ramp so you can drive a floaty hovercraft over it feels more like a tech demo than a puzzle. But when these sometimes finicky elements do work, it’s for the betterment of the game, and represents a huge achievement for Valve’s risk-taking.

That pioneering spirit is commonly overshadowed by the other things Half-Life 2 does so well. But for a game filled with new ideas and toys, that’s easy to do. The game continually reinvents itself from your early escape from City 17 right up to your inevitable return. Water Hazard and Highway 17 take detours into vehicle combat, for example, as well as problem solving on a different scale. Sandtraps grant you the use of Antlion Pheropods and with them the ability to command a force of giant bugs, which can be used to mark enemies for a gruesome nibbling, and to summon drones to use as meat shields. Striders – towering mechs engineered by the Combine – force you to use cover and hit-and-run tactics, their tripod design and dominating presence like something out of War Of The Worlds.

Adding to all the excitement are ricocheting energy balls that introduce a deadly little game of Super Breakout into the chaos of a firefight. Valve feared making a shooting gallery, and responded with a riot of gameplay ideas, granting the kind of variance that is still rare enough to be applauded 12 years later.

But it’s not the toys or the plot, or even the physics, that make City 17 worth revisiting. There’s an intangible secret ingredient that has earned this game its place in history and a Game Of The Decade Award: consistency. It’s not that every element is of the same quality, but that every part of the game hangs together and supports the others in a vast, complex ecosystem of complementary design.

So the story is told not just by our main actors performing in front of us, but in family photos on Eli Vance’s desk, newspaper clippings on Dr Isaac Kleiner’s lab wall and sad skeletons in the houses on Highway 17. It’s told by architecture and graffiti and decor. Little microtales pop up everywhere you go –look for it and you can see evidence of the Combine draining the seas (once planned as a more major plot point), most obviously in the landlocked dock towards the start of Highway 17. Homes are filled with bric-à-brac: pans still on the stove; mattresses stuffed in attics. This doesn’t seem like a surprising amount of detail by today’s HD standards or examples of world building, but it’s just the right sprinkling of mundanity to ground the unthinkably obsidian panels of alien metal eating away at the rundown tenements. It makes you feel for those who used to live there.

Likewise, the physics isn’t just deployed for Gravity Gun puzzles, but for player guidance and interaction (the crowbar also plays its role, becoming a “feeler” in Newell’s words). And though the toys often feel like pre-packed ideas that provide a sparkling hint of novelty, taken together they offer a building repertoire of tricks and aids that vary the rhythm of play. Amazingly, across all this, there are few genuine lows.

And how very Valve that so much of that comes down to its development structure, where teams were split up into ‘cabals’ of different design disciplines. Even choosing the name ‘cabal’ – which refers to a secret political faction – is fitting for a company that shrouds itself in obscurity. If you think about it, Valve practically used Half-Life 2 as a Trojan horse for its now-ubiquitous Steam service. Each cabal would take ownership of a particular aspect of the game, so that, for instance, level designers could make satisfying spaces with simple prototypes, until they were ready for artists to take over and turn them into credible places.

But even this process wasn’t enough. For Half-Life 2, Valve created a Panopticon-like ‘cabal cabal’, which amalgamated members of several different teams. This group took on the responsibility of pulling back focus, ensuring that the high-level goals of consistent quality and entertainment were met. That’s why so much in Half-Life 2 is only glimpsed, but also why it’s held up to scrutiny for more than a decade. In its pursuit of excellence, Valve elected to give us only its best.

Returning to Combine-infested Earth today is more than a mere act of nostalgia or historical tourism, then. Yes, you can spend time in the company of one of the best female wingmen in games, the kickass resistance fighter Alyx Vance, or see where Andrew Ryan from BioShock potentially picked up his oration skills. But that’s not why a quick trip down the train tracks with a crowbar won’t end until you topple the Combine Citadel and all its inhabitants.

Half-Life 2 is a game made to immerse on every level, through a combination of world-building, puzzles and combat, and while it has inevitably fallen behind visually since 2004, Freeman still fades away just as competently as ever, leaving no barrier between you and one of gaming’s best-realised adventures.

This article originally appeared in Official PlayStation Magazine. For more great PlayStation coverage, you can subscribe here (opens in new tab).

The post How Valve cracked open the FPS formula and then put it back together in Half-Life 2 appeared first on Game News.

“Next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room, and potentially pointing further down the road to how we can get it even more unified in mobile.”

Don’t put in that pre-order just yet. This is not necessarily a pledge to have a finished console out by Christmas. Just a firmer commitment to Linux by Valve, and an incoming roadmap to the possible release of the Steam Box. Or whatever it ends up being called. Still, more gaming options are always better than less, and there’s no company better placed to more interestingly disrupt the current status quo than Valve.

The post Valve to (finally) reveal Steam Box plans next week appeared first on Game News.

“You are being trolled,” wrote Valve’s Chet Faliszek. “There is no ARG. Wheatley’s speech was set in Portal 2 fiction – that is all. There has been no directive from Gabe to leak anything. That is all false. I just want to say this so there is no confusion. This is the community trolling the community nothing more. While it is nice to see people excited about anything HL, I hate seeing people be trolled like this.”

Rumors of a Valve-sanctioned Half Life 3 ARG started after a (sadly) unused Spike VGA acceptance video starring Portal 2’s Wheatley surfaced with what appeared to be Half Life 3 related code in the background. Valve was quick to deny the existence of any such ARG to LambdaGeneration, but this did not stop the more fevered Half Life 3 conspiracy theorists from spreading word of the impending sequel.

Prior to the ARG rumors, fans were also teased with images of a Half Life 3 shirt worn in public, as well as suspicious code in the DOTA 2 beta and potential plot details found buried in an earlier Portal 2 ARG. While Faliszek’s post didn’t outright address these pieces of “evidence”, the message made clear that Valve chief Gabe Newell has not done anything official to herald the arrival of Half Life 3.

Or maybe that’s what they want us to think…

The post Valve debunks Half Life 3 rumors appeared first on Game News.

Look – a scientific diagram:

Here’s a list consisting of seven enemies that scuttle and jump at your face. (But deliberately not including Facehuggers because they were made in movie land. Not game land).

7. Pregnators | Duke Nukem Forever

For all of Duke Nukem Forever’s multiple faults, for all of its titular character’s lumpen-headed galootishness, there’s only one area in the game that’s really downright unpleasant. Crudeness, you see, cannot possibly be truly offensive if it’s executed with knowing intent. Things with an ‘offensive’ tone only really become a problem if they’re done callously or without self-awareness. Most of Duke Nukem Forever is a case of the former. During ‘The Hive’ however, it sadly becomes very much the latter. And that’s mostly down to these little f*ckers.

Where Alien’s Facehuggers, much like a lot of H.R. Giger designs, are creepy because of the subtly sexual connotations of their form and functionality, DNF’s Pregnators miss the point completely and go full-on genital-o-rama without a shadow of a hint of a soupcon of subtlety. Basically, they’re a cock-and-balls on legs. They even spit white goo at you as a missile attack. You know, just generic white goo. Could be anything.

Could be, but it’s probably spunk.

Above: Yeah, it’s an achievement of sorts, though one normally celebrated in the porn industry

Their narrative function? Filling Earth women with alien baby. Where Facehuggers hint at unpleasant sexual practices via allusion, Pregnators just get on with them. The actual impregnating process is never shown in the game, mercifully, but this concept art (opens in new tab) (which we’re not going to post on the site) makes it very clear what these fellas are all about.

Makes the tentacle-cock face-thrashing they sometimes give Duke seem rather tame in comparison, doesn’t it?

6. Leapers | Resistance

Man alive these things are ugly. We mean, generally speaking, collectively, as a species, the Chimera aren’t going to win any beauty contests. At least not in our Solar System. And Leapers are possibly the most butt-ugly of all the multi-eyed Chimerians. We doubt that even Disney with all its mastery in the arts of sugary cutefication could make a Leaper look lovable. Here’s what a Leaper might look like before and after being Disneyfied:

Above: It’s even singing a song. Regardless, it’s still less appealing than a Styrofoam cup full of day old tramp mucus

In addition to being scuttly and possessing a tendency to jump at your face, Leapers also have the dubious honour of being one of the few video game ‘characters’ that have officially offended God. When the big man in the clouds found out that Manchester Cathedral was used as a shooting gallery in the first Resistance, lo he was pissed and sent a memo to his underlings, who subsequently cast fire and brimstone and claims of copyright infringement in the direction of Sony. The following video shows Leapers desecrating Manchester Cathedral. Ugly and sacrilegious.

And there’s even more ungodliness. If a Leaper has a nibble on someone that hasn’t had the necessary vaccination, there’s a good chance they’ll turn into a Chimera. Just like vampires. Not soppy good-looking vampires for little girls to cry about. But proper evil vampires that want to eat your entire face off. Apparently, if you feel hot and have a craving for raw meat, you’re infected and will be imminently turning into a Chimera. Either that or you’re Jeffrey Dahmer burning in Hell.

Next page: Even more enemies that scuttle and jump at your face!

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