What an odd leap to take when you clearly understand so little about the franchise, lol
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Watched this online; I have not seen the rest of the game, just the first two hours and this. Therefore, this of course is to be taken with a grain of salt then without having the context of the rest of the game...
After years of being hyped for the possibility of the follow-up to Episode 2, I do have to say this ending hits the wrong notes for me. Everything with how it involves the E2 ending just feels weird, from the time travel, to not really explaining what happened to Alyx then in the retconned ending, completely undermining the impact of E2's ending by bringing back Eli, and (as EatChildren explained well) seeming to shift the focus from this race against the clock for the last chance of humanity's survival to something so... banal and generic with saving Alyx.
That combined with how it seems to treat Gordon and the crowbar with just this weird bit of reverence makes it feel like it was written more by a fan with cool ideas this time rather than a planned arc or continuation. Which I don't mean to put down the new Campo Santo writer, but it does make me sad that we were unable to see the original story seen through.
After years of being hyped for the possibility of the follow-up to Episode 2, I do have to say this ending hits the wrong notes for me. Everything with how it involves the E2 ending just feels weird, from the time travel, to not really explaining what happened to Alyx then in the retconned ending, completely undermining the impact of E2's ending by bringing back Eli, and (as EatChildren explained well) seeming to shift the focus from this race against the clock for the last chance of humanity's survival to something so... banal and generic with saving Alyx.
That combined with how it seems to treat Gordon and the crowbar with just this weird bit of reverence makes it feel like it was written more by a fan with cool ideas this time rather than a planned arc or continuation. Which I don't mean to put down the new Campo Santo writer, but it does make me sad that we were unable to see the original story seen through.
Robin Walker said in a Kotaku interview that this was never the "original script". Epistle 3 is, at best, one of the many, many drafts for the hypothetical Episode 3.
Robin Walker said:
wow sick burn dude. i know enough about it to realize that you have far more impressive and dramatic tools in the game than a crowbar. and in my original post i 100% owned up to only really knowing stuff through osmosis.
the way the op is written made the scene sound different than it clearly is, without context.
Ending their new Half Life game by setting up the wait for Half Life 3 again, has got to be a fucking joke.
Yeah, who would know better than *checks notes* the lead writer of the Half-Life franchise.
Of course, what Laidlaw wrote wasn't the "original" script, that's not how games work. You don't write a script and say turn that into a game. It's a collaborative process that evolves with development. What Epitsle 3 is, is Laidlaw's vision of the ending of Episode 3. What he likely would have pushed for at that point.
It's still canon, it was just reality rewritten, if that makes sense.
Wait, how does this undo the original ending? I remember Half Life 2 just ending with G-Man pausing everything and walking away
The ending of Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Which was a cliffhanger ending that HL:Alyx now retcons to not really be one anyway.
I fucking called it ages ago. Can't wait to dig that post of mine out haha
thank you Valve
What an ending. I totally knew it was Gordon in there.
thank you Valve
What an ending. I totally knew it was Gordon in there.
The G-Man can play by G-Man rules. Though I am curious how the whole ending looks like from Freeman's point of view now.
They should pull a Portal 2 and update Half-Life 2: Episode 2's ending with the new additions so we get Freeman's view of what messing with time like that looks like.
Just in case you don't remember all the things that make the ending so good and perfect...
G-Man has Alyx and he was clearly crossing through time when he got caught by the combine. He is likely always doing this and is alluded to throughout the entire series. For example keeping Gordon in stasis so long and even showing you the future and past.
The advisors in HLA wanted to let G-Man go because they saw what he would give Alyx in the future too. Mossman was clearly the one talking to the Advisors. The combine portal is closed in "our time" and their only advantage is that Eli is dead. The humans have all the advantages.
The G-Man and Alyx save Eli. But clearly Gordon at some point refuses to go with G-Man as he says and so he wants Alyx. Who he appears wanting to capture himself throughout Episode 2. BUT THE VORTS DID STOP HIM FROM TAKING GORDON AGAIN. Notice the G-Man prison was powered by vort energy, literally vort batteries and energy and what gives your gloves that ending power.
By Episode 1 Gordon isn't controlled by G-Man anymore. Vorts did that at the start of episode 1. In episode 2 it always alluded to the importance of Alyx. The G-Man discusses in the black Mesa scene with you as Gordon there and how he watched her since she was young. He also saved her from Black Mesa as he says in Episode 2.
Now it sets up Half Life 3 with Gordon, Eli and dog to save Alyx with the true final enemy. The G-Man, who causes the Cascade in Mesa from the start. The combine are still a big factor but large and part their fight on Earth was reaching an end.
The G-Man wanted Earth to be invaded from the start and the reason why has always been a mystery.
G-Man has Alyx and he was clearly crossing through time when he got caught by the combine. He is likely always doing this and is alluded to throughout the entire series. For example keeping Gordon in stasis so long and even showing you the future and past.
The advisors in HLA wanted to let G-Man go because they saw what he would give Alyx in the future too. Mossman was clearly the one talking to the Advisors. The combine portal is closed in "our time" and their only advantage is that Eli is dead. The humans have all the advantages.
The G-Man and Alyx save Eli. But clearly Gordon at some point refuses to go with G-Man as he says and so he wants Alyx. Who he appears wanting to capture himself throughout Episode 2. BUT THE VORTS DID STOP HIM FROM TAKING GORDON AGAIN. Notice the G-Man prison was powered by vort energy, literally vort batteries and energy and what gives your gloves that ending power.
By Episode 1 Gordon isn't controlled by G-Man anymore. Vorts did that at the start of episode 1. In episode 2 it always alluded to the importance of Alyx. The G-Man discusses in the black Mesa scene with you as Gordon there and how he watched her since she was young. He also saved her from Black Mesa as he says in Episode 2.
Now it sets up Half Life 3 with Gordon, Eli and dog to save Alyx with the true final enemy. The G-Man, who causes the Cascade in Mesa from the start. The combine are still a big factor but large and part their fight on Earth was reaching an end.
The G-Man wanted Earth to be invaded from the start and the reason why has always been a mystery.
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We've technically had an answer to what the Unforeseen Consequences where that G-Man refered to in Episode 2 - now we do. While it is a retcon, it's one that fits within the universe quite well. We've known about a connection between G-Man and Alyx for a while and he's being playing her from the beginning. While this does suggest any possible Episode 3 won't focus on the Arctic or whatever, it still could and whatever the Borealis is could be used to shatter the shackles that hold Alyx. There's a lot of fan service and a lot of exposition for fans of the series and I'm okay with that, I really enjoyed it. Especially getting to see the ending to Episode 2... or at least that area in the new engine, it looked insane! I still can't fathom why they recast Alyx, shame they had to do it for Eli too but that's a different situation entirely.
Now the real question for me is will we have to wait another 10+ years for another taste of Half-Life? Do Valve hope this can drastically increase the amount of VR users out there? Also if a Half-Life 3 was in VR only, I expect a larger pained outcry from the community more than Alyx. However, after playing all of Alyx, I can't imagine experiencing Half-Life any other way. It was magical, just like playing Half-Life 2 all those years ago was for me.
Now the real question for me is will we have to wait another 10+ years for another taste of Half-Life? Do Valve hope this can drastically increase the amount of VR users out there? Also if a Half-Life 3 was in VR only, I expect a larger pained outcry from the community more than Alyx. However, after playing all of Alyx, I can't imagine experiencing Half-Life any other way. It was magical, just like playing Half-Life 2 all those years ago was for me.
Half-Life: Alyx....lets talk about some LORE! (The 7 Hour War) [spoilers maybe]
That first scene with the electricity is definitely a portal storm and the head crab you see likely just teleported in through that. the vorinaughts might be just meeting with the humans, now being free and helping them. Also Alyx and Eli are not referred to with “The” by the vorts in the...
www.resetera.com
I guessed a few things right.
Alyx helping the Vorts. Jumping to the future to save Eli.
I would like to pose something... so many of the staff who made Half-Life 2 are gone, so it would feel like this new team were making something that wasn't their own if they made a 3. Instead now they've reset the table. They've made a way to continue the story their own way, they can literally tell a completely new story without the ties that bound them previously - even if you don't like that, it means the possibility of more Half-Life is far more likely as theories a blank slate now.
So it's a little confusing because we don't know what happens to her after the events in The Vault, but I think she continues on there or is sent back to that time. And isn't fully 'snatched' by the G-Man until after the events at the end of this game/Episode 2. So she'll continue without the knowledge of what is going to happen (The Unforeseen Consequences) until the events of Half-Life 2 begin and the rest from there is history.
Then i question how the end of Ep2 plays out, does she magically get the gloves and deal with the Advisor or does she mourn her dad and a second Alyx appears?
I dunno man, Half Life 2 already set a precedent for jerking off Gordon like he's the ultimate messiah and throwing hamfisted winks at the player every 10 seconds to remind them of how cool and important they are. And there was no shortage of fan service retcons there either, they just avoided changing major plot elements.
I get not liking it but none of what you mentioned is new at all to the series.
Fans may disagree but there's no way there was a big meaningful overarching plan for things at any point. They've always been making it up on the spot.
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I guess retconning the entire ending to Episode 2 is one way to go about it...What I'm not clear on is how this impacts HL2 as a whole seeing that Alyx somehow alreaady knows how things are gonna end up.
These are the Unforseen Consequences warned of at the end of Episode 2.
Eli even yells at you blaming that for Alyx being gone.
Not to mention when Eli says WAKE UP GORDON just like the G-Man. Showing how Gordon is truly a Freeman again.
Gordon joined the humans and you can tell the relationship is building with Alyx and Gordon despite his muteness. He does not want to follow the G-Man. That was the whole thing between Episode 1-2. G-Man being blocked by the Vorts. Saving Gordon.
G-Man was not happy. He paid a high price for Alyx because she saved him and replaces Gordon.
Eli even yells at you blaming that for Alyx being gone.
Not to mention when Eli says WAKE UP GORDON just like the G-Man. Showing how Gordon is truly a Freeman again.
Gordon joined the humans and you can tell the relationship is building with Alyx and Gordon despite his muteness. He does not want to follow the G-Man. That was the whole thing between Episode 1-2. G-Man being blocked by the Vorts. Saving Gordon.
G-Man was not happy. He paid a high price for Alyx because she saved him and replaces Gordon.
...time travel was literally in the first Half Life game. One of the Lambda portal ports takes you back in time before the Resonance Cascade. In Half Life 2 if you let Breen get away at the end you fail from G-Mans assessment that you failed a "time critical sequence" which he could only know if he knows what happens in the future and in Nova Prospekt the portal that takes you and Alyx to Dr Ks place takes you a week into the future.
It doesn't really matter to me. It was authentic as hell and it concluded the "Half Life 2" saga definitively.
While I'm a big fan of the ending I do want to point out one of the inconsistencies. There were two combine advisors at the end of Episode 2, not one. Unless the second vanished somehow? Dog has pretty spot on timing though as he jumps in just like he did in Episode 2, except this time not to attack the advisors.
One gets away when dog attacks. Would be no different here. You only see the one that has Eli as Alyx in the past.
Yeah I jus watched both endings side by side, it makes sense that you don't see the second advisor actually. My bad.
Something I don't think has really been addressed yet though is that "we" actually spoke to the G-Man and had... something of a converstaion. Obviously with Gordon we never had a dialog but I was taken aback in that we actually got to speak to him like an actual...human being...
I hope you realize that, in the interview, Walker brings up that the main reason HL3 didn't go forward was because the team couldn't find a collective vision of the next game. That includes Laidlaw, whose other drafts of the game clearly didn't resonate with the team. That wasn't the ending they planned. That was an ending he proposed at some point and later shared online.
Yeah, now we have slightly updated cliffhanger we can wait on for the next 10 years until the next prequel
And?
That's Laidlaw's view of the ending as the lead writer, I don't care what Walker thinks about it. Also, vision means more than story as they clearly couldn't decide what the big gameplay hook would be.
Valve just made an excellent Half Life game without him, I respect his work but maybe he is not the be all end all when it comes to it.
To, uh, expand on that, wow. Half-Life has been near and dear to me for a very long time, and Alyx is both a fantastic Half-Life game AND continues the journey in ways that set my mind spinnin' and my body tremblin'. Spectacular job from everyone at Valve.
... Alyx as the protag of VR SP HL and Gordon as the protag of flat co-op HL? A girl can dream.
... Alyx as the protag of VR SP HL and Gordon as the protag of flat co-op HL? A girl can dream.
Laidlaw was heavily consulted on this game. Does that mean anything to you?
Both excellent points. Laidlaw is a good writer. He is also not the gospel voice of Half-Life, and to say he's the only person who matters when it comes to how the story resolves itself is disrespectful to all the other talented writers and developers at Valve.
I think even Laidlaw's original ideas spilled out on Twitter would have changed dramatically had Half-Life: Episode 3 production moved forward. As is the case for more or less every game, but especially Valve's, which are subjective to important story beats being influenced by game design and production restraints. The classic example being the "slow teleport" in Half-Life 2, which ultimately became a pretty strong cornerstone of the Combine lore, battle against the resistance, and necessity to research alternate technologies. In reality the "slow teleport" was the result of production issues; Valve were running out of time and needed to get Gordon and Alyx from the Combine base back to City 17. With no playable levels to fill the gaps and production windows closing they inserted the slow teleport idea and the rest is history.
I still feel this ending is awful. Time travel retcons are fundamentally bad writing as far as I'm concerned, particularly in their laziness, and I'm really disappointed this is the direction they took. People will argue that it fits the series and G-Man and lore but it doesn't really. It's just overruling Episode 2's ending with convenient space magic for no reason, while inserting new complexities into the lore that were never there. For all its ambiguity as to the G-Man, the multiple dimensions, etc, there wasn't really any mystique as to the passage of time and causality. Time still operated with linearity and there was direct, irreversible causality from actions. Not so much now.
Is what it is though. I guess we'll have to wait and see where the series future goes. I do think now, more than ever, there is a legit probability of Half-Life continuing in VR form. Valve did essentially make four games back-to-back using Source 1 and the Half-Life formula. VR Half-LIfe is a single entry, so there's plenty of room to grow before burnout, and I can imagine having a fully stabilised build of Source 2 and such overwhelmingly positive reception is givng the teams a big motivational boost. I do wonder if we'll see Portal 3 first though.
I still feel this ending is awful. Time travel retcons are fundamentally bad writing as far as I'm concerned, particularly in their laziness, and I'm really disappointed this is the direction they took. People will argue that it fits the series and G-Man and lore but it doesn't really. It's just overruling Episode 2's ending with convenient space magic for no reason, while inserting new complexities into the lore that were never there. For all its ambiguity as to the G-Man, the multiple dimensions, etc, there wasn't really any mystique as to the passage of time and causality. Time still operated with linearity and there was direct, irreversible causality from actions. Not so much now.
Is what it is though. I guess we'll have to wait and see where the series future goes. I do think now, more than ever, there is a legit probability of Half-Life continuing in VR form. Valve did essentially make four games back-to-back using Source 1 and the Half-Life formula. VR Half-LIfe is a single entry, so there's plenty of room to grow before burnout, and I can imagine having a fully stabilised build of Source 2 and such overwhelmingly positive reception is givng the teams a big motivational boost. I do wonder if we'll see Portal 3 first though.
There is plenty of time travel and bending of space time throughout the entire series all the way back to HL1 and the expansions.
Tons of hints of the G-Man's interest in Alyx in Episode 2.
What they did here was perfect and fits in extremely well with everything setup in the series so far.
I can't get over the script and voice acting for Alyx (The script in particular makes it hard to act well, I'm sure). It's really amateurish. Definitely takes away from that conclusion.