>>730884823

i got tired of those cheap as fuck valve vr sensor cube things failing and refuse to buy anymore - i will only play vr games that don't require them now

>>730884823
and yet I dont remember the end of Ep 2 but do remember the end of Alyx.

https://youtu.be/RzkVD94yAmA?si=3ebBluS33P1CsdId&t=1908

You can hear the writer talking about why

The ending was kino desu

>>730884823
Bro they ruined the original ending of Portal just to sequelbait.

>>730885435
>>and yet I dont remember the end of Ep 2 but do remember the end of Alyx.

I dont remember either, and I've played both.

I think I'm gonna play alyx again this weekend

>>730884823
Because Episode 2's ending was a willy-nilly thing. Gabe felt edgy at the time and he wanted a major character killed for shock value. It just so happened that the devs managed to make that into a memorable cliffhanger. HLA was Valve going for another willy-nilly decision to change it up just because.

>>730885491
This is so stupid.
This story is just whims happening with no care.

>>730884823
don't worry they'll retcon the retcon and say it was all a hallucination because it they really allow for time travel or changing timeline then they dumped the series into the trash.

>>730891705
It's the common theme of the series m8.

>>730891760

https://youtu.be/YCjNT9qGjh4?si=BmJcP5f0ZMI-Qt7T&t=7219


According to Gabe in 2024 "the ending of Alyx is somewhat a self critical realization, so that was super satistifying, and all credit to the people involved"

If 3 is made it will be the sequel to Alyx: Eli is alive and Alyx is captured by G-Man

>>730885491
just confirms they have no idea what they're doing. they themselves don't know who/what gman is and what he's supposed to do. they just make shit up as they go.
half life is just slop made too pitch hardware and online stores.

>>730884823
>Written without involvement of the previous main writer
>Additional writers: From Telltale games former
That's why. Also, G-man's dialogue sounds obvious and stupid in Alyx.

>>730892184
Not even Marc Laidlaw knew what Gman was, in terms of backstory, because he said countless times that Half Life has no backstory. He calls it a "Worldless story". But the difference is that Marc Laidlaw knew how to utilize G-man, and leave the mysteriness of the character tasteful, and only show/expand when necessary and once there was a story for said game.

What his cohort writers and Sean Vanaman (from telltale) did on HL:A is they speculated on Marc Laidlaw's intentions with G-man, like fanboys, but through their own script. This arguably started in Episode 2 because they started making fun of Laidlaw's writing habits, so he passed on more to them. But his released draft of Episode 3's synopsis is excellent. It ends the HL2 saga in a way that is similar to the end of Half Life 1, without all the answers, but it also clearly resolves Alyx's arc, and then seperates her and her people from Gordon, after G-man marks another job completed with regards to the combine.

People always forget that Half Life 3 was never ever promised out loud. What people were expecting was just Episode 3, because they promised 3 episodes and Ep2 was a cliffhanger. And all Epistle3 was, is the wrapping up of the "Episodes" addendum to Half Life 2. it ends the entire Combine arc the same way Half Life 1 ended the Black Mesa arc. Unresolved, but ultimately complete.

>>730892114
>According to Gabe in 2024 "the ending of Alyx is somewhat a self critical realization, so that was super satistifying, and all credit to the people involved"
Gabe had nothing to do with it. He's just taking the word of mouth of the team and their writers. The writers probably explained it in this exact turn of phrase to him. What it really is, is the writers projecting their own idea of a "self-realization" and hoping it sticks, but it doesn't actually hold water, and it's just a group-think.

>>730892114
apparently some half life game was already made ("hlx") but it'll be used to shill their cube. I highly doubt it'll be called hl3 because it's slop and hl3 is too anticipated and they don't wanna risk the name on it.

>>730892114
I expect that the opening of HL3 will try to explain what's going on in HLA ending more clearly at least. One of the reasons why the ending was a mixed bag was that it was too vague. To this day people still speculate whether it's the same Alyx from HL2 that was taken, whether it was a parallel timeline thing going on, etc.

>>730884823
I'd love to play Alyx, but can't justify buying VR just for one thing. Is VR porn worth it though?

>>730889973
No. They were leapfrogging the 3 episodes so that Team A worked on Ep1 and Team B worked on Ep2, and while any episode was in production a smaller team and Marc Laidlaw began the planning/preproduction of the next episode without a production team. So by the time Ep2 released Marc Laidlaw already had an idea of what to do with the cliffhanger, which is clearly what is shown in his Epistle 3 (which he since then took down because Valve allegedly reached out to him and called him names for his lack of respect for the people still working on Half Life at Valve).

He had a pretty clear mind of where to take it, but the Episode 3 team just never stuck together, so the game itself was never properly kicked off with a production team. it died in the prototyping before Valve stopped pursuing "Episodic Content" and then for years Gabe knew it wasn't gonna happen, because he was the guy that decided that Valve shouldn't make that kind of stuff anymore.

>>730892849
VR Porn was definitely a coomer's wildest dream for a little bit but it wears off. Getting your "dick" sucked by a favorite porn actress, or lying in bed IRL while lying in bed with a vidya character I imported into VaM and then fucked it, but it's too much work. It made me realize why couples don't have sex every day, because the physical movement is really exhausting.

>>730892829
I dont think they will explain it, mostly because both of these theories have big holes. imho they will just move along like nothing happened, hell I could actually see something like "5months later" and its gordon with the "team" already in some other place, searching for alyx

It's gonna be HL3

>>730892998
Oh cool shit ass.
That was supposed to be an exponent.
Assfart

Don't reawaken me.

>>730892849
You know, when people buy peripherals like steering wheel or flight sticks, usually they don't just use them for ONE game.

>>730892997
I doubt there will be a far-out timeskip this time though. Episode 2 provided multiple unresolved yet urgent plot points to go through, with Judith being in danger and the chase for the Borealis. Now amplified with Alyx being gone and Eli going berserk, I just can't see Valve going for another time skip like HL2 was to HL1.

>>730884823
It saved Half Life 3 from more escort missions. Kino for that reason alone.

>>730893250
no, not a big skip but Id be really surprised if HL3 starts right where Alyx ended. it will start in the arctic or somewhere with like a quick intro speech from eli. so like 2 weeks later, I overshot in my previous post

>>730893262
Valve is way into the companion escort mission thing since Episode One. I doubt they'll stop now. I can see Dog being the new companion.

>>730892873
I haven't payed any attention at all to the discussions and leaks going around this and only played the games.

Can I get a QRD on what was supposed to happen, or what was the plan or something or how it got leaked and how it broke out?

>>730893250
They're never going to resolve all those things because it was already all resolved in Marc Laidlaws script and they're just abandoning the original narrative. I wouldn't be surprised if you start Half Life 3 and you're told Judith Mossman was "killed" off-screen.

>>730893447
search for epistle 3, it was most likely the original script for episode 3 (and it was kino desu)

>>730893447
You can just outright read it, since the prose is good. Basically Marc Laidlaw released a mysterious text with genderswapped characters and different names in 2017, which first addresses the fans for his "inability to get Episode 3 made" and then goes on to read as if it's Gordon Freeman talking to you about what happened in the story we didn't get, and it's completely authentic, with the Borealis plot intact, character drama between Judith and Alyx, and a G-man appearance midway through and once again at the end, in a Point of No Return moment where the final stand against the Combine begins, and then Gordon is whisked out of that "existence" just a moment before he and the Borealis are deployed like some sort of nuclear bomb on the main HQ.

It's really cool. Borealis was going to have a gameplay feature like the Time Stones in Zelda Skyward Sword, where it's 2 locations alternating in and out of existence based on the parts of the ship that are inside a portal.

He took it down and called himself stupid for not being supportive of the Valve guys. Thing is, Marc had finally quit Valve a year earlier, so that's why he probably sat on this and decided the fans needed to know.

https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Epistle_3

You can read it here. You can click on "corrected" for a rewrite that removes the gender swapping and wrong names.

>>730892454
There is really no need to know what G-man is. That is lore, not story. We know what he does and roughly want he wants at times.
I have no idea why people get so hung up on this. The story will not be enriched if we learn G-man was born in the Xentakter Cluster and works for the Overmind and he has to work hard because his bitch wife took the kids.
He is a complete side character. The story was about the Xen invasion and the Combine Occupation.

>>730893776
>It's really cool. Borealis was going to have a gameplay feature like the Time Stones in Zelda Skyward Sword, where it's 2 locations alternating in and out of existence based on the parts of the ship that are inside a portal.

I really, really hope they use this for hl3. it sounded amazing and it would be visually striking as well

>>730894071
I don't mind if we get to find out about one of his employers at least. Supposedly they're in control of Xen after Nihilanth's death based on G-Man's statement at the end of HL1.

>>730894071
I'm not one of those "you can't DEMYSTIFY the mystery" guys but I agree with you. Storyworlding > world-building. But I would think it was sick if there was some kind of mindfuck twist about G-man either Men in Black style where you realize he's just 1 part of a large complex of "international businessmen" who are managing interdimensional geopolitics and war economies, or if it turns out that the Gordon is G-man theory is real.

They can't be because he doesn't even look like him, but if we ignored that, I would still be open to some kind of endgame development in which you suddenly find yourself in first person walking up to a briefcase, and needing to open a case on your extradimensional self or something, because your present world has no hope of recovery unless Gordon moves one of the many macguffins the previous G-man caused him to to move.

Because that is the catalysator for the storyline and the characters in Episode 2 also canonized it. They say that G-man is the guy that started meddling with Black Mesa and caused the Xen rock to be moved when it did, or something like that.

I can't remember the name of the movie but there was something with the same kind of plot in the 90s, where it's some family guy who becomes a villain in the past where he's causing a passenger train to crash and kill everyone aboard to change an event in his own time, and then he's a mysterious guy that appears to the protagonists who live in the past. So he moves from being a villain to being a sympathetic dad who wanted to keep his daughter from dying or something.

G-man would be the same except not sympathetic, just a business guy of some kind. A "government man". In the end he represents Valve the developer, who are controlling and nudging the player into situations that they ultimately can't change because that's what a video game is.

>>730894471
That would be fucking cool, actually. I imagine entering some compound and going up into a control tower, and it's a room full of analysts who look shocked to see Gordon has found them, and then you have a conversation with one of them telling you everything from their perspective and what they needed out of G-man or something.

>>730892454
>>730892192
I'm fucking glad I'm not the only one who noticed and thinks this. HL:A was fucking dogshit and I'm tired of pretending otherwise.

And it's so infuriating seeing all the soys and zoomers praise HL:A because they don't know fucking shit.

>>730892454
That's a really really good way of putting it.
This is now also my opinion.

>>730892728
how is it slop?
the worst part of alyx was the recast voice actress and the low level of difficulty, going back to a flat PC game where alyx is absent/an adult fixes both of these problems.

>>730897612
>the worst part of alyx was the recast voice actress and the low level of difficulty, going back to a flat PC game where alyx is absent/an adult fixes both of these problems.
The entire game including the ending also exists with her old voice actress. They recast her because of her unions or something lol, at the last moment. Someone uploaded the beta version on YouTube.

I played through the entire HL series for the first time after the HL2 20th anniversary and I really don't understand how people get confused by Alyx's ending. It feels really obvious to me. G-Man leads Gordon into performing acts through minor "nudges" that are plausible in-universe but obviously planned to outside observers (i.e. us). This requires him to constantly monitor, track, and generally fuck with Freeman to ensure he gets to where he needs to be, occasionally intervening directly in situations that would preserve Gordon without making it obvious to others that something is afoot. Over the course of HL-HL2e1 Gordon attracts too much attention from the Vortigaunts, who realize what's going on and start restricting what G-Man is able to do to directly intervene and guide Gordon, which rules him out as "candidate". Being a "candidate" requires "signing" a contract of some sort, which has to be "willing" even if it's a choice nobody in their right mind would refuse (i.e. the bit at the end of HL1). Gordon is ruled out because there's no way for him to accomplish what he did without earning the Vorts' favor, so G-Man sets up a situation to use as a bargaining chip with which to make a contract with Alyx— Eli dies, he goes back to a period of total irrelevancy to events (HLA) and engineers a situation that will lead Alyx into making contact with him, allowing him to show Alyx Eli's death and establish the contract. The contract is established, Alyx is "reserved" as a candidate, and properly "hired" once HL2E2 concludes but with the divergence in events caused by the contract being established.

The best way HLX could make this clearer, I think, is by having two campaigns— Alyx is played in desktop mode in a linear campaign like HL1/HL2 , Gordon's campaign is in VR and is more open-ended, maybe using a hub area of some sort.

>>730898465
>Alyx doesn't talk at all during her campaign
>Gordon does
kino

>>730898465
Nobody is confused.
It's just an obvious shitty retcon that diverges from the original intentions and meaning of the story to bait another cliffhanger leading nowhere, that used to be an actual cliffhanger with a planned resolution.

>>730899656
Tthe planned resolution wouldn't be satisfying after nearly 20 years when everyone knows the plot beat for beat

>>730899656
They resolved the Eli death cliffhanger after all this time and created a new one. Which is pretty clever writing imo. They could've easily not touched it

>>730899656
>retcon
It's not a retcon, it's a continuation.

>>730898465
They're not confused. They understand it, and they hate it. If you played Episode 2 in 2008 and got this in 2019 you wouldn't be amazed by it. You would go "psssh" and say it was lame, because that's what it is.

>>730900206
It is a retcon and a continuation, and the retcon was completely avoidable.

>>730898465
>Gordon's campaign is in VR
valve is a small indie company that will never figure out melee attacks in vr

>>730884823
time travel was always part of the story

>>730899873
But people didn't need Eli's death cliffhanger resolved like that. They just wanted to see "what happens after", and they retconned it instead.
They could've had almost the exact same story but said it was a prequel, and then after resolving the prequel, Alyx has a monologue and it flashes forward to the HL:A graphics rendering images of Eli's death from Alyx's perspective and a hint of seeing something beyond that from Gordon's POV, and then go "Aren't you excited again?". They didn't have to make the new plot revolve "secretly" around the cliffhanger and then make a cheesy revival of Eli, and deflate the tension of an old cliffhanger. This is like if Disney made a Star Wars movie where it cuts to the end of Empire and someone comes in to slay Darth vader in front of Luke and rescue him, and they're like "Sorry about him being your dad. Now only the Emperor is left. DUN DUN DUN DUNNN"

>>730894450
nintendo does thing: "Eewwwwwew DUMB idea!!!!"

Valve does same shit: "HOLY FUCK SO REVOLUTIONARY!!!"

>>730894450
lmao I thought people hated skyward sword

>>730901180
Nyeaah no. Not freely time travel like they do it here. There's dimensional stuff which may include time and space, but it's mysterious. They basically show Gordon "changing the channel". You're taken out of the Black Mesa moment, and put in some kind of stasis, and when you're let in, yes, time has passed, but you're in the aftermath of what you created.

It didn't "go back in time" prior to HLA. It was never that kind of time travel, which is another element of fanfiction creeping into the new game.

>>730892454
That’s fine and all but epistle 3 sucks

>>730901282
They do, but anyone who got that far would agree that the Timestone feature is pretty cool in its implementation. There's an entire segment where you sail a boat through a desert because the time-stone reveals it was water in the long past, so you're sailing in water inside a desert where both realities are phased to the proximity of the rock.

>>730901428
so then can people stop pretending its bad?

>>730901369
There's a pretty big chance that had they made Episode 3 and released it, Half Life would've been concluded and memoryholed. not by valve, but by us, because without vaporware there's literally nothing special about it to discuss, just like people don't really discuss the events of HL2 or Ep1/2 anymore. It's only the meme of "omg we never got the third one" that kept this series in the conversation.

>>730901492
No because Skyward Sword is a pretty shit game.

>>730901496
Would've been better than what we have now.
A conclusion is better than the enjoyment and community built from endless blueballing.

>>730900908
>if you were biased by nostalgiafaggotry you would hate this thing that's cool!
Glad I'm not, then.

>>730901819
only niggers hate it

>>730891705
It has always been like this. It's always been obvious that there never was much of a plan behind it all. Half-Life 2 already felt like several unrelated tech demos patchworked together with no coherent vision.

>>730892454
I genuinely liked Epistle 3 as an ending.