What was his problem?

he wasn't just working with the combine to save humanity, that was only an excuse. we see throughout the game that breen is obsessed with the combine's technology and wants to learn more about them. he doesn't really care that humanity is fucked.

They have a Dyson sphere just a matter of time until they win - Breen was shown the Combines power as he talks about in his speeches of alien world's etc.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

the rest of earth's still fucked, plus we don't how many forces they have on their home planet. There's no way the rebels could've won.

>>Breen manages to negotiate terms to keep the humans alive
except that by HL2, there were about 2 million of them reamining in the whole planet, human extinction was a matter of time if the Combine weren't kicked out

He did all he could to convince the combine to just let humanity survive for a bit longer.
We would have had a real redemption arc if valve stopped jerking themselves off.

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And that one scientist, one simple man, managed to destroy the citadel.

I prefer the post-Orange Box broken version, where he just lazily looks up from his desk instead of jumping up in shock, like he's tired of assholes barging into his office.

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fuckin kek, source?

FULLY MODELED

It's recorded from SMod.

If you're going to be cold and logical about it, then Breen is the only one who has a long-term plan trying to show that humanity can be useful to the Combine.

As much as I sympathize with the rebels, it's pretty blatant that they had no chance of winning unless the G-Man pulls some magic space nonsense out of nowhere. Even the spoilers for what Episode 3 would have been about just end on a somber note of failure as Gordon is left alone to wander the world, not knowing which of his friends are alive or dead.

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What else is he supposed to do?

Freeman then went onto not only indirectly sealing mankind's casket, but propelling himself towards one singular, minuscule Dyson-sphere which is insignificant, a mere blip, compared to the millions, if not trillions more of actual importance.

Even if the Combine don't return, which it makes no sense for them to, given we're nothing more than mere flies, or specs of dust in comparison to what's observable of the Combine -- Earth's in a shattered state, the populous is disheveled, and that's not to count for the after-shock of remnants, political conflict, insurgencies, etc.

You're fucked either way. Do you shoot yourself, or swallow the poison vial?

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What is it with daily Half-Life threads lately?
Not that I'm complaining, a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.

Imagine how much porn half life would have gotten if commerciallized web 2.0 r34 was a thing back then.

>Alyx take's Gordon's place as G-man's lapdog
>Gordon goes full samurai Jack and wanders the Combine occupied Earth
We truly live in the worst timeline.

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He stopped humanity from being completely dissolved by the Combine and everyone turned into Stalkers. If anything Breen gave Gordon and the Resistance a chance by making the Combine leave rental cops instead of keeping the main force and just destroying everything. And when the Combine revive him as a living lima bean clone he actually tells this, feels great remorse for what he had to do and begged Gordon to kill him because this new existance as a human advisor is horrible.

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Will it be good?

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Never coming out. Bannerlord and Cyberpunk will be out before Half life 3. Let that sink in...

He tried to convince people to stick around so they would be turned into mindless Stalkers. Humanity was going to be enslaved as Stalkers no matter how "well behaved" they were. He was a traitorous cunt

Lately? I've always been seeing them. Maybe they seem more common to me because I always spend time in them.

>MFW Half Life is not just a game

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Not really considering there were still millions of alive humans across the world and only a hundred or so Stalkers in the Citadel.

Not like it can't get more right now.

Rebels get turned into stalkers, citizens can join the CP and go up the ranks even if it means pretty much dying. Breen did what he could but humans in Half-Life are done for.

Fucking hell. Why did he even try making new characters? They all look fucking awful. Thank god there’s an option to turn them back to vanilla. Other than that, I love what they did with the game.

I wonder if there was an original plan to make Alyx the new planet-hopping protagonist with G-Man in another sequel, as they retired Gordon as a tragic symbol of the fallen human resistance.

Who knows? Valve probably doesn't.

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Too ambitious for it's own good.
They're putting so much work on concept art, the engine, all that kind of shit before setting down more basic things.
Ontop of that, the most it can aspire to be is a mediocre 2 hour shooter that'll get some press coverage because journos will start screaming 'le real hl3' for clicks.
It won't have the Valve polish. It's levels will be uninspired and it's story just putting to the screen what laidlaw wrote, an SFM animation would have been better.
Besides, nobody will ever come close to whatever kind of fucked up trippy shit laidlaw had in mind, it won't feel like closure to me any more than epistle felt like two years ago.

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it's not popular enough to justify patreonbux.
If HL3 got announced, there'd be a literal wave of porn, just like overwatch or whatever flavour of the month there is.

I'd like to think they couldn't settle on a proper finale, therefore nothing began in the first place, aside from collections of story boards or Laidlaw's version. But in reality, that's probably too hopeful.

Childhood was thinking Petain was the bad guy
Adulthood is realizing Petain was a hero and Hitler did nothing wrong

This. It'll either dissolve overtime or end up as just another shooter, like the Opposing Force: Nova Prospekt "mod".

Did Combine even cared about Earth and Humanity anymore? Why they even bothered with Earth in first place?

He got capped.

From what employees said, work on it started multiple times but they just couldn't settle in one story.
There's been a ton of proof, concept art, code, anything, being leaked every year so it's not like they didn't even start.
In fact, In true Valve fashion, they came very close to release and just canned it because they didn't like it enough.
There's probably a dozen different HL3's rotting in hard drives in valve's offices.

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At first it was just for resources, than it was for Apertures Portal technology because the current Combine portals were ass, way too slow and if destroyed could never be re-established.

It's just really funny that not the professional and uptight black mesa or the fucking combine who operate on a whole other level of intelligence could figure out teleportation right, so they're all after some second hand dingy ship, from an almost bankrupt company, using tech they made in the 50's, that they lost because they were incompetent and all of humanity's future and even the universe's, considering what the combine might do if they got their hands on it, depends on it.
Some people just call portal plebbit and cry 'muh seriousness' but honestly, it feels just right in the amount of black humour.

Why do they need to get the Borealis though? I'm pretty sure everyone knows where the Aperture building is because it has a parking lot, lot of Black Mesa employees were ex-Aperture employees and it was in the news the company was near bankrupt.

Autists trying to fit in qay too hard, Portal is a good series and adds decent exposition.

Portals isn't teleportation though. And Black Mesa figured out Teleportation just fine.

Resources sounds more like "since we got here, might as well..." kind of deal, and they didn't even bothered to actually get the tech, feels more like it was Breen's own little project, while Combine couldn't care less.

The technology is within the Borealis, or *is* the Borealis itself. One way or another, the Borealis is a high valued target due to that, whereas everyone, including the Combine, are led to believe the Aperture ruins are of zero significance, are in ruins, and difficult to navigate. Even then, Glados lurks, as do all sorts of dangers.

incredibly kawaii hitler-san

Nah, it's what the combine do. They take over worlds and take what they want off them.
They hunted nihilanth and the vortigaunts because of their psychic powers or whatever, they took over the world of the advisors because they use them as vessels to put people in, as laidlaw said in the Breen twitter account, and they want the teleportation tech from us, along with the air and water that they drained to their home world in the Beta.

>Valve polish
Am I the only one that remembers you could finish L4D competitive round with a fucking console command? And melee the minigun for it to build-up power and send you flying across the map?

Is it known when Portal takes place within HL? The important stuff is in the borealis but I think Aperture is well hidden taking all into account.

Better question: Do you actually think he believed what the Combine was telling him?

They were obviously lying to his face about their intentions, but did he believe deep down that this was the best way to go?

But wouldn't it make more sense to check the source if they can't find the ship itself? It isn't like Black Mesa where all that's left is a fucking crater, nobody but us knows what happened to Aperture and the place is publicly known. Just strange how the Combine didn't storm in and set up some kind of hub to plug in Overwatch into the mainframe and overpower Glados because she has the City 17 processing power.

They have a parking lot and it was publicly known that Aperture was almost in financial ruin because of the high charisma low intelligence ceo.

Portal 1 takes place a few months or years after the combine arrive, since the scientists were locked inside to work before shit happened but no cops showed up to investigate so humanity collapsed in the meantime.
There isn't an official thing on when portal 2 takes place. Some wikis say 50.000 years because Glados says so in a cut voiceline but that's bullshit because everything would have disintigrated by then. I believe it takes place the same time as HL2, 20 years later because the relaxation containers write that they have a 20 year expiration date on their texture.

I agree. We just don't know, user. Does anyone in Half-Life 2 directly reference Aperture, or at least, Glados? I know Glados is aware of the Combine.
>Are you trying to escape? Things have changed since the last time you left the building. What's going on up there will make you wish you were back in here. I have an infinite capacity for knowledge, and even I'm not sure what's going on outside. All I know is, I'm the only thing standing between us, and them, or - I was.

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Except Combine didn't do shit to actually get it, they just fucked off leaving some litteral who flying beans and a local guy as an overwatch.

Well how must've that parking lot fared when we go back to GLaDOS' chamber before turning her on? It's annoying that I've got no well known timeline for when everything happens but there's some stuff that could make Aperture disappear from common knowledge: GLaDOS killing/kidnapping all employees, ex-employees who went to Black Mesa dying as well, the completely overgrown flora which hides it well and a theory that says Wheatley moved the whole fucking place and that's why we exit somewhere else in the end of Portal 2. But with no clear timeline it's useless.

Kleiner mentions Aperture when he explains the Borealis in EP2.

I doubt it. I got the impression that he was a coward and an opportunist.

youtu.be/nM9QoP3ghlo
user, play the game again.

It's possible that they did and found that it was fucked.

The combine have incomprehensibly big fish to fry, that was the point of the epistle too.
Gordon though he would allahu ackbar on combine central and free earth but these niggas have sun sized power stations, they must own so many worlds they run, earth must be a footnote and despite that, they still btfo humanity in 7 hours for laughs.

WALLACE BREEN DID NOTHING WRONG

Valve polish is customarily referred to in writing and art direction that nobody ever comes close to, nothing can be free of bugs.

Why does nobody make sfm's about this?

>Will it be good?
It's the most promising fan project of Episode 3, so yeah, I think the Borealis team will do their best to make a decent game. The mad lads actually dropped Source in favor of Unreal although that resulted in them having much more work to do and whoever is in charge of coding the physics (see webm) will likely get a job offer from Valve if the project actually gets completed. No idea how they'll handle the voices of Alyx and other minor characters. Hey, even if it fails, at least we got some groovy soundtrack from it:
>youtube.com/watch?v=P9AFBVNvpck

Attached: Project Borealis Physics Showcase.webm (960x540, 2.94M)

fuck off shilling nigger

I hope so. I don't expect it tough based on past fan projects.

Why is the Gravity Gun not animated?

>fuck off shilling nigger
Forgot I'm on Yea Forums for a moment. Why are retards like you even in these kinds of threads? You weren't even born when the first game came out.

Weren't it "only" 2 million? And with suppression fields installed to suppress reproduction unless a citadel was destroyed.

dilate

Well, that's my point. I doubt for Combine itself it would be more troublesome than conquering Earth in first place, but they just didn't want to.

I made this thread for the same reason and I will continue to do so. Half life is my favorite videogame series and half life 2 haters can fuck off

God that's the worst part. I'd be happier thinking that they never even started the third game game, and that they just became soulless dragons crouching over their Steam money hoard and forgetting that Half Life ever even existed before production started.

But there's probably a recycle bin filled to the brim with a lot of good stuff, that they won't do anything with but can't bring themselves to ever fully delete either.

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sorry sweaty, sfm is only for wacky tf2 videos and porn.

Fan service: the game

Yes, AFTER.

>half life is not just a game
I know my friend I know

I don't think pb will be great or even worthwhile either but don't pay attention to him, he's just threadshitting for no reason and just wants (you)'s
Tons of them outright say so in confession threads.

>millions
hundreds of thousands sounds like a more apt estimate considering:

supression field
xen creatures
portal storms
drained oceans
fucked up ecosystems/climate
the combine

I tought G-Man just leaves Gordon since it was Alyx choosing to use the Borealis as weapon made her more valuable then Gordon. Then he and the Vortigaunts would work together against the combine, G-Man and Alyx in HL3.

>Why is the Gravity Gun not animated?
Didn't even notice that but it's probably because they haven't properly animated it yet. Honestly, I was only marginally aware of the project before seeing Tyler (VNN guy) talking about the last update so I don't really know what's going on with them and how long it will take them to make the game (again, if it comes out at all). Still, I hope they'll weaponize the general autism of HL fanbase into mobilizing people with technical know-how to help them finish the game. I can't code for shit, so I'm out of the picture.

>dilate
cringe

dilate

The combine wanted to kill everyone just to be safe in the first place, it wouldn't have costed them nothing.
Breen convinced them that it was in their interest to keep humans alive.

>along with the air and water that they drained to their home world in the Beta.

You'd think an intergalactic empire with such high-tech would have figured out how to create their own air and water mechanically instead of having to harvest it from other planets.

I just want blue shift 2

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>dilate
No user, you're supposed to follow it up with 'yikes' or 'seethe'. Apply yourself.

>The combine wanted to kill everyone just to be safe in the first place
Weren't combine attracted to Earth because of their portal technology? Kinda hard to discover how humans did it if they killed everyone.

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Well I hope they fix that because that was the first thing I noticed. This autism is a blessing and a curse sometimes.

dilate

He was in a shitty linear storygame with shit weapons, bad gameplay, and a fucking stupid story that helped ruin gaming starting with the first game.

the OST's a banger so there's at least that
>youtu.be/ICt-hwet3_Y

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Oof, yikes, cringe, cope, seethe anx have sex.

>save humanity from extinction
>have to make hard decisions under the new paradigm of being a conquered people
>hated by his own people, questioned by his superiors
>thinks he is doing what is best for humanity
>one mercenary shows up under contract to destroy everything you worked for
>levels the entire city, with you in it
now the combine is on the warpath again.

>dropped Source in favor of Unreal
guess I'll just have to watch a playthrough this time

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>Breen convinced them that it was in their interest to keep humans alive.
More like to not kill them immediately. It was kinda clear how little shit they gave about survival of human race and of whatever knowledge they've had.
Again, it wouldn't cost them anything to manage the planet properly either.

>Weren't combine attracted to Earth because of their portal technology
The combine were after nihilanth and his dudes and gordon just happened to open the portal to nihilanth, leading the combine to earth, i.e. the g-man orchestrated it all for god knows what reason.
They didn't even know about human portal tech until recently.

The Combine can't really get to Earth anymore because the City 17 Portal was destroyed. Of course Eoisode 3's plotline was the remnants find the Borealis and create a new portal with Gordon on the ship looking at the Dyson sphere eith his spirit crushed that there is literally nothing he can do to fight the Combine.

>you need me
What did he mean by this

AAAAAAA IT'S NOT FUCKING FAIR

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I always wondered how exactly Breen negotiated the surrender of earth. How did he get into a position to do that? He was only the administrator of Black Mesa, not the president. Did the Combine slugs come to the U.N to dictate their terms?

>"Their slaves... we are their slaves... we are..."
I thought the nihilanth was already a Combine underdog by the time we found him.

In Laidlaw's words
>* The Consul, at the foot of the Radio Tower, wearing a headset, hands raised high to the dropships as he proclaims Earth's surrender

My take is that Nihilanth and everyone following him were already taken over by the combine and just trying to escape.
How mangled up and fucked he is himself, just like how the Combine chop and sew humans into soldiers or stalkers is haunting
>The creature's minuscule legs appear either to be vestigial or the remains of amputation
>The Nihilanth relies on a levitation device for movement.
>His head is so large that he must be kept upright with a small cord/string that extends from the base of the spine to the back of the head.
>The Nihilanth's body features, like the other intelligent Xen races, a third appendage protruding from the middle of its chest, though it is stitched on, likely implying that they are not of Xen origin.
>The Nihilanth wears metallic wristbands similar to those worn by slaved vortigaunts.

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He had some connection to G-Man, and ultimately had a big role in why Combine came in the first place - Resonance Cascade. Out of the entire Human race he probably had the most weight in interdimensional politics even if his exact role isn't clear.

>portal storms
The Combine knew they found an anomaly. I wager the combine knew about earth and humans too. If they just glassed earth there would be no one left to run and hide in those "special places"

Discussing Half Life lore is so depressing because there's only so much you can piece together and infer between the few games and you know damn well any continuation at this point would deviate far heavily from where the series was originally intended to go. We'll never know who G-Man truly is.

They were growing irritated, as im sure the bargain with Breen was to procure the portal tech for them. Test subjects? No problem we got all these humans. When the citadel is imploding G-Man tries to snatch gordon away for good, but the vort, having known G-Man was behind all this SEVERED Gordon's ties. Wrong man in the right place indeed.

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>the OST's a banger so there's at least that
Black Mesa's Joel Nielsen also did a solid job with the soundtrack:
>youtube.com/watch?v=T-s1rAB9A6E

>guess I'll just have to watch a playthrough this time
Why is Unreal a problem for you?

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Yeah i sure would love being turned into a stalker instead of trying to fight for my freedom. Stupid beta faggot

I still enjoy reading it. Each time I do I learn something new. I know people keep asking Valve and Gabe “when is hl3 coming out?” But I haven’t seen anyone ask Gabe “if” they want hl3 to come out. Either way it’s all so tiresome.

It's okay, kid, you can admit games are bad, no one is judging you. FPS were ruined with boring overly linear storyshit bullshit like Half-Life and Halo.

The new Katamari game is looking pretty good

Humans fought for their freedom and lost in less than a day.

Half life lore is fucking great because it's not really shoved in your face. You piece it together from shit characters, even minor ones say, from the environment, what happens around and unfinished content, leaks whatever.
On the same time, it shows enough to hook you in but little enough to have a huge sense of mystery with the combine, the g-man and everything else.

>“Buuhuuu hitler did nothing wrong”
COPE

>used to think all the ambiguity and mystery surrounding the Combine and Gman were an intentional and particularly inspired move by Valve
>now realize that the 'secret' details never existed, and Valve never had an answer for and never could answer our questions if they wanted to because they're all a bunch of hacks
ambiguity is a crutch for shitty writers

Yikes.

Listening to him talk about the majestic wonders of interstellar/intergalactic/interdimensional space you can clearly tell he literally stopped giving any fucks about humans/humanity period. If he even still cares one iota for his fellow human beings it's at most at an instinctual genetic level but nothing beyond that. He didn't even lift a finger to even just ameliorate or lessen people's suffering at any point, much less try to put up any kind of a strategic fight or sabotage from within.

Name one thing he did that shows he didn't just jump at the chance for power and the possibility of some form of ascension within Combine ranks. You literally can't. Breen apologists vary from naive to blind to outright stupid.

If aliens showed up and told you your species isn't allowed to fuck anymore, WWYD?

Meditate to ascension, brah. No humanity. Achieve CHIM.

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Jokes on them, we don't get to fuck anyway.

>WWYD?
Jerk off or use some sort of VR/simulation tech. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

The G-Man never had an identity. Valve might have been going somewhere with him in Half Life 1 by hinting at a connection to the government, but from HL2 onwards when the scope of the forces at play on Earth was greatly expanded on, the Gman existed solely as an in-universe standin for Valve. He's a convenient excuse for plopping you into the story, having you survive against impossible odds and certain death (like the Citadel explosion) and thats it, nothing more. This is obvious when Valve literally speaks through him to you, the player, in his speech at the end of Half Life 2, apologizing in advance for the uncertainty of whether or not the cliffhanger will ever really be resolved

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Never doubt Valve to not release something on time. Like Source 2.

But humans can fuck
the suppression field just stops 'certain protein chains important to the process of embryonic development'.
So you can nut in a chick like jesus wanted but just no babby gets made.

>source 2 was being worked on for nearly ten years
>supposed to be the next big step, like source was
>only ever used to port dota in it, some shitty card game, some shitty chickfad game and a single VR minigame while everything else ran in Unity
I'd laugh if it wasn't so sad.

You also don't feel any sexual pleasure whatsoever. It's like a spaded or neutered animal. Their sexual organs are being stimulated but they don't know or feel what's happening.

Something greater was already being hinted at by Nihilanth.

This dude comes up to you, slaps your HEV suit, says the suppression field is down and that you should impregnate his daughter to give him grandkids
What do

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The combine and the whole alien invasion thingy was planned from day one, since laidlaw mentions all that in documents from 1997.
Though it's easy to think that HL2's plot was tacked on since it's so removed from HL1's

HLVR is still coming. Sometime this or next year. With luck.

Thoughts on mmod?

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Gee, I can't wait for a 10 minute techdemo where you teleport from stationary place where you shoot ayys to stationary place where you shoot ayys in hardware 90% of people don't have and can't afford.

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>those kawaii uguu eyes
modding was a mistake
>similar hair cut to hitler
way too on the nose

>gaben: Source 3 will be free for anyone to use
>it's better and easier then source 1
>that was over four years ago
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAABEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN

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He had to sell out the entire human race or everybody will be killed

He gave wonderful talks about functional programming.

youtube.com/watch?v=ZhuHCtR3xq8&t=1616s

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Subtlety is hard

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H-he's just waiting for HLVR to drop so there isn't something to datamine, j-just you wait

I don't think it would be wise to drop even a hint at Humanity's superiority in any way to Combine.

>I don't think it would be wise to drop even a hint at Humanity's superiority in any way to Combine
Except in the domain of teleport technology:

>Despite the highly advanced technical capabilities of the Combine, they appear to have a relatively limited grasp of teleportation technology. Dr. Mossman explains that while the Combine can teleport from one universe to another, they do not know how to teleport between different locations in the same universe.

>The Combine's method of teleportation appears to be highly inefficient compared to Black Mesa's equivalent; a large amount of power and massive pieces of machinery are required to perform teleportation, as seen at the end of Half-Life 2, where Dr. Breen attempts to escape from the Citadel using a Combine teleporter. This teleporter requires a dark fusion reactor to power it, while the teleporters designed by humans require relatively small amounts of power and very little machinery in comparison. Xen teleporters appear to require almost no machinery or energy of any kind.

>While the physics of teleportation are poorly explained, it is known that Xenian teleporters use Xen as a "dimensional slingshot," bouncing off of one universe to another and from one location in a certain universe to another in the same universe. Combine teleporters cannot do this, instead having to "tunnel" through dimensions to the target universe.

>While the physics of teleportation are poorly explained, it is known that Xenian teleporters use Xen as a "dimensional slingshot," bouncing off of one universe to another and from one location in a certain universe to another in the same universe. Combine teleporters cannot do this, instead having to "tunnel" through dimensions to the target universe.
How do Portals work?

Ask him where the white girls are at.

he's white

This shits gotta stop. Just make the fucking game Gabe you fat faggot. Like I genuinely don’t get it, you make money hand over fist. There’s absolutely no excuse to not at least finish it.
>hurrrrr HURRRRRRRR t-the expectations are too high!!!!!! It’ll never live up to what the audience is expecting!!!
Then stop expecting some industry changing engine or game, faggot. I just want a physical conclusion to the story. Not some autistic lore dumped on Reddit

I'm just saying it wouldn't be wise to tell Combine about that if you want them to go somewhere else and leave only minimal force on planet.
He probably told something how it was all G-Man's doing and now he's fucked off towards a galaxy a few million light years away, you can still caught up to him if you'll go right now.

>t-the expectations are too high!!!!!! It’ll never live up to what the audience is expecting!!!
Considering how shit games have grown the past ten years, that's hilarious

Maybe it's cheaper for them?

I'm assembling an elite team to break into Valve HQ and liberate the various HL3s from the recycle bin. Who's in?

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I'm in

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real talk what was the combines goal?

why it was shit? opposing force is the kino half life game

complete global saturation

>Portal 1 takes place a few months or years after the combine arrive, since the scientists were locked inside to work before shit happened but no cops showed up to investigate so humanity collapsed in the meantime.
There isn't an official thing on when portal 2 takes place. Some wikis say 50.000 years because Glados says so in a cut voiceline but that's bullshit because everything would have disintigrated by then. I believe it takes place the same time as HL2, 20 years later because the relaxation containers write that they have a 20 year expiration date on their texture.

I think there's a bit in the Art Therapy DLC where Glados says that was basically all bullshit and that it hasn't been 50,000 years.

>unreal
no
there's Boreal Alyph thats on source engine.

whats on the borealis?

Lets get this going.

That came from an off hand comment from a writer. In order, at least at the time, to separate the two titles from one another, in a consistency standpoint, they had to create a ridiculously long gap.

Obviously, things have changed since then.

im in lad, where do you want me?

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Portal 3.

If Breen didn't do anything there would be no resistance at all.

valve polish is like scrapping the whole game and remaking it when its done (as they did with hl1)

Source 2 was what titan fall 2 was running on, heavily modified.

>You also don't feel any sexual pleasure whatsoever
This seems like a stretch, but was probably a good idea to keep the madmax dude rape lmao completely out of half life

Valve borked the Source SDK with the Steam pipeline update. It's why I stopped mapping.

user, I'm sorry I have to break this to you: Valve is not a games company anymore. They truly do not give a shit about modders, mappers or people who wanted Ep3 in the first place. It's just not what they do anymore. It's tragic, but here we are.

Unreal is the best option given that it's still actively supported and easy to use. If Valve wants an Ep3 sourceport, they can unfuck their mod tools first.

Actually, i don't remember, were combine even aware of G-man, or was his involvement something only a few humans and vorts knew about?

snatch him to where? whys gordon so popular anyway?

>coding the physics
That's just standard physics with the gravity gun being the only new thing.

This is why Boreal Alyph (the Source mod Episode Three project) basically had to build their own custom Source SDK (Blacksmith) first.

no portal = combine can't come

the point isn't to destroy the combine insomuch as it is destroying their connection to earth

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Uh, isn't one of the major plot points that the combine want earth's teleportation tech because we're the only ones to have invented it? Thus guaranteeing their return?

TF2 was still on Source 1. The only games on Source 2 so far are Dota 2 with patch 7.00, Artifact, some VR game and Dota Underworld. I do remember reading that CS:GO is supposed to be competently ported to S2 as well.

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Mindless expansion. The Combine is basically cancer incarnate.

Because he's the right man to be put in the wrong place to make all the difference.

>CS:GO is supposed to be competently ported to S2
some maps that were just directly ported were leaked in like 2016 but no word of it since.
Fuck valve, they're like that jimmy neutron villain that can't finish anything.

So, basically the Chinese?

Judging by how much work and effort they're dumping into every frequent csgo update I seriously fucking doubt a source port is happening.

bro cs is never getting ported. was meant to happed 3 years ago

The Chinese sleeps and dies, the combine is technically incapable of either.

combine cant die?

“Valve: We make games, we just won’t finish them.”

The portal tech is only something our local combine forces want, and the combine only came thanks to portal storms.
It's possible they have no means to get to us without help on this side.

That bug actually got fixed by that Alfred guy when he was still employed by Valve, believe it or not. Think there were other fixes for HL2 too but that was one of the more obvious ones people bitched about.

they wanted the teleport tech(borealis)because they're too ass retarded to figure it out theirseld but have a interdimensional rift can opener, the joke is they can only invade certain areas where its weak/know where to look(zen border world/cystal lighting our dimension like a moth to a light), go get several pieces of paper and layer them and pierce it with a pen, that hole is their only area of control, with teleport tech they can invade everything/everywhere in every dimension

I don't know but I want to pet him.

Reminder that the combine are actually founded by an alternate Cave Johnson who took the place of GLaDOS and uses the conquered worlds to make test chambers for the Perpetual Testing Initiative

Anywhere else, basically. Vortigants are only able to move him outside the Citadel, a relatively short distance where the entire point of Ep1 is evacuating before the city blows up. Then Ep2 is getting to the missile base where Magnusson is, with Vortigants unable to stop G-man from giving a command to Alyx in the mineshaft. Gordon was probably chosen simply because he was the last remaining science team member who could still take a beating.

Gman himself mentions "multiple offers" at the end of HL2, Vortugants challenge him on this. This implies that they were Gordon's original buyers, and that he was only used as part of a larger ploy to free the remaining Vortigants. It'd make sense considering that Vortigants already had some experience with Black Mesa through their existing Xen expeditions, while Gordon was the only one with the HEV suit. That suit itself is probably why they had him dropped into City 17 10-20 years later specifically, because that would have been the only place to get it. This also implies that Gman did something with the HEV suit Gordon was wearing at the end of HL1, and lends credibility to him saving it for Alyx later on.

Ep2 also opens with Gordon in the exact opposite situation he was in at the start of HL2: he's stuck on a broken train in a rural area rather than a train terminal in a big city. He's not briefed by Gman until much later on, which implies Gman was being suppressed or actually fighting elsewhere. It makes me wonder where Barney plays into all this considering that he was the one who pulled Gordon out of the line in the first place, and was on the train preceding him.

anything past Inbound & Anomalous Materials isn't really fitting of the Half-Life art style though, the Xen tracks are literally just like the Aether OST, brilliant but not fitting for HL

Nobody really knows. The closest approximation of Combine are the giant floating slugs that manipulate the world through psi powers. It's unknown if they are able to do anything since they could either be sentient beings or the alien equivalent of a stalker. Elite troops themselves are highly modified humans without any sentience or humanity anyway.

Really it begs the question as to what the Combine actually are, if they are even a civilization anymore. It's entirely plausible that the Combine in HL2 are just automated manufacturing systems for a higher race that have gone haywire, since Breen doesn't seen too concerned with negotiating a deal at the end of HL2 once he gets the rebel leaders. The breengrub stuff implies he's been reborn into a newer form anyway, which he may not have consented to and might be an automatic thing all Combine lifeforms do.

They clone themselves like Furons with full conscious and memory of their previous life, however it leaves them as fat disgusting, immobile blobs that need levitation devices and artificial arms. It's what happened to Breen who requested Gordon to kill him because that existance is absolutely horrible.

>miss out on a Half-Life thread again
>people taking the Epistle 3 Fanfiction as Canon
every. single. time.

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>no duct tape on meter

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rus stronk!!

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Actually, in Breen's twitter, he says the grub things are enslaved themselves, not the highest combine race and they're used just to store someone's conscience.

also while campy I enjoy the UN solider replacement for rebel troops

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KNACK 2, BABY

I want to get pegged by Alyx.

People who defend Black Mesa's poor design choices by saying "reimagining" should be crucified.

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>tfw no Sonic The Hedgehog mod for Half-Life 2

If this situation ever happened IRL, UN troops would support the invaders.

If advanced aliens offered the world's dictators the ability to stay in power and live lavishly at the expense of their people, nearly all of them would take it. And the UN is little more than a rubber stamp for the dictators who make up the majority of countries.

>avatar music
who thought it was a good idea to put in adventure movie trailer music in xen?
youtu.be/DTaY_55n3n8
Just listen to this shit wtf.

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You just need a bunnyhop script.

this looks uninspired

I dont think CS:GO will ever get ported cause of performance issues from porting S1 -> S2
when Dota 2 got ported it was a shitshow with massive performance loss. it took a lot of time with a lot of patches to get close to the same average frames as source 1, but it never went above it, it never performed equal or better ingame at a basic level. It just allowed prettier particle effects and other quality of life shit.
There are no benefits to updating CS:GO, only negatives.

It's amazing how good Titanfall looks considering its a modified source engine. I wish we had modding tools for Titanfall.

my headcanon has L4D/2 and HL in the same universe where most of the earth is dealing with a Combine plague while Breen runs the only "legitimate" city somewhere in Eastern Europe

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the >implication was that the UN basically became the world's government and elected Breen and did that anyway. Everything combines into a larger identity, without any personality or color. Basically what the UN always was. The beta solider uses blue camo anyway.

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I doubt that because the leaker also posted Breens advisor model, which is clearly human but bloated with stubby arms, feet and puckered face.

>Everything combines into a larger identity, without any personality or color. Basically what the UN always was.

Not really. While a lot of the Western elite want a unified, monocultural monoethnic watered down world, the third world dictators don't, they want control of their personal fiefdoms and a general repression of democracy and free communications that gives their subjects uppity ideas.

And all those dictatorships outnumber neo-liberals globalhomo nations in the UN.

In lieu of any better alternatives, it's what we have. Gordon causes an Aperture science experiment to do something that stops the Combine. However since this all supposedly involves time-travel, the only logical ending would be for Vortigants to rewrite everything back to 1998 or whenever the first Black Mesa crew arrived at Xen and prevent them from getting the crystal that causes the resonance cascade in the first place.

This also works into why Xen is important: it's a place where portal crystals form easily and where Vortigants can control their power. Nobody knows if Xen even survived the events of HL1 in the first place though or who owns it. Though, it would make sense that HL1 was about Gman coming into control of Xen and HL2 about him wanting to get an HEV suit and Ep3 Alyx. I don't see the purpose in this though, unless he wanted to make knockoff Combine Assassins (which were cut from HL2, but exist in HL1 as black ops assassins. Those might be related to Gman in some way since they fight the HECU too).

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>Breens advisor model
Pic?

>Imagine how much porn half life would have gotten if commerciallized web 2.0 r34 was a thing back then.
I think about that literally every day and I always get disappointingly angered

he was born with that nose

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better question: what the FUCK is this man's problem

>inb4 >"man"

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did any vorts tp in hl2?

Also figure that Gman himself considered Black Mesa to be disposable, hence the nuke he procures and arms himself at the end of OpFor. By this point Gordon would have already launched the rocket to close the portal using a satellite and shut it on the other side by killing the Nihlianth. What's interesting is that Gman doesn't have the bomb loaded onto the rocket, which would probably have hurt Xen. He just wanted to cut off access, not destroy it. Magnusson uses essentially the same strategy in Ep2, but instead the Advisors show up at the end and are killed (or at least repelled) by Dog.

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If a hyper advanced alien intelligence started interfacing with humanity, shithole dictators would about as much influence as you have over the tides.

i've been wondering if the weird xen thing in that image is supposed to be a mature advisor/shu ulathoi

Depends on the aliens. While there might be species who'll just slaughter all sentient life and take over the planet wholesale, it's just as possible that those aliens will act like human colonial powers did IRL - they'll support dictators willing to kowtow to them, and allow them immense local power as long as they're willing to keep the rabble in line and allowed them to exploit the planet.

Dry throat?

I remeber reading somewhere that Nihilanth was guardian of Xen. And Xen is border world meaning that you have to cross it every time you use portals. At least long way portals between stars.
Combine are different faction then Nihilanth.
Killing nihilanth actually opened Xen to be free for everyone so Gordon basicallyly opened way for Combine Invasion.

Even calling it Source 2 is a misnomer. It's more like Source 1.5
If they released the whole thing in 2015 when they updated Dota2 it might have had a chance but even then it was being outpaced by other engines. Valve are no longer competitive, they simply dont care.
Might as well not even bother releasing it to the public at this point and keep it inhouse. Only real devs using Source within the past 5 years are Respawn, and their version is so distant that calling it "based on Source" is a legal technicality at most.

I don't think so, they were probably able to after the suppression field went down (which I think was Barney's doing).

HL1 would have been getting control of Xen, HL2 (all episodes) would have been the Borealis + Alyx. The Borealis's purpose is obvious (teleportation device, plausibly a time travel device) but I dunno why Alyx is deemed important. Gordon's value is from his training with the HEV suit.

That's dumb. Literally everything about L4D is telling you that it's a movie series.

COUNT ME IN

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>Gordon's value is from his training with the HEV suit
There's a whole bunch of people trained to use the suit or that can be trained to do so.
Gordon, along with Shepard are just picked by the G-man because he says in the OpForce ending that he just has a hard on for people who survive in difficult situations

Counterpoint.

GladOS and the reality bending horrors in Aperture Science so horrified the Combine they walled it off and never returned, despite how useful their portal tech would be.

Half-Life isn't? It's a campy scifi made-for-tv series but a movie series nonetheless. They even did the typical movie thing of ending every episode on a cliffhanger then walking away.

Shit, I'm down, especially if I'm a 27 year old virgin

if they could wouldnt that imply xen still lives

>GladOS and the reality bending horrors in Aperture Science so horrified the Combine they walled it off and never returned, despite how useful their portal tech would be.
>there were theories of Gordon getting to use the Portal Gun
>we'll never see it realized

Being a fan of Valve's games truly is suffering.

Remember that you can briefly see the Combine Overworld at the very end of HL2, in a manner similar to the webm here Just taking this at face value this implies that the player would have eventually gotten there for a final battle that was foreshadowed before. The Borealis seems like the perfect means to do this, with Gordon letting himself be captured so he can be taken near them Combine's leader (or at least central teleporter/power source) which he can then blow up.

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Same

Interestingly it also uses a beta citadel model

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>horrors
nah

I don't think there was anything scary enough in aperture for the combine to not want to go near it.
They most likely knew about the place from records, sent a couple of dudes to look around and found an empty lot and just assumed that was it and ignored the rest of the facility.
Don't forget cave was a master conman so he most likely didn't tell the IRS about the huge ass underground lair he had.

>We actually were fighting a losing battle this whole time
It fucking hurts bros

The worst part is that it wasn't just theories but an official concept at some point in development

Isn't this the true HL experience? You want that last game, the conclusion but you are losing it, and you will never get it, it's hopeless. So you make a deal with the devil and start playing Fortnite.

Either that or they're powered by Black Mesa's crystal. Or an Aperture crystal, that would be aboard the Borealis. This is what Gman wants, and what the Vortigants try to stop him from sending Gordon to.

Importance of Gordon was spelled out all the way back in the HL1 - he fucks shit up.

he was probably just sick of SOLDIER's shit

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That doesn't sound like the Combine at all. Overwatch is extremely thorough and threatens with permenant offworld relocation for every task to be followed to the t. Sismec scans would have been done to show the miles underground complex to which excevation is done with a forward combine base on the surface.

Between this and the leaked TF2 comic ending Valve seems hellbent on punishing their audience for caring about their stories.

Fucking portals how do they work?

>leaked TF2 comic ending
N-nani?

Petain objectively did nothing wrong

Because the Borealis isn't a teleporter, it travels through time. The theory being that if you could go through time; you could not only stop the Xen incident from happening but also kick the Combine's ass before they ever had a chance to be a threat to Earth
It's then revealed that this is impossible because the Combine are unfathomably large, but the effort to get it is still the same

Yeah, no. The combine do a pretty shoddy business in doing anything that isn't completely essential. They have no reason to investigate aperture. As far as any human record can tell them, they were a nearly bankrupt research company. Nothing important enough to make them send armies to a parking lot.

i've accepted that i'll be dead before EP3 release

Basically Administrator staged the entire war to harvest blood for a cosmic horror in the shape of Abraham Lincoln. In a desperate attempt to please him, she nukes the entire Earth and everyone dies.

Also on the topic of observations notice how Black Mesa's spectrometer is grounded while the Borealis wouldn't have been due to the pure water insulating it in the drydock. Since Aperture's facilities were in northern Michigan their water supply would have been pure water and not saltwater, meaning it wouldn't conduct electricity. This is why Kleiner mentions that the ship took part of Aperture's drydock in Ep2. The lack of grounding might force more energy to stay on the load rather than short-circuiting, meaning a more powerful portal.

It's interesting that this detail exists.

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What is there to imply xen isn't around anymore? Pretty sure resistance teleporters are still dependant on it.

Pure Michigan™

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Postal 4

>this is how they end TF2

I haven't cared about that game for almost 8 years now and I would be absolutely furious.

Fucking what?
Source?

That's your interpretation and headcanon, there's nothing actually linking Half Life to being a in-universe fiction, and by your logic, literally any video game series could be argued to be a movie/TV/etc series in its own universe and not actually taking place because it all revolves around a protagonist and has an interesting plot, but that's fucking stupid, because thats just necessary elements of a video game. The entire premise of Left 4 Dead, besides zombies, is that it's a B-movie horror flick. It's not going to be the same universe as Half Life 2 and i cant imagine how you came up with this besides they're both valve and star humans and the apocolypse because for one the US military is still intact, and two there's no sign of Half Life 2 technology or aliens in L4D and no sign of infected in Half Life, when there should be

>the nuking of the Earth represents the servers being shut down
Fitting, I guess.

everything else

>water supply would have been pure water and not saltwater
except the entirety of aperture science was built in a literal salt mine, and any ground water leaking into the underground drydock that you can find in portal 2 would have been extremely salty.

>woah what link? tell me more!
>instant response
>source?
>......................
lmao nice larp

all the salt was mined out, obviously.

If this is real I might actually off myself, what a massive fuck you to fans.

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>portal storms interest combine, they send fuck you force theough these portal storms.
>Storms end, Fuck you Force is on its own
>during the 7 month war Fuck You Force establishes Citadel. Some planetside obelisk that can call in Fuck You Completely offensive.
>Freeman fucks this up.
>ep1 & ep2 are what remains of the fuck you force, scrambling to accelerate the acquisition of portal tech

The borealis? Would make the most common sense to check the source instead of scouring the entire planet.

It's actually painful to share a board with people who believe this

lol what lincolin was one off the past merceranaries

Plus, Valve said GladOS repelled and killed the combine forces sent to investigate. I imagine at some point they'd get curious what down there is so valuable that a sentient self aware AI kills anything that gets close to it.

Bases on the size of the place they must hace more going on for them than portals, bouncy gels and mind transferring technology

It was a text post on Yea Forums. It's pribably bullshit, but it lines up with Valve's seemingly nihilistic philosophy

pure water doesnt stay pure long, it ionises relatively wuickly

im just disputing what he was saying about xen not existing

>Valve said GladOS repelled and killed the combine forces sent to investigate
where?
Even if she could kill the first bunch of troops, once she had the Combine's attention, I doubt she'd be able to stop the entirety of their army with just a couple of full bullet shooting turrets

Reminder that freeman will be humanitys saviour, he is not meant to do it now but someday
The right man at the wrong place can make all the difference in the world

His preserve wasn't so private

That'd be even more of a reason to break in and plug in Overwatch into the Aperture network so she gags and disassembles glados virtually. Not much human AI can do to an alien coded AI with Citadel Combine processing power.

>teleport all combine to xen
>destroy portal
ggez

Valve is retarded and pulled together their "legendary" game library through sheer luck and timing and just buying other peoples games that were already doing good. Yes it's stupid but that's consistent with Valve

Hey, 75% more bullets, that four times as much dead combine. And see that they were remodeled humans, they probably ran out of disposable soldiers to find out about something that they didn't even know what it was, while a bearded faggot fucked their shit up at home.

>killed the combine forces
So wouldn't that draw even more attention? Rogue machine capable of killing Civil Protection isn't like Headcrab or Antlion biotic outbreak.

See
The Combine know about Aperture, but GladOS pushed them back so hard that they never came back in the decades between Portal 1 and 2.

GLaDOS went rogue when Chel was a child and that must have happened after the Combine logically because the HL3 plot talked about scientists sending the Borealis away during the 7 hour war, if you take that as canon. Though it's weird imagining Aperture running normally after the war, so who knows.

Hard to break in when anyone setting foot in there is instantly crushed to paste by a panel.

I don't know what Sci Fi Toonforce bullshit GladOS pulled, but she got the Combine to fuck off and leave Aperture forever.

>ever doubting Cave "moondust" Johnson

Ep3 should end with the Borealis making a giant Portal Portal on a moon and sucking the Aperture Science mothman colony in for a war against the giant sentient worms. Then Vortigants show up and Gman is revealed to be a male GlaDoS in Cave Johnson's reanimated but dead corpse. He fights whatever monstrosity Breen becomes personally.

think of the memes

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>I don't know what Sci Fi Toonforce bullshit GladOS pulled
It was literally nerve gas.

That's bullshit.
They defeated the ENTIRE WORLD in seven hours while GLaDOS can't fucking kill an unarmed chick.

Did Cave fuck Caroline?

>gman is cave
fuck, that actually makes sense

Then again, the Combine also failed to do shit against some hobo who was in stasis for 20 years and had just a crowbar and the Gravity Gun

Yes. Gordan is their lovechild.

“Why yes, I do play all Source Engine related games and mods. How could you tell?

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Cave Johnson, or at least, Alternative universe him is the fucking MVP
>Buys out Black Mesa and cancels the experiment that would cause the resonance cascade because he saw the danger, saving humanity
>Sees how an alternate self of his that became GLaDOS went crazy so he cancels that project as well, saving his employees
The real hero of the universe right there.

GlaDoS also has local teleporter tech, which the Combine do not. Hence the portal storms, which are effective but limited in capability. GlaDoS has something that can work around that.

What happenned to his voice?
Did cancer five him superpowers?

>Hey, hey, I'm not paying you to sleep over here
>You kicked some serious alien butt last time I saw you so guess what, you're going to kick some serious alien butt again
>Now, I've been told, Cave, don't trust all your plans on a single random dude, but who takes advice from someone who just got fired? huh, how's that?
>So, yeah, unless you want to crowd up the unemployment office, wake up, smell ashes, the lots.

>gordon was a spy for aperture science the whole time
>upon entering the AP's front door he says Hello and walks into a ruined building to report to GlaDoS who promptly begins trying to merge herself with the Combine so she can experiment on them

come to think of it GlaDoS is basically what the Combine want to be: a fully mech AI that uses a human brain as a reference object, basically what all the personality cores are. GlaDoS also experiments on people using funny but with physics experiments instead of biotech/biomod research. I wonder if she herself is a recycled HL2 battle sequence, since Portal's end sequence is kind of like HL2's (pick up ball, shoot it into thing).

You know all Combine forces even Civil Protection wear gasmasks and full concealed uniforms that show no skin right? Plus it'd probably be pic related going in.

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Someone needs to redo the whole HL series with Cave Johnson voiceover.

just poke the eye

Blocks your path.

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gman is the opposite of cave johnson, whereas cave is usually upbeat and energetic gman is subdued and calculating. Wouldn't it be funny if he was just Combine-ized and he takes off a psychic nullifies or other bs and then starts killing Combines himself? This reads less as a Valve story and more as new age crap though. Kinda works with the crystal motif, though.

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You can't stop me, now it's just triple the poking.

Play Neotokyo every Friday on Renraku.

There's nothing to poke though.

The Combine strike me as an empire that is lucky enough to have a shitton of resources that they can afford to be entirely fucking incompetent

Like an Eastern European riot cop. Big and impenetrable, until someone grabs their shields and flips them on their back like a turtle

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>The Combine strike me as an empire that is lucky enough to have a shitton of resources that they can afford to be entirely fucking incompetent
So, Valve themselves are the Combine, then?

Fine, but I swear if I leave this thread without poking something I'm gonna snap.

Not him, but basically yeah. Gabe started out at Microsoft, it's where he made the money to start Valve because MS wasn't interested in selling games online at the time. He applied their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy onto PC games. Essentially what the Combine do.

i know its already been said but i love hl threads. they encompass what this board should be like for all games.

Jesus is there any hope of recovery of a human past this point? That if they had a head injury and re-remember some things would they realize being like this just fucking sucks?

>Bonus Chapter: Xen Attacks

>This is the bonus chapter of Half-Life: Decay. In it, two Vortigaunts named "Drone Subjects" X-8973 and R-4913 must retrieve the crystal sample which was used in tests (and stolen by the G-Man) in Black Mesa and take it back to their leader Nihilanth. It is also interesting to note that the level itself is connected to the parking garage as seen near the end of Half-Life: Opposing Force where the Nuclear warhead is disarmed by Adrian Shephard and rearmed by the G-Man.

They're the comfiest time you can have in here that's for sure.
Mostly because it's an old franchise that zoomers don't care about and older guys look back on fondly and united in wanting to kick gabe's shit in for never finishing it.

once you go full immersive vr youre done for

>Decay never got an official port to PC
It baffles me the most. The game was made by Gearbox when they were still in good terms with Valve, and Half-Life as a whole is a flagship series of PC gaming. Why leave one of its games in the PS2, and modders have to make a port of it?

TF2 threads are also pretty comfy. People actually discuss the game and throw out ideas they'd like to see in it.

What about regular Combine soldiers?

never played tf2 honestly. i kinda regret dedicating my time to cs over tf, but sobeit

Will we ever get Half Life 3 bros?

>He really did have good intentions and he was not a bad guy whatsoever
Let's conveniently ignore the fact that he was Black Mesa's administrator who sent countless personnel to their deaths on Xen, as seen by all the HEV suit bodies. Also, he INSISTED that they perform the anomalous materials test despite several of the staff's warnings, include the creator of the anti-mass spectrometer.

He's a fucking faggot who volunteered to be the one to lead a relatively comfortable life under the combine while the rest of humanity suffers and rats out his former colleagues at any opportunity.

Cmon Yea Forums, give me your best theory to what/who the g-man is

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Maybe the Epic Game Launcher exclusivity debacle will force Valve to invest their money into other projects.

Both. He alludes to it when he mentions he can make any deal with the Combine that he wants.

>has time manipulation travels he can pull on a whim
>completely above the Combine who already travel through universes and casually build Dyson Spheres
>isn't even all that powerful since he has "employers" who can constrict him and coworkers who chastized him for saving Alyx in Black Mesa
Maybe this is one of those mysterious that are better left unexplained

If that was the case then I'm glad the franchise got shelved. Alyx is fucking annoying.

You were not supposed to point that out

> in good terms with Valve
You know, I watched a documentary from Noclip about HL, they were interviewing PitchfordValve didn't participate, by the way and he said, that Valve was shit at communicationmaybe they were busy with hl2 and because of that Gearbox wanted to start making their own games.

>Half-Life 3 is announced
>somehow it's an Epic Store exclusive
>Valve still too lazy to do anything about it

could easily just be a lie, as far as i can tell he has no bargaining powers except the fact that he talked to gman (i think??)

At the same rime he can be shut down completely by Vortigaubts

Yeah but there had to be like twenty of them and they only created a barrier, he still appeared.
If there was just one vort he would probably over power him.

Yeah, it's never bothered me about knowing who or what the Gman is to be honest. The moment he reappears When the Vorts are reviving Alyx is still in my top three gaming moments though.

They've been extensively modified to the point where they have a feed-tube and voicebox installed, which seems to suggest that they don't ingest food from their mouths anymore, and that bulge on their waste might be some advanced colonoscopy bag that recycles their waste back into their body. Its hard to say how much of their brains have been modified, but even if they could "defect" they are no longer normal humans by any degree.

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Still, defecting Combine soldiers are the perfect fanfiction and nothing else material.

he's Cloud

He had the only man who can threaten their hold on Earth and the man in charge of the teleportation research which they desperately want. He was right, he could make any deal and they'd have to agree or he'd just shoot Eli and let Gordon roam free.

theyre strong enough to just kill him afterwards though

well, they can express some emotions, screaming "SHIT!", when grenade lands nearby, so I think basics were left untouched
also I guess they can experience sexual desires

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Man I wish more beta concepts were kept. That helmet is cool looking.

based NT poster

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I don't think the Combine would go back on their word. I think they would agree to any demands Breen would make; what's the worst that he could ask for?

>Nobody knows if Xen even survived the events of HL1
What? Xen is the dimension that binds all the universes together. You can't just blow it up

yeah, beta was something

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Hardcore BDSM with whoever leads the Combine

we give you portals leave our solar system. or more likely " gve me eternal life and portals are yours"

I think only cops, who like barney, are still humans, yell shit and stuff

>we'll never get to experience dimension hopping time travel nightmare fuckery while fighting advisors aboard the borealis

I want off this timeline

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I could see them agreeing to either. Earth's a backwater shithole they don't care about besides its resources (which they've already taken) and the teleportation technology. And why would they give a fuck if Breen lives forever.

Gordon was meant to be an interdimensional mercenary and Gman was essentially his manager. Like said, Gman admits to working for a larger organization that also seems to specialize in hiring extraordinary individuals. There are likely other super powers in the multiverse that are capable of going toe-to-toe with the Combine. Because of the nature of this organization, it's possible that Gman isn't necessarily against the combine, but he's currently working with those who are.

soldiers yell too, but elites is another story

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i don't think the combines would leave a civlization that ,despite being less advanced than them, were able to create teleportation devices.
humanity in HL is very valuable or at least the people involved with the experiments, but they achieved something they couldn't in a short amount of time compared to the time they have been around the universe..

This so fucking much.
The fucked up, alien aspect of half life is what I like the most and from the concept art it looked like it would deliver
Rip

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>Tell me, Dr. Freeman, if you can: you have destroyed so much — what is it exactly that you have created? Can you name even one thing?... I thought not.
based breen

i imagine he probably planned to take controle of the combine through infiltration. good point though, i would have thought returning earths resources would also be paer of the deal idk

as weird as it sounds id say its like the combine is like china (huge resources, can do the same task heaps but limited ingenuity) and the us is obviously the usa, in their way of thinking.

>give humanity a few rocks
>suddenly they have teleportation technology
>Earth holds no value!
whut.

bro hes saying outside of teleportation earth is only worth its resources. id disagree as aperture has a fair bit of cool tech from what weve seen, and probably more that we havent. im sure that gell stuff would be useful somehow. apparently it rips skeletons out as well.

It's only a handful of scientists who developed the teleportation technology. Also they probably have the knowledge after raping Eli's brain at the end of EP2.

Are they even aware of Aperture's existence besides the Borealis?

who knows. id think theyd at least have planetary scanners

even if it's only a handful of scientist, they still represent the PEAK of humanity, imagine the things they could make with other stuff
In the short time they had the right resources they made, a Portal Gun, A Gravity Gun, Portals to other dimensions, Portal to other locations and a resonance cascade

Fully automated luxury gay space GLaDOS technology could take back Earth easily, considering how weak their presence is on Earth.

HL3 should have been GLaDOS and robots vs the entire combine force on earth in order to secure the existence of test subjects and a future for human testing.

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>And Black Mesa figured out Teleportation just fine.
>just fine
>fine
no

Quantum tunneling.

so TF2's robot defense mode

they only needed one man to solve their problems

Imagine if the Portal turrets could actually move their legs.

>In the Opposing Force files, there is a sound byte related to the Gene Worm called "dsbossit". When played, it sounds like plain gibberish. But when played backwards, it seems to say "To win the game you must kill me, Randy Pitchford". Randy Pitchford is CEO of Gearbox. This is a nod to Doom 2 where "to win the game you must kill me, John Romero" is played backwards when the final boss sees the player. Furthermore, dsbossit is the name of this sound in Doom 2's main WAD file.

sasuga, randy

If i remember right, they've already got tech to build Black Mesa-like teleporters from Mossman before HL2 even started.

Original thought process was "I can't save humanity, but I can preserve it and wait for someone else to."
In the end his thought process was "Nobody can save humanity, but I may be able to preserve myself."

>The biggest embarrassment has been Black Mesa facility, but I think that's finally taken care of itself... quite so

assuming the G-man is actually working with the black ops/US government he's just wiping away another billion dollar mistake the US pissed away again

assuming the G-man is some sort of extradimensional being/psi-powered being it means funny shit was going on at BM that was enough to affect him

>If aliens showed up and told you your species isn't allowed to fuck anymore, WWYD?
I'd fuck them.

I would advise against thinking about OpFor as fully cannon. That line alone became irrelevant when it were confirmed what G-man himself was behind Black Mesa incident. Even in HL1 it was implied everything was just a part of his plan to get Xen.

hunt down the freeman at all costs for his horrible crimes against fashion

his actual nature was never conceived by the developers, he's just a wizard who does it for shits and giggles as far as plot is concerned,

So what is the top level of Combine authority actually like?

imagine gordon with the portal gun and gravity gun, literally invincible.

cthulu monsters

He didn't want to get fucked by a big worm monster.

Tho if OpFor story were meant to be self contained he probably were talking about Race X involvement.

Breen didn't strike me as malicious, so much as morally bankrupt. But it's been a long time since I played HL2.

unconfirmed. As far as the story is concerned at this point, the rebels are "winning".

probably beyond human comprehension tbqh

That just means that it will come out some day. The longer it takes, the easier it will be to wait. Don't worry, just have hope, user.

bros hl3 leaked

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>that helped ruin gaming starting with the first game.

Technically true.

he's god almighty our lord who has returned to save man from the alien menace

Still doesn't explain why the Nihilanth is wearing braces like a slave.

Rebels are winning at local conflict by cutting off shitty combine wonabees on our side and sabotaging everything they could use to contact the main forces. The Combine being much stronger than everything on Earth was never a secret, see 7 hour war.

The worst part about Half Life 3 never coming out is that we'll never get any more Dr. Mossman.

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She looks like she fucks black guys.

Imagine playing through Half-Life, one of the more self serious games out there. And running into GLaDOS as Freeman. It would be so jarring.

is Laidlaw's fiction any good

He's a god whose job is to keep the multiverse stable. If a species could control both time(Borealis) and space(portals) it would destroy all universes, so his actions are to prevent this. Destroying Xen brought Combine, vortigaunts and humans together in one place. Bringing back Gordon in HL2 created a chain of events that led to the Combine being cut off from Earth never to find it again, and the Borealis being destroyed. That keeps three species from ever mastering time. And the enslavement of vortigaunts/humanity is so they know the consequences of researching time. When all the Combine currently on Earth are killed, and civilization rebuilds, no one would be allowed to conduct research on the level of Black Mesa/Aperture.
It might also be possible that the unintentional teleport of the Borealis out of Aperture/ Cave Johnsons illness/ lack of funding/ Glados locking down Aperture were all timed/influenced to happen, just to create the moment where Gordon sees the Dyson sphere and realizes how hopeless the fight is. Every move by G-man kills 5 or 6 birds with one stone in the grand scheme of things.

So would some kind of head injury bring back enough humanity into a Combine soldier that they see how shit their life is that they'd consider defecting?

nah its basically shits fucked, rip oh well. he didnt expand any l o r e or resolve anything

Freeman has a lot of things stronger than a Portal Gun inside his HEV suit. Needless to say Glados will be back into pieces.

Colostomy bag*

Never is a long time, user.

I'm talking about her tone, and the quipy bullshit "personality" she has.

Her personality isn't Poker Night 2 though.

I've never played it before and at this point I feel like if I tried I'd get shit on by autists who play constantly and my team would kick me

>big tiddy milf in a sweater and tight-ass pants
>almost no R34/ecchi shit
I don't get it, you'd think drawfags would be all over her.

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G-Man waited twenty years to unleash Gordon Freeman on the world. Why? One could infer that until that point, rebellion really would have been futile, even with the Free Man on their side.

You'd be surprised. It's the exact opposite of that. The community is friendly, understanding of new players, and welcoming. Due to how the game was built, there's no real disadvantage aside from not knowing the maps, but you come to your senses soon enough.

"the right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world"

Maybe I'll check it out. I just wish dystopia was still alive

We all do.

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>not wanting to know what happened to Adrian Shephard

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But it has to be the RIGHT wrong place.

what said, the regulars are pretty cool.

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well yes, i was implying "Freeman can't do shit in the 7 hours war but he can do shit afterwards"

My favorite implication in HL2 is that the transhuman arm of the Combine still have some degree of sentience/self-awareness, enough that Breen tries to motivate them with fear during Nova Prospekt as well as their little bits of exclamation and dialouge. For some reason I super fucking dig the idea of a spinoff story/game about the transhuman branch doing jackboot space marine shit on distant planets or in other universes. Though Overwatch Elites are where I assume they're just completely beyond any remaining scrap of meaningful humanity and may as well be robots.

to combine: need his knowledge about black mesa/gordon (bit of a stretch given they can absorb memories)
to gordon: need his knowledge about the combine

I just wanted to post a silly sentence.

>The Nihilanth's body features, like the other intelligent Xen races, a third appendage protruding from the middle of its chest, though it is stitched on, likely implying that they are not of Xen origin.
No it's an y section, it's the standard surgical cut you do if you either want to get into the chest and abdominal cavity or just general autopsy.
It's most likely really invasive cybernetics operations or removal.

Gordon freeman
I dunno. I'm a sucker for multiverse shit so maybe he's an alternate Gordon or something, or maybe from the far future. G could stand for government, and a future government could employ him to keep the timeline in check/arrange these events.

The best one I saw is he represents a species that has mastered teleportation and time travel and, fearing what the multi-universe-spanning Universal Union might do with humanity's ingeniously streamlined one-of-a-kind teleportation technology, leverages Gordon Freeman (more importantly, his HEV suit) as a one man army into ensuring that they will never ever get their hands on it. It safeguards his own people/their interests, which just so happens to liberate humanity as a happy accident.

The combine base their power on travelling between multiverses and gathering resources from 'their' solar system and integrating any useful races they defeated into their ranks.
The combine don't have the ability to teleport through space beyond their limited solar system and all the solar systems tied to them through the multiverse. This is why they want the human portal tech

G-Man's name came from his model/entity name, his actual name has never been stated.

>G could stand for government
that's exactly what it stands for. "G-man" is slang for "government man" and I'm guessing they named his entity that for that reason. I think G-man's authority comes from a much higher power than any earthly government given the bullshit he pulls and the stakes at play.

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>has the power to travel through multiple universes
>has the power to conquer entire planets in hours
>has the power to integrate entire species into their own

>limited

K

>leverages Gordon Freeman (more importantly, his HEV suit) as a one man army
What's so important about his suit? Shit was practically mass produced in BM and still being produced after.

They can do those things but they can't go very far within actual universes. So if they conquer the solar system of Earth they can't just teleport to other solar systems in our universe.

Just fly around in sub-light and then build cross-dimensional portals to act as fast travel. In other sci-fi stories even that is already amazing.

Doesn't change the fact that they're conquering entire solar systems in other universes with ease. It's a limitation in name only.

Earth is like a small country during the cold war- large powers want to control us for their own reasons, but they don't really care about our well being.

G-man is an agent of some as-yet unknown power in the multiverse. Said power has better technology than the combine but less manpower/resources, or they simply don't care enough about Earth to bring many resources to bear on it. They aren't fond of the combine, perhaps the two are at war or see each other as rivals.

The combine conquered earth initially for its resources, but the teleportation technology was a tempting and useful asset to them. G-man's job is to prevent them gaining this technology. He has limited resources, but he can travel through time and space and manipulate proxies like Gordon.

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If they spend the effort to travel to other solar systems in an individual universe, they'd have no way to connect the two. If they open another multiverse hub on the new solar system, it would simply attach to that same solar system in different universes.

The combine would essentially be creating a second faction that may get portal tech before them and end up overthrowing them.

They can't control it that way. Presumably any portal that is very far away from the earth portal would also be very far away from their home one as well, as they're still bound by the speed of light. The Aperture portals don't work that way however.

intergalac gov, but why does it mtter?

audible kek

>They turned me into a grub gordy!

Well, fair enough, but I ain't talking about settling, i'm talking about resources. Sure, getting there and bringing it back would take a fuckload of time but it could be done by automated systems, so, who cares.
I mean, they obviously have no need for habitable planets, or at least that's not why they invade everything, and time is of little importance to them seeing as how they completely fine with Breen wasting theirs.
Also, if Epistle 3 is anything to go by, the only technology which actually can be a game changer for them is, ironically, time travel.

So why is everything under them so mundane and corporate?

They've deemed it more efficient to just siphon resources from any multiverse solar system they can attach themselves to. Sure, setting up a ton of automated drones to harvest resources from other solar systems might be beneficial in the long run, but that's looking at a payoff hundreds of thousands of years into the future when they could just continue doing what they do now and have all their desires met.

It's the best tool he could possibly have for a gun-toting adventure across wartorn irradiated Earth; bulletproof, immune to nearly all hazards, self-medicating. It's definitely not a macguffin end-all artifact, Gordon's wits and tenacity are what get him through, but the suit helps makes the man. There's plenty of times Gordon would be APEX FUCKED without it for how often he's bombarded in some new neurotoxin/radiation/bioslime/the vacuum of space.

They can't travel through time, which limits them to a Type V civilization. The people who direct G-Man are most likely Type VI (time travelers).

>decades later half life is still being discussed, theorized, speculated, etc
Beautiful.

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type?

He was doing what he thought was best for humanity in an unwinnable war.

kardashev.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Kardashev_Scale

>good games are being discussed in Yea Forums
good, imagine Yea Forums not discussing good games.

Again, fair enough, but that's kinda undermines the idea what they actually need teleports.
Meanwhile, Humanity almost reached type VI simply because some crazy businessman wanted to make perfect shower curtains.

i mean that scales a bit flawed, technically we already are 4.6 by pure definition, but i assume it means larger structures and not just matter. im refering to quantum teleportation

The biggest reason they want teleports is so they can expand their empire. At the moment they're practically an immeasurably tall, but extremely narrow, tower piercing through the multiverse. Once they have ways to quickly travel to and control things further away via teleportation, they can widen that tower.
It's just adding on to their already enourmous power, yeah, but more power is something people will always pursue. Especially if they're afraid of other races who might have already achieved this. God forbid there was a technology to send a ripple through the multiverse and effectively destroy a single solar system in every instance of it.