Some mornings, you get up to the conventional on a regular basis drudgery of writing about videogames. Other days you get up to a gender-swapped model of probably the most anticipated videogame story of all time, revealed by the lead author as a closing farewell to followers.
Today is the second kind of morning. Marc Laidlaw has launched some “fan-fiction” on his weblog, detailing what would have been the plot of Half-Life 2: Episode three, had he bought to make it. It’s fairly wild.
For every thing else we find out about Half-Life 3, now we have a devoted article.
If you are simply right here for the hyperlinks, this is the place Laidlaw posted it, you will want this archive to truly learn it till the Reddit hug stops. There’s additionally this handy pastebin (through the ever-reliable Wario64 on Twitter) with all of the gender-swapping and renaming fastened up.
For those that need a fast abstract, you bury Eli Vance and get on a seaplane to Antartica. It’s then shot down and also you wander via the icy wastes for some time. You ultimately discover the time-and-dimension-shifting Borealis and handle to board it, preventing via it even because it phases via realities, with glimpses of every thing from the Seven Hour War to the far way forward for the Half-Life universe – even just a few of the Combine homeworld.
Eventually Alyx and Dr. Mossman (who has been with you, by the way in which) have a battle and Alyx kills her, as a result of Alyx desires to make use of the Borealis as a makeshift time-missle battering ram in opposition to the Combine and Mossman desires to present it to the Resistance. You go together with Alyx’s plan now that Mossman is useless, a suicide mission till the G-Man reveals up, saves Alyx and leaves you to your doom. Just because the Borealis rams into what’s clearly an indestructible Dyson Sphere you’ll have zero impact on, the Vortigaunts prevent and dump you again into the Half-Life timeline, a few years sooner or later.
The End, please look ahead to Half-Life three however by no means count on any closure. Oh, additionally, Breen is a slug.
It’s an attention-grabbing story, follows the construction of different Half-Life video games and leaves a lot of the greater questions fully unanswered. There is nothing on who the G-Man is, nothing on his relationship with Eli Vance or his daughter. The Combine aren’t defeated, and even actually scratched, and Gordon would not say something.
With a little bit little bit of studying between the traces (at the least for my part) it reveals the place among the difficulties in growth had been. The scenes after the seaplane crashes sound boring and like Laidlaw by no means actually fleshed them out till you attain the Borealis. They’re additionally in huge icy wastelends, so goodness is aware of how they’d have labored gameplay smart.
Equally, the preventing in and across the Borealis sounds wonderful, however technically difficult, notably again in 2008 when this was nonetheless recent in Laidlaw’s thoughts and the principle thrust of Valve’s growth. Then there’s the matter of precise alternative within the story, one thing Half-Life by no means did earlier than nevertheless it seems like Laidlaw wished to.
It’s undoubtedly price a learn, and I did not go into all the main points in my brief abstract above. As you possibly can think about, it is given part-catharsis, part-frustration to followers wanting solutions. As Laidlaw says on Twitter himself, they by no means would have gotten them – seeds had been planted with none plan of what the timber would appear like, and so they all the time wished to ask more questions than they answered.
This most likely places paid to any tiny probability of seeing this in recreation kind – in case the final ten years weren’t sufficient. At least we bought a little bit closure.
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