Half-Life: Alyx it ends there Half-Life 2: Episode Two it concludes, after we have changed everything we thought we knew about where this story was going, or what would happen next.
They are pure tactics of the highest priority. What might have been a game that kept the story in a tangible pattern became something that changed the nature of the Half-Life story as we thought we understood it.
However, to continue anywhere, and ask the game's writers what all this means, we will have to confuse certain things.
Everything old is new again
As we've previously reported, there seems to be no big question as to whether there will be more Half-Life games in the future. What those games will be, however, is a bit controversial.
"No bible puts everything into the next three games, I'd like to say, if Marc (Laidlaw, the first writer for Half-Life) had a secret book," Valve (kinda) writer Erik Wolpaw told Polygon, laughing. "This would have been a big deal."
"The finale obviously shows some indications we're all excited about, so it's not like there is no idea, but no, no concrete, 300-page book on where the game goes after this," Valve writer Jay Pinkerton said in an agreement.
So, let’s talk about this conclusion, because it is a miracle, and it seems to be uplifting too much.
The game begins by accepting that mission Alyx is on its way – a trip to save his father Eli Vance from the Combine – will fail. Eli Vance is dead. We already see him die. The game itself reminds us of this fact in its opening moments. The stats seem low, and it sounds like we're passing through the same ground as previous games, talking about narration, except this time in VR.
But in fact Alyx wins in his first goal before the game ends, despite all the belief. Eli is freed, and he has news of some sort of massive weapon being seized by Merge. Something they don't want anyone to know about. What he seems to be nervous about. And whatever it is, resistance needs to get its hands on it if there is a City 17 hope.
Alyx's mission is now no longer about rescue, but about finding, and perhaps even using, that weapon. But he discovers that this may not be the case, but he can be human. And that person could be the most important person in the Half-Life mythos: Gordon Freeman. If Alyx can reach the man who became a myth after the Black Mesa events, but disappears right after that, he might get the chance to win the planet back to Combine.
So now we're back to the rescue mission game, just a rescue mission with a very different target. And the closer to that target, the heavier the items become. Because he's not Gordon Freeman in captivity, it turns out.
It is G-Man.
And releasing the seemingly total power of the prison has good uses, as it gives him the opportunity to be retaliated. He does not have the ability to remove Combine from Earth, which would be very disruptive to his "bosses," but he could do something that would be good, in the long run. He shows Alyx's future, except that Alyx's future happens in our real life. We see Eli Vance's death, and Alyx is offered the chance to save him, as long as he's about to work for G-Man.
Remember the conclusion of Half-Life 2: Episode Two? If not, let's give it a go. This is what Alyx saw, more or less, and what he was given the option to change.
Changing the past, or perhaps, more accurately, altering the existing conditions in the game, allows the team to get players updated on the game's story without repeating things that fans already knew.
"The problem is how do you make the ending feel like this game?" Valve writer Sean Vanaman explained to Polygon. "How do we solve the prequel problem so we don't feel like the game is just a short story hidden in the world of Half-Life?"
Alyx now actually it does he has the ability to save his father, but doing so will change the course of the whole game's story. He accepts the contract, his father is saved, and he goes to … wherever G-Man stores the goods between their jobs. That is where Gordon Freeman disappeared in time Half life and Half-Life 2, maybe.
Except, somehow, Eli Vance knows that G-Man has changed things, and he has his daughter. We do not know exactly how Eli knows this, but we do know that he wants to do something about it, and he knows someone who can turn to him to save his daughter, before relying on and saving the world: Gordon Freeman.
The final moments of the game, behind the credits, mark the return of the Dog as the robot returns Gordon's famous boat to his hands. Or rather, as this is VR, your hands. And this is where everything ends.
This concludes, by twisting and turning, to solve the many problems the narrative team had fought for in terms of game development.
“We had a problem first, we were & # 39; a god in boxing & # 39; Those are the two biggest ones, ”Pinkerton said. “The idea that once you release a god, God is right for you. And that kindness should have a positive effect. What does Alyx want? ”
The game doesn't give Alyx much to look for without a single purpose. He was always trying to save his dad from Combine, so using that desire as a throughline means they don't have to make a McGuffin in the middle of the game, even if it turns out for a while, that they will. It was Eli and so on we are going to die, we know how that story ends as we've played it Episode Two. But for G-Man to bring him back and hire Alyx as an asset? Immediately the subject changed again, and surprised.
"It just pushed the ball in a way that everybody in the room was finding interesting," Pinkerton said. "You can't stop thinking about it … We can't stop talking about it."
It's a hell of an end, it took us back to the final minutes of the previous issue in the Half-Life series, while turning a lot of what we thought we knew into what would happen next.
I was impressed by how quickly Eli Vance was able to put together what had happened before calling for help from Gordon Freeman. The group discussed leaving a clue behind what G-Man was saying, and pulling some cosmic strings perhaps to change things that shouldn't have been changed, but that idea was cut for several reasons. So how does Eli know what's going on? I asked the three men if any other timeline had been made, and if so, what had happened to the first events that unfolded Episode Two.
"It's fun to think, isn't it?" Said Vanaman, looking away from the camera and smiling.
Here's where we start digging into the Half-Life storytelling philosophy a bit, because discussing these things, and wondering what's going on, is part of the game. It's the part that the narrative team doesn't want to shut down this at the start of the Alyx release.
"We have a timeline, and a vision in our heads that we shared with one another as we went along, so we're working on it," Wolpaw said. “But we don't want to talk about it because it's fun to watch. It's fun to guess. And I feel like we're turning things off as soon as we start saying, here it is, you know? ”
"We have the answers, we assure you," added Pinkerton. "We have the answer, but we don't want to spell it."
That resilience, however, comes with its benefits.
"To some extent, what you just described is what we can hope for," Wolpaw said. "People think, & # 39; Oops, man, I'm excited, excited about what's happening next, & # 39; rebuild this remaining IP and add it a little." Now the final story is no longer a thing of the past decades, it is a new concept for everyone, and questions about what the rest of the game means.
In that center of that lore, too, it was G-Man himself.
Who is G-Man? What does he want?
Half-Life: Alyx he managed to make all of this heavy-handed and uplifting narration, which ends surprisingly well without giving too much detail as to, in fact, G-Man who or whatever he wants. Something the policy is often funny about, but never elaborates on. There is an inner sense of what he can and cannot do in this world, but what might otherwise be restricted to players is intentional.
“It is very important for us to be able to formulate rules around him, so that we can give them instructions,” explained Pinkerton. “That is something that I think is very important. And we are always too sensitive to rob people of the joy of anonymity. But there is a fine line between being disciplined about that and coming across a kind of fatigue and inaction. ”
Wolpaw pointed out that some light on G-Man and working on these mysteries is a place the series might want to go, but this was not a game to do so. But to keep Half-Life Moving on, they'll have to increase the focus a bit, because Combine is now a contained threat. That means that G-Man and its mysterious bosses may have a more important role to play in the story sooner rather than later.
“If you remember Episode Two, they had blocked those sites, ”said Wolpaw. "So what's left of the Combine World is what's left of Combine."
No other sites, Link is attached here with us as we are stuck here with them. They can't escape, but no confirmation is forthcoming. So that story has a chance that it will end sooner than fans think.
"You need to start thinking about changing one focus to something else," Wolpaw explained.
Who G-Man is, and what he does for himself, can make a very different focus on upcoming Half-Life games. The question I had was that, internally, at least, they knew who G-Man was, and what he was working on.
“I feel like I don't want to answer this one. Just a hard pass. Let's just keep quiet and change the subject back, ”Pinkerton said.
"There are a few competing ideas," adds Wolpaw.
They do not want to write a closed-ended bible story, because too much Alyx they come from an idea that comes from where they want this story to be and where they want to end things. If they decide something now, does that limit their ability to turn it into something cool later if they have a better idea?
Besides, the defining feature of G-Man as a character is not to be understood, he is something else. And the writing team wants to keep it that way for at least a while.
Like Batman, his identity doesn't matter, because his impact on the story is always felt by what he himself is it does. The mystery is part of the experience, and explaining too much can take away some of her beauty.
"That's so much more than so many other actors, how it is unknown, and what his motives are, the whole thing was still unclear," Pinkerton said. "Everything about her is unique and yes, I think, personally, I do not speak as a company because as a person, I think it would just rob me of that great character if I suddenly had a bio, and I knew where she lived, or what she wore when she got her mail. that is. ”
Now what happens next?
The Half-Life story has to go past the world of the cliffhanger it was introduced into Episode Two and then it is amazingly transformed by the events in it Half-Life: Alyx.
Valve has already stepped back and re-introduced the players to the world through a prequel, changing the ends of the original finale, but doing something like this can sound like a trick, a way to stand out while looking like new things. Anything that comes next in the game's story sounds like it has to go through that point in time, or the team runs the risk of frustrated players waiting for some kind of resolution.
"I think we're frustrated too," Wolpaw said, frankly. “We did exactly this. It was interesting. It absolutely sounds like it works. I'm so glad we pulled it out, apparently. And, yes, the next thing I would like to keep moving forward is. I also understood that this one is speaking to me personally, not to institutions. But you know. ”
Half-Life: Alyx deals with a story that ends with one character being placed in icy snow, another returning to the dead and putting his money into the struggle after the loss of his daughter, and Gordon Freeman who is famous for returning his boat, VR. It sounds like the victim of the hero is being placed in the hands of Freeman and the actor. There are many places the next game can go from here, but you never know exactly which team the team is going to use as part of the adventure, even for those working on the game.
"It sounds like we're in a pretty middle-class area with no paint in the corner, but we don't have much of a problem with blank pages," Pinkerton said. The only question that may now be the most important is: When will we be able to play the next chapter?