Half-Life (General Topic)

It sucks things in and spits them back out.

...so... no? Unless you mean Ep 1 where you get the Gravity Gun first I guess, but that's an exception.

So who here has heard of Project Borealis? It's a non-profit fan-made Episode 3 for Half-Life 2, developed in Unreal Engine 4 and based on Marc Laidlaw's Epistle 3.

This is Update 5. Concept art, proof of concept, some rough gameplay, pre-alpha stuff... designing and building levels for the game, demonstrating latest progress on gameplay and sharing some new concept art and general updates.

Any thoughts, tropers? I am excited and looking forward towards it.

Furry headcrabs! They actually have fur or fur-like material on top. They're so fluffy! I wanna hold one. I don't care if I turn I just wanna feel that fluffiness!

& Okay?

Edited by Dhiruxide on Jun 21st 2019 at 5:00:36 PM

Just gotta de-beak the little sucker, you'll be fine.

As for what to think... I'm not gonna get hyped up, just yet. Fan projects often take a LONG time to reach a near-finished state, and that's if the staff doesn't lose interest and eventually move on to greener, more profitable pastures. The one good bit of news though is regarding the owner of the franchise itself, Valve: the company has generally been fine with fans creating (and even profiting off of) fan-mods and the like, so that bodes well in terms of not receiving any last-minute cease-and-desist orders.

Exactly. And as for this, they're releasing some solid project milestones. Just hoping it doesn't go the way of some fan projects where they fall in love with their own hype / a single element of their project.

And then don't keep it within achievable timeframes.

I do hope this comes to something. But yeah, will wait and see what they get to do.

The first few levels of Xen in Black Mesa Source are now open for testing.

I hope it does well. If it gets popular enough and Valve are chill enough about it, they might actually accept it as canon. It's not like they have any incentive whatsoever to actually make a next installment, since no matter what they do it will probably anger some people. It's been long enough that people will expect unrealistic things of the next one.

Edited by Journeyman on Jun 26th 2019 at 1:08:33 PM

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/black-mesas-xen-beta-is-now-available/

So, the Black Mesa Xen levels are nearing completion! First three (Of 19) are out for beta testing. They're saying that a release of the whole pack is nearing. Buuuut the project did take 7 years overall. But it looks like it's nearing completion.

...19 levels? For real?

Daaaaamn. We're not counting loading from one area to another like HL does usually?

If there is one thing I'd like the Black Mesa team to do, it would be to replace those loading pauses. Games have had dynamic loading for much longer than this has been in development. I guess it's a limitation of the Source engine.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 26th 2019 at 2:22:31 PM

Not sure - Xen had a lot of "bitty" levels that were just platforms. I think they've changed a few, expanded some and added a few more in. But yeah, loading into each one probably.

Took advantage of the current sale to grab Black Mesa. Took the entire inbound train ride repeatedly pausing to tweak graphic settings for a playable FPS, but I'm still having fluctuations. Sometimes it's 40+, sometimes it's <20. No vsync causes tearing regardless of FPS. Dropping dynamic shadows and shadow cascades from high to medium noticeably helped, so that might be the cause.

Still fun. Having a hell of a trouble headcrabshotting zombies due to their shambling.

Also made me wonder. What could've happened if the techs managed to pull the plug on the AMS a moment before the resonance cascade would've gone prompt supercritical and thus shut it down with only major equipment damage and Xenian incursions across the planet, but no Combine? Cue Breen pushing for legal action against the crew for prematurely stopping the experiment and doing everything in his power to repeat it (because he knows the Combine will have his ass for doublecrossing them if he doesn't) while the crew is arguing to the federal investigators (the event registered on every single seismograph in the US, so hiding it was impossible) that the whole thing would've blown up in their faces if they hadn't stopped.

Basically, Black Mesa becomes the US' Chernobyl.

Edited by amitakartok on Jun 26th 2019 at 12:54:33 PM

Unlikely. The federal government was trying to silence everybody with the HECU marines, remember? They'd do everything possible to silence and shame any survivors from Black Mesa, maybe even label them terrorists or saboteurs. And yeah, Breen would probably get off relatively easy compared to his staff, especially since it would benefit his goals to make another attempt at causing a cascade resonance.

Edited by SgtRicko on Jun 28th 2019 at 12:42:09 AM

Would breen cause another cascade? I mean for what I know that happen due Gman pushing for it even when it was a bad idea.

Breen is an opportunist, i don't think he was actively collaborating with the Combine during Half-Life 1, i mean, it was Nihilanth who was heading the invasion and the Combine just happened to detect it and find an opening. I think Breen just happened to be the right man at the right time to be the quisling the Combine wanted.

Didn't the government only try to silence them after things got out of hand?

If they didn't reach a proper Resonance Cascade, then that'd be a point of contention on the Government, but I imagine they'd hold back on the trigger finger long enough to help keep this all a secret.

That being said, G-Man was at the military camp, and according to Shephard's diary, this seemed to be something that some of the soldiers were getting specialised training for...

But is that even canon? It was in a Gearbox expansion. No clue.

Well Shepard himself is canon to HL 'verse but Race X are solely Gearbox's own.

Even if Shepard wasn't intercepted/taken interest in by G Man, he would've been tried anyway, right? I don't see any scenario in which Shepard wins, just loses. He's still in stasis!

I admit I've completely forgotten about the G-Man. Now I feel dumb.

So anyone played any quality maps and mods? That Echoes mod looks damn sweet! I am unsure about recycled stock voice quips for scientists tho lol. That was Narmy for me.

Another mod I like is the Half-Quake Trilogy. Bizarre, surreal and all about suffering and dying in many ways. I love the aesthetic especially, starting with Amen. Black, white with some green.

I have not.

Re-reading the "corrected" Episode 3 plot synopsis from Mark Laidlaw I've realized something...

...Episode 3 was going to conclude the Half-Life 2 story arc and still would have been a finale that left more questions than answers. I'd have been just as frustrated with Valve for not "explaining" anything as I am with them simply shrugging the series into the void.

Thankful as one can be for Laidlaw providing some closure just reading how this Episode was meant to conclude infuriates me. It's interesting that The G-Man would just pluck Alyx away and ditch Gordon. That lovecraftian, "the universe is bigger than you can ever possibly know" style of storytelling fits. I could accept that. But then Alyx's fate would be left dangling and we'd probably never hear or see from Gordon Freeman again anyway.

On that note I am somewhat okay with how this ended. Or, at least, less not-okay.

Edited by Soble on Jul 26th 2019 at 8:26:49 AM

I would actually love it if Alyx was the main playable character protagonist in Half-Life after E3. Imagine all the tasks given to her and her trying to subvert and break free.

Same, but HL seemed to run with the Silent Protagonist thing and making Alyx mute seems like it'd be weird. She was the person giving input where Gordon wasn't.

I literally said nothing about making her mute nor should she be mute either. It would be an awesome contrast too and her gameplay will be standard Half-Life shooting with hacking mechanic. Always liked to imagine her able to hack turrets to slaughter combine troops in secluded rooms

Edited by Dhiruxide on Jul 26th 2019 at 5:42:28 PM

And having a mute protagonist worked really well... in the original Half-Life, where who you were stopped mattering the moment disaster struck.

But to remain such when you're meant to be some messiah to the people just feels weird... Especially with the notion that you're meant to actually have recurring companions.

Personally, I would like Alyx to take over the role of the protagonist, so that we can have an actual person as part of the plot instead of someone who is deliberately designed to be as void of a real person as possible.

Weird? It would have been weirder if he started talking out of nowhere in the sequel. It works fine.

I agree with second part, Alyx is lively and think of the gameplay mechanics with her hacking tool.

I'm pretty sure Episode 3 was never intended to be the end of Half-Life 2. They planned for a ton of episodes if I recall correctly.