Half-Life 2: A Larger Puzzle

I tend to measure in our piece is worth by how interesting the thoughts I'm happening with it are and half-life 2 is a perfect example of why this all comes down to one keyword subtlety anyone who's seen my thief two videos will know I'm a big fan of subtlety I want to have to put in the work to understand the full breadth of the story and that's a sense of discovery that games can be especially good at capturing while the half-life series is a linear story with relatively few spoken lines there's so much going on in the story that isn't directly explained you to the point where I'm still learning new things about the story in world nearly 12 years after I first play it half pipe to this dafuk lies to half-life 1 also though not quite as much there will be spoilers for all of the valve directed half-life games and opposing force from here on out just look at the half-life 1 chapter questionable ethics the game expects us to understand the implications behind finding laboratories full of Capetown dyes the Black Mesa team has been doing experiments on the aliens and of course that means they knew about them well before the resonance cascade not to mention the factories of Xen filled with passive vortigaunts without a single word this confirms that the vortigaunts are indeed brainwashed and that they're being used to manufacture soldiers for some sort of alien overlord who will eventually find out as the combine that also explains the shackles the vortigaunts are forced to fight in I love this stuff it makes the game feel so much bigger than it is because there's no telling what else you might have missed in the story there's a very good chance that the Nylund was trying to hold a portal to earth open so that the enslaved aliens could escape the combine but that whole theory deserves a video of its own on behalf life - from the very moment you start half-life 2 your mind is filled with questions most of which can actually be answered very quickly if you pay attention to the nuances of the world what happened to the aliens well there's a boarding on sweeping trash behind a fence in the beginning they're probably still enslaved where am i well there's some sort of European language on a lot of the walls and the man giving the speech on the monitor says welcome to city 17 this world is so heavily controlled that its cities are numbered the fact that we're only in city 17 tells me that they're probably many cities left in the world whose the sky on the screen I thought so much of the city 17 that I elected to establish my administration here in the City Hall so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors huh he must be some sort of leader but he's not really the one in charge and whoever these benefactors are probably the ones who enslaved the vortigaunts the flying camera just took a picture of me this is clearly some sort of hyper secure role over Earth I wonder why they haven't just brainwashed us all yet wait gman said wake up and smell the ashes is it my fault that humanity has been taken over by this Orwellian master race we haven't even taken 30 steps and the players mind is already racing asking tons of questions and figuring out tons of answers it takes 10 seconds in city 17 to have the plight of the entire human race explained to you indirectly and it only gets more interesting from there next up we meet some humans and learned how paranoid and downtrodden they've become and the next transmission from Breen explains why a suppression field is employed by the combine to make all of humanity sterile and as Breen gives a speech explaining its purpose to concerned citizen we start to understand Breen a bit better there's a ton of subtext in this second green speech should you choose to stay and listen to the whole thing Breen talks about instinct like it's some sort of primitive aspect of humanity that we need to grow out of and maybe he has a point there but it also makes us question whether Green has already been brainwashed or if he's just fooled himself into swallowing the combines propaganda so that he can keep a seed of power does he really have humanity's best interest to heart or is he just looking out for himself is he even real the combine can probably simulate a human face and speech if they have the technology we've seen so far this is how you do injury you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who wasn't excitedly waiting to see Breen in person after listening to the speech and game and what's so cool is that everything I've said so far is left with a player to ask themselves and discover none of this is expressed in cutscene it's up to the player to pick up the scraps of the world and rebuild it in their head it feels like we're writing some crazy fan theory as we learn about the world but in reality we're just putting together two puzzle pieces before we move on I'd like to tie off one last tangent I left the reason the combine don't just brainwash all of the humans is because of our scientific prowess I think it's fair to say this early on the combine don't have teleporter technology because otherwise kleiner and Eli would be trying to figure out how to crack that rather than develop our own teleporters this is of course confirmed in Episode two when we learned that the combine is after the Aperture Science Research at borealis we'd be here for hours and hours if I were to list all of the little things that build on the world like I have been so far so let's take a look at how the game subtly contextualizes new gameplay scenarios there are a couple of great ways this is done one of my personal favorites is the city scanners you'll be going about your business during some of the games downtime and suddenly one will pop around the corner or fly in from the ceiling and snap your picture then by the time you turn the corner metro cops will already be there it's a great way of foreshadowing a combine ambush while also contextualizing their presence in what would otherwise be a totally random places but it also showcases just how powerful the combine are the moment one of their thousands of city scanner sees you it takes 30 seconds for tons of cops to be deployed to your location maybe a little unrealistic but it gets you to be afraid of an enemy that's almost completely harmless and purely mechanical terms if you just spawned one in using commands all I can do is take your picture and temporarily blind you but in practice it's a great bit of foreshadowing to a lot of the games encounters another much less subtle way of signifying a larger fight is the way that some of the cops are scripted to shoot up flares when they see you this is a bit less believable seeing as the cops would probably have live feeds like the city scanners do but it's a universal language you see someone fire a flare before they start shooting you you know you need to get out of there from a purely arcade standpoint the game would be just as fun without these touches but of course games are about much more than mechanical part and just like its predecessor half-life 2 is a fantastic example of how much fun a game can be while still being focused on theming and narrative rather than purely gameplay another thing that happens a handful of times is Gordon encountering the fractured communications between rebel outposts I'll bet at least half of the people listening never caught this tiny bit of storytelling when you first get the airboat you're told to meet some rebels at a red barn around the river and eventually you find the red barn with nothing but headcrab zombies and an empty headcrab canister smashed through the ceiling it makes you wonder if the combine can intercept the rebellions emergency transmissions or if their information networks are just fast enough to know where these rebel stations are either way this makes for a great segue into one of my favorite subtle touches and the half-life games Gordon inadvertently gets tons of his allies killed be they rebel or scientist we all know about the elevator from half-life 1 but remember this moment that suit of yours is full of tracking devices based on what we see in half-life 2 I'd say it's safe to say that the combine eventually find out how to tap into those tracking devices which is why we see moments like this and which surgical strikes that were clearly directed at Gordon end up getting more of the rebels killed or moments like this always starts first a building then the whole block don't worry they'll find one sure enough moments later Gordon enters the building and the Metro cops instantly rate it once again Gordon basically got all of these people killed and yet they're still giving their lives for him somehow I doubt anyone made it out of station 10 after they gave board in their airboat then of course there's the fact that Gordon leads the combine in the Black Mesa eased my gratitude junker first you leave me straight to the doorstep of my oldest friend then you deliver yourself compromising the greatest human led research facility on earth with the possible exception of white forest after the combines raid on Black Mesa East they captured Eli and I think it's fair to assume that they also learned a great deal more about our teleportation experiments which is of course the main thing that keeps the human mind from being obsolete in the combines I before I go into a lunatics rant in the final section of this video I'd like to point out what is in my opinion the most subtle genius thing in the whole half-life series Green is still alive that might not be news to you as we ride the elevator up to his office and the climax we over here I'm talking to a combine advisor about a host body [Music] Oh this is of course an advisory body the brain that we kill in the end of half-life 2 was supposed to be killed possibly as a diversion maybe just to fool us an episode one we even see Breen's advisor being created and instantly lashing out at Alex and Gordon from within its pod this is why at the end of episode 1 when the citadel is finally collapsing we see countless advisor pods launched out of it like I said you've probably heard that one before but what if I told you that we actually meet brains advisor in episode 2 and it tries to kill Gordon and ours when this advisor first wakes up from its pod we see attest its new abilities on an oil drum and by mind / being a corpse then and notices Gordon and even after being injured and never takes its gaze off of Gordon for a second the way it locks eyes with you as far as I'm concerned makes it basically certain that this is Breen's advisor and in spite of the damage it takes it does indeed survive and if we assume that the tongue ability is indeed a mine probe then that means that after the tragic ending of episode 2 the combine suddenly knows all about the borealis and Eli's teleportation research and all sorts of other rebellion secrets talk about a cliffhanger all right onto the Meshuga rant half-life has a great little story about good triumphing over the impossible lots of evil if you just look at the cutscenes but there's so much more to half-life storytelling that adds near endless depth to its world and a great amount of moral ambiguity - as we see in greens and clear motivations but let's backtrack a little bit to the single biggest mystery in half-life the g-man nobody even knows what this guy is really called we've just been calling him g-man because that was his model name and a half-life 1 and yet for 20 years everyone who's ever played a half-life game is wracked their mind trying to figure out his story and yet we still don't have anything outside of theories everything we know about half-life tells us that there must be some combination of the puzzle pieces some angle of looking at things that could explain g-man's origins and motivations but we just haven't figured it out yet in a way this is the tragedy of 5 5 3 and also the magic of it a few years ago on my birthday and OS Marc Laidlaw the lead writer for half-life released a letter from the perspective of Gordon Freeman recounting the events of half-life 3 and as far as I'm concerned this is the Canon and Nick did a series it ends with Gordon and Alex travelling through a portal to the combine overworld and realizing that there's countless Citadel's and a Dyson Sphere in plain view a Dyson Sphere being a theoretical device that surrounds an entire star so that a civilization can harvest thus energy losses loot it just goes to show that throughout the entire half-life series Gordon has been meddling in forces that he can't possibly comprehend MIT education or no and g-man fits perfectly into that category his motivations his origin his true form his name we're all completely outside of our comprehension as mere humans we get a few brief glimpses into the combines true power over the course that completed to have five games but like the g-man there one puzzle piece that will never truly be able to fit with the rest simply because they're too complicated we know a lot about the combine they enslave planets they augment those creatures cybernetically and they send the slaves to conquer other planets they see value in human creativity and they need to drain entire frames with their water and they have the ability to copy minds and the adviser pods beyond that though we can't begin to comprehend the true scale of their operation are the combine even sentient or organic it's perfectly possible perhaps even most likely that some species out in space created an AI that can assume them and then spread out from planet to planet assimilating everything like the Borg and Star Trek but then how does the 9:1 fit in if it was helping combine and slave species escaped to earth then why did she man help Gordon kill it only to turn around and then to fight the combine 20 years later and assuming opposing forces cannon g-man is the one who activated the new can black mesa to create the portal storm that allowed the combine to get to earth then we have the Vorta gan so we're able to overpower g-man when he tried to steal Gordon away after half life to that are they starting a rebellion of their own on their homeworld where these earth border guards how were they able to intercept Gordon but not able to bring him out of stasis before the events of half-life 2 who really knows this is the true magic of half-life it looks clever players figure out such an incredible amount of lore from the world and then they leave a couple of the most important questions completely unanswerable this is why fans care so much about getting a final half-life game they asked us to work so hard to learn as much as we can about the world only to deny us the ultimate answers that all of that information was supposed to lead to but anyways this isn't a pointless rant about why we need a 5-3 this is me celebrating the amount of careful and precise work that went into making a story that the whole internet was engaged with and trying to decipher I mean half-life is practically a niche game to still be playing nowadays but there's still plenty of people trying to unlock this game secrets 15 years later and that's no accident it's simply the way that the game was designed and as far as storytelling in a pS goes to this day it's the most elegant stylish engaging and skillful job of it that we've ever seen [Music]

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 581,404

Keywords: valve, Mark Laidlaw, game design, gaben, Gabe Newell, half life, half life 3, episode, cannon, story, discussion, analysis, world, building, visual, storytelling, lore, essay, theory, conspiracy, recap

Id: -iI05uJgBA8

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/-dead_slender-]

Great video. But one that I'd like to point out is that the Nihilanth was not an ally to the Combine. Marc Laidlaw confirmed that it was a slave that fled to Xen. So the soldiers it created was for it's own army. Otherwise, we probably would've seen alien grunts in HL2.