Half-Life 2 Makes me Proud to be a Human

as always before we begin today's video i'd like to verbally thank my patrons especially those donating ten dollars or more monthly such as alex van der wude almost dead again anatoly volnov andrew melmick big time jim colin gajek cooper sutton corby godwin cosmo borski daniel christman darius fazier david kaiser duncan bristow fralem jack eisenberg jano john strange jp de la tour jw max benning mixer rules money and muses ceelo silver silence vladimir's noldholm wolfhd and young master pig i barely got this one out on time so thanks for sticking with me for all of its bleak atmosphere and hopeless situations half-life 2 is one of the only pieces of sci-fi that makes me proud to be a human half-life 2 is probably the absolute greatest example of designing a game with goals in mind what do i mean when i say that well i'll start out with an analogy that i use a lot with games we can think of the narrative as the lyrics and the gameplay as the music to create a lyrical song that really sets the mood you want these two things need to work together and the exact same is true with the game games like all art are ultimately about making the player feel the things you want them to feel whether that feeling is excitement stress power fear courage or something more complicated there's a gameplay scenario and a narrative scenario that can bring out that feeling and for something to be truly cohesive those two things need to work together while it's almost never this simple i'm of the opinion that most games design should start with the feeling that you want to give the player and everything else should then stem from that in something like dark souls those feelings are stress courage excitement and triumph and i'm sure that anyone who's played them would agree that they definitely bring out those emotions with both their intense gameplay and their cryptic stories and worlds well what's half-life 2 going for it's a little bit more complicated but it starts with this idea that humanity is special we'll start with the narrative as that's the more familiar aspect of games i'll try to keep the lore from the later games out of this but in half-life 2 especially we're told a fairly simple story about gordon freeman and left to pick up the scraps of this huge and intricate story of humanity as a whole and that larger story is where we'll start after playing half-life 2 you'll probably have one big question that can be solved by just piecing together the puzzle a bit why haven't the combine just totally enslaved humanity and gone on with their day why is sentience allowed to exist on earth well for all of the combine's incredible technology there's one thing that they couldn't figure out on their own local teleportation that is to say teleporting from one place to another without having to use another dimension zen as a bridge between the two points i won't get into the specifics of zen relay emulation or any of that stuff suffice it to say that human scientists were the ones who were able to crack the code and make this incredibly important scientific advancement that giant teleporter you see at the end of nova prospect that's human engineering the combine just coerced the scientists and supplied the materials the whole plot of the half-life 2 games is basically centered around local teleportation tech and humans were the ones to pull it off what this all boils down to is that the only reason humanity wasn't completely destroyed by the combine is because we're able to think outside of the box and see things from a perspective that this gigantic alien mega race is too large to consider so humanity is special because it's able to think out of the box well as anyone who's played the first game will know that's gordon freeman's specialty so now let's look at a couple of gameplay scenarios where thinking outside of the box is what allows gordon to survive the most obvious of these would be the gravity gun centric areas not only is the gravity gone a clever bit of human engineering on its own but when it's time to use it in gameplay it's usually also got something to do with human ingenuity getting a third battery by flinging a piece of trash up to this precarious platform defending yourself against zombies by cleverly using the gravity gun to activate the spinning blade trap from a safer distance grabbing supplies from across the battlefield without having to cross enemy fire pushing a vehicle off a cliff so that it's unable to continue powering a shield generator the applications for this thing are endless and more importantly it completely changes the way that you look at any given gameplay scenario it makes you think outside of the box for me it's impossible to play half-life 2 and not think for a split second here and there man humans sure are clever so narratively we get that message across with the whole local teleportation thing and by showing how the human resistance has been able to subvert and avoid combine detection and from a gameplay perspective the gravity gun is constantly making us feel clever for thinking outside of the box but on top of that you've got other more specific gameplay scenarios that bring that feeling across nova prospect is a great example as this rebel says one man alone wouldn't stand much chance going in there but a man with a pack of ant lions well that's a different story well with a bit of creative use of these ant lions we're able to disable the combine devices that keep said ant lions away and before long we've completely destroyed nova prospect that's all narrative stuff but from a gameplay perspective we use these ant lines to draw fire away from ourselves as we run from cover to cover storming the beach as it were we use them to distract sterilizer sentries so that we can get past we use them to trigger trip mines and break up enemy formations and hey after all that's over you might even use the bug bait to stun an enemy soldier every once in a while i could go on and on listing gameplay scenarios half-life 2 is a big game after all but i think you get my point here half-life 2 is a game where humans are constantly thinking outside of the box both narratively and in gameplay however this whole idea about humans not necessarily being able to outsmart the combine but being able to surprise them gives way to what i think is a more interesting overarching theme of half-life 2. half-life 2 is about being beaten down by an overwhelming force and eventually turning that force's aggression back against it this happens narratively on both the short term and the long term we use combine energy pellets against a combine portal generator and that's what enables us to destroy the citadel but on a smaller scale we almost exclusively use combine weaponry barney uses the combine's own network to communicate with kleiner's lab and the resistance we use combine mounted guns against them we fire manhacks at enemy soldiers we use combine med kits rather than human ones we use combine energy outlets to power our hev suits and hell we can even power it with the metro cop's stun sticks the point is that from a gameplay perspective almost every single advantage we have when fighting the combine is one that the combine itself gave to us but when we start looking at things from a narrative perspective it becomes clear that this isn't the only side to that coin we have to be overwhelmed by that enemy force before we can start using it for ourselves and this is a pattern that can be found in both gameplay and narrative in almost every single chapter that's centered around fighting the combine in the first of these chapters root canal the metro cops overwhelm us with these exploding barrels but with a little bit of that classic human ingenuity and some quick thinking we can turn that advantage against them and by the end of the chapter they're the ones who are being overwhelmed by the barrels the combines trains put us in some sticky situations where we have to move faster than is comfortable but after we get through this section it's one of those same trains that covers our escape and gives us a chance to shake off all of our pursuers in the next chapter water hazard we're absolutely beaten down time and time again by combine hunter choppers forced to dig into the dirt and hide from them and the payoff is this [Applause] [Music] so yeah it's pretty badass once you get this gun you'll have to forgive my gratuitous use of montages this is easily the most bombastic chapter in the game anyways the way that these cps ambush you shortly after you get the gun only for them to be absolutely destroyed by your newfound power is just such a perfect way to illustrate how unprepared the combine were for that human ingenuity that i keep hyping up a couple of friends of mine think that water hazard is a little bit too long and personally i couldn't disagree more the long time that you spend being beaten down by the combine here working your ass off to evade them is just the setup to this absolutely incredible payoff once you get the gun that gun came off one of the same 100 choppers that you're up against i always like to bring a little iron into a firefight you don't really fight the combine too much over the next few chapters but a couple of notable points would be when you pick up the ar2 during your first encounter with overwatch soldiers and use it to flank a combine assault on shore point base and when you get to pier 137 while i can't find any evidence that the combine were using this magnet crane for its intended purpose they are at least using it as a crow's nest and needless to say we absolutely romp them with this crane once we get into nova prospect that same pattern continues at its most blatant when alex literally hacks the sterilizer sentries which have been bothering us for so long allowing us to use them against the combine and we of course use their own teleporter to get us out of there after destroying the place with ant lions moving forward onto the uprising things continue as they were with dog just wrecking the combine all while being built from combine scrap components and then we're on to dark energy where it couldn't be more obvious the combine's weapon confiscation field overcharges our gravity gun and hev suit making us more powerful than we have been at any other point in the game and they use these prisoner transport tracks to take us straight where we were headed anyways which ultimately leads us to the ending where we use their own weapons against them to destroy their entire base of operations on earth this is more or less the arc of all the combine-centric chapters in half-life 2 and when you compare gordon's story to the much larger story of humanity as a whole it's the same sort of story humanity is overwhelmed by this unstoppable all-powerful force and we use that human ingenuity to strike back and turn the combine's advantage on its head with this in mind it makes sense thematically why the resistance and the citizens place an almost religious amount of faith in one theoretical physicist his fight against the combine is completely parabolic of the struggle of all humanity hell his sudden mysterious return even gives him a bit of a jesus allegory that i'm sure helped his messianic repute spread you might be saying to yourself that's really neat but why does any of this matter the game is fun and the story is good isn't that enough well here's the thing half-life 2 tells a simple but incredibly compelling story with the atmosphere and the tone to match it and that makes it pretty memorable but what i think elevated it to the downright legendary status it has is that connection we want to see humanity overthrow its oppressors in the exact same way that we want to destroy that damn hunter chopper that's been pinning us down for five minutes straight we want to hit the combine where they least expect it in the exact same way that we want to watch our ant lines pop out of the ground and flank a squad of overwatch soldiers who are pushing us we want to shut down the suppression field so that we can reproduce once more and save humanity and the exact same way that we want to shut down this suppressor gun and finally start moving troops through this part of the city again half-life 2 is a game that tells its story through its gameplay just as much as it does with its characters in world building and the result of that is the one simple fact that makes this game as legendary as it is no matter what aspect of the game comes to mind when you think half-life 2 you think overcoming an impossible force when you think freedom you think freeman ingenuity dr freeman aren't you forgetting something i must admit you've achieved a great deal but and time again i've tipped the balance in your favor don't mistake my management for providence ordinarily i wouldn't have intervened but these are extraordinary times and things played out as you had set them in motion well let's just say we wouldn't be having this conversation in another time i gave a man a warning and that man's ingenuity left to the same unforeseen consequences dr freeman in the meantime this is where i get off you

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 467,048

Rating: 4.9483705 out of 5

Keywords: half, life, Half-Life 2, Alyx, gordon, kliener, kliener, gabe, newell, eli, vance, analysis, ending, explained, discussion, spoilers

Id: m7tppdVrxbQ

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020