>An immense light blazed. I caught a cosmic view of a brilliantly

>>94907929
> Is there a /co/ character
Any galaxy sized being or any being with galaxy-wide (reality warping) powers. There are plenty to pick from.

>>94907929
>they do a 9/11
>It's the equialvent of them breaking some windows in one of the restaurants inside one of the Twin Towers.

Sounds like they're going to recton everything due to TIME TRAVEL and release a new version of the series soon, no?

>>94908145
>Valve
>releasing SP games

>>94908145
This is from a plot summary for what would've been the next game that Marc Laidlaw recently posted. Valve has decided that a Dota card game spin-off takes priority over finishing the Half-Life series.

Dr.Manhattan, Squirrel Girl, pretty much all the upper level cosmic beings in DC and Marvel if they wanted to.

>>94907929
With /v/ it's far harder to say, because aside from rare examples, you're not dealing with reality-bending beings.
With comics, on the other hand, you've got a shit ton of absurdly overpowered characters who in literally any other media besides their own where the inevitable deus ex machina stops them, they would just flat-out be God and could destroy something like the Combine as a whole with a snap of their fingers.

My headcanon is that Gordon got some kind of multiversal awareness during the test chamber incident, kind of a low rent Dr. Manhattan, so the gameplay actually reflects his experience accurately - like in edge of tomorrow, he can't die so he's literally unstoppable even though he's just a mook with a gun.

They kinda lampshaded it with Breen's harangue to the combine troopers in the prison "He's not some trained infiltrator, he's just some scientist geek!"

Dismantling a dyson sphere multiversal civilization might take him a while tho

>>94908685

I think it's pretty obvious by now that the G-man's job is to pull strings in specific places.

What I get from it all is that the G-man is a representative or agent from an even more powerful entity/collective than even the combine with their dyson sphere(s), and his entire job is to cause as many waves with as little effort as possible. "the right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world."

I'm convinced that a large part of Gordon's success is the G-man's indirect involvement in the world. Not to take away from Gordon's own ability to fuck shit up with heavy ordnance and bent pieces of metal, but the G-man puts Gordon where he has to be to be the most effective.

I don't think Gordon will be able to do much to fight the actual combine without the G-man's backing. But I think that our other favorite character, Alyx Vance, might just be able to do more to destabilize them. And if Gordon doesn't at some point tear his shit up, the G-Man might just destroy them instead.

Granted, there's still a lot we don't know. Like what's the deal with the vortigaunts and the vortessence?

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The Qu, but I suppose that might be more /lit/ than /co/
>Their world had given the toughest resistance against the Qu onslaught. So tough,
in fact, that they had turned back two successive waves of the invaders, only to succumb
to the third.
>The Qu, with their twisted sense of justice, wanted to make them pay. Even
extinction would be too light a punishment for resisting the star gods. The humans of the
rogue world needed a sentence that would remind them of their humiliation for
generations to come.
>So they were made into disembodied cultures of skin and muscle, connected by a
skimpy network of the most basic nerves. They were employed as living filtering devices,
subsisting on the waste products of Qu civilization like mats of cancer cells. And just to
witness and suffer their wretched fate, their eyes, together with their consciousness,
were retained.
>For forty million years they suffered; generation after generation were born into
the most miserable of lives while absorbing the pain of all that they were going through.
>When the Qu left, they hoped for a quick extinction. But their lowliness had also
made them efficient survivors. Unchecked by the Qu, the colonials spread across the
planet in quilt-like fields of human flesh. After an eternity of tortured lives, the human
fields tasted something that could almost be described as hope.

>>94909311
REMOVE QU

>>94908279
Or any other game, for that fucking matter.

>>94908128
WITH AXE AND SWORD AND MACE

>>94909396

I hope Valve realized they fucked up when they announced their card game to an overwhelming "aw."

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>>94908128
>>94909520
REMEMBER THE WORDS OF TORQUEMADA

>>94909311
The last posthuman civilization should be able to handle them. Significant proportion of all system in a thousand galaxies support Dyson spheres, wormhole network that trivializes travel.

Still /lit/ I suppose even if it's illustrated, but the COM-BINE is no MAAAAAATCH FOR-THE DAAAAAA-LEEEEEKS!

>>94909542
SING YE THE DEVIATUS AND REJOICE!

REJOICE I SAID!

ARE YOU REJOICING, CITIZEN?

>>94909589
Time War era Daleks specifically are by far one of the most powerful sci-fi armies out there. Every soldier is a nigh indistructable and armed with an incredibly powerful death ray, who never needs rest, food, ammo or anything else that would require a supply chain and lives only to kill. And if they somehow lose a battle they can just time travel back and re-do it.

They had to be put into a position where the amount of time fuckery meant the entire war period was incapable of being time travelled in, and put up against 13 incarnations of a guy who's superpower seems to be bullshitting a way to save the day to be defeated. Even then some found a way out.

>>94907929
Batman

>>94908839
I get the impression that G-Man represents a smarter faction, not necessarily a more powerful. Like you say, more about a distributed effort to turn as much as possible to shit for the Combine. And while the might have some sort of morality they need not have much concern for the Combine's victims, if any.

>>94909785
Yeah. Time travel will tend to fuck over anyone that doesn't have it, just like interstellar travel.

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>>94907929

>>94909542
eat shit, torquemada.

>>94907929

There's literally thousands who could kill Combine with absolute trivial ease.

I have honestly no idea why /v/ kids are shitting their pants over a simple Dyson sphere. It's only a big deal if you compare it to things that exist in the real world. It's no big deal at all in terms of fiction.

>>94910956
The deal is that it's not The Dyson Sphere

It's A Dyson Sphere

Just one of many in not a single universe, but a multiversal empire

>>94910993
>multiversal empire

Based on what? Just having awkward dimensional travel does not make you a "multiversal empire". Star Trek Federation has that.

All I see is kids fellating a Type-2 civilization into a Type-5 one based on nothing.

And even if it was an actual Type-5 civilization, that's nothing at all in terms of fiction in general. Thought-Robot Superman could blink his omnipotent eye and erase it. Demonbane would probably destroy it on accident during a fight against something more serious.

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>we will never find out who G-Man is
Who is he guys?

>>94911084
Based on the fact that it is an empire known to extend into multiple universes.

>>94910956
When all you have is a fucked up planet, some allied alien guerillas and a dodgy foreign military advisor it's a pretty big deal.

Note: Gordon died on his way to his home planet.

>>94911084
Sounded more like a type 2 and change dispersed across multiple universes to me.

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>>94907929
I always get hard when a Dyson Sphere is mentioned.

>>94911305
>When all you have is a fucked up planet, some allied alien guerillas and a dodgy foreign military advisor it's a pretty big deal.

Sure. But /v/alve kids are acting like Combine is some unstoppable threat in terms of fiction in general, instead of only within of Half-life.

My guess is it's because they have literally never read anything in their lives. Not a book, not even a comic.

>>94910993
Do you have a single fact that suggests they have more than one Dyson sphere? Because only one is ever shown.

>>94911460
Anything with a Dyson whatever and FTL force projection is a pretty big deal. Bigger stuff isn't that common. (I took a quick look at my fiction and comics shelves and there's not a lot of books featuring factions that wouldn't shit themselves seeing the Combine) I would have no idea about most top tier factions except the Culture and the Daleks if I didn't occasionally browse Vs treads on spacebattles for fun.

>>94911546
Well, and the Xeelee but I didn't read much beyond Ring and some shorts. Overall real scientists do good wanking when they write SF and feel like it, like Baxter and Bear. And Forward I guess but who can read his books anyway?

>>94911546
Monitors laugh at this "threat".

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>>94907929
A ten foot tall robot made out of blades capable of time travel, temporal manipulation, and instant teleportation to any point in the universe.

>>94909963

I would say that in the Half-life Universe, smarter = more powerful.

The amount of spatial fuckery the G-Man is able to engage in is something I don't think even the combine are capable of, or at least don't use. I think it's canon that the Nihilant was a slave of the Combine at one point, and the Nihilant was capable of just as much or more than the Vortigaunts.

>>94911084
Based on the fact that they invaded Earth from another universe? And that Earth is far from their first conquest? And that the Xenian collection of aliens were fleeing from them?

>>94911870
Getting /lit/ in here or did someone make a comic?

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>>94907929
The OG Combine - Ellos, The Cosmic Hatred

>>94908279
Valve hasn't decided anything.

Valve is an experiment in anarchy. It has no formal management structure. Employed are free to decide for themselves what projects they pursue, with the only oversight coming from peer review. Like all anarchies, it's fucking terrible at getting anything done.

>>94912281
There's something to be said for having a shit ton of resources as well. G-Man and any associates could be fighting against trillion to one odds for all we know.

>>94912737
And they all decided in unison they'd prefer easy money and abandoned their other projects for things like DOTA cosmetics.

>>94912734
This. "Them" are extremely powerful.

>>94912748

True enough.

All I know is, G-man can't be trusted.

>>94909785
By far my ass. The Xeelee could stomp them effortlessly. Who needs Dalek bumps and shitty death rays when you have hand guns that can kill stars and an FTL engine that help you travel anywhere in time and space?

>>94912291
They said they traveled to Earth through tunneling through dimensional barriers, but never confirmed whether or not they came from a different one. The Nihilanth and his slaves were pushed into Xen (which still existed on the boundaries of their reality) by their invasion, but they seemed to be able to function on Earth instead of violently decomposing due to differences in the laws of physics, so I'm pretty sure they came from the same unverse too. I always took it as Everybody skimming the dimensions to travel through vast differences more quickly and effectively but never actually break through to a different universe.

>>94912737
>>94912869
"you can work on whatever you want" turned into "you could fuck around with whatever stupid shit you want, get nothing done, and still get paid"

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>>94907929
This man is more /co/ than most of /co/.

>>94913243
This is precisely why the Publisher-Developer relationship isn't inherently evil. It can turn abusive with bad publishers, but the system isn't inherently wrong. To push out games at all ever, you need to give developers structures and goals.

Imagine how many great games never would have been made if the developers stopped making the game in the final months of polish because they got bored.

>>94913094
>hand guns that can kill stars
im starting to think some /co/ material might be a little bit stupid

>>94913349
It's not even that, there's no boss telling them to get shit done. There's no boss calling the shots or making sure people get projects done.

>>94909974
It often fucks over those that *do* have it, too.

>>94913233
Google combine dude, they're multi dimensional I'm sure it states that in the games

I believe the combine are actually at war with another or multiple empires,
Earth was just a threat waiting to happen and they could take whatever resources it has at the same time, the g-man is def part of some faction that's way has slot of confidence maybe machine?

>>94913393
The Xeelee aren't /co/ and it makes sense in the context of the stories.

>>94913689
Yeah, better time traveler wins. Fun will be had if the People decide the Time Lords are gone and so they need a time travel capability of their own. "It's just the one Dyson" - yeah, but it's effectively the Culture with time machines.

>>94912737
>Valve is an experiment in anarchy.

Valve: Give the consumer what they will pay for, not what they want.

It's got nothing to do with the hierarchy of the company, they made Steam, which is like facebook only with a captive audience that buys stuff in a very profitable niche. They may eventually toss some money at the guys who made the HL1 remake or something but I figure they're all too busy figuring the exact amount of gold plating for their outhouse toilets to worry too much.

And more power to them.

>>94914497
Hl3 would make a shitload of money no matter how terrible it is, the problem is that people at valve would rather not bother with something as hard as that.

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Are there any comics or cartoons that end with the MC giving up out of despair?

>>94914541

I think it's more likely a case of being stunted by perfectionism.

Valve is most likely trying to do with HL3 what HL2 did at the time. They're trying to do something new and groundbreaking. But odds are they can't think of anything groundbreaking enough, or everything they do think of gets applied elsewhere, or is disregarded as not being groundbreaking enough.

I have faith in Valve still, but at some point you pass the TF2 threshold and go into the Duke Nukem Forever area of game development time.

>>94914600
>I have faith in Valve still
you poor unfortunate soul

>>94913233
From what Judith Mossman mentioned, the Combines can tunnel through from and, to less extend, to "their universe", but they haven't developed a local teleportation system like the one that was developed on earth (except a really crude version in Nova Prospekt that slingshot you with a week-long delay) and are forced to rely on local transports once they arrive.

I don't think they come from the same universe as the slingshot based teleportation system can go up to the border of the universe (Xen) and back, this would have made it really easy for humans or any other faggot with the same teleportation system to follow them "home".

They are really powerful but they aren't all that powerful either, once they attack an universe, they are stuck there and it doesn't seem possible to send anything back (including an SOS) without nuking their entire infrastructure to bits.

>>94914005
I don't think Earth was a threat, but they developed a teleportation system that you can use both way, with no delay and with no maximum range (in your universe)

Put next to it that some massive empires like the Combines never developed such thing and you get a race to be the first there, either to get it or to prevent your enemies from getting it

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>>94907929
>they have a big thing
>so they're unbeatable

That's such retarded reasoning. Just because they have a Dyson sphere doesn't mean their home world can't be destroyed or their bodies killed. Plenty of advanced races in Star Trek had amazing tech, and it didn't really matter. Even a species capable of walking through doors to any point in the universe was already extinct.

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>>94907929
>Is there a /co/ character or faction who could defeat the Combine?
The Lords of the Higher Worlds.

>>94909311
Considering the Astromorph Gods wiped the floor with the Qu, the Astromorph Gods could totally take the Combine.

>>94914971
That's /lit/ though, no?

>>94915223

There's plenty of Elric comic adaptations, so I'd argue "no".

>>94915223
/lit/ and /co/ I'd say.

>>94908685
Freeman has quantum inmortality, half life is just the timeline when he keeps and keeps living

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>>94914971
It will always be /mu/ to me.

>>94914568
>we will never see the freeman's mind version of this

>>94911599
>xeelee

Aren't they in the series where one race of up and comers converted an entire galaxy into a bullet and fired it using quantum bullshit, only for the race they fired at to no sell it?