Why does the dyson sphere even matter? Even if the combine were

The sticky is nothing more than a fanfic by some valve dev.

>>388217479
You mean fanfiction from the former writer of the Half-Life series.

>>388217479
nice try gabriel newberg

>>388217626
>former
>o
>r
>m
>e
>r

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>>388217479

>>388216482
It was meant to throw a wrench in their plans at the very least since, if they take down what they believe to be the staging area of their invasions, they'll hopefully set them back for a while. Seeing the Dyson sphere just shows that what they're doing isn't going to do shit because they have a fucking Dyson sphere.

>>388216482
It was basically a super nuke
And it did jack shit

>>388217745
well theres no current so he'll have to do

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>I caught a cosmic view of a brilliantly glittering Dyson sphere. The vastness of the Combine’s power, the futility of our struggle, blossomed briefly in my awareness. I saw everything. Mainly I saw how the Borealis, our most powerful weapon, would register as less than a fizzling matchhead as it blew itself apart. And what remained of me would be even less than that.

k i n o

>>388216482
Any species that can build a dyson sphere would be eons ahead of humanity
The combine are essentially literal gods to us
They literally enslaved multiple races to enslave us

>>388217745
he wrote the entire half life series. as far as i'm concerned whatever he says is canon until valve releases episode 3, which wont happen.

>>388218093
If laidlaw wrote a full novelisation of the series I would buy the fuck outta it

I know people are treating this as the end of HL, but really, it's just an employee that doesn't even work there anymore. I mean, there's no chance of them making anything anyways since skins are more profitable apparently, but to take this as the final confirmation is a fucking joke. He doesn't own the rights to HL; he has no say on the ending since he doesn't even fucking work there anymore.

>>388218210
>taking some hacks fanfic as canon
He's not an authority at valve. If they order them to work on hl3, hl3 will happen.

>>388218392
>authority at valve
dont really care, he wrote the story.
>If they order them to work on hl3, hl3 will happen
lol you dont understand valve do you buddy, do some research. half life 3 is not coming out.

>>388216482
The fact that they managed to create an artificial construct that encompasses an entire star shows how technologically advanced they are and there's no way humans can even stand a chance against their full might.

>>388218093
it'd be amazing

imagine the buildup, arming the Borealis and planning to take down the Combine's base of operations through space/time travel

and then you go through with it and after the point of no return you shift into existence next to a humongous dyson sphere surrounding a giant fucking star

and it does nothing

>>388218504
If Adam West came out and wrote a fanfic about Batman dying, it's not canon.

>>388218585
adam west wrote batman? thats really interesting because I thought bill finger did.
try harder

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>>388218585
>comparing an actor to the lead writer
>mfw I will never be this retarded

>>388218745
Adam West is Batman, nigger.

>>388218367
>game is making good progress
>clear signs that it will see the light of day
>"now would be a good time to publish the plot of it to a blog"

do you know how dumb you are

>>388218585
Yeah, but we also haven't been waiting for news on Batman's status for the last 10 fucking years, you moron.

>>388218803
so marc laidlaw is gordan freeman? wow your stupidity is outstanding.

>>388218058
I love your wit

>>388216482
idk the idea that the combine are truly invincible and the player loses in the end is unconventional and a neat twist

>>388218846
>the first person to pick up the torch is the undisputed authority on the subject

>>388218367
>companies make games, not people
>the person who wrote literally all of the half-life story heretofore is irrelevant
my god, I can feel the ideology

>>388218736
what is this?

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You think Gabe will release a press conference explaining what happened? I'd figure Valve's higher uppers are having an emergency meeting right now if Laidlaw leaked this without permission

>>388219096
background for the story of HL3, if it was gonna be made

>>388218931
>combine are are all-powerful and invincible enslaving races left and right and have a Dyson sphere
>initial occupation force is completely cut off when a ragtag grouo of resistance fighters (who they have been unable to quash in 20 years despite defeating Earths combined military forces in 7 hours) blow up their big tower
Defend this

>>388218845
>>game is making good progress
>>clear signs that it will see the light of day
hahahahahahahahahaaha

Has anyone read his novels? Are they as good as breengrub?

>>388218997
How much money do you get from the government? Living with autism must be hard.

>>388219175
I think if Gabe gave 2 shits about HL fans he wouldn't have said nothing for 10 years and let the NDA expire. He'll continue sitting on his throne of burgers doing whatever the fuck he does with his billions of dollars.

>>388218845
I'm not sure you read my post right? I didn't say shit about it seeing the light of day dude. Marc flat out doesn't work for Valve, so I don't understand why people take his word for the final verdict.

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>>388219175
They'll probably just ignore it or deflect by saying there is a VR game coming out in the hl universe.

>>388219210
Is it by Marc, or some random douche?

>>388216482
If it wasn't for the Dyson sphere, you wouldn't know that crashing Borealis is pointless.

>>388219242
Its not supposed to be realistic. The Combine are a metaphor for Valve and the Dyson sphere is Steam. Gordon's futility mirrors how little Valve cares about making HL3

>>388219242
earth to the combine is probably just some rusty attic they do their diy projects in when bored

>>388218931
"Invincible" is perhaps taking it a bit far. I choose to read it more that they just vastly, WILDLY underestimated just how mind-bogglingly powerful and star-spanning the Combine empire truly was and even all the work they put into the Borealis is nothing more than a spitball in terms of effectiveness.

G-man and hell even the Vorg's have and continue to fight against the Combine, the end of HL2:E3 is just a stern and realistic reminder that nothing you did the past two games truly harmed them and the future holds nothing but an endless fight against an all-powerful enemy.

So, tl;dr, bleak but not hopeless.

>>388219382
Unconfirmed, but 99% it's by Marc since it fits perfectly with the story he just released where Breen gets transplanted into one of the Grub beings.

>>388219175
I dont really think gaben will give a shit, their good friends. They might have spoken about it privately but he wont confirm or deny shit like he usually does and will continue to milk multiplayer cow. It's a small trinket for us to let us know its never coming out.

>>388219175
They are probably feeling relieved that people can finally let Half Life 3 go, and will just focus on their shitty card game.

>>388219289
$200 a week. Then anywhere from $0-$25 a day from shilling. I literally get to shitpost all day.

>>388219526
>their

>>388219092
Companies do make games anon; you think this one motherfucker made the whole game? At the end of the day it's still a media product for people to buy. Moreover, he's still just the writer. Movies have scriptwriters come and go on the same material, why should games be any different?

>>388216482
That was the fucking joke.

Alyx was so blindsighted by "my daddy" that she wasted humanity' s only chance to fight the combine.

>>388219282
you're retarded

Remember when everyone praised Valves "do what you want" business structure

Now its just evolved into a hat factory with no passion or ambition, living off Steam money.

The creativity has been killed

So have the resistance really lost? The Bourealis being destroyed means that the combine can't get access to the bootstrap device at least

>>388219381
>2019
>Half-Life VR
>it's just the first game, still goldsrc graphics

>>388219516
He actually did confirm it was him on his old twitter account at one point.

ITT: retards don't realize that story for EP3 was already done and locked in - by Laindlaw - and at the time when Laindlaw was still at Valve, i.e. at the time when EP3 was still in production.

There is no real reason to question that the content of Epistle 3 is what the game's plot was actually going to be.

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>>388216482
Also shows that Alyx was a fucking retard and so was her dad, """"""too dangerous"""""" when facing a super civilization who plan to just use and dispose of you. The ONLY true, actual advantage humanity had was superior teleport technology. If the Resistance had used it, then at the least they could have fucked right off the planet and set up space habitats really easily, and that probably would have been good enough. The Combine wanted Earth for its resources, they didn't actually give a shit about humanity itself or think much of it. If Humanity moved into stealthed space habs they'd be fine, and with portal tech it'd actually be totally feasible. MAYBE someday humanity could actually hit the Singularity and get to the point of either fighting the Combine or being good enough to simply join on, but they'd need a development platform first and portal tech offered that.

God damn those two were stupid. Breen had a point given what he knew, but I bet given access to portal tech he could have been convinced to take an alternate path by virtue of seeing that humanity actually had a chance. He just genuinely thought/knew it didn't. Mossman was 100% right.

>>388217479
Hey Gabe, the knife making its way through your back fat will get you eventually

>>388219242
You were fighting their shitty slave army all along

>>388219423
And the only reason they go in the attic in the first place is because they heard a weird noise, saw the hatch was open, and heard there might be cool portal tech in it

>>388219516
>It was made years ago
Okay so that's probably real. Also has anyone tried to rig that grub skin? to a model

>>388218392
>posting about things you don't know about

Marc had been at Valve since the beginning. He was the authority as far as the story went. He'd work with the developers and they'd find a balance between what could plausibly be done with a game and the story.

Practically everything we know about the franchise comes from his writing and his feedback over the years to questions on the steam forums.

And they won't tell him to do shit because he quit 18 months ago. Valve kept delaying work on the project and at some point in 2016 scrapped it altogether. Valve wasn't the company he had grown with anymore and decided it was time to go.

>>388219242
Play Stellaris.

>50+ planet empire
>notice some single-planet empire on the fringe of one of your sectors
>roll over it in a month
>assign it to the sector and go back to focusing on important things
>governor of that sector is low-level and strapped for resources
>doesn't build enough guards
>3 years in, planet rebels
>long exhale, send another small fleet to roll over it again

When you are stretched thin and need to focus your efforts, it is entirely possible for brief lapses in control. Ultimately pointless and it just forces the ruler to re-allocate some resources to bring things back under control, but even in modern society this happens. Normal weaponless plebs light shit on fire, riot, and start throwing bricks. The resistance in the game thinks they're actually making progress, but the ending shows they're just being irritating shits to a force they currently cannot beat.

So was Alyx programmed by the G-man during childhood, or just retarded?

>>388220514
yes

>>388216482
It's symbolic to how vast their empire is and how advanced they are compared to us. Our advantage in portal technology and the advantage is possibly posed over the combine is completely eclipses by their power. The point was to keep the technology away from the combine, it's even more crucial because the ship was capable of going through time as well. It's just something nobody should have at their disposal.

>>388220514
Typical character degradation.

You get a character who seems cool, hard and dedicated, but when true adversity or challenges strike, they crumble instead of rise. "Muh daddy" basically broke her and shifted her from a dedicated fighter to just a blind vengeance-seeker.

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>>388220157
Yep.

>>388219381
I refuse to believe that they'd be stupid enough to make a VR HL game, everyone will go fucking berserk

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>>388216482
>blog is the plot for Episode 3
>Episode 3 got cancelled
>Half Life 3 did not
jesus, you faggots already forgot the Half-Life 2 beta which had a completely different story than the release?
this is what Valve does, writing a story/game then not being satisfyed and starting over again.
tl;dr HL3 is still in the making.

>acquire vessel capable of time travel
>don't use it to travel back to Black Mesa in 1998 and prevent the resonance cascade

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>>388219242
>combine are are all-powerful and invincible enslaving races left and right and have a Dyson sphere
They're not "all-powerful and invincible" dumbass, only from a human perspective. A dyson sphere is a megastructure almost beyond comprehension for us but it's still just one around one star, there may well be other ancient civilizations of similar magnitude. The Combine has bigger fish to fry, Earth is literally irrelevant except as a standard mining/preventative operation. The Combine is like a big government bureaucracy in the true, scary sense: it looks slow moving, people mock it. But it has vast power behind it, and it just goes. And goes. And goes. And goes. It never forgets, it outlasts everything, it can focus on a million things at once, and it can think very long term.

>>initial occupation force
Initial force came in, crushed Earth, and then promptly left. The "occupation force" is actually mostly humans, specifically augmented/altered humans that Breen is trying to position as a possible future part of the overall Combine. That's it. In fact that's a core point of the whole thing, that you never ever see more then a minimal garrison and some humans equipped with alien tech.

>>blow up their big tower
Combine uses portals that take tons of power/infrastructure. Which they've got, they've got a dyson sphere. They never bothered doing anything major on Earth because it's just a mining operation. And if the local enforcers fail they don't really care either, that just means they're unworthy. Combine already extracted a lot of what they came for.

>Defend this
Pay attention when you play the game and try thinking a bit you dribbling retard.

>>388221025
People liked Resident Evil 7 though.

>>388220753
>>388220562
Thanks for confirming. The
>Alyx had not seen the cryptical schoolmarm (no male equivalent) since childhood, but she recognized him instantly. “Come along with me now, we’ve places to do and things to be,” said the G-Man, and Alyx acquiesced.
bit had me confused as to their relationship.

>>388221143
They didn't have complete control over where/when the Borealis was connected to.

>>388220514
No, but actually think about her childhood. She was a low level guerrilla who grew up in the years after humanity had crumbled, she didn't go to MIT or something, and she very much wasn't and never displayed nor could be expected to display high level strategic thinking. Her Dad was a bad influence in that regard too, too old and too blinded by previous failures, his losses and misconceptions to take a larger view or consider how to turn things around in out-of-the-box ways. Really it had all the classic signs of path dependency and problems when a techbase evaporates and you're left with just a small few maintaining knowledge.

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Why is everyone saying this is a 'bad' ending? First it was for Ep 3/HL3 and clearly not meant ot be the 'last' game.

>>388219242
Guerilla warfare and terrorism are hard to combat but there's no real threat towards the combine anyways since it's just one small tower plus with the knowledge of how futile their resistance is it'll most likely fizzle out within their generation

>>388219516
>but 99% it's by Marc since it fits perfectly with the story he just released where Breen gets transplanted into one of the Grub beings.
We've know that since episode 1 though

>>388221613
The Half Life franchise literally ends Gordon realizing that there's not fucking way he'll ever beat the Combine

>inb4 new game in Half-Life universe in next 5 years

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>>388221886
No?

That's how Ep3 would have ended. Or HL3 which it probably mutated into. It more than likely wouldn't have been the last game.

>>388221143
To be precise it would have taken a lot more work and research to perfect the technology and start deploying it. It's not clear time travel like that would have the effect they wanted anyway, might just result in a universe split for example (many worlds hypothesis).

But yeah, actually taking the tech and using it would have been by far the smart move. No reason in that case they even had to stick with one thing, they had breathing room. With portal tech of that level they could finish clearing the Earth of remaining Combine forces, and then simultaneously:
- Work on building up Earth while isolated
- Work on moving a self-reproducing contingent of humanity OFF of Earth
- Work on temporal/spatial weapons
- Work on achieving singularity
- Use space/time tech to try to gather intel on Combine (they would have found out about the Dyson Sphere and scale at this point)
THEN after all that and having lots of options sure, with backup plans and careful considerations maybe consider something like time change. But come on.

>>388221613
It's a bad ending, not a poor ending. Bad as in it's bad for the characters - all was futile and pointless, everyone died, and it went full existential horror at the end.

>>388221886
Which is a good ending. There's no reason he should be able to.

>>388221886
Which is realistic.
No, the right man in the wrong can't stop a multiversal empire that annihilated Earth's combined military in seven hours.

>>388221234
Not arguments. If Earth was so worthless and only useful for mining what's up with all the studies being done on the portal technology. Why keep any human alive or at least with free will at all if they're just there to gather resources and build their slave army

>>388221946
>It more than likely wouldn't have been the last game.

But as it stands, Episode 3 is the absolute end of the series

>>388216482

Is it bad that I don't care about half life. I didn't play the games till I got the Orange Box for cheap in like 2008 (didn't really have a functional game worthy PC till then either) and at that point I bought it for Portal and TF2. Eventually installed and tried HL2 and went back to 1, the games were, decent at best. It just didn't grab me. There were some neat ideas but I just really didn't understand the appeal. I understand the significance of Gaben and Steam and the Source engine and all that jazz but looking at the games just from the perspective of "were they good" they were just alright to me. I really think I missed something but I don't know. There's just nothing appealing to me about a protag whos only face shot we see is on the gamebox

>>388221613
Because it's a 'you can't win' scenario. Just try to imagine how much more advanced a civilization has to be to create a dyson sphere. All the engineering, materials and computational power required to build and maintain it is beyond comprehension.
What we are are bacteria cultivating on a piece of bread compared to the combine. The peak of human engineering was destroyed by being used as a suicide bomb instead of being researched further. And to top it with a cherry, the bomb was but a ripple in the water of the ocean

>>388221986
>it went full existential horror at the end.
Not really. We don't know what the hell Alyx and Gman have planned. Gordon's still alive and he's got the vortigaunts by his side.

>>388221886
>franchise
It's in the G-mans best interests that he and his employers stay more powerful than the Combine. We see already his next lackey to go against them is Alyx.

>>388221809
Yeah, Combine can literally just wait it out. Probably (based on Breen's words) they also would have simply seen it as a basic test for Breen and his augmented humanity. This was a simple trainer wheels chance for him to show them humanity could have some value beyond harvesting.

But whether that worked or not, with its tech and industrial base destroyed and humanity reduced to a few hidden, isolated cells based around those old enough to exist pre-invasion, degradation of knowledge was inevitable. Once all the Black Mesa folks died off in another few decades of old age if nothing else, the next gen wouldn't have or be able to maintain the same level of education/training. Over the generations (well, they'd likely all die off anyway due to all useful resources being extracted) with no escape or options it'd be the slow, cold death and reversion to primitiveness. Combine would take a view over centuries and millennia, not years.

>>388221025
It would just be a glorified tech demo like the lab. Half life in name only.

>>388221234
>Earth is literally irrelevant except as a standard mining/preventative operation.
>They never bothered doing anything major on Earth because it's just a mining operation.
A big part of Half-Life 2 is the fact that the Combine have mastered interdimensional tunneling, but not local teleportation, which humans have mastered. The Combine's only local teleporter was destroyed when Gordon and Alyx fled Nova Prospekt.

>>388222259
As it stands episode 2 is the absolute end of the series, episode 3 is not 'canon' it's about as close to canon as we'll get, but that's not canon.

>>388216482
You don't understand how massive Dyson sphere is. Even if this ship could destroy an entire planet size of Jupiter, it still would be a small nuance for the sphere, akin to mosquito bite, probably even less.

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I kind of hoped Episode 3 would've finished the Combine arc and then HL3 hypothetically would've moved onto something else.
I guess Laidlaw's ending implies Gordon probably would've been working with the Vorts in HL3.

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>>388222556
>episode 3 is not 'canon'
Eat shit, Gabe, you fat fucking jew

>>388222556
Shut the fuck up Gabe.

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Apologize

>>388222146
>If Earth was so worthless and only useful for mining what's up with all the studies being done on the portal technology.
Portal technology would actually be super useful to the Combine, and Breen hopes to use it as his most powerful card and negotiating item to show that humanity should be taken forward in some form.

>Why keep any human alive or at least with free will at all if they're just there to gather resources and build their slave army
Not sure what you mean by this? The Combine, as the name fucking says, are a civilization that has combined and taken in tons of others when they saw use. They probably have standard protocols for assessing when some species might ultimately serve, and Breen & Black Mesa's work got their attention enough to be given the chance to succeed or fail. Humans are default irrelevant, but some tiny section of the Combines hyper computer systems/bureaucracy saw nothing to lose and potential to gain by following procedure.

>>388216482
The revelation that the Combines are so technologically developed to have a Dyson Sphere ultimately shows that the rebellion's plan to blow up their shit with the Borealis is basically futile.

>>388219175
They probably saw it coming. Laidlaw probably had an NDA that just expired.
Really its nobodies fault but valve's

>>388222947
Yeah but humans have the superior teleportation tech. that was gonna be the theme that tied Portal's story into Half Life

>>388222843
Breen's head was up his own ass but he literally did nothing wrong. Humanity's existence was bleak but it was a far sight better than annihilation.

>>388222432
>A big part of Half-Life 2 is the fact that the Combine have mastered interdimensional tunneling
Not "mastered", merely "good enough that it works". Human teleport tech (well, Black Mesa's/rebels anyway, Aperture Science seems to do it directly) also is "interdimensional" based remember? But it's much, much more efficient, and much more precise, and able to be used for local movement too. It's a fundamental improvement from a different perspective. I'm sure the Combine would love to do their interdimensional tunneling at 1/1000000 the energy cost or whatever it ends up being, and be able to do it with less infrastructure. Then they really could deploy their main armies anywhere they wanted whenever they wanted by gating them in at will from their primary megastructure.

>>388222843
Why didn't our guy grub Breen try to infiltrate the Combine from the inside and try to fuck shit up bearucratically? He had to know the pointlessness of the resistances actions from the start.

>>388216482
Gordon defeated the Nihilanth by himself, I'm sure he has proven himself to be able to defeat a retarded solar powered Death Star.

If the series continued passed this ending, they would find a way, but it probably won't happen now.

>Could have been an awesome sequel
>Muh dun't wun't tu disappunt puple.

Fuck you Valve, it would have been better with a shit end than unfinished with no end at all.

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>>388217479
You must be younger than the game or have not played it. Go back

The events of Black Mesa were a direct result of Gman for reasons not currently known

This alerts them to humanity's existence. They were curious how a primitive species like ours could produce portal technology when they themselves could not. And just for the record, humanity is not anything special, a super advanced alien caused the events that gave us that tech.

Litetally, who's the G-Man?

>People saying that's the end of the series
I thought it was left pretty open with Alyx being the MC or Gordon getting out of his slump since the vortigans have such crazy power that they could teleport to the Combine home star just to pick up Gordon. Why not use the forces of Xen. Dyson sphere implies the combine are locked to their homestar. Their is a vast universe out there funding gman and shit. Probably all enemies of the combine

>>388219674
The Nile isn't just a river in Africa, anon. Let it go.

>>388222947
Because Alyx/daddy were too small scale thinkers. If humanity had hung onto portal tech and the advanced borealis stuff, and developed it, and maintained isolation while creating their own star empire, then a few hundred or thousand years down the line maybe they really could do something to the combine. Tens of millions of temporal antimatter missiles or opening portals to the hearts of multiple stars directly into the sphere or trigger their combine's central star to go early supernova or something. Think big.

>>388223108
>Yeah but humans have the superior teleportation tech
I guess technically they still have somewhat superior tech since there is still that rebel one, but that looks like hot fucking garbage next to Aperture's, and hl3 would have thrown that away.

>>388219790
Maybe it was that time of the month.

>>388223190
In laidlaw's fanfic it says he has basically been relegated to a low-level clerk. His only use was ambassador for all of earth. Failing that, they turned him into a science experiment. They probably don't even let him use the executive grub bathroom.

>>388223239
Space baby was already made the Combine's bitch. Him and the vorts are in shackles. The grunts were most likely the Xen equivalent of the Overwatch soldiers in 2.

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>>388218585

>>388218392
>Laidlaw
>Hack

Man, I wish I could be this woke.

>>388223361
Who fucking cares?
Who the GMan is has always been such an irrelevant fucking question.
He's a contractor to a higher power that's working against the Combine. That's all that matters.
Is his form his real one? It's irrelevant. He's a middleman, some stiff doing a job.

>>388223312
>And just for the record, humanity is not anything special, a super advanced alien caused the events that gave us that tech.
Source? The problem was the purity of the crystal they were using. Humanity invented teleportation twice independently.

>>388223190
>>Why didn't our guy grub Breen try to infiltrate the Combine from the inside and try to fuck shit up bearucratically?
>>He had to know the pointlessness of the resistances actions from the start.
>why didn't he do pointless resistance that I'm saying is pointless?
You may want to rethink your post here anon. Breen was "infiltrating" as in aiming to become some low level bureaucrat who could argue humanity's case and get us some basic survival. What would "fucking shit up" accomplish, they'd notice and that'd waste all his effort for nothing, as you said.

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>>388223361
Don't think there'll ever be an official answer. Personally I think he's just a member of another alien race far beyond the Combine etc who are pulling strings to their own ends.

The Dyson Sphere is the source of the Combine. The ship was enough to destroy a planet. They thought they'd be destroying the Combine by destroying their home world, which they succeed in doing, but the Combine have moved beyond such measly boundaries.

The Borealis would have phased it out of existence, the reaction of its disparate particles wobbling into one another would be like matter and antimatter.

Basically the ending goes from "We did it, we're riding the bullet that will kill the beast" to "We're riding the flea that lands on the whale."

Reminder that Dyson didn't fall for the global warming meme

>Alyx ditches you after destroying humanities last hope.

Don't ever hug me again bitch. Although even if humanity is stuck being the combines slaves hopefully gman and Alyx(and whoever gman ditches her for next) get something don't since they are still enemies of the combine

>>388223361
The combine is at war with another alien organization. G-Man is either part of, or contracted by, that organization. His goal in HL1 was to gain control of Xen for this unnamed alien group, and his goal in HL2 was to have the teleportation tech destroyed.

His job is to handicap the Combine for his organization. That's it

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Were the advisor's brain-tentacles just for feeding, or was it their way of transferring somebody's mind to a host body?

>>388223312
I thought that the G-Man only gave the Xen crystal to Black Mesa once? Forays into Xen were already done several times before the Resonance Cascade.

Also, Aperture Science didn't have any help from the G-Man with their portal technology.

>>388223150
>I'm sure the Combine would love to do their interdimensional tunneling at 1/1000000 the energy cost or whatever it ends up being, and be able to do it with less infrastructure. Then they really could deploy their main armies anywhere they wanted whenever they wanted by gating them in at will from their primary megastructure.
Well yes that was my point when you said Earth was simply a mining thing.

>>388223190
>fuck shit up bureaucratically
Like what? You obviously don't comprehend the vastness of the combine. Earth, humans are just a minor mining and research operation. A dyson sphere doesn't get built in a day, month, or even years. It would take countless human lifetimes to engineer, gather material, build, and harness the power of a project like it.
We don't know the full implications of the combine getting control of the borealis. Would it have revolutionized everything or just been a minor jump in tech advancement they would have reached eventually? I lean on the latter, since if it was really important to them, they would have put more resources towards it. As is, forces came in, crushed the earth, and left forever. The rest of the infrastructure was built mainly from earth resources.

>>388223361
Representative for a coalition of races competing with the Combine. He ultimately wants their empire to fall. He doesn't really care about humanity either but at least realizes they are the key to restoring peace.

>>388223794
>Earth, humans are just a minor mining and research operation.
At the start, the Combine was just enslaving earth as per normal, but then it became about capturing earth's superior teleportation tech

So is the dyson sphere just around the Solar system, only Earth or does it go around the whole Milky way galaxy?

>>388223971
It's around a star in a completely different galaxy and/or universe

Having such a bleak ending would be quite inkeeping with the game really.

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>>388219456
>"Invincible" is perhaps taking it a bit far.
No, not really. Sci fi is full of tropes about humanity finally prevailing due to some retarded reasons, but this is something like a NATO-like military foce occupying some African village for some reason. Not even the whole African state, just a village. There may be more villages like these, this is probably the case why NATO-like organization didn't send their full force in order to occupy this village, but they still have no chance of repelling the modern army. Sure, NATO-like troops are not invincible, you can still shoot them with your arrows and poison the water supply. Heck, maybe you can find nearby villages and do a revolt or something, maybe it will be succesful enough and one mortar strike you somehow god through dark magic will hit a nearby FOB. Will this bring NATO-like highly decetralized organization down? Lol. But unlike the villages in Africa, Earth is separated by physical spacetime limitations and unlike NATO-like force, Combine don't even want to show up in the village themselves, except for occasional advisor.

G-Man is, of course, a variable in this situation, but so far he has done fucking nothing. In fact, you can argue that G-Man only escalates the whole deal. Combine clearly don't give a single shit about vortigaunts since they let them be on Earth and do whatever. It seems they don't give a shit about anything, but only when there's a slight chance. People tend to forget that most ALL of Combine forces on Earth are slaves. Either human slaves, that wanted to become metropolice or soldiers or biotic vehicles that were probably enchanced slaves from another enslaved world, again, like metropolice, soldiers, elites or stalkers. Humanity is done. The best kind of scenario against a Kardashev 2 is them losing interest in us so fucking much they won't even bother destroying us, because that would be too costly.

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>>388223971
It's in another dimension anon.

>>388222843
Why didn't hee just embrace becoming a combine?
He litterally got put on the winning team.

>>388221117

You are so fucking delusional you really should start taking medicine for that.

>>388216482
I'm not really sure about the ending. What's up with Alyx taking such a dark turn at the end.

That's nothing like how she was written in HL2 and the two episodes.

>>388223971
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
It's not even in the milky way.
What it is, is basically a structure that can harness most of the power of the biggest natural nuclear reactors, stars. It wouldn't go unnoticed if it were anywhere near earth

>>388224135
>G-Man is, of course, a variable in this situation, but so far he has done fucking nothing.

He captured Xen for his employers, and stopped the Combine from getting their tentacles on teleportation tech

>>388224295
Her fucking dad died

>>388224295
Seeing her dad die in front of her eyes is gonna fuck her up a bit. Everyone is the main character of their own life, she reached a point where she can't trust anyone else to do these things.

>gigantic megastructure that encompasses and harnesses the energy of an entire star
Wow sounds safe and very stable. I'm sure there is no way to disrupt it's operation or destroy it.

>>388224365
>stopped the Combine from getting their tentacles on teleportation tech

They have teleportation tech, they don't have fast teleportation though.

Which is why they weren't able to shit on the rebellion immediately.

>>388223786
>Well yes that was my point when you said Earth was simply a mining thing.
Earth IS simply a mining thing. That's the original and still core goal. The Combine aren't convinced anything more will come of it, but they are curious to find out. So they let Breen try to make it happen, with a reward if it does and failure gets him what he would have had anyway (maybe worse). It's not clear they actually realize how far along portal tech is (it wasn't generally known about to humanity or breen either), just that there is potential. They may have been letting things go along as they were precisely to create conditions that would encourage its development under their control.

It's also not clear that they expected interference from other higher powers. If G-man/gordon had never jumped in there then it all would have worked out for them. They would have gotten the advanced teleport tech (though maybe not portal tech), Breen & altered humans maybe given a spot, they could have then finished stripping Earth in a hurry and that would be that.

>>388223361
The "Breen Grub" Twitter story that Laidlaw wrote, to me, somewhat implies that the G-Man is one of the original Advisors/Shu'ulathoi who "hatched" and as such can take any form he desires. The story indicates that there was a political strife that occurred within the Advisor's society (referred to as a "disease") that led to them becoming an imperialist society as opposed to a benevolent one. From the story's text, it seems clear to me that the G-Man is intended to be one of these original ones who is combating the new regime.

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>>388218367
>dat denial

>>388224080
>>388224178
>>388224358
How did the Borealis manage to go there then? I mean its not like they knew where combine dyson sphere is

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>>388224267
>its not just a crude draft of the HLEP3 plot that got scrubbed
>being this gullible
lmao

>>388224358
How would you even detect a dyson sphere?

>>388224420
I'm sure it was just built willy-nilly let's just do it and not cover any points of failure.
Face it anon, a dyson sphere is a incomprehensibly complex and large structure. If it could fail, it wouldn't be built.

>>388224590
The people that invented the bootstrap device accidentally discovered how to travel through time and space. The ship literally had the power to go to any place of any time.

You can see why the G-Man didn't want anyone to have it

>>388216482
So if Mossman was a double-agent, does this mean the raid on Black Mesa East was planned by Eli or was that still just the Combine following Freeman?

>>388223361
Why the fuck do we need to know? Why the fuck does everything have to be revealed? It's shit like that ultimately kills game discussion. Mystery is so underused I swear. Reminds me of what happened to the forerunners in halo.

>>388224641

Whatever helps you sleep at night, Valve drone. I actually just feel really sad for you knowing that you'll die before you get to see another Half-Life game since it'll never happen.

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>>388224135
>The best kind of scenario against a Kardashev 2 is them losing interest in us so fucking much they won't even bother destroying us, because that would be too costly.
The Portal tech (that Alyx destroyed) offered another option. With that you could produce gateway generators and widely dispersed wormhole linked habitats around things like red/brown dwarfs. It would allow the building of a relatively sophisticated, by human standards, civilization but one that was irrelevant and basically stealthed to all the SERIOUS civilizations and hyper intelligences that clustered around the big stars/black holes and resources. It's about the only way that sort of thing could work, but it's hard to overstate how big a deal it'd be if you wanted to build basically a stealth human level space civ following the bacteria model.

>>388221886
I tought the combine was cut from earth, and now they only had to deal with was was left.

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>>388224786
k thx bro xD

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he could have prevented this

>>388219312
I don't think you understood his post. Laidlaw would not have published this even, to his knowledge, there was a chance of the game being made. He didn't leave Valve all that long ago and he's intimating that it was not going to happen.

>>388224786
>says it was proposed plot for episode 3
>episode 3 got canceled
>strongly implied that Half-Life 3 is being worked on, at what rate we don't know

This is what VNN says, and he's pretty much the ultimate authority on Valve and shit.

The borealis isn't just teleportation tech, it's dimension hopping tech which goes through TIME and space.
That's why G-man has to get rid of it.
A good analogy for G-Man would be the CIA in Latin America 60s-80s.

Earth in this case is a revolutionary group,G-Man mysterious coalition would be the USA and the Combine would be the commies.
CIA doesn't give a shit about the wellbeing of the countries fighting against the commies, but they will do anything in their power to stop commies from taking over potential assets.

>>388224453
His job seems to be to simply gimp the Combine's advancements of teleportation.

Because of him, they only have the slow, clunky ass dimensional teleporters now.

>>388224665
Good question, but to answer that we'd have to know how it works. It's pure fiction and detecting it would depend entirely on that fiction, if detectable at all.

>>388224665
A telescope? Nigga you serious? Just wait for light from stars to stop reaching the earth.

>>388224752
>or was that still just the Combine following Freeman?
That one. In Nova Prospekt Judith says to Breen he should've waited for her signal.

>>388224983
I have a feeling that HL3 would have been about rediscovering this tech, then Gordon giving chase to the G-Man, now that he can match the guy's dimension hopping bullshit

>>388224742
>You can see why the G-Man didn't want anyone to have it
G-Man might well be right. Humans are dumb. Imagine they loaded it up with antimatter or something and sent it back right to the start of the universe and set it off, even tiny disruptions at that point long before any civilization or entity at all could bootstrap would change the entire history of the universe entirely. That is way, WAY too dangerous to let a bunch of dumb apes have.

In a scenario like that you probably need god-like beings who act as temporal police.

>>388219897
Humanity's end game is kicking the combine off earth, not necessarily the destruction of the combine race

>>388221234
>mining operation on earth is a rational idea
>Dyson sphere is beyond our comprehension
LOOK AT THIS FUCKING IDIOT

>>388224978
>>strongly implied that Half-Life 3 is being worked on, at what rate we don't know
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
>implying anyone at Valve gives a shit about a single player game that would be pirated to hell and back vs gambling card games for underage retards emptying their moms' credit cards

Valve will NEVER EVER make another good videogame unless they buy out some indy studio.

>>388224893
It was a big blow to them to lose the citadel but it was temporary. The will soon return, and in greater numbers.

It's actually a pretty fucking good story and rounds off the series well.

It's a massive fucking shame we'll never get the game, but even those few paragraphs were better than the story in 99% of videogames, especially FPS.

So when the G-man takes Alyx and left Gordon did that mean he was officially done with him?

I don't understand why the G-man would want Alyx over Gordon, cause Gordon is a dimension destroyer.

>>388225412
Gordon is rebellious and has the aid of the vortigaunt, G-man hates that.

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>>388225412
it could mean
>yes gman was done with gordon. Freeman is no longer part of the equation
or
>Freeman's job wasn't actually done yet

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>>388225243
Agreed.
Having Freeman end up as the Eternaut is a cool element too.

>>388225112
With that little bit of Mossman being revealed it made me think Eli and Mossman purposefully led the Combine to Black Mesa East, because if Eli got captured he knew Alyx and Gordon would come to try and save him while probably destroying Nova Prospekt in the process.

>>388225412
Vortigaunts were helping him, meaning he wasn't just submitting like he did before.

Alyx has also proven herself as capable at fighting by then, and is (presumably) more easily influenced due to her dad dying.

>>388224665
>How would you even detect a dyson sphere?
It's trivial, thermodynamics means all that energy is still coming out of the star and has to be radiated into space, it'll just be shifted and coming from a larger point.

>>388224992
>Good question, but to answer that we'd have to know how it works
Uh, no. Not at all, at least not unless we're talking fantasy & magic. If a Dyson Sphere could be made IRL though then it's not hard to calculate what sort of emissions it'd have. There's still a star in the middle, every last joule of that energy ultimately has to be re-radiated. The sphere (or something more realistic like a Dyson Swarm/Matroska Brain) uses the temperature delta between star emissions and deep space radiation to perform useful Work(in the thermodynamic sense) increasing entropy. That leaves a clear signature, you don't need to know how it's made anymore then you need to know how to make a car/gun/computer to make predictions about their energy use/emissions.

>>388225412
Alyx went ahead and made the call to destroy the ship, which is exactly what the G-Man wanted you to do, while Gordon was said to have been swayed by Mossman plea to keep the ship for study.

She does what the G-Man wants. Gordon doesn't.

>>388216482
I know this can sound like a stupid question but, why not sell the rights of the game if they are not gonna release it?

>>388225412
Gordon has the Vortigaunts on his side, and as you see in Ep1(or 2 I don't remember it's been years) they can block G-Man in numbers, and he gets mad as fuck when it happens.

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FUCKING MURDERED

>>388225704
Pride. Probably.

>>388225412
Alyx is easier to manipulate, and the Vortigaunt were fucking with G-Man whenever he tried to contact Gordon

>>388224978
>>388221117

Except the Episodes WERE considered Half-Life 3. Gaben straight up said that they should've called the episodes 'Half-Life 3: Episode 1" instead of being part of Half-Life 2.

So Episode 3 is technically Half-Life 3 according to 2006 Gaben

>>388225723
She was right and did nothing wrong

>>388225243
>Accepted that it's better for EP3 to never exist than to get another duke nukem forever
>Lead writer of the series shows us that it would have been glorious
At least we have closure now. Both that the series is dead and that the struggle against the combine is relevant to us, but they exist in a larger time scope and we are ultimately irrelevant in the whole scheme of things. Whatever the combine and the g-men are, they're too advanced for humans to be relevant. Maybe the only reason we were even contacted by the g-men was that borealis could accidentally travel through time, and that they as the interdimentional police came to stop it from doing something stupid

>>388216482
>Even if the combine were a medieval civilization, what is one single science ship slamming onto the planet going to do?
Imagine if a plane crashed into Putin's home. There would be chaos.

>>388223749
Breen said it was a "previous version" of him, so no.

Old friends have been silenced, or fallen by the wayside. I no longer know or recognize most members of the research team, though I believe the spirit of rebellion still persists. I expect you know better than I the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it. Except no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final episode.

Is there a more kino ending than this?

>>388218585
1. Adam West was an actor and not a writer and 2. He's fucking dead

>>388221143
You can't prevent the resonance cascade, because it already happened.

>>388218736
Oh fucking hell this is just childish

>>388225707
Except Gordon was still (assumingly) doing what the G-Man wanted. I don't see how Gordon could've stopped the Vorts from saving him from the Citadel's portal explosion.

>>388225838
That's true. Crashing the Borealis didn't do much.

>>388225906
This is more like a toy car

>>388225195
>I'm a retard
Yeah, we know anon. It's ok.

For everyone else: Dyson sphere doesn't mean they don't still need volatiles or want to keep growing it or develop new Dyson spheres around other stars. Life bearing worlds change atmospheric composition, stability, and concentrate stuff in ways that could make them more efficient and cheaper to get stuff out of. Remember the Combine dimensional portal tech is energy intensive, so they need to focus their efforts. They probably have thousands of such harvesting things going on at once and they're all automated/bureaucratic. It's just part of the background for them same as ours are.

It's like America getting rare earths or precious metals we depend on for our industry out of some african shithole. Our power and development is invincibly higher then theirs but that doesn't mean it's not cheaper and easier to just work with them to take their resources.

>>388216482
Dyson sphere is the main power source. And it's fucking astronomical in scale. You cannot destroy it with any of the Earth resources. The battle was lost the moment it was started and the rebelion will never win.

>>388219282
Yeah. Thats what he was trying to say you illiterate fuck.

>>388225959
It's probably a stab at Valve for shitting all over Half-Life and preferring to have steam make money for them than actually making games.

>>388225704
Because it would sell like hot cakes as long as the company is somewhat good. Valve are inherently jewish so they hate to see the success of others.

Do we get to play as a Vortigaunt in the next game?

>>388225834
so we are waiting for HL4 then?
doesnt matter what shouldve been and what not, you think Valve cancels their most high rated and anticipated franchise? gtfo

>>388225838
>She was right and did nothing wrong
She really was and didn't. Alyx a shit.

>>388218093
Half Life had a ton of kino moments but I think this one would've taken the cake.

>>388219986
>Hey lets use the borealis and study it! We could use local teleportation to evade or combat the combine because currently, it is inevitable that we will los-
>*gets shot*

I don't understand why we wouldn't go with the actual scientist instead of the rebellious young woman consumed by revenge

>>388226098
>The battle was lost the moment it was started and the rebelion will never win.

If anything it has guaranteed humanity's destruction. When humans weren't making a fuss they weren't a problem, now that they've started fighting the combine will probably stop playing nice.

>>388226098
Well, that rocket in Episode Two isolated Earth from the Combine teleporters, the Borealis was the only way left to link Earth to the Combine Overworld.

>>388226159
You already good in Half-Life: Decay.

>>388224940
Who's that semen demon?

>>388225723
BLACKED

>>388226032
G-Men wanted to freeze him in that time period, Vortigaunts instead put him elsewhere and conscious.
It's also implied that Freeman also went with Moss plan over Alyx, which is not what G-Man wanted.

>>388225704
>let random shutter company make money off your ip
>run it into the ground and tarnish what it was
Also it would be an ip that would be too expensive to buy. Valve is doing fine so they wouldn't need to reduce the cost like companies going under do. Its a game series that is seen as amazing. Game 3 would sell based on title alone because of all the hype it has generated over the years. It would just be too expensive.

I would have really liked it if gman sent the dude from opposing force after you

>>388226286
ChibiEricka. Nudes are extremely easy to find. She does cosplay and modelling.

>>388226260
So what if they temporarily cut the cord, it matters very little to the combine. They can just reinvade like they did in the 7 hour war but instead it'd be much quicker.

>>388226316
Makes me wonder if G-Man didn't take control or influence Alyx to kill her. Like he got her to tell her dad to prepare for unforeseen consequences.

>>388226334
I remember trying to make a mod in 2006 about Shephard hunting Freeman after the events of Episode One. I wrote a script for the intro, made a few prototype maps, then abandoned it.

>>388226060
>dephase an entire planet
>toy car
Nigger what

>>388226604
I don't think you understand the scale of a star.

>>388226230
>I don't understand why we wouldn't go with the actual scientist instead of the rebellious young woman consumed by revenge
FUCKING ELITIST YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO YOU AREN'T EVEN MY REAL MOM WHAT ABOUT MY *FEELINGS*

>>388226098
>The battle was lost the moment it was started and the rebelion will never win.
Naw, they had a chance for the right value of "win". With portals they could leave Earth and have humanity exist as a planet-less low level space civ, and probably last effectively forever because all the big boys wouldn't ever give a shit and humanity would be too spread out and slippery to stomp easily.

But yeah, "defeat the aliens" lol no.

>>388226558
They can't reinvade unless they find a completely new portal technology. The Borealis was that.

>>388226558
The only way they got into Earth was through the portal storms. There are no more portal storms in the 20 years after the 7-hour war. So how would have they gotten back to Earth if the Citadel's portal and Borealis was destroyed.

I love how bleak and eery it is. Suits the atmosphere/tone of Half-Life perfectly. The sort of unsettling beyond your comprehension kind of stuff.

Half-Life was always great at that. Even all the way back to unravelling the conspiracy/truth behind the shit at Black Mesa which was never explicitly laid out.

>>388226604
The thing is that even getting rid of one planet is nothing when the combine are so incredibly massive and powerful.

>>388226032
The vorts on top of the fact that Gordon was showing signs of rebellion was more then enough justification to have him replaced

So is this the final ending of the half life story or just of episode 3?

I really wouldn't have been disappointed if this is the story the game had.

>>388226237
humans were dying out anyway, they sterilized the entire global population

>>388225967
1. He Is the Batman
2.
>When someone dies, everything they've ever done disappears and nobody can find the stuff they made when they were alive

>>388226438
Thank you for the direct answer and not a 15 post argument about him trying harder to find the source.

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>>388218803
no one can possibly be THIS retarded

>>388226780
Just Episode 3. It was clearly setting things up for possible future sequels.

>>388226558
I'm not sure they'd have a way back though. Didn't they originally invade as a result of the Resonance Cascade/fall of the Nihilanth? Is there presumed to still be an open door to Earth via the borderworld or whatever it was?

>>388226780
There's a pretty huge sequel hook at the end.

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>>388226438
>That face
I regret asking

>>388223431
this doesn't really work in text, anon.

>>388224665
>how would you detect a FUCKING STAR EATER
gee I wonder

>>388226161
Why should they make it?
They have all the money they could ever need, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop. Any true artists with a semblance of soul left in them has already gotten the fuck out of there.

Valve making HL3/HL4/HL2E3 whatever right now would be like Gamestop making a video game. Monetarily, they just don't need to (the risk/reward just isn't worth it), and Steam's near-monopoly of the PC gaming market doesn't look like it's going to fall any time soon (and even if Steam begins to struggle they still have their money-printers in the shape of Dota 2, CSGO and Tf2 cosmetics).

So were the advisors the true form of the combine or just another slave race?

>>388225627
That's a bit of a roundabout way of doing it instead of just going "Gordon, Alyx, go destroy Nova Prospekt."

>>388226874
The rocket in Episode Two enabled the satellite network left in orbit by Black Mesa to plug any holes left by the Resonance Cascade. No door was left after that.

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I'm quite rusty on Half-Life lore, but from what I recall are the Combine inter-dimenional? Like is their empire stretched across dozens of universes? Or is it just normal space. I don't really recall how Xen worked.

>>388226663
Or, if the borealis was turned over in exchange for assimilating earth into the combine. It's obvious that the g-men were the other interdimentional superpower and they had no intention of taking steps in favor of the people of earth. It'd probably fail and there's no real reason why they'd assimilate us, but if breen got the bureaucracy rolling enough then just maybe we could have been on the better side of the war.

>>388227014
>So were the advisors the true form of the combine or just another slave race?
Slave race. That's why Breen becomes one.

>>388227014
Unclear at this time.

>>388224665
gravitational disturbance probably
>>388225662
if we're talking the half-life dyson sphere, there's no guarantee that you'd see any emissions considering that they could just dump the energy into another dimension

>>388226958
A Dyson sphere wouldn't radiate much, and it's extremely hard to spot things in space when they don't radiate.

>>388226738
It's a thorn in their side. That's never happened to them before. This would cause an entire restructuring of their whole civilization.

>>388226663
>FUCKING ELITIST YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO YOU AREN'T EVEN MY REAL MOM WHAT ABOUT MY *FEELINGS*
I JUST WITNESSED THE DEATH OF MY DAD IN FRONT OF ME AND MY DAD WAS THE BRAINS OF THE REBELLION, THEREFORE I SHOULD LEAD IT NOW. FUCK OFF STEP MOM

>>388227014
Slaves. No one knows what the race (races?) the Combine actually looks like.

>>388216482

You guys realise that while the idea is neat, eventually some Deus Ex Machina would be absolutly mandatory to take down such a powerful organization?

>>388227085
The combine stretch across the entire multiverse

>>388227241
Yeah. In the same way that a thorn in the side of a person has any significant implication.

Or, you know, it means fucking nothing.

>>388227252
The Irony is that Eli probably would've wanted Gordon to lead should he die.

>>388227286
The whole point of that ending is that there's no hope.

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Here's the texture for Breen's Grub form

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>>388227231
we found one using google sky

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>tfw everyone thought the incredible portal technology that people were fighting over at the Borealis was literally just the portal gun from Portal
>tfw what it really was


It seems such a silly assumption in retrospect. Guess Aperture really was onto bigger things than le wacky portal shooters.

>>388225723
My first playthrough I really couldn't stand her but damn was she right. I feel ashamed of my words and deeds now.

>>388226805
humans themselves weren't sterilized. the combine just had a device in place that was able to remotely stop humans from reproducing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ch4wRRHTg

>>388225662
I like how you are confusing and mashing both of those concepts together.

Watched some sci fi youtube channel have ya?

>>388224780
>the forerunners
Don't fucking remind me
>all we know about them was that they liked humanity, felt responsible for the Flood and set off the Halo rings after they fucked off out of the galaxy
>343's shitty fanfiction book comes out and now they're just generic ancient evils

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>>388219853
>>388226132
>clear signs that it would see the light of day
Yeah, after almost a a decade, right?
Nah, Gaben would continue to milk his gambling games for an eternity more and memers like (you) would be going 'ahh half life 3 guise!' at the slightest nod to the community

OUT

>>388226558
The portals were gone and it probably takes lightyears to physically get to earth from their main base.
By the time they arrived, resistance would have studied the Borealis enough to get a decent plan.

But Alyx as the good little G-man pawn she was destroyed humanity's only chance, so now the combine can't get to Earth but humanity also can't build an escape plan.

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>>388226859
:thinking:

>>388224665
Transit photometry

>>388227231
You WOULD howsoever detect irregular light/heat patterns from the star; as if it fades/weakens away and then reappears. It would be like a pulsating lightbulb.

>>388226023
I wouldn't call it childish. Look at the date, it's from 2012.

>>388227321
Are you really this stupid.

>that realisation gman already recruited alyx when she was a little girl at black mesa

>>388227438
The portal gun is still an incredibly sophisticated piece of technology. Imagine if Combine units had portal guns. It would give them a tactical upperhand nearly every time.

The only drawback is the moon rock medium necessary for portaling. If that was worked around then the portal gun would have no drawbacks.

>>388227095
Well, you could try that TOO, but no reason to do so until AFTER making sure Humanity had a Plan B. And C & D & E for that matter. With the pressure taken off and portal tech there's no reason not to try to negotiate from a position of more strength and value.

>>388227376

It was a cliff-hanger to an even more never-going-to-happen Episode 4.

>>388227663
Moon rocks aren't necessary, they're just great for conducting portals

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>>388227540
he's still posting holy shit
i dont think he realizes why we think he's retarded

>>388216482
I'm mad G and Alyx left you to fucking die on the ship without a care.
I didn't expected it from that cunt.

>>388227635
Yeah, "recruited" ;)

>>388227663
It's likely that at this point it's implied that G-man is a collaborator for another dominant empire that are competing with the Combine for control of Earth.

Gordon and Humanity were merely proxys for the G-mans empire.

Vortigaunts confirmed for biggest bros of all bros.

>>388216482
It wouldn't. The point was to destroy the Borealis so that it wouldn't fall into the Combine's hands.

>>388227085
Xen is a boarder world. Basically nothing by itself, but those Yellow Crystals it had proved important for both humans and the combine's teleporter technology.
It basically became a slingshot kind of deal. It's why the Nihilanth retreated there and was trying to tunnel through to earth.

>>388227438
Maybe the portal gun was just an earlier example of Aperture's teleportation research which culminated with the Bootstrap Device.

>>388227282
I doubt it's an enslaved race, it's probably just some artificial lifeform they constructed to put semi-important minds in like breen or whatever low-grade paper pusher assigned to the godforsaken backwater known as "urf"

>>388227805
>I'm mad G and Alyx left you to fucking die on the ship without a care.
>I didn't expected it from that cunt.
She's been brainwashed my man. Half life 3 was going to be about killing the Gman and saving her.

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>>388218585
>Actor = Writer

>>388227663
>Dude moon rocks
I really wish this meme would end. Moon rocks are just simply highly conductive to portals. You could make the argument that test chambers are coated with them so that a portal forms every single time for testing purposes, but both games prove that a moon rock coated surface is not needed for a portal to form.

>>388227839
meant for >>388227517

>>388227438
>It seems such a silly assumption in retrospect. Guess Aperture really was onto bigger things than le wacky portal shooters.
Portal Gun is actually a much bigger deal and more useful in a lot of ways then the Borealis teleporter thing. The game Portal never uses it for even a tiny fraction of its potential since Aperture were crazy and also the whole Invasion thing.

>>388227663
It's beyond what you're thinking, even with the moon dust limitation it'd still be possible to do things like solar blasters or generators or true stealth. It'd reshape everything.

>>388227839
>for control of Earth.
Please. Nobody cares about earth. The two factions are fighting for control of the multiverse

>>388227805
>didn't except to be betrayed by a female racemixed shitskin and a literal space jew

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>ywn get to ride a fucking reality shifting fishing boat into a fucking Dyson Sphere

fuck you Valve

>>388227771
Did Aperture ever get portals working on non moon-rock surfaces? Even if they moved beyond moon-rocks to something else, that's still an inherent drawback in the technology: The need for a specialized medium upon which to project portals.

I actually expected G-man to try to save the Borealis for his own goals, with that whole "unforeseen consequences" thing.

>>388227805
It's like the ending of the original Half-Life, only now Alyx has taken Gordon's place.

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Why the fuck am I getting Interstellar vibes from all of this shit

>>388228001
At least we have Artifact

>>388227682
The thing to consider here as well is how important the borealis truly was to the combine. If the cared enough they would have sent more forces to capture it instead of using the locally established slave labor. Maybe they would have reached that kind of power on their own eventually, maybe they just wanted it out of our hands so we couldn't fight back. There's a ton of room for speculation, but ultimately what the implications are is that humanity vs the combine would forever be entirely one sided if you look at the big picture.

>>388218146
This. If the combine have a legit dyson sphere it is better for humanity to just give up and accept enslavement, the combine could literally wipe mankind out in the blink of an eye, enslavement is mercy to the combine.

>>388227791
Adam West Is the Batman.

>>388227923
Yeah, that's what I meant. Whatever they are, they work or are forced to work for the real bosses; they are not the puppet masters.

>>388228090
The Combine wanted it because their teleportation tech was garbage

>>388227450
yeah I know, but the result was the same. There was no reason to assume that they would ever turn the field off, they'd probably just let everyone grow old and feeble instead of bothering to exterminate them directly, maybe saving the human genome to some thumb drive that they throw in their eurasia-sized archive of "shit we might have use for down the line" at best

>>388226973
>what is portal

>>388227635
>inb4 she was doing some shit to the circuitry of that computer that exploded

>Half life is cosmic horror now

ok

>>388228079
I'd rather not have it desu

>make a waifu
>make waifu the bad guy

brilliant

>>388228119
Humanity would die off in less than hundred years of slavery anyway because of the reproduction suppression field.

>>388228242
Yes it was, but if it were truly important to capture they'd send shit from their ultradimention to seize it. As is in the game, they used brainwashed humans, an extremely limited species compared to even the grubs/advisors which are still a slave race. What I'm saying is, maybe they would reach that level of tech on their own eventually and capturing it was only a slight boost in tech credits.

>>388228119
Going by the art design for HL2 and the actual Citadel ghouls I'd rather die, thank you.

>>388228391
I mean, wasn't it always? Since the first game?

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>yfw we thought G-Man saving Alyx from Black Mesa was a moment of mercy
>yfw it was him grooming her the whole time to replace Gordon

>>388228391
>now

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>>388228150
How the fuck can you still be this retarded? Just read your previous posts and learn how stupid you sound

>>388228391
>now
Somebody never played to Xen.

>>388228391
it always was with the Ninilith whatever the fuck in the first game

>>388228460
>Monsters in a research lab
>Cosmic horror

No?

>>388228419
It was a joke.

>>388227515
Are you literally retarded? Thats what >>388218845 was implying with his you dumb nigger

>>388228536
What about traveling to psychedelic alien dimensions?

>>388228391
>what is xen
>what is a slave race of aliens governed by a giant baby alien

>>388228539
rape isn't funny anon

>>388228445
>but if it were truly important to capture they'd send shit from their ultradimention to seize it.
They would've but it would've taken like 20 years for them to get to earth because the combine can't teleport to different locations, only between dimensions

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>>388219986
Eli Vance in particular bothers me. He and the other resistance members appear a lot less surprised by Gordon suddenly popping up in City 17 than they should be. They didn't ask questions about it. Eli (and possibly some other characters) seemed to have some kind of idea about Gordon's circumstances between HL1 and HL2, and it would've been helpful to talk about that stuff a little bit earlier; share stories, and help Gordon catch up with what's been going on.

Also, I have never forgotten the way Eli and Alyx didn't want Gordon to have a chat with Breen and find out some answers about the G-man. It was suspicious as hell.
Eli got killed so we'll never find out what exactly did he know, but the games gave me the impression that he was trying to keep Gordon in the dark about some important things.

>>388227805
I'm okay with it. Either she'd gone mental from the grief after her dad died, or G-man messed with her free will like he's already done before ("dad, prepare for unforeseen consequences"), or she was just not worth trusting since the beginning (see picture). Any of those factors - or a combination of them - works for me.

>>388228010
Maybe it was him planting seeds so that it would eventually get destroyed.
Just remember: he programs Alyx to say that line. Eli knows shit's gonna hit the fan, so he decieds to destroy the ship. Advisors conveniently appear and kill him. Alyx then goes to carry on her dead father's wish.
This is clearly him playing some multidimensional chess.

>>388228482
THE BATMAN

>>388228475
Always have a backup plan if your pawn becomes unreliable.

>>388217745
so what if he is former. He gave life to the whole series asshole. He is the creator and he wrote all we know about the game

>>388227915
No shit, Sherlock Holmes.

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>>388228090
>but ultimately what the implications are is that humanity vs the combine would forever be entirely one sided if you look at the big picture.
Portal tech would let humanity change the picture though to simply not be "vs The Combine", it'd open up the option of a highly decentralized, stealthy, non-planetary/extra-stellar space civilization. Humanity could be happy and free, but never challenge any of the big powers at all, and simply be beneath notice. Like humans themselves vs rodents or bugs or whatever. If they don't cause us trouble or have nothing we want we don't generally go out of our way to bother them either. Hell, they might even be pretty to watch or perform some useful roles.

>>388228119
Not giving up on avoiding enslavement but rather accepting limits and giving up on Earth/some future super civ would work too.

>>388228536
>what is Xen, a celestial land of surrealism?
>what is Nihilanth, a huge space fetus monster controlling an army of alien creatures?
>what is Gman taking you on a trip through time and space?

>>388228119
go to bed Dr Breen

>>388221117
keep dreaming

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>>388228704
And a back up for that plan

>>388219096
https://twitter.com/breengrub

>>388226065
Yes exactly, its energy intensive so why waste it on some gravity well with little to no valuable resources? The only thing I can think of are radioactive elements but you can probably get a wealth of those somewhere else in the galaxy and in better conditions too. Its stated nowhere that the combine is mining the entire universe and that would be the only logical reason for them to be on earth (since they leave nothing behind).
Mining earth for volatiles? The most abundant elements in the universe are helium hydrogen and oxygen. Fucking skip earth and go straight to jupiter and saturn if you need those.

Seems like Breen was right all along

>>388228724
His fanfic ending is shit. He's a hack and has no authority on the matter anymore.

>>388229000
them trips don't lie

>>388228119
That's probably why Breen genuinely though Humanity submitting to the Combine was good. He had probably known about the Dyson Sphere and realized humanity had no chance of ever beating the combine, not with their current technology.

It all makes sense why Breen was pleading with Eli to give up and Gordon to stop what he was doing.

>yfw Breen only had humanity's best interests at heart but got killed.

>>388228654
>He and the other resistance members appear a lot less surprised by Gordon suddenly popping up in City 17 than they should be
Maybe this was just the Gman fucking with people's perceptions to enable Gordon to easily integrate back into reality.

>>388228654
I was always under the impression that Eli was the one who "hired" Gordon for the events of HL2. With Him and the Gman having already contacted each other. Like during the initial test that lead to the Resonance Cascade.

Breen was probably aware of the Gman (or at least his organization) from what he learned from the Combine. "How about it, Dr. Freeman? Are you aware that your contract was open to the highest bidder?"

>>388218931
Well, they can't be truly invincible. You killing the Nihilanth(?) at the end of HL 1 was apparently enough to liberate the Vortigaunts.

The best mankind can do is wipe out the remaining combine forces on Earth, since it seems portals are how they do FTL travel. But it will be an uneasy peace, knowing the Combine is still out there

>>388228536
Except the monsters were from an extra-dimensional hyper-surrealist borderverse controlled by a deformed eldritch super-being and the lab was manipulated into unleashing the horrors of the multiverse by another eldritch superbeing who also passively observes and eventually abducts our main character in order to use him as a tool in a greater cosmic plan.

As far as a late 90's shooter about killing aliens in a lab goes, that's some fairly cosmic horror undertone.

>>388228654
It doesn't exactly seem like characters are fully lucid when G-Man is around. Look at Gordon, He just kinda passively goes with G-Man at the end of HL1

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The letter said that Gordon finally returned to "future" Earth long after Ep2 ended.
Does that mean Chen is a hag now? How do the event of portal timeliness correlate with Half life anyway?

>>388228920
If I were the Combine, I would wipe out Earth just to be safe and sure they won't come looking for me in a few million years or something. Plus, it's a display of your spacewar penis to the other advanced races that may exist.