What the fuck happened...

>Don't expect anything consummate with the originals.
Have you played Alyx? It's fantastic. I have nothing but faith in Valve for whatever they do next with Half-Life

The way I saw it was that G-man, after having lost control over Gordon, uses Alyx as a replacement. However, to make sure she isn't useless, he puts her through a quick test run/bootcamp. I personally can't decide if it was all real time travel fuckery, or if he put her through some simulated "course" in that weird void he hangs out in.

This is a psychic manipulation being used by the advisors so that alyx and gordon think everything is fine, and will lead them to the borealis

If you ask the resident schizos its a pocket dimension

27 years.

Of course he didn't. He's a poorfag.

>uses Alyx as a replacement.
But if she's unwilling to BE his replacement as she clearly is, how is she going to serve him? Gordon was not abducted and brazenly strong-armed into doing what he did in the HL2 games, he was just set loose by G-Man with no context.

Alyx on the other hand does not want to be his puppet and was basically tricked into it. When he "unleashes" her she can just not do shit.

Alyx having Vortigaunt shock powers in the end segment is important to understanding what happened.

banned

explain for grug.

Explain?

valve is full of talentless hacks. Is anyone surprised all of their games in the last few years flopped hard?

>Yo Freeman, dis nigga and his shitty ass unforseen consequences bullshit. I'm gonna fuck him up

Hearing everyone talk about gordon towards the end gave me fucking chills, the gman sequence had me chocked up and i basedgaped at the saving eli stuff.

When I heard the HEV suit noise i thought it was just a nice nod, then I had fucking chills as soon as i heard the breathing, then seeing dog and the crowbar was a fucking emotional overload. What a game.

I like to think the reason there was barely any melee combat in this one was because they'll focus on it a lot more in HL3 if it's in VR with the crowbar.

>Who was the woman talking to the Combine? Mossman?
Yes.
>Why did she say the G-Man escaped Black Mesa?
Because it was written in a way to purposefully mislead the player.

Honestly kek'd at this. I know Eli's original voice actor died, but this dude sounds almost nothing like him, and has an entirely different vibe around him. Great ending anyways.

gravity weapons fucking up in combine areas isn't something thats new or weird

I love that they kept laidlaws intent with gman and alyx, it was fucking obvious gordon was getting replaced in his eyes and epistle 3 confirms it.

>valve is full of talentless hacks. Is anyone surprised all of their games in the last few years flopped hard?
CS:GO and Dota 2 have been phenomenal successes for Valve, especially Dota 2. They make more on Dota than just about anything else. Underlords is a well-made auto chess clone for mobile, Alyx is getting 10/10s left and right, their only shit game was Artifact.

Valve said that the reason for no melee combat was because it's honestly janky as fuck in VR and difficult to get right. Boneworks largely failed on melee, the weird slow weighty feeling combined with the IK body jank made playing it feel miserable.

What happened to the other advisor though? Alyx only nuked one of them, and then dog casually walks in instead of busting skulls like original ep 2.

He's a retard.
Final chapter takes your weapons away and you pull the energy surging through the vault out of the wall with the Russel's to kill combine.

if I'm understanding it right, HL3 gonna start where Alyx ends right? anything prior to HL2's ending is still valid but only this time nobody got nixed? (Alyx becomes G-Man's chosen one)

I guess you could say Gordon being trapped at the end of HL1 is unwilling on his part too? But I'm grasping at straws in that regard.

That's my current problem with the story if this was all to trap Alyx, it just seems pointless. If G-man can time travel why wouldn't he just pluck her out of existence at any time knowing Eli would do anything to get her back. Also, it seems weird he'd be trapped himself when I don't think combine can even time travel like he can

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Apologize.

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How is Alyx supposed to "serve" G-Man? Come to think of it why the fuck did Gordon do it? Are they retards?

The end of Episode 2 is where we will start, with the only thing changed being Alyx gone and Eli back. The story and goals are still the same with potential for Alyx sections now with her doing GMan's wishes without knowing the outcome on Gordons mission

>Come to think of it why the fuck did Gordon do it?
Because the alternative was being portalled to certain death?

so how does Portal/Aperture connect into all this

Combine legitimately captured him.
Alyx stumbling upon him and freeing him just gives background to the "worth far more than initial appraisal" line.

FULLY

The Borealis.

gordon 'served' the G-man by being dropped into city 17 and being discovered by his old buddies from Black Mesa. From there, he just decides to help his friends out, but it was all according to the g-man's keikaku (which was, I guess, getting Breen out of the picture?)

The bigger question is: what the fuck is the overall plot with the g-man? His employers are using the combine for some purpose, but the combine are pretty much the dominant force in the galaxy. How does Earth fit into the G-man's employers schemes? How does Gordon killing Breen and destroying the citadel help them? It's like they want to fuck up the Combine, but at the end of HLA the g-man says that getting rid of the combine would run against his employer's plans-- which makes sense, since the g-man set the plot of half life 1 into motion.

So their plan is to just fuck up the combine a little bit? But the combine is aware of the g-man trying to fuck them up and are actively working to stop him (confirmed by mossman in HLA). I don't really understand.

>His employers are using the combine for some purpose, but the combine are pretty much the dominant force in the galaxy.

The combine are like an inter-dimensional British empire colonizing different planets for their resources. The g-man might be working for the inter-dimensional France or Spain trying to disrupt them.

Gordon wasn't really given a choice and was equally strong-armed to work with the G-Man in the end of HL1, since the other option was literally death. He literally just dumped Gordon without giving him any orders or a mission outside of "wake up and smell the ashes" onto a train in City 17 because he knew just dropping him off to his own devises will serve what he wants. He would just do the same with Alyx and use her when he knows what she would do naturally and willingly would line up with his own/his employers desires.

I wondered if Valve would make Alyx games in VR and Gordon games in 2D, but the ending of HLA makes that less clear as you're controlling Gordon. Then again Valve could've just done that for the cool / I clapped factor and change their mind later. I wonder if the G-man 'using alyx' would just be dropping her in another setting at some point in the story.

There's always bigger fish, maybe inscrutible ones without the material imperatives of the Combine.

Yeah the whole employee thing is more of a LARP/formality
G-Man is a weird guy. Thing. Whatever. He's like a weirdo who monologues to animals.

Everyone asking about gman, ain't nobody suspicious of those vortigaunts not telling everything?

>Then again Valve could've just done that for the cool / I clapped factor
This is all it is.
The ending is so concerned with "HL3 CONFIRMED GET HYPED BOYS!!!" chanting that it forgets to actually tie up the whole vault plotline.
>How does Alyx get out?
>Why does Alyx not remember her encounter?
>Why does Eli not tell anyone else what was in there?
>What happens to Russel?
all unanswered

Here you go, niggas.
Alyx is present for the entire HL2 storyline.
When Episode Two fades to credits, Gordon passes out.
While Gordon is unconscious, time continues moving forward while the G-Man CTRL+Z's Eli and lets Alyx from the past kill the Advisor. Then he takes Alyx from the present.
Eli wakes Gordon up.

Are you talking about their ability to foresee future events? It seems that their sense is not absolute and that the future can easily change just by telling someone about the future (Alyx saying she'll help the Vort and his Friends, and he then says because of that Eli is now saved). I think they don't say anything because their sense of the future is constantly in flux as things change, and informing people of the future can easily change it, defeating the whole point.

I heavily doubt all future Half Life Games will be VR. While VR is revolutionary in some regards, it's also restrictive other ways compared to a traditional kb+m FPS like the Half Life Series. I have a feeling that the next Half Life game will probably be a normal FPS so they don't completely disenfranchise the majority of their fanbase from ever playing another half life.

Nah bro, they know more about gman, the combine, and everything else going on than they let the humans know of. But they keep that info hidden for some yet undiscovered reason.

Vortiguants are "insane ranting hobo" tier incomprehensible. I prefer not talking to them at all.
Plus they wuz oppressed slaves n shieeeet, therefore they're good guys. Do you even consume popular media?

>HL3

never ever

see you in 2038

And they diiid save Gordon's bootycall, so I guess they're cool.

They seriously give me the creeps. They've been friendly but I can't put my finger on it. I have a gut feeling they're not so great. It's like a subtle horror being built up.

imagine how pissed off gman was when the combine picked up his fucking building and put it in a vort box. kek

>Nah bro, they know more about gman, the combine, and everything else going on than they let the humans know of.

Plus I wonder if relative to all the other planets under the combine's sphere of influence, we're just some backwater shithole they didn't expect to give them as much trouble as we do now.

Can't wait to play Half-Life: Barney on my Joywire and end up at this exact same cliffhanger except Eli gets replaced by Doctor Cross with G-Man magic or something.

The whole G-Man thing I can kinda agree on, but just because we haven't seen them tell your characters everything about the combine in the few moments you're not actively fighting and near a vort, doesn't mean they haven't told everyone in the 20 years since the 7 hours war. There's just a lot of info that I assume in canon everyone knows about, that valve hasn;t just laid out so they don't write themself into a corridor because they wanted to write the deepest lore.

To the G-man point, though, he seems so manipulative, mysterious, that maybe his existence is hard to determine, describe, or know about even with the Vorts. He also has been shown tot alk directly to other humans throughout HL1 and HL2, so either people know about him, or he can essentially wipe memories after putting events and ideas into motions.

It's because they have dark complexions and speak with an unrefined foreign accent. Also their nude oily supple flesh which they bare with no shame. It's enough to give anyone the shivers.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what's going on. The Combine want exactly two things from Earth: the oceans, and some free teleportation RnD work. Outside of that they give so little of a fuck that their plan to get rid of humanity is just turn off our ability to breed and sit on their fat asses waiting for everyone to die of natural causes or police brutality by the inmates they're letting run the asylum.

>13 years

>it's just episode 2 with the MC replaced

see you in 2033 where the same thing happens and you play as barney.

Because he's holding her dad as hostage, if she doesn't play ball he'll nudge a thermonuclear warhead onto him like he did Black Mesa. G-Man had limited leverage over Gordon outside of merely holding the leash.

I think it's implied through what breen was saying in HL2 that the future of humanity is through the combine, probably as synthetic soldiers like the other combine enemies you fight (there are even references to off world assignments for combine soldiers, so it may already be happening). Seeing how the only other thing close to a infantryman you find in the games so far are hunters, I bet that the Combine Human Soldiers serve a pretty nice niche for the Combine.

>Combine Human Soldiers serve a pretty nice niche for the Combine.
Relatively inexpensive cannon fodder?
I suppose the opposable thumbs are nice for precision tasks, I bet Hunters aren't great at those