Create cool character

I hate op4 just because Randy thought they were so clever and original with their false villain trope (you're the bad guy but not ~actually~ a bad guy) when it's actually lame as fuck. Defeats half the purpose of making it from the HECU's perspective in the first place.

I just never touched the expansions for some reason. I've replayed the main game several times, along with HL2. I've got a ps2 copy as well, so i can do the co-op campaign.

basically every Vampire the Masquerate story after Bloodlines

>Kill off the literal protagonist of the first game in a comic book that no one has ever read
>This comic book is canon

Very cool.

U wot m8

"Guy with Cool Gas Mask: is Hunk From OG RE2 though:
youtube.com/watch?v=alStb3nw0Xs
Sheer perfection...blah blah..muahaha...oof
*has the last laugh*

"Barney" was the generic name of the security guard model from Half Life 1, the Barney in HL2 could be literally ANY of the Barney's in HL1 and that was the joke

Think about it, do you ever hear ANYONE in HL2 refer to his surname as Calhoun? Nope, because that's Gearbox's name and Valve don't want to mix the old Gearbox expansions into canon
Blue Shift isn't canon, but it's very easy to think it is

>generic gas mask soldier
>cool character
I love opfor but god damn

blue shift is a really lazy expansion by comparison; opfor adds new guns, new enemies, new AI squadmates, a new boss, and a decently long campaign
blue shift adds NOTHING new from the base HL (and doesn't include any of the new additions found on opfor) and is significantly shorter than opfor

blue shift felt very lazy if you played opfor first

G-man might be saving him until freeman stop obeying him

He was given the name Calhoun by Marc Laidlaw you stupid faggot

Marc Laidlaw actually spoke of this in one of his emails with fans.

Basically, everyone at Valve considered the Gearbox expansions to be non-canon. For the entirety of Half-Life's development, "Barney" was just a generic name for security guards. There was no one Barney, all guards are Barneys. When Gearbox made Blue Shift, they took that generic name, slapped a family name on it and called their player character that.
When Half-Life 2 was in development, Valve wanted to bring back "Barney from Black Mesa" as an actual character. They didn't have a particular "Barney" in mind, and specifically not the Blue Shift character. However, Marc thought it would make more sense to use a ready-made name instead of making up a different Barney, so they used Barney Calhuon. The name carried over, but the character itself did not.
For all intents and purposes, HL2's Barney could be someone completely different from Blue Shift's Barney.

how would you fit him into the HL universe now?

Calhoun has a locker.

That already happened, retard. That's what the HL:A ending is all about.

G-man lost control over Gordon after HL2, episode 1 and 2 Gordon is free.

>The evolution of the name is that in HL1, we called all the security guards Barney. They're all different but...the same guy. It was down to texture and model limitations of the time we shipped. He was called Barney because in early development he looked like Barney Fife... I suspect Chuck Jones, the artist, actually based him on Don Knotts. (He got a bit less crazy looking before we shipped.) When Gearbox started doing Blue Shift, which would follow the adventures of one individual, they wanted a name for the character, so I came up with Calhoun. By the time we got to HL2, we were able to treat more of our main characters as individuals, and I thought it was amusing to stick with the name Barney Calhoun for the particular security guard who survived Black Mesa. I try not to think about it too hard. I didn't have any idea what they were making in Blue Shift and didn't play it until it was done. The game put you in the shoes of one of those many Barneys at Black Mesa...one who managed to escape. Were they ALL named Barney Calhoun? I don't know, but it's the sort of nonsense question that arises when you try to retrofit logic on something that initially made no sense. I try not to think back that far. I don't know Blue-Shift well enough to know if it conflicts with anything in HL2--I enjoyed it when I played it, but it didn't influence decisions in HL2. But it also doesn't particularly bother me to think maybe it was the story of how the Barney in HL2 escaped Black Mesa.
>Another bit of trivia, which I sometimes point out...his name was originally spelled Colqhoun, after Robert Carlyle's character in Ravenous, which I had just watched when Gearbox asked for a last name for the character.

Barney is as canon as Benry

I agree that Adrian is bestlad (my wife), but he's really hard to work with

>have his entire arc with little contact with Gordon or the scientists
>he fights the race X, which Laidlaw didn't plan and have no ideas for
>genuinely cool character that Laidlaw likes but don't know what to do with

they basically left him out of the story because they want to let Gearbox do their thing with him.
Barney was in comparison much easier to implement in the plans Laidlaw had for HL2.

Simple as.

HECU was created in Op4, in the original HL (and before the HD packs), they were just "the military". Randy thought it would be a good idea to give them more character, and I think it's fair.

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>Grunt no different from other MY ASS IS HEAVY
He is less of a character than Doomguy

he's got a cool design, his mates know him well and trust him, he has basic but cool nonetheless interactions with them
there's just something special about him

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silent odst guy with no personality is a cool character?

that because he's Randy donutsteel OC

crysis, i think
except they revived him in crysis 3

At least he has some sort of personality unlike Gordon if we go by his diary notes.

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Gas Mask characters are by default absolute chads.

I like how he pets the spore launcher and plays with the other alien things you get.