Location of events of Half-Life 2

[Tuuc]

http://i51.tinypic.com/ezfuv9.jpg From Half-Life 2: Episode 2, not long after repairing the car and getting the NAV system, the first building of the village up on the hills when you hit a Combine roadblock at the mouth of a tunnel.

"Summa" is total in Finnish.
"Kron" is the monetary unit of the Nordic countries (excluding Finland) and used in Estonia as well, but here written in Swedish form (though mistyped here, the proper form AFAIK is in plural, "kronor").
"Volym" stands for volume in Swedish, and "liter" for litres.

As a first-time poster who is not interested in canonical accuracies and such things, I think this is nothing but a slightly lazy attempt at bringing foreign feeling to the game. However, as I've seen in many other communities, I'm fairly sure there are some people here who are up for a lenghty and basically useless debate on the location of the events of this game. If not, at the very least this makes an interesting detail for some Wiki page no one reads. "There was a Nordic community in East Europe" blah blah.

 

[Rizzo]

You might be on to something there.

 

[SeBBeN]

All the words on that gaspump are swedish but a lot of other signs and letters in the half life 2 series are russian.
And like you said, this is probably just there to bring a "foreign feeling" to it, as to there is really no official location for City 17 or any other of the areas that the game takes place in.

 

[Tony]

Yeah, it's just a compilation of Eastern Europe. Though the Half-Life wiki points out that White Forest more heavily resembles the American North-West.

 

[hakojo]

Trying to figure out where City 17 is is like trying to figure out where Springfield is. It's wherever it needs to be for the story to happen.

 

[GeniusX]

Nice observation, I didn't even notice it.

 

[Kyzr]

Trying to figure out where City 17 is is like trying to figure out where Springfield is. It's wherever it needs to be for the story to happen.

Springfield is in Vermont, which is what the makers of the series said after Vermont won the video competition, which was held to hype up the release of the Simpson movie.

As for city 17, there are two places where it might be. The first place is st. petersburgh, russia. Some clues that hint at this location are the russian themes present in the game as well as the design of the building in city 17 and the canal system. Bot cities are next to a large body of water, both are near forests and mountains. It would make sense that valve would want to base c17 off of st. petes, because the combine are oppressing the people in city 17, and the communists oppressed the people back in the soviet union.

The other location where city 17 might be is Odesa, Ukraine. This city is a likely choice because it has just as much russian influence as st. petes, as it was part of the old soviet union. An obvious clue is that an NPC in half life is named Odesa Cubbage, a hint at the location or just a coincidence, i don't know. More so then st. petes, Odesa is surrounded by a sea, mountains and forests.

Although this argument of where the events of half life take place is completely pointless, its still pretty fun to debate.