Looking Back - Half-Life 2

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Almost a year after Half-Life 2 was released to the world, Computer and Video Games has had the privilege to interview Valve's Doug Lombardi and Marc Laidlaw on how exactly this legendary game came to be. With a bit of information on just about every aspect of the games creation being shoved into your cranium, you’d think you were the one who created this work of art!

Laidlaw: It's a classic science-fiction technique to build your world with details, any one of which could be made into a story or a book in its own right. There's something skimpy and cheap about trying to extract full-scale entertainment from every single little detail, rather than just liberally scattering them about. Some writers will take one idea and spread it very, very thin; others will take that one and five others like it and stuff them ten to a page for hundreds of pages. Guess which kind I prefer? We're trying not to be stingy, but to strike sparks and suggest more stories than can possibly be told. In a game especially, some of our fans love looking for clues that help them piece together a sense of the world, others want to get on with the shooting. We try to satisfy both camps; perhaps this is impossible, but we do try.

No, that’s not it, silly! Be sure to check out the rest of the interview here. Trust me, it’s a worth the read.

 

[Adabiviak]

We knew that some immense threat had chased the Nihilanth and its creatures out of their own world and into Xen, from which location they were all too glad to seize the opportunity to continue on to Earth with suppression through the citadels. But the exact nature of the threat was left to be solved in Half-Life 2.

oh! How does this fit in to your own idea of the HL universe? This infers that the Nihilanth and it's creatures were not native to Xen, chased there apparently by the combine. Does he also infer that the Combine were on Xen?

 

[Adabiviak]

Why do they show the screenshot of the hydra at the end of the article? Did they not play the game?

 

[Feuyaino]

Trust me, it’s a worth the read.

Oh thank God. I've been looking for a worth the read for quite a while now.

 

[Sui]

Hehe, good ol' Half-Life 2. The Saturday before last, I got up at 11, started playing Half-Life 2, completed it at 7 in the morning on Sunday and went to bed. It was so damn fun!

 

[VIP0R]

I read this in the Last moths PcZone(uk) and it is indeed an excelent Read!

and im sure the Picture of the Hydra is just there to show parts of the Development

 

[Varsity]

oh! How does this fit in to your own idea of the HL universe? This infers that the Nihilanth and it's creatures were not native to Xen, chased there apparently by the combine. Does he also infer that the Combine were on Xen?

It certainly changes some things. He also seems to imply that Nihilanth's Xenians had Citadels of their own? Or perhaps that it's the Combine as we know them today who have been chased out? But by what?

 

[Darkside55]

We had a glimpse of the larger threat when we were working on Half-Life 1. In other words, we knew that once you cleared out the Nihilanth (end-of-game boss), you were going to discover something worse beyond it. We knew that some immense threat had chased the Nihilanth and its creatures out of their own world and into Xen...

This whole interview was worth it just for that. What Doug said certainly seems to imply that there was no Combine control on Xen. Laidlaw once said that every species on Xen wasn't native; so, Nihilanth and the controllers, along with presumably the grunts and slaves flee wherever they're from (which is being taken under Combine control) and wind up on Xen. Really puts the "thieves...they all are thieves" line into context.

 

[Asuka]

Very interesting points we have here. This is hypeing me up for HL2:AM like crazy!