Epistle 3

With no official confirmation of either title, "HL3" has come to refer to whatever is next in the series. I've seen tons of comments across different sites that continue to "correct" this but I really don't think it is a distinction that needs to be made.

Rafert• 9 years ago

events following those described in my previous letter (referred to herewith as Epistle 2).

If 'Epistle 3' does not mean 'Episode 3', then 'Gertie Fremont' does not refer to 'Gordon Freeman'. That's what the author called it, whatever the internet at large thinks at any point in time is less relevant IMO.

naiyt• 9 years ago

The distinction is absolutely significant. It's all about expectations. The originally promised "HL2:Episode 3" didn't need to be some huge revolutionary product, just a satisfying conclusion to HL2 and its episodes, while setting up the scene for the next game. As soon as people start saying "HL3" they expect some grandiose, ground breaking product.

The story laid out here by Marc is much closer to what you would expect from Episode 3 rather than HL3.

dddanmar• 9 years ago

I agree - this is the story outline for HL2:EP3. If this is close to the truth of the projected story line, it's way too short. It wraps up HL2:EP1 and HL2:EP2 nicely but I'm going to be naive and say it's not the end of HL3.

Maybe the best move now is to just move on directly to HL3 and reference part of this released story line as flashbacks.

I can dream, right?

klondike_7• 9 years ago

Valve has basically implied that this is going to be the case, since it's been too long without a release for them to continue the episodic format

JSONwebtoken• 9 years ago

Yeah, it never would have lived up to the hype. Explained nothing.

Lewton6• 9 years ago

it never would have lived up to the hype.

If this had been released as episode 3 a couple of years after episode 2? Sure it could

justsayinyaknow6• 9 years ago

Has any entry in the Half Life series really explained anything? We get little glimpses into certain events, some from different perspectives (like the Black Mesa incident). We never get the whole picture and what we, as the player, know is told to us by other characters or shown through events we experience.

wbillingsley2• 9 years ago

Yes, in that HL1 & 2 played on such well known tropes that it only needed to show you the scene and you knew the story.

The opening was laden with every disaster movie signal (up to and including "Nothing will go wrong" said in emphatic tones). The lift doors in Office Complex open to archetypal zombie horror. The scientist getting gunned down by the military cover up in We've Got Hostiles hits any number of movie tropes while clearly signalling the next bit is Rambo-style action...

It's fairly similar to the first Star Wars movie, in that because it is hitting the tropes quickly and clearly, and jumping from setting to setting, it can tell the story very efficiently.

sweezyjeezy• 9 years ago

Did people love the Half Life series because of the story? I was never that interested in it personally, I played because of the exceptional game mechanics and level design.

It was impossible to hold a coherent thought, given the baffling and paradoxical timeloops, which passed through the ship like bubbles.

I would have loved to have seen what Valve would have done with this.

dom96• 9 years ago

Did people love the Half Life series because of the story?

Yes, or at least I did. Very much so. I loved the story so much that I would probably be quite happy watching a Half Life 3 movie.

thearn42• 9 years ago

Yeah I was hoping for at least a bit more on the Gman's motivations.

adamrezich3• 9 years ago

I used to have this perspective on media, and I think LOST broke it for me. I don't need everything explained anymore, I just want to enjoy an engaging and entertaining story. Sometimes leaving some stuff to the imagination is the right move.

Fun fact: there IS no "Half-Life story bible", so it's not like they're witholding story from you, they just literally haven't written it: https://twitter.com/marc_laidlaw/status/899511161145573376

97803459807• 9 years ago

My website's down for now. I guess fanfic is popular, even a genderswapped snapshot of a dream I had many years ago.

https://twitter.com/marc_laidlaw/status/900960760481726464

stupidcar• 9 years ago

Not much of a story really, it seems like they had no intention of actually answering any of the mysteries around the G-Man and Alyx, but it sounds like it would have been a fun game.

camus2• 9 years ago

The G-man is a Deus Ex Machina, it's always a lazy plot device.

Pica_soO5• 9 years ago

Yeah, dragons and eagles, and now a guy in a suit.

alanh• 9 years ago

perhaps, but he transcended that. his visible and unreachable appearances at other times, combined with his bizarre diction, made his character capture the imaginations of many.

Nition2• 9 years ago

This plot may have been originally intended more as Half-Life 2: Episode 3 than Half-Life 3.

klondike_7• 9 years ago

Version with the code words replaced: https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/6vwelo/i_edited_m...

hasenj2• 9 years ago

I'm not sure if I'm an idiot or if it's because English is not my native language or what, but I find it really difficult to follow this narration style.

Can someone give a short summary of what happened?

TD;CU (too dumb, can't understand).

davman• 9 years ago

They go to Antarctica to find the Borealis (the ship built by Aperture Science from Portal).

The Borealis is phasing in and out of reality. Rescue Dr Mossman from the Combine, she has details to make the Borealis phase in for enough time to get Freeman+Alyx+Mossman on board, chased by Combine.

While on board, discover Borealis is moving through Time as well as Space. Mossman wants Borealis recovered for the Resistance, Alyx wants it destroyed. They fight, Alyx kills Mossman.

Borealis reconfigured to fly through Space to Combine planet to try to destroy it with explosion, as they arrive G-man takes Alyx off the ship, Vortigaunts take Freeman.

Combine world too massive, powered by a Dyson sphere, Borealis explosion does nothing.

Freeman back on Earth sometime in the future, won't take part in any more conflict with Combine.

p49k• 9 years ago

I haven't played the game, so I'm a bit confused: what parts of the story are slyly referring to Valve itself rather than the HL3 story? How do you get "welp, looks like HL3 is cancelled" based on this story?

hasenj2• 9 years ago

Thank you very much!

rocky1138• 9 years ago

So... if Gordon is on the Earth in the future, did the Combine go away, or what? It really doesn't answer this important question.

rangibaby4• 9 years ago

The boat mentioned during HL2 E2 can teleport anywhere easily and instantly. The crew set it teleport to random places so the aliens wouldn't get it. Gordon and Alyx are able to board the boat, where Judith Mossman wants to use the technology to help the resistance while Alyx wants to destroy it as Eli wished. Alyx kills Judith and rigs the boat to explode. Her and Gordon teleport to the alien homeworld on a suicide mission. Alyx is recruited by the G-man and Gordon is rescued by the Vortigaunts. The boat bomb is much too small to damage or destroy the alien planet. Gordon awakens on an Earth where much time has passed.

throwanem4• 9 years ago

Spoilers for everything!

- Freeman and Alyx Vance, acting as an advance party for a larger Resistance force, seek out Borealis, the Aperture Science research ship which Eli Vance charged them to find and destroy shortly before his death. Their helicopter crashes near the site, and they make the last few miles (?) by probably somewhat frostbitten foot.

- On reaching the location in Antarctica where Borealis is last known to have been, Freeman and Vance find the ship is phasing in and out of spacetime, and a Combine garrison has been established to capture it at earliest opportunity. They also find a surprisingly alive Wallace Breen and kill him, and a captive Judith Mossman who, despite her earlier actions painting her as a Combine quisling, insists she's actually a Resistance double agent. She also has the plot coupon required to access Borealis. Freeman and Vance break her out and bring her along.

- The party succeeds in boarding Borealis, as do some of the Combine troops from the garrison. The ship immediately desynchronizes from local spacetime again, both isolating the boarding parties from the Combine and the now-arriving Resistance forces, and exposing them to severe disorientation as distant times and places impinge upon the tenuous reality aboard the ship.

- Borealis's situation proves to be caused by an incomplete long-distance teleportation system, the "Bootstrap Device", which was being developed aboard the ship prior to the Combine invasion. As Combine forces seized the graving dock which housed Borealis during the Bootstrap Device's development, the science team on board favored the possibility of escape over the certainty of capture, and activated the untested Device with a target destination of Antarctica. It sort of worked, but left Borealis unstuck in spacetime. The fate of the science team is unknown.

- Two options emerge for what to do with Borealis. Mossman favors permanent resynchronization with the ship's destination spacetime, allowing the Resistance to study and exploit the technology aboard. Vance favors rigging the ship's reactor (or something) to explode, and synchronizing her with the major Combine military staging area that's been a recurrent feature of her shifts through spacetime - thus fulfilling Eli Vance's final instructions and likely achieving an immediate and significant strategic victory, at the cost of whatever longer-term benefit the ship's unique technology could offer. Mossman attempts to disable Vance and implement the former option; Vance shoots Mossman dead and implements the latter.

- The G-man rescues Vance, but leaves behind Freeman, for whom it appears he has no further use. The Vortigaunts rescue Freeman immediately before Borealis materializes in the middle of the Combine base, which is gigantic on a previously unappreciated scale, and the ship explodes to no meaningful effect whatsoever.

Here the plot ends, and Freeman's story - or at least our involvement therein - apparently with it.

KON_Air4• 9 years ago

TL:DR; Alyx ruins humanities only chance to one up Combine with time travel and buggers off with G-Man.

hacker_93• 9 years ago

The story actually sounds really fun to play, and fits the Half-Life universe perfectly. Funny that this script has reached the top of Reddit, HN and Twitter within hours of posting, and even crashed the authors site. Even to a blind man it's obvious the demand for the game is there, so it's amazing that Valve continues to ignore it and the fans, but I guess without a cash flow problem they really don't see the point in spending time developing it. A shame.

Edit, GitHub Mirror: https://github.com/Jackathan/MarcLaidlaw-Epistle3/blob/maste...

zimpenfish• 9 years ago

It's probably got to the point now that whatever they did would be negatively received because it cannot live up to the hype of the past N years. And since they're basically free-printing money out the wazoo via Steam and DOTA etc. why even bother with the hassle?

ge96• 9 years ago

I still remember the underwater fish sound, eh uh eh uh eh uh eh uh frantically trying to find a way out of the water

bhrgunatha• 9 years ago

Not sure if you've seen this or not but it sounds really plausible to me.

Why valve will never release Half Life 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50lSIaSR3zc

klondike_7• 9 years ago

First of all, Valve has lost some interest in single player games [1]

Valve is also likely waiting for their new game engine, Source 2, to be completed because Source 1 is hideously outdated by today's standards.

And finally, they're going to have to come up with something truly great to live up to nearly 10 years of hype

[1]https://kotaku.com/5795355/valve-probably-done-with-single-p...

gcp• 9 years ago

They are already running their largest game, Dota 2, on the Source 2 engine.

croon2• 9 years ago

Valve is also likely waiting for their new game engine, Source 2, to be completed because Source 1 is hideously outdated by today's standards.

Source 2 was patched into Dota 2 years ago, and being patched into CS:GO this year.

Furthermore Source 1 didn't really get outdated as such, it got iterated on numerous times before introducing Source 2, which I assume will not be "completed" until Source 3 gets named the next version.

SmallDeadGuy3• 9 years ago

I'm surprised it's not complete yet. DotA 2 has been using it for 2 years, but CS:GO is still being ported to it and expected to be finished later this year.

mariusmg• 9 years ago

And finally, they're going to have to come up

Nope, they are making too much money from Steam and microtransactions for CS:GO/DOTA/ etc. Now Valve is like a fat pig to which gets lots of good food everyday. No reason to get up and "fight"/make games, the money gets to them anyway.

Sad.

fleetfox• 9 years ago

Source2 has been done for a long time. It's not published yet because they don't have it documented and figured out whole packaging and publishing process. Source: https://youtu.be/YpaNnX_9Q5s?t=1641

ErneX• 9 years ago

Titanfall and Titanfall 2 run on a modified Source engine as well, don't know if it qualifies as "Source 2" but those are 2 recent games

TheRealDunkirk2• 9 years ago

Valve released HL2 along with Steam. I'm convinced they'll release HL3 with their own, Valve-branded console. I'm also guessing that it will be an exclusive to SteamOS for 6 months or something.

m0th87• 9 years ago

Steam was released before HL2. I remember playing HL1-based games on it.

bluthru• 9 years ago

That was my hope when I first heard about SteamOS: A Linux distro with great drivers that would free gamers from a Windows reliance.

HL2 launched Steam, HL3 would launch SteamOS.

Oh well.

ZoFreX2• 9 years ago

it's amazing that Valve continues to ignore it

Valve isn't a monolithic entity nor a top-down controlled company though. This argument doesn't reflect how they make decisions.

They have spoken on a few related points in the past:

* Their projects often change dramatically during development, even being scrapped or started over again from scratch (Half-Life is a rework of a scrapped project, Team Fortress 2 was completely rebooted)

* They prefer not to talk at all about things that are very hyped because they believe it's more painful to the community to go through those twists and turns than have radio silence

* If they aren't happy with the quality of something they produce it doesn't see the light of day, rather than release something that isn't great

* For it to happen requires enough people within the company to decide to work on it, and see it through

sametmax4• 9 years ago

If they aren't happy with the quality of something they produce it doesn't see the light of day, rather than release something that isn't great

This is very important. If HL would have been a EA game, you would have had it years ago. And it would have sucked, but everybody would have bought it and EA would have made bank.

Valve cares. Sometimes that means you will not have what you want, because they know they can't provide it.

txdv• 9 years ago

its been 11 years, nobody cares anymore about the structure in their company

they could be riding clowns while coding hl3, all I care about is for hl3 to be released someday

djhworld• 9 years ago

What incentive to Valve have to make HL3 though, really?

They make a ton of cash on Steam and DOTA2. It's sad for the fans, in the recent DOTA international tournament, Valve announced a new game to the crowd who were whipped up into a frenzy.

The new game, to the collective groan of the audience, was a DOTA2 card game

swalsh• 9 years ago

HL3 could solve their VR problem, there's a lot of people who are "waiting", who don't see a reason to get the system yet. HL3 could push them over the edge.

Plus, it would be a really sweet game.

petercooper2• 9 years ago

IMHO this is the problem that occurs when things are built by committee. You need a strong person who "owns" a creative project, lives and breathes it, and sees it through.. like a movie director or an author does. We shouldn't be thinking of Valve's motivation to make the game, but some creative who defines what it means to be "Half Life".

Valve's structure doesn't feel very supportive of this sort of creative game making even if it's perfect for running infrastructure and creating storyless games like Dota and TF.

Pica_soO5• 9 years ago

Im waiting for the fans to pick up the pieces and make it real.

wrinkl32• 9 years ago

While someone inevitably will try, I don't see it being good. The hallmark of the Half-Life series was not its plot, but an almost compulsive obsession with the gameplay quality. Few professional studios could rival Valve in that, let alone a fan project.

roblabla• 9 years ago

I mean, I don't know if you've seen Black Mesa (the game), but they've done an incredible job at making an HL1 reboot, with some levels drastically expanded, a lot of things tweaked, and it's amazing how well it works.

Valve doesn't have a monopoly in gameplay quality - they're just very consistent about it.

grwthckrmstr• 9 years ago

Half Life 3 confirmed!

thearn42• 9 years ago

It's a good and short read, and I accept it as closure for what I always thought was a very well written series.

olivierva• 9 years ago

I think a new Half Life game would be the perfect opportunity for Valve to showcase their virtual reality kit. So far there are no blockbuster VR games and the Half Life franchise (Portal included) has a history of being very innovative (e.g. HL2 using a physics engine for the narrative, HL1&2: story told through level design). There is a lot of potential to use immersive virtual reality to enhance the story telling.

834572• 9 years ago

They said years ago that HL3 would not be a VR focused game but I suspect that has changed by this point. There are still issues with normal locomotion in VR and nausea so I suspect either there will be some new idea in that realm or HL3 will take on Portal technology to explain teleportation based movement.

vectorEQ• 9 years ago

a lot of complaints about valve. u know what people also complain about a lot... companies milking their intelectual property.... i think half-life so far has left a great legacy. if they ever decide to continue it , it would be sweet. i'd hope it would be in the same fashion, shooter for pc, not VR bullshit. but hey... still enjoying half life 1 and 2+ so fuck all the whiners. be thankful for what you have got, not a needy little baby crying for more!. maybe if u guys behave thankful people like gabe/marc and others involved with what we love would listen.

wbillingsley2• 9 years ago

Trying to imagine playing this, it sounds like they were struggling to get it "right", and it may have kept feeling like a poor cousin of other games. In comparison to HL1 & 2, the plot seems a bit slow-starting, ends on an actual anti-climax instead of a cruelly-interrupted climax, and the game mechanics (snow/stealth, map phasing, time bubbles) seem to suffer from other recent games having done variations on these very well.

Add the inherent disappointment of not having the portal gun that everyone's expecting to be in there somewhere, and it could feel like it was bound to disappoint.

HL1 & HL2 did a very good job of switching genres and game mechanics from level to level, while still keeping everything clear and centred on a simple familiar mystery plot. The levels were able to establish their genres very fast -- usually from the first scene you saw as the doors opened or you rounded a corner. Everything was clear, and in both cases the motivating story was very simple, and the "plot" was setting. You've got to get help; you've got to get to Lambda Complex, We've got to get you through the portal to shoot what's on the other side...

This HL3 plot seems to have got a bit "Lost" (sorry, tv series reference) as people's motivations are uncertain and there's exposition, and an attempt to partially unfold the mystery while always adding new ones... and still trying to make those bug-pod things work as a villain that didn't work in Ep1 or Ep2.

Still, the bones of a good game are there. From my amateur eyes, it just looks like it needed to stop trying to resist/subvert the viewer's expectations, and just hit a few of the notes the player's been waiting for so they can have a note of satisfaction on the way to the new mystery.

hacker_93• 9 years ago

No game mechanics are mentioned in the story, so why wouldn't there be a portal gun? Extrapolating, if one is in a time travelling ship, the portal gun could actually generate portals between different time dimensions, and I can already think of a ton of gameplay ideas that could use this concept.

Balgair2• 9 years ago

Using the portal gun to not only jump through space, but time as well?

Ummm, YES!

The 'structure' of the puzzles you could use that with would need to be very tightly controlled (enemy position vectors, amount you can travel backwards in time, maybe some sort of energy mechanic you have to pick up as you go along, etc). But still, WOW! Jumping back to the start of a level at the very end and you must manipulate time to accomplish the level, there is a LOT of possibility to talk about there. I have no idea what jumping forward in time would look like except if you went back, say 5 minutes, and then you could only go forward again up to that 5 min mark.

However, you can't use this in a PvP manner very well, only co-op. Maybe you could have the players ALL jump back in time except the user of the time device who got to essentially teleport around. However, the cheesing of that mechanic would be frustrating in the extreme.

x775• 9 years ago

"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 epistle."

This feels a lot like Marc talking about Valve, no?

nassyweazy• 9 years ago

That's exactly my feeling too.

Pica_soO5• 9 years ago

Here lies Anarcho-Syndikalism, a concept that was proven to work under less favorable conditions, but stagnated in self-strangulation due to unreasonable risk avoidance.

One wonders how much that piece of paper at valve is really worth.

dejawu2• 9 years ago

If the paragraph you quoted is indeed Marc talking about Valve, then I feel that the sentence,

"I expect you know... the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it."

points to the hope that people will take this story and create fan games with it. Having seen the tremendous quality and effort put into the Black Mesa [0] remake, I have great faith that the inevitable fan-made Episode 3 will live up to expectations.

[0] https://www.blackmesasource.com/

trampi• 9 years ago

"This was the case until eighteen months ago, when I experienced a critical change in my circumstances, and was redeposited on these shores"

Marc Laidlaw left Valve in January 2016. The end of the post is also probably about Valve, as others have already figured out. I wonder what else there might be to discover.

throw2016• 9 years ago

This would have been a treat for those who had finished episode 2 and were waiting anxiously for the next step in the saga.

Sometimes its simply not possible to do things and fans understand but Valve just shuttered the series and turned their back on fans. It's like Game of Thrones suddenly deciding to close down for no obvious reason and with no explanation to fans.

This reeks more than a little of the arrogance of success and it's in some ways a betrayal of all the gamers who appreciated Half life for what it was and propelled Valve to its initial success.

klondike_7• 9 years ago

It's interesting how much this differs from the storyline of the infamous leaked HL2 Beta [1], which was based on a rough version of what became HL2, Episode 1, and Episode 2. [1]http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_2_original_storyli...

AceJohnny2• 9 years ago

Most of the obfuscated references have been elucidated, but I'm not finding anything for who "Dearest Playa" is. Does anyone know?

Crespyl• 9 years ago

"Dear Player"

whingingfanboy• 9 years ago

The real HL3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqRUjjuUl7U

Epistle 3

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