Maybe Xen is a planet wich was blown up, and all the parts were floating around, and theres still oxygen around. And maybe those trampoline thingys extract oxygen, in exchange for cole dioxide(like plants!).
EDIT: DAMN IT, i got ninjad.
lol, and what about the gravity? .D
at the physics class i’ve learnt that the gravity is direct proportional to the size of the planet , so xen is lot smaller then earth , so the athmosphere must be harder to breathe if it contains oxygen
Well, if xen is smaller than earth, and the gravity is lower, that means that it can contain air, but thin air, cuz the planet cant pull in as much oxygen.
hello, capitan ‘obviously’ .)
xen is not smaller, xen is not even a planet, helloo!!
/thread
what the hell did i just say?
/facepalm have just facepalmed/
Outside of the “just a game” argument that would be too easy to make, a few folks are forgetting that Xen isn’t necessarily located within an area of space as we understand it in our universe, being that it is a “dimension between dimensions”.
All the rules folks here are attempting to apply do not necessarily apply.
Valve merely created something which would look and feel very alien while remaining in keeping with suspension of disbelief. Other than that, they did what they could with what they had engine wise.
The thread is already over, there’s a scientist with no protective suit on whatsoever on xen.
i come to idea that xen is earths future and vortigrunts are either mutated humans (like striders) or created creatures by combaine or anything like that. and g-man is the representative of remaining humanity… i just dont think of any other explanation of everything that and extremly dont belive that valve hasnt thought of air on xen.
there is second thing but it is possible that gearbox didn’t cared about of reality of game and so didn’t gave any air support to barney and adrian so this also explains everything.
anyway i dont care much :XD:
(Is 3 days after the last post Necroposting?)
How can combines make Vorts??
^
^
:facepalm:
Instead of a planet that keeps the atmosphere and rocks of Xen in orbit, couldn’t it just as well be a giant “ball” of dark matter (or whatever the word for unknown particles is), that has the same gravitational pull as, for example, a planet?
Maybe antimatter, and when you fall…
If Xen is made up of anti-matter… wouldn’t it explode when the HEV teams came into contact with it?
Not xen, just the giant ball keeping the parts there.
But the scientist was never meant to be there, you just spawned him.
It’s totally sensible that Xen has an Earth-like atmosphere, since Xen creatures have no trouble breathing on Earth. Gordon may or may not have a helmet, but it’s irrelvant. The dead scientists in HEV suits with helmets were just being cautious. Air might be breathable, but maybe there is deadly alien bacteria? Humans might be killed off like the Martians in War of the Worlds. Also, helmets might provide some extra protection against being headcrabbed, or being hit with bullsquid spit, etc etc.
If I was involved in making a movie of Half-Life, I’d have Gordon wearing a helmet at the start, and then have it be damaged beyond repair in the resonance cascade. Zapped with green lightning, or teleported out of existance, or smashed by falling debris or something. That way Gordon could go around helmetless, without the retarded plot element of him not putting on a helmet in the first place. 
I’m sorry I’m going to have to have a bit of a rant. TIME FOR WALL OF TEXT.[/SIZE]
I don’t see why people have such a problem with Race X. They are an advanced universe-hopping race with sophisticated biological technology that detects the dimensional rift and decides to invade. EXACTLY LIKE THE COMBINE. Oh, except for the borg-like assimilating of other races thing. But basically, the question “where did Race X come from” is the same as “where did the Combine come from”. Race X was another bunch of aliens that detected the rift and took advantage.
It’s also not an issue that we never saw any Race X creatures in normal Half-Life - in the first chapters of Opposing Force you see very few Race X creatures (one shock trooper, one car park full of pit drones), and when Adrian wakes up in Opposing Force it is around the Surface Tension/Forget About Freeman time period. The invasion of lots of Race X creatuers doesn’t start until a chapter after Adrian sees Gordon jumping into the Lambda teleporter.
Also, it’s quite plausible that more than one alien race (Race X and the Combine) would detect the dimensional rift and do something about it - we’ve no idea how many other universes there are, there could be a billion of them. (If you believe parallel universe theory there’s an infinite number of them, but I hate parallel universe theory so I’ll suppose there’s a billion different universes rather than an infinite nearly-identical universes.) Some universes have intelligent life in them. Perhaps even a million intelligent species in each of the billion universes. Some of those species have teleportation technology/universe jumping technology and can detect dimensional anomalies. Some of them are aggressive, and like to conquer worlds in other universes. That could mean there’s a million advanced universe-jumping hostile alien races. Xen is a borderworld that seems to be inbetween many universes. So it’s not surprising that two or three seperate races of aliens detected the dimensional rift between Earth and Xen and decided to invade.
An especially nice touch is that early in the game one lone Shock Trooper teleports in, a scientist exclaims to a security guard that he has never seen that type of creature before. It then grabs him and teleports him away. It kidnaps the scientist and takes him back to his own world. The Race X aliens are exploring and studying our world, taking samples and specimens back for study. Then when they decide we are weak and puny they do their proper invasion, half way through Opposing Force.
Adrian Shephard and the Black Ops and the other surviving soldiers succeeding in killing a whole bunch of them, and then Race-X’s teleport beachead got nuked and turned into a radioactive crater (or buried under radioactive rubble), so they gave up. If they ever tried coming through again they’d discover a world taken over by the Combine and abandon invasion plans pretty quick. It’s even possible that Race X got a taste of their own medicine and they were also conquered by the Combine. Who knows? It doesn’t matter. Race X were the first scavangers to try and take advantage of the Black Mesa/Xen rift, but they were amateurs compared to the Combine, and so all we have to worry about in Half-Life 2 is the Combine.
Valve gave their blessing to Gearbox to make Opposing Force. They didn’t make it randomly out of the blue with no input. Back in 1998/1999 the understanding of what an expansion pack should be was “new enemies and new weapons”. If Valve themselves had made their own expansion pack they’d have put in new enemies and new weapons, but they were 1) too busy and 2) didn’t want to spend another two years making Black Mesa corridors, so instead they farmed it out to Gearbox.
What made Opposing Force an exceptional expansion pack was the different way it did things. Valve expected Gearbox to do the obvious “the continuing adventures of Gordon Freeman”, but instead Gearbox pitched several concepts, one of which was “you play as one of the evil soldiers sent into the facility to kill Freeman”. Valve thought that was awesome and said yeah do that. They gave them the complete “Half-Life Bible” that had all the Half-Life story so far, and they said “at the end having Black Mesa be nuked, cause we don’t want to do Half-Life 2 in Black Mesa.”
Lots of people have decided to question Opposing Force’s canonicity based on Marc Laidlaw’s comments in a couple of email replies that he wasn’t involved in the creation of the Race X aliens, and he only had limited input on the Opposing Force story and even less input on the stories for Blue Shift and Decay. He also said that when he wrote the story for Half-Life 2 he didn’t worry about contradicting the Gearbox expansions, since it was already hard enough not contradicting Half-Life 1 without worrying about contradicting extra content done by other people.
Sorry to break it you folks, but Marc Laidlaw was a guy that joined Valve when they were half way through making Half-Life. Valve already had a story for the game, and Marc Laidlaw’s job was to make it better. When it came to Half-Life 2 Marc Laidlaw was much more important, but it’s not like the Half-Life story is Marc Laidlaw’s baby.
Marc Laidlaw might have only had limited input, but that doesn’t mean that VALVE had limited input. It’s likely that Gabe Newell said “Giant alien insects armed with cockroach-guns that shoot energy bolts? That sounds AWESOME.” And it is likely that Gearbox were in constant contact with Valve, they’d have been working with Valve closely whenever they had a technical issue of some kind.
Also, Marc Laidlaw commented that he didn’t think Race X were from Xen, as they didn’t seem to be very well adapted to Xen… but that originally the vortigaunts weren’t from Xen either, and that he reckoned that nothing was originally native to Xen. He didn’t go “Don’t talk to me about Race X, I hate them, they don’t exist.” Instead he said they came from another universe. Something Gearbox themselves said when they first announced the new aliens in Opposing Force.
Opposing Force is regarded as one of the best expansion packs ever. It even won awards. Not for “best expansion pack”, but for “best action game”. How can a game that was critically praised when released, won awards, and enjoyed by fans, and well supported by Valve (many Half-Life patches also included updates for Opposing Force) now be dismissed as some non-canon mis-step in the Half-Life story? Just cause the almighty Marc Laidlaw hasn’t crowbarred Race X or Adrian Shephard into Half-Life 2 in some contrived manner?
Alien was done by Ridley Scott, and its sequel Aliens was done by James Cameron. Ridley Scott had no creative input on Aliens, as far as I know, but you don’t see people saying Aliens is non-canon. Aliens is a good movie, and it doesn’t contradict the first movie, so there’s no problem. Now, you do see people say Alien 3 is non-canon, but that’s because 1) Alien 3 isn’t very good, and was not well recieved by critics or fans 2) Alien 3 went through about 10 different writers and several directors, so no creative vision behind it, just 20th Century Fox trying to make megabucks, and 3) James Cameron said he thought Alien 3 was a slap in the face, an insult to both him and the fans, because they killed off Newt and Hicks and Bishop in the opening credits.
But Opposing Force is no Alien 3, it’s an Aliens.
The Black Mesa mod shouldn’t have any Race X stuff in it, cause Race X weren’t in Half-Life 1. And Half-Life 2 shouldn’t have any Race X stuff in it cause Race X are made totally irrelevant by the Combine invasion, and trying to put them into the story somewhere would make things absurdly complicated. But that doesn’t mean Opposing Force never happened and Race X doesn’t exist. Back when Opposing Force was released there was never any question of it being “non-canon”, it was an official Half-Life game, and it is still an official Half-Life game. And since nothing in Opposing Force contradicts the story of Half-Life 2 or the Episodes or Portal, there’s no reason for it to stop being an official Half-Life game.
Nobody can wall-of-text quite like Your Evil Twin. like how so much of it seems well thought out and wrong