well, let’s bring some common sense into the problem:
one thing, explaining xenian physix:
[/IMG]
well, there must be a forse, keeping the magnetic hanging island on the right place and pole, but those’re details.
but i like to think that there’re many location types in this world:
these pics represent an unreal, but very cozy world ¦)
p.s.: don’t forget the quote in someone’s signature:
and dias,
sry, can’t help it ¦))
Well said. I’ve never thought about the Race X aliens being scared off by the Combine. This was very well thought out. I agree. 
Or maybe they chickened out when the gene worm got raped by Shephard.
Yeah, Valve had a story for the game, but there’s this piece of text from Raising the Bar which I’ll quote for ya:
"Barney, Scientist, & G-Man
Initially conceived as a somewhat ineffectual bad guy, Barney was used by AI programmer Steve Bond to run experiments in enemy squad behaviour. By putting the player in the role of a squad leader, and forcing Barney to follow instead of fight the player, Bond hoped for an easy way to test navigation rules. The unexpected result of this experiment was a working companion character, which instantly appealed to everyone who saw Barney in action. This caused Valve to rethink large portions of the story, and recast Gordon’s role as the game went into a complete overhaul beginning in late 1997."
And I’m just going to pull another quote here, also from RtB:
“Science fiction author Marc Laidlaw joined Valve in the summer of 1997.”
Whoops, looks like Marc Laidlaw might have had a big influence on the story after all, huh.
Here’s another quote, this time from https://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=114535:
“racex was purely a gearbox creation that doesn’t figure at all in my thinking about the world. Understand, they wanted to come up with a set of creatures that would create gameplay they knew how to make. They could have been making an original title or an add-on for some other franchise, and plugged racex into that–the reason being that they had gameplay they wanted to explore and needed the freedom of their own race of critters to conduct those experiments with. If gearbox had kept making hl games, i suppose we might have seen these threads develop. Since blackops are not a gearbox creation per se, but an opportunistic use of existing real-life elements, i don’t see how the idea of canon applies to them.”
There, he said they don’t fit in his thinking of the Half-Life universe.
Race X was purely a gameplay device.
Fortunately, it’s not the critics and the fans that decide what is canon, it is Marc Laidlaw and Valve.
Er… actually you’ve undermined your own argument instead. The fact that they brought Marc Laidlaw on board in 2007 just means that when they were overhauling the story they had a proper novelist on board to make it much better. It helps to have a proper writer rather than just a bunch of programmers. But that doesn’t mean Marc Laidlaw was responsible for the total story, that it was all him. Your quote says that they overhauled the story of the game due to accidentally discovering it was cool to have friendly AI characters helping you. They changed the story due to GAMEPLAY reasons, not because of Marc’s valuable input.
In the early alpha versions of Half-Life the Black Mesa facility was a tightly controlled military facility, and the security guards were MPs (military police) that were hostile to the player, they were the early human enemies before the serious dudes in gasmasks showed up. Then they realised that actually it would be cooler to have security guards fighting alongside the player, and overhauled the story so that instead the security guards were rent-a-cops, the people in Black Mesa were all civillians and the military was trying to kill everyone as part of a cover-up. That was a decision made by Valve as a whole, not Marc Laidlaw, due to a discovery that it made for more interesting gameplay.
Gameplay was the most important thing. If it hadn’t been, Valve would have had Marc Laidlaw write the plot of Opposing Force. Instead, they licensed Gearbox Software to make a Half-Life expansion… “New levels! New enemies! New weapons!” It’s not like it happened behind Valve’s back.
Marc might not have been happy with the idea of a bunch of outsiders tinkering with the story he worked on, but that means nothing. Movie sequels and episodes of TV shows are often written by various different writers, and often they do things differently. No reason a computer game should be any different. James Cameron didn’t need Ridley Scott’s permission to invent the Alien Queen in Aliens, and the guy that invented the Romulans in an episode of Star Trek didn’t need the permission of the guy that wrote the first episode of Star Trek. All that matters is that the studio heads agree to it. In Valve’s case that’s people like Gabe Newell and Marc Harrington. They are the producers/directors of the “movie”. THEY are the ones that say what is official and unofficial, what is canon and non-canon, what is Half-Life and what isn’t. Marc Laidlaw is their employee. They can’t write good stories so they employ Marc Laidlaw to write good stories, but that doesn’t make Half-Life his. If the producer of a movie doesn’t like something in a script, he tells the script writer to go change it. He may even fire the scriptwriter and get someone else. Half-Life is a franchise that has had multiple writers (lots of people at Valve have creative input, and of course Gearbox had its own writers), and so whether or not Marc Laidlaw came up with Race X or figures them into his grand scheme of things isn’t important.
Firstly, Race X don’t have to think into his thinking of “the world”. During opfor’s development Gearbox themselves said that Race X were beings from another universe that noticed our world due to the dimensional rift and have come to plunder our world’s resources. (Just like the Combine, heh.) We have no idea how many other universes there are, there could be billions, and do you think that Marc Laidlaw has thought of every species of every planet in a billion universes? Marc Laidlaw thought up the details of Xen and the Combine, that’s his “world”, two or three universes, but it is easy enough to introduce a new species into the mix - new aliens show up from a new universe.
If Gearbox had Race X coming from Xen or living in Xen or something, then it would be a sticky issue - they wouldn’t fit into Marc Laidlaw’s thinking of the world, he never intended for such creatures to be living in Xen, and they could complicate the Xen/Combine storyline, so Marc would either have to include them, or would have to say that actually they don’t exist and Opposing Force is no longer part of the Half-Life story. But Gearbox said they came from elsewhere, so they don’t mess with anything in “Marc’s world”.
You also ingore the fact that elsewhere in that same forum thread Marc actually comments on where race x might come from.
Someone asked whether Race X came from Xen, and he answered that they probably came from some other universe beyond Xen. (Which is exactly what Gearbox themselves had already said, though no-one seems to remember this.) If he considered Race X completely non canon, instead he’d just say “don’t ask me about Race X, because they don’t exist. Gearbox made them up, but in my story there is no Race X, and they come from nowhere.”
Actually, this is what Marc Laidlaw has to say on the subject of canon:
And furthermore:
His words: The games must stand on their own, contradictions and all. And he himself considers the argument about what is canon to be “bizarre” - neither Marc nor anyone else at Valve have ever said that anything in the Half-Life franchise is non-canon.
And although he says “contradictions and all”, Opposing Force actually doesn’t contradict Half-Life 1 or Half-Life 2 (Half-Life 2 contradicts Half-Life 1 far more than it contradicts Opposing Force!), so there isn’t even any reason for anyone to want to get rid of Opposing Force, other than the fact that some particular fans personally don’t like the game or don’t like Race X or something along those lines, or some Marc Laidlaw hero-worship where anything not created by Marc is some evil non-truth.
When writing the story for Half-Life 2 Marc Laidlaw didn’t give a crap about what happened in the Gearbox expansions and so there are no Gearbox elements in the Half-Life 2 / Portal storylines. But Opposing Force was effectively a self-contained story, in which a character who isn’t Gordon discovers some other aliens invading after Gordon has already left, and proceeds to kick their arses and stop their invasion. Story over.
It’s like an episode of Star Trek or something - just because some random alien race from an episode of Star Trek doesn’t become a “regular” enemy that gets mentioned again like the Klingons or Romulans, doesn’t mean that episode of Star Trek never happened, it just means that they served their pupose and are done with. They aren’t relevant to the continuing adventures of the Enterprise, and Race X isn’t relevant to the continuing adventures of Gordon Freeman. But they still happened. There’s no need to retcon something that is no longer relevant and which doesn’t interfere with or contradict the current story.
I never said they changed the story because of Marc’s input, I merely said that because they did overhaul the story, Marc got a chance to have much more influence on the story than he had in the original story.
You claimed that he didn’t have much influence on the story. At least that was how I understood it.
I’m very aware that the rest of Valve has influence in the decisions that is made, I even said that in the very post you’re counter-argueing.
Gameplay was the most important thing. If it hadn’t been, Valve would have had Marc Laidlaw write the plot of Opposing Force. Instead, they licensed Gearbox Software to make a Half-Life expansion… “New levels! New enemies! New weapons!” It’s not like it happened behind Valve’s back.
I figure you have a different understanding of what Marc said, than I.
I get it to that Marc does not consider Race X a part of the Half-Life universe.
And what Marc considers a part of the Half-Life universe, I consider a part of the Half-Life universe.
The origin of Race X was at no point a part of my argument, so I fail to see how I could “ignore” the quote.
I was actually just replying my opinion to your wondering of why people don’t consider Opposing Force canon.
Well Xen is not a planet! It’s a Border world…like another dimension. :}
SO IT HAS TO BE CLOSE TO OR WORLD. :}
It cant be close if it’s not even in the same dimension…
Your walls of text fail instantly because of lines like these.
Your arguments for the canonocity for Race-X and anything else you defend in regards to Opposing Force are strictly in the sense of elaborating on fiction “in universe”. Sure absolutely, fucking E.T.'s race could have been the prime enemies in Opposing Force by your “logic”.
I suppose everything G-Mod is also canon as well, in that regard hmm?
The debate with the canonocity of Gearbox’s creations is strictly in artistic license vs design sensibility, and given that Gearbox took liberties with both while ignoring Valve’s sensibility leads me to the conclusion that they are not canon. Race-X just does not fit into the scheme of things, the only things Gearbox improved upon was the boss fights, and I’m kind of partial to the latter stages of the headcrab zombies.
Outside of that all they delivered is exactly what gamers back in the day wanted to see added into their favourite game, new enemies and new weapons, regardless of how much sense it made in the grander scheme of things.
Anyways, it’s time to get over ourselves and get back on topic.
Er, yes. If Valve software slapped their name onto the box, then yes a game in which the aliens from E.T were the enemies would also be canon. We both know Valve would never do that, but if Valve went crazy and decided to give the Half-Life license to people wanting to make an E.T. game, then like it or not the E.T. aliens would be part of the Half-Life canon.
Wow, talk about a strawman argument! Obviously things made in G-Mod are not canon, since the random people on the internet that make G-Mod mods have not been licensed by Valve to produce an official Half-Life game. (And if you only mean the stuff made by Garry… when Garry’s Mod went retail, Garry was simply given a Source Engine license, the ability to modify the source code for fancy special effects, not a license to create a new Half-Life game. Garry’s Mod has no story.)
To put this “what Marc Laidlaw says goes” thing in perspective… let’s think of TV series and movie franchises. Take Star Trek. Originally there was Star Trek in the 60s, then the movies, then Next Generation, then Deep Space Nine, then Voyager, then Enterprise. The movies had different writers and directors, Next Generation had different writers and directors, Deep Space Nine… you get the picture? And ALL of it is canon. Some of the movies and episodes were great, while others were awful and an embarresment to everyone involved. (Romans in space?! Pregnant male crewmembers?!) But they are all canon. Gene Roddenberry - the original creator of Star Trek - hated the way the series became more cynical and the Federation developed problems in Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, but that doesn’t mean those series aren’t canon.
Saying that only the stuff that Marc Laidlaw likes is Half-Life canon is like saying that only the 1960s Star Trek that Gene Roddenberry worked on is canon, or that only optimistic/utopian episodes that fit his vision of the future are canon.
How do Race X not fit into the scheme of things? Race X are different aliens from a different universe, that detected the rift, investigated (kidnapping scientists etc) and then eventually invaded to steal our resources. Before Half-Life 2 you could have argued that having a second race of aliens from a different universe invade Earth sounds a bit contrived, but then Valve did exactly the same thing with the Combine in Half-Life 2.
And if you mean in terms of their physical appearence or design or something… well they are an alien race from another universe. It would have been dumb if they had the same physiology as the Xen aliens. How could Gearbox have made shock trooper/pit drone design more in keeping with Valve design? No-one knows have Valve would design yet another group of aliens from a totally different universe. The Combine certainly don’t look much like the Xen aliens.
I suppose the one thing Gearbox got “wrong” was the Gonome, the later stage of headcrab zombie evolution, since there are no Gonomes in Half-Life 2. But then again, Marc Laidlaw said that source of poison zombies was that a headcrab must have eaten something poisonous and gained that characteristic… it appears that headcrabs easily adapt and evolve according to their surroundings and pick up biological traits from other creatures, so it is reasonable for there to be different types of zombie in HL2 than in HL1 or in Opposing Force.
And as for AI… well the Shock Troopers had the same AI as the human grunts. Valve’s vortigaunts were just alien slaves forced into combat, and the alien grunts were big dumb brutes, Race X was supposed to be an intelligent enemy (kidnaps human scientists to study our weaknesses, remember?), so it made sense for them to use intelligent squad tactics.
So what about Race X doesn’t fit Valve’s design sensibility?
Also, you say the only thing Gearbox improved upon was boss fights, but they also did some great level design. Gearbox’s biodome labs are great - the idea of Black Mesa scientists creating miniture Xen-like environments is imaginative, and the labs and offices are like real places, with microscopes and computers and equipment and containers full of biological material, etc etc. Compare that to Questionable Ethics, which has a great ambience and great looking corridors, but makes no sense. Biological experiments on alien creatures being conducted in the same building as a laser lab and a prototype particle beam weapon laboratory. (Black Mesa is HUGE! They can’t be that short on space!) No entrances or exits apart from a rotating door in the lobby, meaning it would be impossible to get those containers full of alien grunts into or out of the building. Scientists have to walk through one lab full of alien specimens to get to another (if an emergency seals the doors to one lab, then the scientists in the other two labs are trapped as well!). Labs contain no equipment other than a big ceiling-mounted microwave that kills everything. No door seperating the laser/weapons lab upstairs from the tanks full of headcrabs on the ground floor. And the crazy surgical machine of doom.
And then there’s stuff like the Surface Tension warehouse full of missiles and explosives and a thousand tripmines… who the hell planted all those tripmines? WHY?! Did the soldiers want be blown up by a random headcrab?! If they wanted to blow everything up, why not just use a remote-detonated satchel charge rather than a thousand tripmines?! No reason, Valve just wanted to make a difficult jumping puzzle in which one false step instantly blows you up.
It seems to me that Gearbox did a much better job at creating a believable Black Mesa facility than Valve. And didn’t sacrifice common sense for the sake of jumping puzzles.
You’d have a point if Opposing Force was like a vacuuous summer blockbuster movie like Transformers, lapped up by the public but panned by the critics. Opposing Force was an award-winner, and many critics commented on how well it maintained Half-Life’s high standards, and the excellent level design. Opposing Force also provided closure to the HL1 story, by having the Black Ops/G-Man nuke the facility.
No-one was really talking about the topic anymore anyway, since it was effectively answered back on the first page. Xen has an atmosphere similar to Earth. If you reckon the Gearbox expansions are canon then that reinforces this, as while Gordon could theoretically be wearing a spacesuit helmet, Adrian Shephard/Barney Calhoun definately do not. And if you don’t accept the expansions as canon, then the fact that Xen aliens can breathe our atmosphere is evidence that Xen’s atmosphere is similar to Earth’s.
I was irked that when the Gearbox expansions were mentioned as evidence of Xen’s breathable atmosphere they were immediately dismissed as being non-canon, except for the nuke because Valve explicitely confirmed they wanted Black Mesa nuked. I first got Half-Life in the year 2000, and it was a pack that contained both Half-Life and Opposing Force. I bought them together, I installed them both at the same time, and I played them through one after another, and I enjoyed them both.
To me Opposing Force seemed like a proper continuation of Half-Life, not some unofficial knock-off or bit of fan fiction. Playing Half-Life and then Opposing Force was like watching Robocop and then Robocop 2. Sure, Robocop 2 isn’t as good as Robocop 1, but that doesn’t change the fact that Robocop 2 is a cool film, and the official sequel. Robocop 2 was done by a different director and a different writer, but that doesn’t stop it from being Robocop 2. Robocop 3 is a pretty rubbish film, it’s terrible compared to Robocop 1, but it’s still Robocop 3, it’s still canon.
The sensible attitude for an any argument of canonicity is that anything seen a game or movie or TV series episode is canon until a later game/movie/episode contradicts it. If something in Robocop 3 contradicts Robocop 2, well history has been rewritten and so the Robocop 3 version of things is canon. In old Star Trek they once went really fast, up to Warp 14 or something, but in Next Generation they changed it so warp speeds are exponential, and Warp 10 is an unreachable infinite speed. It became official Star Trek canon that Warp 10 is infinite, so the old Warp 14 thing is uncanon, a mistake, really it was just warp 9.5 or something.
Nothing in Half-Life 2 or the Episodes or Portal contradicts the existance of Race X. So Race is still canon. The fact that Race X isn’t in Half-Life 2 is not a contradiction, as there’s no good reason why Race X would appear in Half-Life 2. They were defeated in Opposing Force, and it would be suicide for them to attempt invasion again as Race X’s weapons are not that much more deadly than ours, and the Combine could beat them as easily as they beat us in the 7 Hour War.
I recall that a couple of years ago Gabe Newell was interviewed by some gaming magazine and the interviewer asked if we’d ever see Corporal Adrian Shephard again. Gabe replied that he “liked Shephard” and “We haven’t forgotten about him. We might see him again some day.”
That’s the head of Valve saying that it is possible that they may do something with the protagonist of Opposing Force. Not very compatible with the idea that Valve wants to pretend Opposing Force never happened.
Race X is a game device, it’s up to the fans to decided if and how they fit into the Half-Life story.
Back to Xen:
It’s another dimension, making anything plausible for the writers.
If Marc Laidlaw or Gabe Newell, or somebody at valve just blatantly stated that they didn’t consider Opposing Force canon at all, save for the nuke? Would it still say it’s canon? Or what if they somehow worked into Gman’s dialogue that Gordon is the only person he’s followed and put in stasis?
You’re not very good at reading people are you? Or do you just not get that they’re a business?
Obviously in that case Opposing Force would no longer be canon. It’s called a “retcon” - retroactive continuity, where the a new piece of work changes the established history so that previously established facts actually never happened.
The movies Superman 3 and Superman 4 used to be canon, but then in recent years Superman Returns was released, which was set after Superman 2. It retconned the franchse so that Superman 3 and Superman 4 never happened.
There was also Halloween H20, which was set twenty years after Halloween and Halloween 2, and retconned the franchise so that Halloween 4, 5 and 6 never happened.
This is not the situation with Half-Life 2 and Opposing Force, however, as there are no plot details of Half-Life 2 that contradict the events of Opposing Force. And that’s why people like Marc Laidlaw have said refused to explictely say that certain things are canon and certain things are not - the guys at Valve don’t use any Opposing Force plot elements, but the Opposing Force doesn’t contradict their story either, so there’s no need for them to start doing retcons.
So far the only retcons have been that “Dr Alex Kleiner” from the Half-Life instruction manual became Dr Issac Kleiner. And somehow Barney fought alongside you in Black Mesa, despite the fact that every security guard you fought alongside in HL1 could be killed.
All I wanted to know is what would be enough to shut you up. 
I’d shut up if whenever people mentioned something from a Gearbox expansion on these forums, someone else didn’t immediately say “Opposing Force is not canon.” I don’t mind people saying that they personally don’t consider the expansions to be a part of the storyline, but I object to people insisiting that it is an official fact.
Valve Software admits that they didn’t come up with the Gearbox storylines, and that’s why you don’t see Gearbox elements in Half-Life 2, but they have not said that the events of Opposing Force never happened. So if someone comments on something in the Half-Life universe and uses an event from Opposing Force as evidence, they should not be shouted down with cries of “There are no male assassins” or “There’s no such thing as a Powered Combat Vest” or “Xen’s atmosphere might not be breathable” or “We don’t know what happened to Black Mesa.”
fair enough.
Valve considers opposing force canon.
I forget the precise wording and origin of this quote, but Marc Laidlaw has been quoted as saying that the canon of any of the Gearbox expansions is entirely up in the air until it is confirmed or disconfirmed by Valve at a later date. He’s said himself several times that they’re not out to spoil the fans fun by setting everything about the Half-Life universe in stone. There are several points about the Half-Life story that spark interest and debate in their mystery, such as the Seven Hour War or how and where Eli lost his leg and they would be ruined if the mystery was gone.
It’s utterly useless to try and convince each other that one is canon or not because you’ll never get any solid answer. What you end up with is a lot of arguments that try and present the possibility of something as proof. The best you can hope for is to try and convince people out of trying to state that Gearbox expansions are canon or not, and rather convince them that they are in fact free to be interpreted. Of course, I don’t expect this to stop the debates/arguments, but hopefully people won’t get so damn into them.
Dunno dude, did you see the two-post long walls of text in the Half-Life film topic in the old forums?
You know who could wall-o-text very well that I haven’t seen in a while?
Mad scientist.
Where the fuck is that guy? Did his houseboat sink?
:facepalm:
Please do not talk about stuff you obviously know nothing about.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.