I think HL2 has some death animations, they’re just very subtle.
Oh, please no. Time travel doesn’t fit into the HL universe at all. And the whole reason Black Mesa was nuked was because Valve didn’t want to go back there.
If they were to go to a previously visited location it should be Xen, IMO.
We’re going to give a little visit to Xen on our way to the Combine homeworld to trash the place. And it’s going to be awesome.
Time travel already exists in HL to a certain degree. The G-Man is at least able to stop/manipulate time and to send Gordon into the future. Also I don’t see why time travel wouldn’t fit a universe with parallel dimensions, portals and teleportation.
Timey Lee Jones
Remember, you technically time traveled to the future in HL2. Nova Prospekt to Kleiners lab, from your perspective you left Nova Prospekt and arrived at Doc’s immediatly. Kleiner even explicitly states that you were missing for an entire week, giving you up for lost.So not only does it fit, it has already happened.
It will probably manifest as a ability of G-Man, specially since it looks like he can make 20 years seem like a night’s sleep.
Time travel would probably never work from a gameplay perspective, but I wouldn’t put it past being a major story event. HL2 was completely different from HL1. If the next game is made as an “Episode” ie. saving HL3 for later, then finishing off the HL2 arc by using the Borealis to undo the Resonance Cascade could be another turning point for Gordon’s journey. I don’t think Valve is ballsy enough to do that though, and will probably just stick with the world of HL2 rather than reinventing Half Life again. Which might be for the best, who knows.
Borealis = time travel
That’s the idea.
Come with me if you want to live.
I prefer Terminator and Half-Life as they are.
Separate.
Long ago in a distant land, we THE COMBINE, biomechanical masters of interdimentional travel, unleashed an UNSPEAKABLE EVIL.
But a foolish MIT graduate, wielding a regular crowbar, set forth to oppose us.
Before the final blow was struck, we TWOAH open a portal in time and flung him in to the future, WHERE OUR EVIL IS LAW.
Now the fool seeks to return to the past, and undo the future that is THE COMBINE.
I just had this strange idea that during Episode 3 as the ending to it all, you find the ship’s time traveling device. then you get sent back in time to pre-resonance cascade events & stop yourself from pushing the cart into the reactor with Alyx & Barney (still have no clue where he was during ep. 2). Find G-man before he finds out of the time loop paradox, force him to talk then deal with his buddies. Pretty much that’s it & it leaves you off with a screen of the trio just chilling with a nice six pack with gordon’s name on it. Barney owes him you know. 
I nominate myself for shittiest plot ending ever by the way
I wrote up a lengthy, stupid plot for Half-Life 3 this one time. The first section involved finding the Borealis. Vortigaunts kept the Combine off of it and managed to combine its technology with the Vortessence to defeat the Combine. Gordon and Alyx then got teleported to a semi-stable Combine-run city in North America, where they would find Adrian Shephard. There was then much bullshit involving the Air Exchange and fights between Advisors and portal-gun-wielding Vortigaunts, culminating in Gordon killing the G-Man and using his briefcase, the final weapon you receive, to fight off the Combine. However, the Combine have even stronger units, previously unseen, that can’t even be taken down by the briefcase. In the end, it turns out that all this time, Gordon wasn’t actually a scientist; he was actually Black Mesa’s mentally disabled hazardous environment worker, who was being told he was a scientist to keep him happy (Breen also referred to him as a scientist because Gordon wasn’t important enough prior to the Resonance Cascade to be a blip on Breen’s radar, and after the Resonance Cascade he only heard second-hand accounts from people who claimed that he was a scientist). After learning this, Gordon revisits the nuked remains of Black Mesa, where he must choose between leaving Alyx for dead on Xen but securing the Earth from the Combine permanently, or giving Alyx enough time to get back from Xen but allowing Combine to flood the Earth with no means of ever stopping them, with the assumption being that they just destroy everything. In either case he dies when the remains of the Resonance Cascade room collapse.
Does that cover all the “hurr durr this is what HL3 is going to be” cliches? Because I swear, when I wrote it up a year or so ago, I thought it was all brilliant, but looking back, it seems to be practically the archetype for HL3-prediction stupidity.
I’m going to assert that, at the end of Episode 1, Barney traveled out of City 17 on the train and then, after the destruction of the citadel and the subsequent portal storm, had to abandon the train and set out on foot. Then he got in contact with Kleiner and Eli and they told him that he should go to the Arctic base where they found the Borealis (having just cracked the code Alyx had been carrying and found Mossman’s recording). That way, he can show up again when Gordon gets to the Borealis.
If they’re going to institute time travel at all (some evidence of that is Gordon’s 20 year stasis, the slow Combine teleport, Chell’s “99999999…” stasis, and Cave Johnson’s “trace amounts of time travel” quote), I think Gordon would travel into either the future…or, if they’re going to have backwards time travel, into the past sufficiently so that you don’t have to deal with gameplay elements such as finding another Gordon running through Black Mesa… perhaps travel to before the Combine enslaved the Xenian creatures and stop the Combine (or perhaps even G-man’s employers) once and for all. Who knows?
“But danielsangeo,” you proclaim, because that’s how you speak, right? “Wouldn’t that create a time paradox?” Not if you go the multiverse/multiple timelines route. You are now a person out of time (like the G-Man?) and the Gordon Freeman in the new timeline analyzes the test sample and nothing happens except for some unexpected readings and you’re left with unrequited (and rather disturbing) love over the now-toddler Alyx Vance. :retard:
Sounds like Prince of Persia more than Half-Life
Says Cave Johnson ;D
Touché.
I wouldn’t call that time travel though, unless cryostasis is time travel too (or indeed just living at all). Stretching or contracting pieces of time in relation to others is a fairly well established area of science (e.g. near light speed travel or high gravity makes time slow down for you). Going back in time is a whole different ballpark, and if they weren’t extremely careful would most likely just turn the whole storyline into an incoherent mess. Not to mention Kleiner and Eli’s dialogue about the Borealis doesn’t suggest anything to do with time travel - if anything it seems more like some form of teleportation, which is a running theme of the series.
The only thing worse than going back in time to stop the Resonance Cascade would be if Gordon woke up and it was all a dream, IMO.
It is still time travel. Probably just worked as a 4th dimensional wormhole of sorts. Besides, I’m pretty sure science said that traveling back in time is impossible (or it happens in black holes, but fuck that).
Also the G-Man has pretty much demonstrated a very ample variety of skills such as stopping time, showing you glimpses of the past and the future and also a form of teleportation. So he probably has skills that affect other dimensions as well. Makes you wonder how he really looks like.
And no, the only thing worse than traveling back in time and stopping the resonance cascade would be that the G-Man is gordans father or gordans future self. By far the stupidest noob theories.
My theory (I’ve mentioned before) is that there’s no way we’re going right to the Arctic. The advisers themselves are at White Forest at the end of EP2, and I’d bet anything that they brought some more backup- probably all they could get. So there will be some fighting at WF. My guess is that Gordon will wake up a minute later, maybe in another room. Barney, Alyx, Kliner, and Magnusson are there. Everyone’s preparing to leave; the plan is to meet up at a small rebel base further up north we haven’t seen yet. A short conversation will take place about that, and Barney + the doctors will separate from you and Alyx. The northern base will be what Black Mesa East was to HL2, but the trip will be shorter.
Anyone who expects HL3 to get to the Arctic quickly is mistaken. At least the first two or three chapters will involve getting away from WF to a safer location. Then they will journey to the Arctic and see the Borealis. I can only hope HL3 will be a long game. The majority of the game can’t be the journey to the arctic, but the journey can’t be really short. It should take an hour, maybe.
Once we get to the Borealis, who knows what. That’s the event horizon when it comes to predictions. We just don’t know enough- maybe Valve still doesn’t know themselves (I hope they do)! Maybe we’ll get a third new innovative weapon from the Borealis alongside the unknown powerful AS technology. It won’t be the ASHPD; Aperture must have made more than one kind of handheld device in their gigantic underground facility.
All the theories I see about HL3 are so quick to jump right to Arctic territory. Why? Consider all the time in HL you spend just getting from place to place. We’ll see such travel in HL3, and some important things are bound to happen along the way.
As for things like the Combine homeworld, I’m hesitant to say it’s going to happen in HL3- maybe we’ll get there, but sneaking around the homeworld of a huge evil multidimensional empire with whole planets full of resources and advanced technology stolen from who-knows-how-many races is a bit harder than infiltrating just one Citadel.
Maybe at the end of the game Gordon can steal a gigantic can of alien insecticide to get rid of the Xen wildlife on Earth. It would be huge and oversized, like the ASPQTD, and would hold way more on the inside than outside due to Secret Combine Space Warping Janitorial Technology (SCSWJT). That will be the last chapter: at the end we get to go around effortlessly cleaning up the head-crabs, antlions, etc. Left click to spray, right click to squirt. 
I for one am beginning to hope (and believe) that there’s going to be a time skip between HL2E2 and HL3 comparable to the one between HL1 and HL2.
Only time travel in the most basic sense, such that we’re all time travelling. I don’t think it’s an indicator of any other forms of time travel appearing in the series. Like I said, it’s more along the lines of cryostasis.
Also, I think the G-Man’s skills are more to do with perception than the physical manipulation of dimensions - he doesn’t literally stop time, but changes Gordon’s perception of it, and the glimpses of the various places that he gives Gordon are dream-like manipulations of his senses. This would be a lot more efficient than actually taking him to those places, and the G-Man seems like an efficient guy.
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.
