Valve should add him with a less than 15 seconds screen time which he gets blown to bits just to make sure no one talks about how he could survive a regular “death” like ghost from CODMW2
Or make a completely random characters talking about completely random things as it would still be fine because half life fans would find meaning in it themselves.
While the idea of a guard man named Barney existed before Blue Shift (which is also true for Gina Cross) Blue Shift isn’t interwoven in any recognizable way with Half-Life 2.
The satisfaction of him getting killed off for good would be pretty awesome
Subject: B. Calhoun.
For HL2, they decided that, at the very least, the Barney banging on the door at the beginning of Inbound is indeed the Barney, and that his last name is Calhoun.
So basically Gearbox made a couple of awesome characters and Valve are using them.
Not really, Gearbox simply gave full names to two characters that were already in HL1 and Valve only ended up using Barney’s full name on HL2, everything else about him is still Valve’s creation.
I dont get what people see in him
i really liked the original hl because i wasnt just some soldier shooting at whatever i saw
no it was a scientist who was doing that
Honestly, if I’m shooting my way through an alien infested underground lab, I’ll take military training over a knowledge of quantum physics any day.
because we are risking our golden balls while sitting in front of that computing devices of ours, arent we
I wouldn’t mind a Half Life 2: Opposing Force. Shepard added more to the Half Life Universe then a bunch of jumping puzzles. Now, I know Gordon is totally awesome and would beat Shepard in a fight, but that doesn’t mean Shepard can’t have the title of vice butt-kicker. They don’t have to tie it in completely, because that would be hard, but I think that it could make for an interesting plot twist.
Why do people equate Gearbox’s good level design in Opposing Forces with Shepard being a character worth revisiting?
Shepard didn’t add anything, he was just another silent and even faceless character, which gives him even less of a personality than Gordon.
but… but…
he was a soldja!
pro tier 1 operator with a wrench
Give him HEV suit arms
and you couldn’t tell the difference
You completely miss the point I was making.
The idea of a guard man named Barney existed to some degree already in the original Half-Life game and probably goes back even further in time to the very first drafts for characters and story arcs. But that’s not what’s of interest.
From a designer’s point of view the addons with regards to content are so loosely connected to Half-Life 2 that it seems like the developers at Valve don’t care much at all of what happened in the extensions of Half-Life 1. Now I understand that there was never a complete master plan for the Half-Life universe. Only a few concretes ideas for characters, locations and key elements existed. The rest of the universe remained in a draft state. Vague ideas existed but none of these were formulated and concretised as long as you are not even close to encounting them at your current stage of development. In design it’s sometimes better just to know the direction your heading to and make decisions about which path you’re going take just before you are about to encounter them. This way maximum freedom and creativity is given to the developers, spontaneous ideas can be included into the product and much more important fundamental design flaws (sc. big bangs) are less likely to appear (which actually pose a key problem in ‘master plans’). In this sense also the addons were developed. The Gearbox developers were given some info on key story (eg. Shepard is soldier, Black Mesa is about to get nuked, Shepard gets detained) elements to be included and the rest was pretty much up for themselves to be created. And that’s exactly the sad part. The story arcs and characters which were actually done by Gearbox self have no further influence or representation in Half-Life 2 or any of the episodes.
thats going below my name. i laughed so very hard at that.
I understand your point. It does work better for Valve with the expansions being non-canon. I’m not arguing with you on that.
They did pull two significant points out of them to use as canon, though. Making the point that the name Barney has been around before Half-Life has nothing to do with anything in this thread.
seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeriously
“canon” is a non-issue for valve
the only people even talking about canon are the ocd fans
The same can be said of Adrian.
I’m thinking production for a game with Shepard. When Half-Life 2 was in production, Valve tried their absolute hardest to keep the poject a secret. Except for a few leaks, I’d say it was 
Anyways, what I’m saying is that they may be doing the same thing here. Shepard reached popularity they didn’t expect and now they could be working on a project that’d be centered around him or include him. Not saying it could be Half-Life 3 or Episode 3, but you never know.