One of the more underrated parts of HL is the 7 Hour War, it would be absolutely awesome if the BM Team decided it as their next adventure!
I think the BM team will be glad of being finished with this behemoth of a project and I don’t think they would embark on the adventure of creating another mod, at least not for the foreseeable future.
Just my 2 cents.
That moment when you see a thread about something that would be really cool and then you go into the thread to find that OP contains one sentence exclaiming that the topic of said thread would be really cool.
That was pretty much exactly what I did.
If I knew what I was doing, I would try to make a mod about that. I think it’d be a fun ass game. Or if valve did it, tho I’m sure that wouldn’t be a good idea.
I thought the question mark made it obvious that it would just be one of these types of threads.
Anyway it’s not like nobodies tried it before.
That sounds like an interesting idea, but it would probably require an incredible amount of work. It took the Black Mesa team many years to create their game, and it still isn’t complete. I expect that for a really good game about the Seven-Hour War, you would need to have voice actors along with several developers working in certain areas, such as mapping, texturing, etc. If developers like the Black Mesa team were to work on such a project, so long as you could develop the story, I have little doubt that you’d end up with a high-quality game. Another thing that makes me think about… would the game be designed to be about seven hours long?
And it would take about seven years to finish.
I’ve actually spent a fair amount of time speculating about what such a video game might involve. The only real idea I had was the PC being some civilian (probably ex-military to justify gun skills) who gets caught in a city that has a citadel dropped on it. Then you have to escape because the combine are cannibalizing the city or murdering everyone or something, and maybe you go sneak off to some remote mountain bunker and help form the beginnings of the resistance.
Of course, any idiot can come up with ideas.
QED. :retard:
that sounds about right
While we are on the topic of idiots coming up with ideas, I always thought it would be cool if there was a game set some time after the seven hours war. I thought it would be cool to explore the combine from a less antagonistic angle, and I think of a game set in some more rural area, perhaps a small town. The combine have enforced their world order in the giant city centers, and set up defenses around them to combat the Xen aliens, but outside of the cities are still people living, free of combine control, but fully exposed to the new alien threat presented by the inter-dimensional portals. It would be a free roam game similar to skyrim/fallout/far cry, only much darker and a heavier emphasis put on survival and environment rather than questing. Because all rebel activity at this point has been crushed, the combine would occasionally roll through on combine business and be neutral towards the player and other civilians/scavengers inhabiting this near-ghost town, possibly even allowing minor interaction with them. Not to say that the Combine would be good by any stretch, more-so that they just didn’t care about the people outside the major centers in the slightest, because they knew they were bound to die out eventually.
This would really open up avenues to explore the series from an entirely different angle, while still staying completely grounded in well established Half Life lore. (EDIT: Except for the part where I decided the combine DON’T round up and enslave every last human being 
)
That’s a pretty interesting idea. You’d basically play as the guys along the coast in Highway 17 and in the White Forest.
But, yeah, it’s heavily implied that the combine make a point of rounding everyone up into the cities, so it might not really /work/ from an IC perspective. Maybe if the Combine were outright hostile, and you had to evade patrols and keep your bases hidden while you scrounge up supplies and launch raids…
Now I’ve got the idea in my head of bases that are, instead of magic wanted-level-clearing safe zones, useful but vulnerable secret bases that the combine will attack and eventually destroy if you accidentally lead them to them.
Well I was thinking about Black Mesa East somewhat. Breen states that they had already been aware of the resistance there, the only reason the combine really went in was because Freeman started riling up the entire police force and slaughtered like a hundred people along the way.
I figure that if the combine sent in a mass invasion force, locked down the major cities, they would only round up enough people to fill said cities with workers and whatever else they needed there. If they crushed earth’s defenses in seven hours, I doubt they could care any less about little pockets of humanity scavenging in the wilds. I can see resource prospecting occasionally coming through, but there would be no need to destroy “wild people”. They would pose absolutely no threat to the combine, though the combine could make use of them occasionally, EG: we don’t feel like wasting soldiers on this deathtrap, you clear that out and here’s some meager reward and/or we won’t just slaughter you right now.
That would be a neat twist on your typical “questing”. Imagine a patrol rolls into your little patch of hell and you have the misfortune of being spotted. One of the soldiers summons you and you have two choices, run away and get shot to death, or go over and probably get sent on some dangerous mission that the combine don’t feel like doing themselves, or maybe they just get a kick out of sending scavenging humans to their deaths. Maybe sometimes these Combine will give you some gear to complete this mission/quest, and you can keep it if you survive.
Could also go for the light-vs-dark thing that some games do and you can choose between the rebels and the Combine as your starting point. You could be a Combine soldier and go against those pathetic resistance members, go on raids of outposts, things like that. 
A game where you get to play as the Combine could be very interesting. It sucks that Combine Destiny 2 seems to have died - the last Twitter update was 2 years ago.
I like your ideas there, Rot. It might be cool if it let you also see firsthand the gradual encroachment of Xenian wildlife on Earth’s, with things like Antlions.
Awesome topic for a first post, As much as I would love to see a game be made about it, it would be irrelevant. When the Combine invaded it was initiated by the combine utilizing the portal storms to thrust the mile plus tall citadels directly into the earth in major city’s. Imagine if you can, a tower over a mile tall randomly falling out of the sky into the earth in the center of NYC faster than the speed of sound, deploying its support cables to keep it upright, destroying everything near it from the impact, skyscrapers toppling immediately from the force in wake of a towering supreme structure, the sight of that alone would drop your jaw. Imagine how much dust would be kicked up into the air. This would happen almost immediately in every single major city on earth all at once.
The combine have the ability to travel from universe to universe, they came to earth after the black mesa incident out of curiosity because of the portal storms. The combine however lack the ability to travel within the same universe with the technology they have, the scientist at black mesa created technology to travel within our own universe, for example from earth to Jupiter and can do it with far less energy than the combine use to travel, the combine desperately need this technology to truly be able to conquer entire universes, even at the speed of light, a universe cannot be conquered in a respectable amount of time, the ability to travel to and fro from galaxy to galaxy in mere seconds is a requirement. The combine discovered that humans on earth have technology they need yet have failed to find it, Its likely the G-man plays a large roll in this as his “employers” have him activate Gordan Freeman at a prefect time, like he says “The wrong man in the right place can make all the difference in the world.” Whoever these Employers are, it seems they are rivals of the combine and are attempting to maintain the balance of power in not (the) but (thee) universes that the combine have influence over if not more. The G-man activated Freeman 10 years down the line for a reason. A premeditated reason.
After the Citadels have all simultaneously performed a shock and all strike on earth they would open up like they do in HL2 when Freeman is discovered to be alive. Discharging all units, many of them you probably never see in the HL series. The combine themselves are a race that has met the peak of its evolutionary possibility, as seen in HL2 episode 2 they have full physic and most likely telepathic powers, a single combine adviser can crush tall building with only its mind and likely would be used. This would be a war with no fronts, but much rather like watching a virus spread, nothing would stop it. No amount of training would solve a combine invasion, not even nukes, because the citadels would be established in all major cities and it would be suicide. In the end of HL2 you can look into the portal and see a handful of citadels in the combine’s home planet so its safe to assume they have alot of them. The 7 hour was was only 7 hours long because humans were foolish enough to attempt to battle something they did not understand and where confused and shocked, in reality the war was over immediately.
That’s possibly very true. However, for the sake of the game, I’m pretty sure the best route would be to have it START (kinda like a prologue) during the 7 hour war. Here, it’s teach you such things as a tutorial would cover. Then, the main game would be post 7 hours, as there are 20 years in between the war and HL2.
That would make a good, free-roam game imo. Like a Fallout game, in the HL universe, with some construction to it (I.e building your base and such).
On a quick side note, wouldn’t a mile long, many thousands of tons long metal tower destroy an entire city? Or at least a much larger radius?
I think it would be epic just way to short, but it would be awesome to explore the environment, hide and evaluate the invading forces etc. On note of the citadel yes it would, however in HL2 the Citadels are within clear view in the middle of city 17, but it would be anticlimactic for the game to have miles of rubble to scourge threw before reaching it, but also in HL2 episode 1 on the first lvl you can tell without a doubt that it crashed into the earth and was not built. In fact for a tower over a mile tall to stand you would need to smash it into the earth far beyond the speed of sound, it would of been of a interstellar origin beyond our ability to understand if not at the speed of light as its most likely the combines primary means of travel in a universe.
Accident ditto quote with edit.
I’ve actually been thinking about this since the thread came up, and I realized that what Pyro and (rot) were discussing in regards to “wild people” is in fact corroborated by Ravenholm and St. Olga from lost coast. There are still settlements of people around outside of the Combine-controlled “urban centers”, and the Combine seem to tend to ignore them for the most part, rolling through from time to time to take prisoners or maybe potshots at any troublemakers, but otherwise leaving them alone until they get around to installing artillery nearby to shell the crap out of the town with headcrabs.
Unless the town is a rebel hideout, it seems to generally take up to 20 years to do so.