Why does the dyson sphere even matter?

Why does the dyson sphere even matter?

Even if the combine were a medieval civilization, what is one single science ship slamming onto the planet going to do?

The sticky is nothing more than a fanfic by some valve dev.

You mean fanfiction from the former writer of the Half-Life series.

nice try gabriel newberg

>former
>o
>r
>m
>e
>r

...

It was meant to throw a wrench in their plans at the very least since, if they take down what they believe to be the staging area of their invasions, they'll hopefully set them back for a while. Seeing the Dyson sphere just shows that what they're doing isn't going to do shit because they have a fucking Dyson sphere.

It was basically a super nuke
And it did jack shit

well theres no current so he'll have to do

>I caught a cosmic view of a brilliantly glittering Dyson sphere. The vastness of the Combine’s power, the futility of our struggle, blossomed briefly in my awareness. I saw everything. Mainly I saw how the Borealis, our most powerful weapon, would register as less than a fizzling matchhead as it blew itself apart. And what remained of me would be even less than that.

k i n o

Any species that can build a dyson sphere would be eons ahead of humanity
The combine are essentially literal gods to us
They literally enslaved multiple races to enslave us

he wrote the entire half life series. as far as i'm concerned whatever he says is canon until valve releases episode 3, which wont happen.

If laidlaw wrote a full novelisation of the series I would buy the fuck outta it

I know people are treating this as the end of HL, but really, it's just an employee that doesn't even work there anymore. I mean, there's no chance of them making anything anyways since skins are more profitable apparently, but to take this as the final confirmation is a fucking joke. He doesn't own the rights to HL; he has no say on the ending since he doesn't even fucking work there anymore.

>taking some hacks fanfic as canon
He's not an authority at valve. If they order them to work on hl3, hl3 will happen.

>authority at valve
dont really care, he wrote the story.
>If they order them to work on hl3, hl3 will happen
lol you dont understand valve do you buddy, do some research. half life 3 is not coming out.

The fact that they managed to create an artificial construct that encompasses an entire star shows how technologically advanced they are and there's no way humans can even stand a chance against their full might.

it'd be amazing

imagine the buildup, arming the Borealis and planning to take down the Combine's base of operations through space/time travel

and then you go through with it and after the point of no return you shift into existence next to a humongous dyson sphere surrounding a giant fucking star

and it does nothing

If Adam West came out and wrote a fanfic about Batman dying, it's not canon.

...

adam west wrote batman? thats really interesting because I thought bill finger did.
try harder

>comparing an actor to the lead writer
>mfw I will never be this retarded

Adam West is Batman, nigger.

>game is making good progress
>clear signs that it will see the light of day
>"now would be a good time to publish the plot of it to a blog"

do you know how dumb you are

Yeah, but we also haven't been waiting for news on Batman's status for the last 10 fucking years, you moron.

so marc laidlaw is gordan freeman? wow your stupidity is outstanding.

I love your wit

idk the idea that the combine are truly invincible and the player loses in the end is unconventional and a neat twist

>the first person to pick up the torch is the undisputed authority on the subject

>companies make games, not people
>the person who wrote literally all of the half-life story heretofore is irrelevant
my god, I can feel the ideology

what is this?

You think Gabe will release a press conference explaining what happened? I'd figure Valve's higher uppers are having an emergency meeting right now if Laidlaw leaked this without permission

background for the story of HL3, if it was gonna be made

>combine are are all-powerful and invincible enslaving races left and right and have a Dyson sphere
>initial occupation force is completely cut off when a ragtag grouo of resistance fighters (who they have been unable to quash in 20 years despite defeating Earths combined military forces in 7 hours) blow up their big tower
Defend this

>>game is making good progress
>>clear signs that it will see the light of day
hahahahahahahahahaaha

Has anyone read his novels? Are they as good as breengrub?

How much money do you get from the government? Living with autism must be hard.

I think if Gabe gave 2 shits about HL fans he wouldn't have said nothing for 10 years and let the NDA expire. He'll continue sitting on his throne of burgers doing whatever the fuck he does with his billions of dollars.

I'm not sure you read my post right? I didn't say shit about it seeing the light of day dude. Marc flat out doesn't work for Valve, so I don't understand why people take his word for the final verdict.

They'll probably just ignore it or deflect by saying there is a VR game coming out in the hl universe.

Is it by Marc, or some random douche?

If it wasn't for the Dyson sphere, you wouldn't know that crashing Borealis is pointless.

Its not supposed to be realistic. The Combine are a metaphor for Valve and the Dyson sphere is Steam. Gordon's futility mirrors how little Valve cares about making HL3

earth to the combine is probably just some rusty attic they do their diy projects in when bored

"Invincible" is perhaps taking it a bit far. I choose to read it more that they just vastly, WILDLY underestimated just how mind-bogglingly powerful and star-spanning the Combine empire truly was and even all the work they put into the Borealis is nothing more than a spitball in terms of effectiveness.

G-man and hell even the Vorg's have and continue to fight against the Combine, the end of HL2:E3 is just a stern and realistic reminder that nothing you did the past two games truly harmed them and the future holds nothing but an endless fight against an all-powerful enemy.

So, tl;dr, bleak but not hopeless.

Unconfirmed, but 99% it's by Marc since it fits perfectly with the story he just released where Breen gets transplanted into one of the Grub beings.

I dont really think gaben will give a shit, their good friends. They might have spoken about it privately but he wont confirm or deny shit like he usually does and will continue to milk multiplayer cow. It's a small trinket for us to let us know its never coming out.

They are probably feeling relieved that people can finally let Half Life 3 go, and will just focus on their shitty card game.

$200 a week. Then anywhere from $0-$25 a day from shilling. I literally get to shitpost all day.

>their

Companies do make games user; you think this one motherfucker made the whole game? At the end of the day it's still a media product for people to buy. Moreover, he's still just the writer. Movies have scriptwriters come and go on the same material, why should games be any different?

That was the fucking joke.

Alyx was so blindsighted by "my daddy" that she wasted humanity' s only chance to fight the combine.

you're retarded

Remember when everyone praised Valves "do what you want" business structure

Now its just evolved into a hat factory with no passion or ambition, living off Steam money.

The creativity has been killed

So have the resistance really lost? The Bourealis being destroyed means that the combine can't get access to the bootstrap device at least

>2019
>Half-Life VR
>it's just the first game, still goldsrc graphics

He actually did confirm it was him on his old twitter account at one point.

ITT: retards don't realize that story for EP3 was already done and locked in - by Laindlaw - and at the time when Laindlaw was still at Valve, i.e. at the time when EP3 was still in production.

There is no real reason to question that the content of Epistle 3 is what the game's plot was actually going to be.

Also shows that Alyx was a fucking retard and so was her dad, """"""too dangerous"""""" when facing a super civilization who plan to just use and dispose of you. The ONLY true, actual advantage humanity had was superior teleport technology. If the Resistance had used it, then at the least they could have fucked right off the planet and set up space habitats really easily, and that probably would have been good enough. The Combine wanted Earth for its resources, they didn't actually give a shit about humanity itself or think much of it. If Humanity moved into stealthed space habs they'd be fine, and with portal tech it'd actually be totally feasible. MAYBE someday humanity could actually hit the Singularity and get to the point of either fighting the Combine or being good enough to simply join on, but they'd need a development platform first and portal tech offered that.

God damn those two were stupid. Breen had a point given what he knew, but I bet given access to portal tech he could have been convinced to take an alternate path by virtue of seeing that humanity actually had a chance. He just genuinely thought/knew it didn't. Mossman was 100% right.

Hey Gabe, the knife making its way through your back fat will get you eventually

You were fighting their shitty slave army all along

And the only reason they go in the attic in the first place is because they heard a weird noise, saw the hatch was open, and heard there might be cool portal tech in it

>It was made years ago
Okay so that's probably real. Also has anyone tried to rig that grub skin? to a model

>posting about things you don't know about

Marc had been at Valve since the beginning. He was the authority as far as the story went. He'd work with the developers and they'd find a balance between what could plausibly be done with a game and the story.

Practically everything we know about the franchise comes from his writing and his feedback over the years to questions on the steam forums.

And they won't tell him to do shit because he quit 18 months ago. Valve kept delaying work on the project and at some point in 2016 scrapped it altogether. Valve wasn't the company he had grown with anymore and decided it was time to go.

Play Stellaris.

>50+ planet empire
>notice some single-planet empire on the fringe of one of your sectors
>roll over it in a month
>assign it to the sector and go back to focusing on important things
>governor of that sector is low-level and strapped for resources
>doesn't build enough guards
>3 years in, planet rebels
>long exhale, send another small fleet to roll over it again

When you are stretched thin and need to focus your efforts, it is entirely possible for brief lapses in control. Ultimately pointless and it just forces the ruler to re-allocate some resources to bring things back under control, but even in modern society this happens. Normal weaponless plebs light shit on fire, riot, and start throwing bricks. The resistance in the game thinks they're actually making progress, but the ending shows they're just being irritating shits to a force they currently cannot beat.

So was Alyx programmed by the G-man during childhood, or just retarded?

yes

It's symbolic to how vast their empire is and how advanced they are compared to us. Our advantage in portal technology and the advantage is possibly posed over the combine is completely eclipses by their power. The point was to keep the technology away from the combine, it's even more crucial because the ship was capable of going through time as well. It's just something nobody should have at their disposal.

Typical character degradation.

You get a character who seems cool, hard and dedicated, but when true adversity or challenges strike, they crumble instead of rise. "Muh daddy" basically broke her and shifted her from a dedicated fighter to just a blind vengeance-seeker.

Yep.

I refuse to believe that they'd be stupid enough to make a VR HL game, everyone will go fucking berserk

>blog is the plot for Episode 3
>Episode 3 got cancelled
>Half Life 3 did not
jesus, you faggots already forgot the Half-Life 2 beta which had a completely different story than the release?
this is what Valve does, writing a story/game then not being satisfyed and starting over again.
tl;dr HL3 is still in the making.

>acquire vessel capable of time travel
>don't use it to travel back to Black Mesa in 1998 and prevent the resonance cascade

>combine are are all-powerful and invincible enslaving races left and right and have a Dyson sphere
They're not "all-powerful and invincible" dumbass, only from a human perspective. A dyson sphere is a megastructure almost beyond comprehension for us but it's still just one around one star, there may well be other ancient civilizations of similar magnitude. The Combine has bigger fish to fry, Earth is literally irrelevant except as a standard mining/preventative operation. The Combine is like a big government bureaucracy in the true, scary sense: it looks slow moving, people mock it. But it has vast power behind it, and it just goes. And goes. And goes. And goes. It never forgets, it outlasts everything, it can focus on a million things at once, and it can think very long term.

>>initial occupation force
Initial force came in, crushed Earth, and then promptly left. The "occupation force" is actually mostly humans, specifically augmented/altered humans that Breen is trying to position as a possible future part of the overall Combine. That's it. In fact that's a core point of the whole thing, that you never ever see more then a minimal garrison and some humans equipped with alien tech.

>>blow up their big tower
Combine uses portals that take tons of power/infrastructure. Which they've got, they've got a dyson sphere. They never bothered doing anything major on Earth because it's just a mining operation. And if the local enforcers fail they don't really care either, that just means they're unworthy. Combine already extracted a lot of what they came for.

>Defend this
Pay attention when you play the game and try thinking a bit you dribbling retard.

People liked Resident Evil 7 though.

Thanks for confirming. The
>Alyx had not seen the cryptical schoolmarm (no male equivalent) since childhood, but she recognized him instantly. “Come along with me now, we’ve places to do and things to be,” said the G-Man, and Alyx acquiesced.
bit had me confused as to their relationship.

They didn't have complete control over where/when the Borealis was connected to.

No, but actually think about her childhood. She was a low level guerrilla who grew up in the years after humanity had crumbled, she didn't go to MIT or something, and she very much wasn't and never displayed nor could be expected to display high level strategic thinking. Her Dad was a bad influence in that regard too, too old and too blinded by previous failures, his losses and misconceptions to take a larger view or consider how to turn things around in out-of-the-box ways. Really it had all the classic signs of path dependency and problems when a techbase evaporates and you're left with just a small few maintaining knowledge.

Why is everyone saying this is a 'bad' ending? First it was for Ep 3/HL3 and clearly not meant ot be the 'last' game.

Guerilla warfare and terrorism are hard to combat but there's no real threat towards the combine anyways since it's just one small tower plus with the knowledge of how futile their resistance is it'll most likely fizzle out within their generation

>but 99% it's by Marc since it fits perfectly with the story he just released where Breen gets transplanted into one of the Grub beings.
We've know that since episode 1 though

The Half Life franchise literally ends Gordon realizing that there's not fucking way he'll ever beat the Combine

>inb4 new game in Half-Life universe in next 5 years

No?

That's how Ep3 would have ended. Or HL3 which it probably mutated into. It more than likely wouldn't have been the last game.

To be precise it would have taken a lot more work and research to perfect the technology and start deploying it. It's not clear time travel like that would have the effect they wanted anyway, might just result in a universe split for example (many worlds hypothesis).

But yeah, actually taking the tech and using it would have been by far the smart move. No reason in that case they even had to stick with one thing, they had breathing room. With portal tech of that level they could finish clearing the Earth of remaining Combine forces, and then simultaneously:
- Work on building up Earth while isolated
- Work on moving a self-reproducing contingent of humanity OFF of Earth
- Work on temporal/spatial weapons
- Work on achieving singularity
- Use space/time tech to try to gather intel on Combine (they would have found out about the Dyson Sphere and scale at this point)
THEN after all that and having lots of options sure, with backup plans and careful considerations maybe consider something like time change. But come on.

It's a bad ending, not a poor ending. Bad as in it's bad for the characters - all was futile and pointless, everyone died, and it went full existential horror at the end.

Which is a good ending. There's no reason he should be able to.

Which is realistic.
No, the right man in the wrong can't stop a multiversal empire that annihilated Earth's combined military in seven hours.

Not arguments. If Earth was so worthless and only useful for mining what's up with all the studies being done on the portal technology. Why keep any human alive or at least with free will at all if they're just there to gather resources and build their slave army

>It more than likely wouldn't have been the last game.

But as it stands, Episode 3 is the absolute end of the series

Is it bad that I don't care about half life. I didn't play the games till I got the Orange Box for cheap in like 2008 (didn't really have a functional game worthy PC till then either) and at that point I bought it for Portal and TF2. Eventually installed and tried HL2 and went back to 1, the games were, decent at best. It just didn't grab me. There were some neat ideas but I just really didn't understand the appeal. I understand the significance of Gaben and Steam and the Source engine and all that jazz but looking at the games just from the perspective of "were they good" they were just alright to me. I really think I missed something but I don't know. There's just nothing appealing to me about a protag whos only face shot we see is on the gamebox

Because it's a 'you can't win' scenario. Just try to imagine how much more advanced a civilization has to be to create a dyson sphere. All the engineering, materials and computational power required to build and maintain it is beyond comprehension.
What we are are bacteria cultivating on a piece of bread compared to the combine. The peak of human engineering was destroyed by being used as a suicide bomb instead of being researched further. And to top it with a cherry, the bomb was but a ripple in the water of the ocean

>it went full existential horror at the end.
Not really. We don't know what the hell Alyx and Gman have planned. Gordon's still alive and he's got the vortigaunts by his side.

>franchise
It's in the G-mans best interests that he and his employers stay more powerful than the Combine. We see already his next lackey to go against them is Alyx.

Yeah, Combine can literally just wait it out. Probably (based on Breen's words) they also would have simply seen it as a basic test for Breen and his augmented humanity. This was a simple trainer wheels chance for him to show them humanity could have some value beyond harvesting.

But whether that worked or not, with its tech and industrial base destroyed and humanity reduced to a few hidden, isolated cells based around those old enough to exist pre-invasion, degradation of knowledge was inevitable. Once all the Black Mesa folks died off in another few decades of old age if nothing else, the next gen wouldn't have or be able to maintain the same level of education/training. Over the generations (well, they'd likely all die off anyway due to all useful resources being extracted) with no escape or options it'd be the slow, cold death and reversion to primitiveness. Combine would take a view over centuries and millennia, not years.

It would just be a glorified tech demo like the lab. Half life in name only.

>Earth is literally irrelevant except as a standard mining/preventative operation.
>They never bothered doing anything major on Earth because it's just a mining operation.
A big part of Half-Life 2 is the fact that the Combine have mastered interdimensional tunneling, but not local teleportation, which humans have mastered. The Combine's only local teleporter was destroyed when Gordon and Alyx fled Nova Prospekt.

As it stands episode 2 is the absolute end of the series, episode 3 is not 'canon' it's about as close to canon as we'll get, but that's not canon.

You don't understand how massive Dyson sphere is. Even if this ship could destroy an entire planet size of Jupiter, it still would be a small nuance for the sphere, akin to mosquito bite, probably even less.

I kind of hoped Episode 3 would've finished the Combine arc and then HL3 hypothetically would've moved onto something else.
I guess Laidlaw's ending implies Gordon probably would've been working with the Vorts in HL3.

>episode 3 is not 'canon'
Eat shit, Gabe, you fat fucking jew

Shut the fuck up Gabe.