Before Valve began to associate with Steam, the company made revolutionary games that left a huge mark on the entire industry. Half-Life, of course, thundered most of all: we already talked about the development of the first, it was the turn of the sequel, whose metamorphoses during creation were much cooler than those of its predecessor.
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Sprint preparation
1/1 Gabe Newell in 1999
Development of Half-Life 2 started in 1999, six months after the release of the original game. The team has traditionally taken up two areas at once: the development of the plot and the creation of the engine. This time, Valve decided not to trivialize and instead of reworking the finished one, it focused on its own completely, with an emphasis on physics and realistic facial animation.
From the very first days, the project was, to put it mildly, ambitious. Valve conceived Half-Life 2 as nothing less than the best game in history. The Cabal principle used in the development of the first part is back – however, due to the scale of the game, it was necessary to make changes to the previously working scheme. When the first Half-Life was created, small groups were formed within the team, dealing with game documentation, according to which the game was later created. And if earlier it worked without any particular difficulties, then this time there were several problems at once. The team almost tripled: instead of a couple of dozen people, about 80 employees were involved in Half-Life 2. The technology in the early stages of documentation creation was impossible to predict, so planning was much more difficult. And the scale of the project led to the fact that the Cabal team could not keep up with the creation of documentation at the same speed with which the development proceeded. The solution was to form several teams: three of them worked on different parts of the game, and three more on art, sound and acting.
The first steps
1/1 First screenshot of Half-Life 2, map Get Your Free TVs! Source: GameSpot
At first, the plot was proposed to be transferred to space. In Half-Life, the last levels took place in Xena, so it seemed a logical step to continue this direction and make Gordon a space traveler fighting aliens. Fortunately, the company’s art director Viktor Antonov suggested moving the action to Eastern Europe, and by 2000 the backbone of the scenario began to take shape: the world was enslaved by the Alliance in just a few hours, and only rare people are still trying to resist.
In 2001, an important event happened: Gabe Newell, who stood at the origins of Valve and Half-Life, decided to step back from participating in the development of the game and focused on the future Steam service. The team, however, was not very upset by this, and development progressed like clockwork. In the same 2001, the engine was worked out so much that Half-Life 2 received its first map – Get Your Free TVs!
1/2 Screenshot from the leaked version of Get Your Free TVs!
The level was originally created to test a concept and was not intended to be released or introduced to the game. A small location showed the uprising of the townspeople and the civil defense forces sent to pacify them. The latter arrived at the place by transport, and civilians actively threw “Molotov cocktails” on arriving cars, stole televisions in stores (hence the name of the map) and fought hand-to-hand with representatives of the authorities. There was already a working physics model, and although the map was made at a very basic level (buildings looked more like boxes, and the graphics did not differ much from the original Half-Life), its release gave a good boost to the team’s morale. Preparations began for E3 2002, which Valve was not destined to attend. This is due to Gabe Newell.
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Look
Half-Life 2 Presentation at E3 2003
Lost levels
1/3 Concept art of the wasteland around City 17
Alas, a full-fledged “old” storyline simply does not exist, but from those scraps that are, a fairly complete picture is formed. However, it is worth noting that many fragments contradict each other, since often later maps and episodes were created to replace the old ones. In addition, the process was helped a lot by the so-called WC mappack – an early pack of maps created in Worldcraft – the predecessor of the Hammer Editor, which is used in the release version. The latter includes more than a thousand maps, most of which are not completed and represent repetitive locations at different stages of development.
The plot starts in a similar way: Gordon wakes up on a train ten years after the events of the original Half-Life. As in the release version, Ji-man brings him up to date (as always, it is impossible to get the full picture from him). The train starts outside City 17, so players should have seen the devastation left over from the Seven Hour War. In addition, the ruins of civilization were inhabited by Houndies and Bullsquids – monsters that were not included in the release game, but were present in the original Half-Life. In the city itself, it was relatively calm: the rare unreasonable aliens who broke through were burned by cremators – mysterious tall figures with round heads and flamethrowers in their hands.
1/4 Crematorium on city streets
Until 2003, City 17 was a much gloomier place: most of the townspeople wore gas masks (he got his Gordon from Ji-Man) because of the terribly dirty air, the sky was constantly twilight, and the atmosphere was even more oppressive. At first, Gordon moved around the streets without weapons, hiding from the police and seeing the consequences of an alien invasion – about the same thing that happened during the initial train ride in Half-Life, only with the opportunity to study the environment at his own pace.
Later (presumably – not without the help of Barney Calhoun), Gordon was supposed to be at the combine factory – in a location that did not make it into the final game. The huge, noisy room was full of slaves: adults and children, Vortigaunts and stalkers (another creature cut from the game), which were watched by the civil defense forces and combots – slightly modified scanners from the release version. Unlike the mechanisms that got into the game, the combots were able to shoot and release poisonous gas. The factory was powered by Vortigaunts – special devices, inside which were Vortigaunts, supplying electricity to the devices connected to them.
1/5 An early version of the main entrance to the train station
From the factory, Gordon went to the square, where he saw civil defense in action: mass arrests, shootings and other lawlessness. One of the rebels helped the hero avoid capture, but he himself was arrested, sending Gordon to a new location – an arcade hall. Here, the citizens played a strange game: controlling the manhacks, flying saws, they attacked the rebels, thereby earning points. At the same time, in the course of the plot, one could learn that the game is not a game at all, but a demonstration of the operation of cameras built into real mechanisms. Here Gordon finally met Barney, who sent the scientist to the radio tower – a direct route to Dr. Kleiner’s laboratory.
The laboratory itself remained almost unchanged, except for the teleportation device: initially it had a different appearance and was located in a separate room. Moreover, Gordon was to be sent to the Kraken base to Helena Mossman, Judith Mossman’s predecessor.
There were other cut-out locations, the most famous of which, perhaps, can be considered the ship “Borealis”, which has undergone many changes. At the very beginning of development, it was planned as the first location of the game: Gordon found the ship almost abandoned in the ice, where the Borealis found itself after being attacked by combine forces. Borealis was at the time the Resistance’s floating base, transporting supplies to the Kraken submarine base. Most of the crew died, and the survivors turned off the engines, as creatures like headcrabs launched by enemies do not tolerate the cold. Gordon was supposed to launch a small submarine with the mechanic Odell and go to the Kraken base for help.
1/7 Exterior of the arcade hall
In the second version, the Borealis was already a harvester research ship, which Gordon got to about halfway through his journey. The goal was the same: to get to the base “Kraken” with support from Odell. Here, by the way, the assassins of the harvesters were supposed to appear for the first time – genetically modified girls armed with two pistols and possessing a rich arsenal of melee and ranged combat techniques. The model was largely based on the black assassins from the first Half-Life.
Interestingly, one of the deleted levels, Saint Olga, was later released as a separate techno demo, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast. The Byzantine-style Fisherman’s Village was designed to showcase the updated Source engine with HDR technologies, fine-tuning of materials and surfaces, and author commentary.
Another reality
1/10 Early concept art. City-17
Many locations, not all of which are mentioned in the text, were removed, as in the early stages Valve planned a much longer game: instead of the final three days in City 17 and the surrounding area, Gordon’s journey took four, and the range of locations was much higher. And if at the beginning of the game only a few locations were cut, then in the second half whole chapters were deleted. As the developers recall, the initial version seemed overly “bloated” and required adjustments – many ideas were later reflected in episodes, both released and unrealized.
Interestingly, City 17 was originally an American city, based on Washington, adjusted for the many skyscrapers and primitive building layouts. All this worked for a dystopian design, which was planned at first: as references, the developers recalled “1984” by George Orwell and such films as “Dark City”, “Blade Runner”, “City of Lost Children” and “Avalon”.
The design of City-17 was not so much reminiscent of Western European cities as it inspired thoughts of Art Deco, but gradually the visual style was transformed. By the 1920s, other eras began to be added, and then completely changed the tone and approach to art design to a lighter and “post-Soviet” one.
It is worth noting that initially the harvesters processed earth materials and structures, creating new ones, instead of adding their technologies to the existing ones. Hence the design of the Citadel, which has changed over time, which looked like a jumble of metal plates rising to the sky.
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