Vapourware Hypothetical Half-life 2 Episode 3 plot released by the lead writer Marc Laidlaw

[Roguey]

I'm pretty sure, from what I remember, that Judith was a spy, she just flip-flops because she loves Eli, and Dr. Breen stupidly told her he would give Eli to the Combine and make her finish his work on Earth teleporters.

Mossman's double betrayal is open to interpretation and never fully explained during the course of the games. A likely explanation is that she had a change of heart in aiding the Combine after seeing Breen's callous treatment of Eli. However, it is also possible, particularly through her proclamation that taking Eli to Breen was "the only way", and her telling Gordon after his capture in the Citadel that until he is where Breen wants him, there is nothing he can do, that she planned the final confrontation in the Citadel from the beginning. Another theory, inferred from her conversations with Dr. Breen, is that she considered cooperation with the Combine as the only way to ensure Eli's safety; of course, this could also have been her way of throwing all parties off as to her intentions.

When she said "We're doing what I could never do alone. We're stopping you," I just figured it was some keikau.

 

[Explorerbc]

The whole travelling in time and dimensions could have been really interesting and offered them a lot of options plot-wise.

Both Singularity and Cryostasis had you switch through the present and the past to change the story but also as a gameplay mechanic to alter your environments. I guess this is how it would have worked if they ever made it.

 

[LESS T_T]

Coincidentally, some mod team released a mod containing levels from Episode 3 (or Half-life 3). It's based on leaked prototype maps that Valve worked on sometime between 2012 and 2013, and the mod team supposedly polished them up.

Download: http://www.moddb.com/mods/hl2aftermath/downloads/hl2aftermath-release-1

Due in no small part to Marc Laidlaw's Epistle 3 post, the release schedule for this mod was slightly stepped up.

Release 1 of the mod contains:

• 11 levels created by Valve between 2012 and 2013, intended for Half-Life 3. Keep in mind that these levels were gameplay experiments, not actual storyline based levels.
• 4 demonstration levels created by Lever Softworks to show various functions and NPCs not seen in those levels.
• weapon_proto1, a Combine laser-gun that shoot through walls, intended for Episode 3.
• hl2eb_weapon_proto1_debug, a command which toggles the Developer Console spam created by weapon_proto1.
• npc_combine_armored, an Armored Combine Soldier, intended for Episode 3.
• npc_wpnscanner, a City Scanner with a laser gun, intended for Episode 3.

Unfortunately, npc_surface could not be included in mod, as we do not have the sufficient source code. For more information, consult the mod's ReadMe.txt file.






This mod should be played in conjunction with watching this Valve News Network video, "The Half-Life 3 Beta Map Leak":

 

[Mynon]

New heights of Steam community's retardation
https://www.polygon.com/2017/8/28/16215092/dota-2-steam-user-reviews-half-life-3-artifact

 

[LESS T_T]

I'm looking forward to all the objective reviews Artifact will get.

 

[Akratus]

New heights of Steam community's retardation
https://www.polygon.com/2017/8/28/16215092/dota-2-steam-user-reviews-half-life-3-artifact

Stop linking to polygon you shitposter.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

review bombing intensifies

 

[buru5]

I'm seeing this described as "The End of Half-Life". As if him dropping these plot details and saying "I don't know" when asked about the future of the Half-Life series is some sort of definitive proof that Half-Life is dead. Am I missing something here?

 

[theSavant]

Marc Laidlaw, the Half-life series writer who left Valve some time ago, posted supposedly the plot of Half-life 2 Episode 3 on his personal blog: http://www.marclaidlaw.com/epistle-3/

original post

Epistle 3

Dearest Playa,

I hope this letter finds you well. I can hear your complaint already, “Gertie Fremont, we have not heard from you in ages!” Well, if you care to hear excuses, I have plenty, the greatest of them being I’ve been in other dimensions and whatnot, unable to reach you by the usual means. This was the case until eighteen months ago, when I experienced a critical change in my circumstances, and was redeposited on these shores. In the time since, I have been able to think occasionally about how best to describe the intervening years, my years of silence. I do first apologize for the wait, and that done, hasten to finally explain (albeit briefly, quickly, and in very little detail) events following those described in my previous letter (referred to herewith as Epistle 2).

To begin with, as you may recall from the closing paragraphs of my previous missive, the death of Elly Vaunt shook us all. The Research & Rebellion team was traumatized, unable to be sure how much of our plan might be compromised, and whether it made any sense to go on at all as we had intended. And yet, once Elly had been buried, we found the strength and courage to regroup. It was the strong belief of her brave son, the feisty Alex Vaunt, that we should continue on as his mother had wished. We had the Antarctic coordinates, transmitted by Elly’s long-time assistant, Dr. Jerry Maas, which we believed to mark the location of the lost luxury liner Hyperborea. Elly had felt strongly that the Hyperborea should be destroyed rather than allow it to fall into the hands of the Disparate. Others on our team disagreed, believing that the Hyperborea might hold the secret to the revolution’s success. Either way, the arguments were moot until we found the vessel. Therefore, immediately after the service for Dr. Vaunt, Alex and I boarded a seaplane and set off for the Antarctic; a much larger support team, mainly militia, was to follow by separate transport.

It is still unclear to me exactly what brought down our little aircraft. The following hours spent traversing the frigid waste in a blizzard are also a jumbled blur, ill-remembered and poorly defined. The next thing I clearly recall is our final approach to the coordinates Dr. Maas has provided, and where we expected to find the Hyperborea. What we found instead was a complex fortified installation, showing all the hallmarks of sinister Disparate technology. It surrounded a large open field of ice. Of the Hypnos itself there was no sign…or not at first. But as we stealthily infiltrated the Disparate installation, we noticed a recurent, strangely coherent auroral effect–as of a vast hologram fading in and out of view. This bizarre phenomenon initially seemed an effect caused by an immense Disparate lensing system, Alex and I soon realized that what we were actually seeing was the luxury liner Hyperborea itself, phasing in and out of existence at the focus of the Disparate devices. The aliens had erected their compound to study and seize the ship whenever it materialized. What Dr. Maas had provided were not coordinates for where the sub was located, but instead for where it was predicted to arrive. The liner was oscillating in and out of our reality, its pulses were gradually steadying, but there was no guarantee it would settle into place for long–or at all. We determined that we must put ourselves into position to board it at the instant it became completely physical.

At this point we were briefly detained–not captured by the Disparate, as we feared at first, but by minions of our former nemesis, the conniving and duplicitous Wanda Bree. Dr. Bree was not as we had last seen her–which is to say, she was not dead. At some point, the Disparate had saved out an earlier version of her consciousness, and upon her physical demise, they had imprinted the back-up personality into a biological blank resembling an enormous slug. The Bree-Slug, despite occupying a position of relative power in the Disparate hierarchy, seemed nervous and frightened of me in particular. Wanda did not know how her previous incarnation, the original Dr. Bree, had died. She knew only that I was responsible. Therefore the slug treated us with great caution. Still, she soon confessed (never able to keep quiet for long) that she was herself a prisoner of the Disparate. She took no pleasure from her current grotesque existence, and pleaded with us to end her life. Alex believed that a quick death was more than Wanda Bree deserved, but for my part, I felt a modicum of pity and compassion. Out of Alex’s sight, I might have done something to hasten the slug’s demise before we proceeded.

Not far from where we had been detained by Dr. Bree, we found Jerry Maas being held in a Disparate interrogation cell. Things were tense between Jerry and Alex, as might be imagined. Alex blamed Jerry for his mother’s death…news of which, Jerry was devastated to hear for the first time. Jerry tried to convince Alex that he had been a double agent serving the resistance all along, doing only what Elly had asked of him, even though he knew it meant he risked being seen by his peers–by all of us–as a traitor. I was convinced; Alex less so. But from a pragmatic point of view, we depended on Dr. Maas; for along with the Hyperborea coordinates, he possessed resonance keys which would be necessary to bring the liner fully into our plane of existence.

We skirmished with Disparate soldiers protecting a Dispar research post, then Dr. Maas attuned the Hyperborea to precisely the frequencies needed to bring it into (brief) coherence. In the short time available to us, we scrambled aboard the ship, with an unknown number of Disparate agents close behind. The ship cohered for only a short time, and then its oscillations resume. It was too late for our own military support, which arrived and joined the Disparate forces in battle just as we rebounded between universes, once again unmoored.

What happened next is even harder to explain. Alex Vaunt, Dr. Maas and myself sought control of the ship–its power source, its control room, its navigation center. The liner’s history proved nonlinear. Years before, during the Disparate invasion, various members of an earlier science team, working in the hull of a dry-docked liner situated at the Tocsin Island Research Base in Lake Huron, had assembled what they called the Bootstrap Device. If it worked as intended, it would emit a field large enough to surround the ship. This field would then itself travel instantaneously to any chosen destination without having to cover the intervening space. There was no need for entry or exit portals, or any other devices; it was entirely self-contained. Unfortunately, the device had never been tested. As the Disparate pushed Earth into the Nine Hour Armageddon, the aliens seized control of our most important research facilities. The staff of the Hyperborea, with no other wish than to keep the ship out of Disparate hands, acted in desperation. The switched on the field and flung the Hyperborea toward the most distant destination they could target: Antarctica. What they did not realize was that the Bootstrap Device travelled in time as well as space. Nor was it limited to one time or one location. The Hyperborea, and the moment of its activation, were stretched across space and time, between the nearly forgotten Lake Huron of the Nine Hour Armageddon and the present day Antarctic; it was pulled taut as an elastic band, vibrating, except where at certain points along its length one could find still points, like the harmonic spots along a vibrating guitar string. One of these harmonics was where we boarded, but the string ran forward and back, in both time and space, and we were soon pulled in every direction ourselves.

Time grew confused. Looking from the bridge, we could see the drydocks of Tocsin Island at the moment of teleportation, just as the Disparate forces closed in from land, sea and air. At the same time, we could see the Antarctic wastelands, where our friends were fighting to make their way to the protean Hyperborea; and in addition, glimpses of other worlds, somewhere in the future perhaps, or even in the past. Alex grew convinced we were seeing one of the Disparate’s central staging areas for invading other worlds–such as our own. We meanwhile fought a running battle throughout the ship, pursued by Disparate forces. We struggled to understand our stiuation, and to agree on our course of action. Could we alter the course of the Hyperborea? Should we run it aground in the Antarctic, giving our peers the chance to study it? Should we destroy it with all hands aboard, our own included? It was impossible to hold a coherent thought, given the baffling and paradoxical timeloops, which passed through the ship like bubbles. I felt I was going mad, that we all were, confronting myriad versions of ourselves, in that ship that was half ghost-ship, half nightmare funhouse.

What it came down to, at last, was a choice. Jerry Maas argued, reasonably, that we should save the Hyperborea and deliver it to the resistance, that our intelligent peers might study and harness its power. But Alex reminded me had sworn he would honor his mother’s demand that we destroy the ship. He hatched a plan to set the Hyperborea to self-destruct, while riding it into the heart of the Disparate’s invasion nexus. Jerry and Alex argued. Jerry overpowered Alex and brought the Hyperborea area, preparing to shut off the Bootstrap Device and settle the ship on the ice. Then I heard a shot, and Jerry fell. Alex had decided for all of us, or his weapon had. With Dr. Maas dead, we were committed to the suicide plunge. Grimly, Alex and I armed the Hyperborea, creating a time-travelling missile, and steered it for the heart of the Disparate’s command center.

At this point, as you will no doubt be unsurprised to hear, a Certain Sinister Figure appeared, in the form of that sneering trickster, Mrs. X. For once she appeared not to me, but to Alex Vaunt. Alex had not seen the cryptical schoolmarm since childhood, but he recognized her instantly. “Come along with me now, we’ve places to do and things to be,” said Mrs. X, and Alex acquiesced. He followed the strange grey lady out of the Hyperborea, out of our reality. For me, there was no convenient door held open; only a snicker and a sideways glance. I was left alone, riding the weaponized luxury liner into the heart of a Disparate world. An immense light blazed. I caught a cosmic view of a brilliantly glittering Dyson sphere. The vastness of the Disparate’s power, the futility of our struggle, blossomed briefly in my awareness. I saw everything. Mainly I saw how the Hyperborea, 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.

Just then, as you have surely already foreseen, the Ghastlyhaunts parted their own checkered curtains of reality, reached in as they have on prior occasions, plucked me out, and set me aside. I barely got to see the fireworks begin.

And here we are. I spoke of my return to this shore. It has been a circuitous path to lands I once knew, and surprising to see how much the terrain has changed. Enough time has passed that few remember me, or what I was saying when last I spoke, or what precisely we hoped to accomplish. At this point, the resistance will have failed or succeeded, no thanks to me. Old friends have been silenced, or fallen by the wayside. I no longer know or recognize most members of the research team, though I believe the spirit of rebellion still persists. I expect you know better than I the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it. Except no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final epistle.

Yours in infinite finality,

Gertrude Fremont, Ph.D.

So... who's going to make the Epistle 3 mod?

Already done.

First reading the plot and then watching the mod (which kinda fits the plot, even though very barebones... but still...)... it's better than nothing. And the ending is acceptable. It gives me a bit of solace. Easier now to put HL2 behind

 

[Latelistener]

At this point, as you will no doubt be unsurprised to hear, a Certain Sinister Figure appeared, in the form of that sneering trickster, G-Man. "Come along with me now, we've places to be and things to do," said G-Man, and Gordon acquiesced. He followed the strange grey man out of the Borealis, out of our reality. For me, there was no convenient door held open; only a snicker and a sideways glance. I was left alone, riding the weaponized research vessel into the heart of a Combine world. An immense light blazed. 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.

Just then, as you have surely already foreseen, the Vortigaunts parted their own checkered curtains of reality, reached in as they have on prior occasions, plucked me out, and set me aside. I barely got to see the fireworks begin.

And here we are. I spoke of my return to this shore. It has been a circuitous path to lands I once knew, and surprising to see how much the terrain has changed. Enough time has passed that few remember me, or what I was saying when last I spoke, or what precisely we hoped to accomplish. At this point, the resistance will have failed or succeeded, no thanks to me. Old friends have been silenced, or fallen by the wayside. I no longer know or recognize most members of the research team, though I believe the spirit of rebellion still persists. I expect you know better than I the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it. Expect no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final episode.

Yours in infinite finality,

Alyx Vance

I think that would be more appropriate.
Gordon so far hasn't said a single word, and if they had developed Episode 3 back then, the narrator could've been anyone but Gordon.

 

[Infinitron]

Somebody's trying to repair burnt bridges: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/th...e-corridors-marc-laidlaw-on-writing-half-life

"The narrative had to be baked into the corridors": Marc Laidlaw on writing Half-Life​

Also yeah, he does regret posting that Episode 3 story

“I was deranged,” says Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw of his decision to publish the plot of Episode 3 as fanfiction. “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.”

Laidlaw first discovered that community in the mid 90s, in the office of Valve, where Gabe Newell and team were already hard at work on Half-Life. “I’d seen bits and pieces of the levels they were working on, but as soon as I heard the name, I just got this amazing buzz,” Laidlaw says. “I could see the whole world they were aiming at somehow, and I felt it was a collective vision. This is one reason it’s so weird to me when people try to attribute authorship to me that I’ve never felt. It was all there when I got there, in embryo.”

Half-Life was already recognisable as the FPS that would change everything: the disaster at the government lab, the dimensional breach, the battle to break through to Xen and end an alien incursion. Originally, Valve planned to tell its story more traditionally through third-person cutscenes. But when they ran out of time, the team doubled down on the unbroken first-person perspective and found unexpected strengths in it. “The main one was simply the chance to not wake you from the dream,” Laidlaw says. “You were supposed to be alone in this vast scary environment, but also alone in your head, and you could be whoever you wanted to be in that world.”

That loneliness became a defining characteristic of a campaign that only ever granted you temporary friends - an endless succession of AI tagalongs. In fact, by modern standards, there’s very little dialogue in Half-Life. Rather, Laidlaw had the dev team explain the stories they were trying to tell, and helped them solve narrative problems through level design. “Lots of traps and detours and obstacles and occasional moments of breakthrough,” he says. “Really good level design tells its own story. You don’t need NPCs popping up to tell you what to do if your visual grammar is clear enough. Then when characters do pop up, they can say lines of dialogue that make them feel like characters instead of signposts.”

It’s this approach that resulted in Half-Life’s trademark flow and perfect pacing - as well as a lot of black comedy, in which scientists were pulled into vents and belched out again in pieces. Half-Life’s continuous and consistent fiction left you with the sense you were passing through a cross-section of a larger world, rather than a set of fairly narrow levels. Nowhere was this more keenly felt than in its famous opening train ride, into the bowels of Gordon Freeman’s unorthodox and intimidating workplace. That came about when Laidlaw and level designer Brett Johnson decided to fix up some of the latter’s ruined lab areas and bring them to the rest of the team.


“It solved the problem of how to start the game,” Laidlaw says. “The plan up until that point had been to start immediately after the disaster, as the smoke cleared. But after all the work of building broken levels, it seemed like a waste not to get more use out of them. Then we just worked backwards from there to flesh out the preceding events. These were all economical ways of doing storytelling with the architecture - which was my whole obsession. The narrative had to be baked into the corridors.”

Half-Life’s NPCs were primordial. Besides the G-Man, they were all repeating archetypes - scientists and security guards who shared the same voices. For Half-Life 2, Newell tasked Valve’s team with upgrading these characters from automatons to people - developing animated facial features, and mouths that bent into all the right shapes to match their recorded lines. “We had to develop the story in ways that supported all that,” Laidlaw says. “More and better dialogue, richer characters.” As a result, the writer and his colleagues welcomed Gordon into the family of Eli and Alyx Vance. Back then, it was a big swing - action games hadn’t dared tackle anything so domestic, but Laidlaw considers family the “basic dramatic unit”.

“We looked for ways to unify characters and give the experience more coherence,” he says. “As we revised our story outlines, lots of characters suddenly ended up related to each other.”

The wider Black Mesa science team became another kind of family, albeit a far more dysfunctional one. Hal Robins’ generic scientist became the quavering, comic Dr Kleiner, and Black Mesa’s administrator - the same who had pushed for Half-Life 1’s precipitous, disastrous experiment to go ahead - became Dr Breen, the villain who would berate Gordon for misapplying his doctorate in theoretical physics. “If Gordon just popped up in this dystopian future, since he’s a mute conduit with no distinguishing characteristics of his own, how would we even know this was the same guy? By building a community around him, we were able to give him a shape,” Laidlaw says.

Laidlaw doesn’t remember any debate about giving Gordon a speaking part as the characters around him evolved. Rather, the hero’s peers started cracking jokes about his silence. “We had the example of Duke Nukem, and wanted to do the opposite,” Laidlaw says. “Our original vision for Gordon was that we didn’t even want to show him on box art. We wanted the player to bring their imagination to this character, and let them talk to themselves as they play, and let that be Gordon’s voice.”

Levity came in many forms, including a singing vortigaunt hidden in a cave off the beaten path, whose chanting ended with a hacking cough. “That was a recording of Gabe when he was in his Tuvan throat singing phase,” Laidlaw says. “He would practice in the elevator and in the parking garage.”

Breen made for a fascinating antagonist - a collaborator slowly feeding his fellow citizens to the alien Combine, who truly believed that appeasement was humanity’s best hope. Speaking down to City 17 from lofty television screens, he was a rationalist rather than a populist - oppressing with appeals to reason, not emotion.

“We knew that we were going to have these monologues running in the background of scenes for aural texture,” Laidlaw says. “When you write something like that, you have to convince yourself that maybe there’s some substance to these arguments.” Breen was influenced by Father Karras, the sociopathic prophet of Thief II: The Metal Age. “He provides an incredible radio show while you’re sneaking around doing thievish things,” Laidlaw says. “I was appalled at myself when I went back years later and listened to those Karras broadcasts, and realised how much I lifted from Thief.”

City 17 itself was defined by Bulgarian art director Viktor Antonov, who guided Valve toward the muted, quietly devastating characteristics of repression in Eastern Europe. “Viktor brought a visionary style that catalyzed a lot of experiments we’d made up until the time of his arrival, so that we could stop floundering, pick an approach, and start honing,” Laidlaw says. “I just tried to match the vibe, to the extent I did, and didn’t really look outside the game for that.”


In the episodic expansions that followed Half-Life 2’s launch, as the Free Man’s legend grew, Laidlaw increasingly played with the fact that the player was always winging it. “Good thing you know what you’re doing,” said Alyx as you disappeared into the heart of City 17’s Citadel to prevent its radioactive core from exploding. Gordon had no masterplan, and to an extent, neither did his writer - who employed the G-Man’s imprisonment of Gordon as a tool to ensure the protagonist could always be mothballed for later.

“I’m not sure I liked it,” Laidlaw says. “I just didn’t know what we could do about it given the way the games had to unfold, as a series of products delivered over time. Half-Life 1 was supposed to be a one-off so the vague resolution at the end was fine for what it was. When we started realizing that this all was going to have to lead somewhere, then we had to wonder where? You’re caught between wondering whether there’s going to ever be another game, and whether this series is going to go on forever. Each of those scenarios demands a different kind of strategy - do you converge or do you open up?”

The best Valve could do was cling to a design philosophy of leveraging cutting-edge tech to make engaging games, then making story decisions to support what they’d built. “The story never drives the tech,” Laidlaw says. “I had always hoped that we’d stumble into a more expansive vocabulary or grammar for storytelling within the FPS medium, one that would let you do more than shoot or push buttons, or push crates. Ultimately, I just got tired of the FPS altogether, as a form, and less interested in trying to solve the story problems inherent in a Half-Life style of narrative.”

Laidlaw only envisioned a story for the series up until the end of Half-Life 2: Episode 3, which he never got to make. Shortly before leaving Valve in 2016, though, he was leading an early VR project dubbed Borealis, named after the infamous Aperture Science icebreaker teased in Episode 2. “It was too early to be building anything in VR,” he says. “When people are struggling with the basic tools they need to rough out a concept, it’s hard to convey any sort of vision, and it all evaporated pretty quickly.”

The crossover between the worlds of Half-Life and Portal wasn’t Laidlaw’s idea. “I didn’t want it to go there at all,” he says. “I just had to react as gracefully as I could to the fact that it was going there without me. It didn’t make any sense except from a resource-restricted point of view. Portal needed art, and rather than flounder forever looking for something completely new, it ended up drawing on something that looked very Combine-y.”

The connection was well-advanced before Laidlaw realised it would have knock-on consequences for the Half-Life universe. “All we could do is then try to incorporate them somehow,” he says. “I felt like doing this made both universes smaller, but from a franchise branding perspective, that’s a good thing. I eventually did come up with a scenario in which we could connect Aperture and Black Mesa, and we had Borealis lying around from the earliest days of Half-Life 2, so I thought maybe we’d end up with some cool lore and backstory in the long run.”


Laidlaw’s plan for the rest of Half-Life’s story was, during the Borealis project, “very vague and diffuse”. “It’s important to say that every story we did was a thing we discovered along the way, as a team, and not as something I had an idea for and somehow drove people to execute,” he says. “The only way to figure out the story for a Half-Life game was to make the game. There’s no reason to think a thing I put down on paper was going to bear any relation to a final product.”

But of course, Laidlaw did ultimately put Episode 3 down on paper - and publicly. Shortly into his retirement, in August of 2017, the writer posted an epistolary short story on his website, in the voice of one Gertrude Fremont, PhD. “Dearest Playa,” it began. “I hope this letter finds you well. I can hear your complaint already, ‘Gertie Fremont, we have not heard from you in ages!’ Well, if you care to hear excuses, I have plenty, the greatest of them being I’ve been in other dimensions and whatnot, unable to reach you by the usual means.”

Aliases aside, what followed was very clearly recognisable as an outline for an unreleased Half-Life adventure which would wrap up the dangling story threads of Episode 2. The letter was widely interpreted as an admission that players would never get to see this conclusion in interactive form. Today, Laidlaw regrets ever publishing it.

It would have been best, he thinks, to have kept to himself and dealt with his isolation in ways that didn’t reflect on his former employer. “Eventually my mind would have calmed and I’d have come out the other side a lot less embarrassed,” he says. “I think it caused trouble for my friends, and made their lives harder. It also created the impression that if there had been an Episode 3, it would have been anything like my outline, whereas in fact all the real story development can only happen in the crucible of developing the game. So what people got wasn’t Episode 3 at all.” Instead, it was just a snapshot of where Laidlaw was at that time. “Deranged,” he repeats. “There’s really no other explanation.”

Laidlaw has otherwise kept his distance from Gordon, or Gertie. He didn’t consult on Half-Life: Alyx, despite reports to the contrary, but gave its writers his blessing. “I wouldn’t have wanted anyone second-guessing me, and I had total confidence in Jay Pinkerton and Erik Wolpaw to do good inventive work,” he says. “I intended to play it at some point but… I never got a PC, so I’m starting to think I probably never will play it. I don’t ever need to see another Combine soldier again, not even in VR.” The last place on Earth he’d ever want to go back to is City 17. “They nuked Black Mesa because of me,” he says. “Just so I wouldn’t have to see it again!”

Laidlaw had a fantasy that, having retired from games, he’d return to his original calling and publish novels again. In 2018, living through a post-flood lockdown on Kauai, he wrote Underneath The Oversea - the culmination of the lessons he’d learned in writing dialogue and plotting adventures at Valve. “I was pretty happy with it, and blithely sent it out for my agent to shop around,” he says. “And it was roundly rejected everywhere it went.” Ultimately, Laidlaw self-published on Kindle, to “zero notice”.


“What I hadn’t realised is that if you stop writing books for 20 years, everyone forgets who you are,” he says. “If you’re, say, around 60 years old, you’re going to be dead soon, so there’s not much reason for publishers to start trying to build an audience.” Today, he mostly makes music instead: “I can’t seem to stop chasing ever smaller audiences.”

Yet Laidlaw’s stories have entertained millions - even if, like Gordon, he’s very often chosen to take his voice out of it and let the corridors do the talking. “From my first visit to Valve, I had many conversations with people who shared my vision of integrating narrative and level design - specifically, how you would make that architecture do your storytelling,” he says. “I only wanted to think about the FPS experience. It just seemed the most involving and interesting for narrative, because it put you right into the middle of a story the way a novel did.”

 

[Morgoth]

"The narrative had to be baked into the corridors": Marc Laidlaw on writing Half-Life ​

Also yeah, he does regret posting that Episode 3 story

Feature by Jeremy Peel Contributor

Published on March 1, 2023




“I was deranged,” says Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw of his decision to publish the plot of Episode 3 as fanfiction. “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.”
Laidlaw first discovered that community in the mid 90s, in the office of Valve, where Gabe Newell and team were already hard at work on Half-Life. “I’d seen bits and pieces of the levels they were working on, but as soon as I heard the name, I just got this amazing buzz,” Laidlaw says. “I could see the whole world they were aiming at somehow, and I felt it was a collective vision. This is one reason it’s so weird to me when people try to attribute authorship to me that I’ve never felt. It was all there when I got there, in embryo.”
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Half-Life was already recognisable as the FPS that would change everything: the disaster at the government lab, the dimensional breach, the battle to break through to Xen and end an alien incursion. Originally, Valve planned to tell its story more traditionally through third-person cutscenes. But when they ran out of time, the team doubled down on the unbroken first-person perspective and found unexpected strengths in it. “The main one was simply the chance to not wake you from the dream,” Laidlaw says. “You were supposed to be alone in this vast scary environment, but also alone in your head, and you could be whoever you wanted to be in that world.”

That loneliness became a defining characteristic of a campaign that only ever granted you temporary friends - an endless succession of AI tagalongs. In fact, by modern standards, there’s very little dialogue in Half-Life. Rather, Laidlaw had the dev team explain the stories they were trying to tell, and helped them solve narrative problems through level design. “Lots of traps and detours and obstacles and occasional moments of breakthrough,” he says. “Really good level design tells its own story. You don’t need NPCs popping up to tell you what to do if your visual grammar is clear enough. Then when characters do pop up, they can say lines of dialogue that make them feel like characters instead of signposts.”
It’s this approach that resulted in Half-Life’s trademark flow and perfect pacing - as well as a lot of black comedy, in which scientists were pulled into vents and belched out again in pieces. Half-Life’s continuous and consistent fiction left you with the sense you were passing through a cross-section of a larger world, rather than a set of fairly narrow levels. Nowhere was this more keenly felt than in its famous opening train ride, into the bowels of Gordon Freeman’s unorthodox and intimidating workplace. That came about when Laidlaw and level designer Brett Johnson decided to fix up some of the latter’s ruined lab areas and bring them to the rest of the team.



“It solved the problem of how to start the game,” Laidlaw says. “The plan up until that point had been to start immediately after the disaster, as the smoke cleared. But after all the work of building broken levels, it seemed like a waste not to get more use out of them. Then we just worked backwards from there to flesh out the preceding events. These were all economical ways of doing storytelling with the architecture - which was my whole obsession. The narrative had to be baked into the corridors.”
Half-Life’s NPCs were primordial. Besides the G-Man, they were all repeating archetypes - scientists and security guards who shared the same voices. For Half-Life 2, Newell tasked Valve’s team with upgrading these characters from automatons to people - developing animated facial features, and mouths that bent into all the right shapes to match their recorded lines. “We had to develop the story in ways that supported all that,” Laidlaw says. “More and better dialogue, richer characters.” As a result, the writer and his colleagues welcomed Gordon into the family of Eli and Alyx Vance. Back then, it was a big swing - action games hadn’t dared tackle anything so domestic, but Laidlaw considers family the “basic dramatic unit”.
“We looked for ways to unify characters and give the experience more coherence,” he says. “As we revised our story outlines, lots of characters suddenly ended up related to each other.”
The wider Black Mesa science team became another kind of family, albeit a far more dysfunctional one. Hal Robins’ generic scientist became the quavering, comic Dr Kleiner, and Black Mesa’s administrator - the same who had pushed for Half-Life 1’s precipitous, disastrous experiment to go ahead - became Dr Breen, the villain who would berate Gordon for misapplying his doctorate in theoretical physics. “If Gordon just popped up in this dystopian future, since he’s a mute conduit with no distinguishing characteristics of his own, how would we even know this was the same guy? By building a community around him, we were able to give him a shape,” Laidlaw says.



Gordon Freeman is canonically a fan of Laidlaw. In his locker at Black Mesa, below his diploma and to the right of a Thermos flask, are two books: The Orchid Eater and The 37th Mandala, the latter of which won the 1996 International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. Laidlaw blames Valve prankster John Guthrie. “I remember him snickering about it,” he says. “By the time I saw them, nobody was allowed to make any more map changes.”
Laidlaw doesn’t remember any debate about giving Gordon a speaking part as the characters around him evolved. Rather, the hero’s peers started cracking jokes about his silence. “We had the example of Duke Nukem, and wanted to do the opposite,” Laidlaw says. “Our original vision for Gordon was that we didn’t even want to show him on box art. We wanted the player to bring their imagination to this character, and let them talk to themselves as they play, and let that be Gordon’s voice.”
Levity came in many forms, including a singing vortigaunt hidden in a cave off the beaten path, whose chanting ended with a hacking cough. “That was a recording of Gabe when he was in his Tuvan throat singing phase,” Laidlaw says. “He would practice in the elevator and in the parking garage.”
Breen made for a fascinating antagonist - a collaborator slowly feeding his fellow citizens to the alien Combine, who truly believed that appeasement was humanity’s best hope. Speaking down to City 17 from lofty television screens, he was a rationalist rather than a populist - oppressing with appeals to reason, not emotion.
“We knew that we were going to have these monologues running in the background of scenes for aural texture,” Laidlaw says. “When you write something like that, you have to convince yourself that maybe there’s some substance to these arguments.” Breen was influenced by Father Karras, the sociopathic prophet of Thief II: The Metal Age. “He provides an incredible radio show while you’re sneaking around doing thievish things,” Laidlaw says. “I was appalled at myself when I went back years later and listened to those Karras broadcasts, and realised how much I lifted from Thief.”
City 17 itself was defined by Bulgarian art director Viktor Antonov, who guided Valve toward the muted, quietly devastating characteristics of repression in Eastern Europe. “Viktor brought a visionary style that catalyzed a lot of experiments we’d made up until the time of his arrival, so that we could stop floundering, pick an approach, and start honing,” Laidlaw says. “I just tried to match the vibe, to the extent I did, and didn’t really look outside the game for that.”



In the episodic expansions that followed Half-Life 2’s launch, as the Free Man’s legend grew, Laidlaw increasingly played with the fact that the player was always winging it. “Good thing you know what you’re doing,” said Alyx as you disappeared into the heart of City 17’s Citadel to prevent its radioactive core from exploding. Gordon had no masterplan, and to an extent, neither did his writer - who employed the G-Man’s imprisonment of Gordon as a tool to ensure the protagonist could always be mothballed for later.
“I’m not sure I liked it,” Laidlaw says. “I just didn’t know what we could do about it given the way the games had to unfold, as a series of products delivered over time. Half-Life 1 was supposed to be a one-off so the vague resolution at the end was fine for what it was. When we started realizing that this all was going to have to lead somewhere, then we had to wonder where? You’re caught between wondering whether there’s going to ever be another game, and whether this series is going to go on forever. Each of those scenarios demands a different kind of strategy - do you converge or do you open up?”



Laidlaw was initially hired to write for Prospero, the lost early Valve game designed to combine Tomb Raider and his beloved Myst in a sci-fi setting. “It had trouble finding its identity, especially in the industry at that time,” he says. “And before we could go much farther down that road, Half-Life suddenly needed all hands on deck.”
The best Valve could do was cling to a design philosophy of leveraging cutting-edge tech to make engaging games, then making story decisions to support what they’d built. “The story never drives the tech,” Laidlaw says. “I had always hoped that we’d stumble into a more expansive vocabulary or grammar for storytelling within the FPS medium, one that would let you do more than shoot or push buttons, or push crates. Ultimately, I just got tired of the FPS altogether, as a form, and less interested in trying to solve the story problems inherent in a Half-Life style of narrative.”
Laidlaw only envisioned a story for the series up until the end of Half-Life 2: Episode 3, which he never got to make. Shortly before leaving Valve in 2016, though, he was leading an early VR project dubbed Borealis, named after the infamous Aperture Science icebreaker teased in Episode 2. “It was too early to be building anything in VR,” he says. “When people are struggling with the basic tools they need to rough out a concept, it’s hard to convey any sort of vision, and it all evaporated pretty quickly.”
The crossover between the worlds of Half-Life and Portal wasn’t Laidlaw’s idea. “I didn’t want it to go there at all,” he says. “I just had to react as gracefully as I could to the fact that it was going there without me. It didn’t make any sense except from a resource-restricted point of view. Portal needed art, and rather than flounder forever looking for something completely new, it ended up drawing on something that looked very Combine-y.”
The connection was well-advanced before Laidlaw realised it would have knock-on consequences for the Half-Life universe. “All we could do is then try to incorporate them somehow,” he says. “I felt like doing this made both universes smaller, but from a franchise branding perspective, that’s a good thing. I eventually did come up with a scenario in which we could connect Aperture and Black Mesa, and we had Borealis lying around from the earliest days of Half-Life 2, so I thought maybe we’d end up with some cool lore and backstory in the long run.”



Laidlaw’s plan for the rest of Half-Life’s story was, during the Borealis project, “very vague and diffuse”. “It’s important to say that every story we did was a thing we discovered along the way, as a team, and not as something I had an idea for and somehow drove people to execute,” he says. “The only way to figure out the story for a Half-Life game was to make the game. There’s no reason to think a thing I put down on paper was going to bear any relation to a final product.”
But of course, Laidlaw did ultimately put Episode 3 down on paper - and publicly. Shortly into his retirement, in August of 2017, the writer posted an epistolary short story on his website, in the voice of one Gertrude Fremont, PhD. “Dearest Playa,” it began. “I hope this letter finds you well. I can hear your complaint already, ‘Gertie Fremont, we have not heard from you in ages!’ Well, if you care to hear excuses, I have plenty, the greatest of them being I’ve been in other dimensions and whatnot, unable to reach you by the usual means.”
Aliases aside, what followed was very clearly recognisable as an outline for an unreleased Half-Life adventure which would wrap up the dangling story threads of Episode 2. The letter was widely interpreted as an admission that players would never get to see this conclusion in interactive form. Today, Laidlaw regrets ever publishing it.

"All the real story development can only happen in the crucible of developing the game."

It would have been best, he thinks, to have kept to himself and dealt with his isolation in ways that didn’t reflect on his former employer. “Eventually my mind would have calmed and I’d have come out the other side a lot less embarrassed,” he says. “I think it caused trouble for my friends, and made their lives harder. It also created the impression that if there had been an Episode 3, it would have been anything like my outline, whereas in fact all the real story development can only happen in the crucible of developing the game. So what people got wasn’t Episode 3 at all.” Instead, it was just a snapshot of where Laidlaw was at that time. “Deranged,” he repeats. “There’s really no other explanation.”
Laidlaw has otherwise kept his distance from Gordon, or Gertie. He didn’t consult on Half-Life: Alyx, despite reports to the contrary, but gave its writers his blessing. “I wouldn’t have wanted anyone second-guessing me, and I had total confidence in Jay Pinkerton and Erik Wolpaw to do good inventive work,” he says. “I intended to play it at some point but… I never got a PC, so I’m starting to think I probably never will play it. I don’t ever need to see another Combine soldier again, not even in VR.” The last place on Earth he’d ever want to go back to is City 17. “They nuked Black Mesa because of me,” he says. “Just so I wouldn’t have to see it again!”
Laidlaw had a fantasy that, having retired from games, he’d return to his original calling and publish novels again. In 2018, living through a post-flood lockdown on Kauai, he wrote Underneath The Oversea - the culmination of the lessons he’d learned in writing dialogue and plotting adventures at Valve. “I was pretty happy with it, and blithely sent it out for my agent to shop around,” he says. “And it was roundly rejected everywhere it went.” Ultimately, Laidlaw self-published on Kindle, to “zero notice”.



“What I hadn’t realised is that if you stop writing books for 20 years, everyone forgets who you are,” he says. “If you’re, say, around 60 years old, you’re going to be dead soon, so there’s not much reason for publishers to start trying to build an audience.” Today, he mostly makes music instead: “I can’t seem to stop chasing ever smaller audiences.”
Yet Laidlaw’s stories have entertained millions - even if, like Gordon, he’s very often chosen to take his voice out of it and let the corridors do the talking. “From my first visit to Valve, I had many conversations with people who shared my vision of integrating narrative and level design - specifically, how you would make that architecture do your storytelling,” he says. “I only wanted to think about the FPS experience. It just seemed the most involving and interesting for narrative, because it put you right into the middle of a story the way a novel did.”

One of the rare writers (besides Sheldon Pascotti) who weaved their writing talents seemlessly into game design in a manner that elevated the whole game.