How HalfLife Alyxs Story Draws From Canceled HalfLife 3 Plot

How Half-Life: Alyx’s Story Draws From Canceled Half-Life 3 Plot

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How the leaked narrative elements of the canceled Half-Life 3 influenced the story and gameplay elements of Valve’s VR hit Half-Life: Alyx.

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How HalfLife Alyxs Story Draws From Canceled HalfLife 3 Plot

The story of Half-Life, once thought to be as dead as Half-Life 3, has been given new life with Half-Life: Alyx, the premier title and “Killer App” for the Valve Corporation’s new Index VR Headset; though a prequel to Half-Life 2, story elements from the canceled Half-Life 3, particularly it’s themes of time/dimensional travel, wound up factoring into the plot of this ground-breaking new game.

In the first Half-Life, the bespectacled Gordon Freeman struggled to survive a scientific experiment gone wrong, fighting off trigger-happy special forces and invading alien ecosystems. In Half-Life 2, Gordon Freeman was thrown forward in time to an Earth conquered by aliens, inadvertently spear-heading an uprising against the Combine authority and their human collaborators. As its title suggests, Half-Life: Alyx focuses not on Gordon, but on Alyx Vance, a freedom fighter struggling to build the resistance movement that will eventually fight alongside Freeman in Half-Life 2. Braving occupied districts and alien ecosystems, Alyx and other former affiliates of Black Mesa work to challenge their Combine oppressors and sabotage the mysterious ‘superweapon’ they’ve hidden in a floating sky vessel.

The visuals of Half-Life: Alyx reflect the half-formed nature of the resistance movement Alyx is working to build. Instead of Gordon Freeman’s iconic Gravity Gun, Alyx Vance uses a cruder “Gravity Glove” that lets her (and VR players) pull and throw small objects. The Citadel, the center of Combine oppression in City 17, is still under construction at this time. All of Alyx’s weapons are one-handed, to facilitate VR interactivity and reflect the Resistance’s current lack of large, heavy ordinance. In short, the story of Half-Life: Alyx definitively takes place before the hypothetical Half-Life 3: how then, does the story and narrative of Half-Life 3 factor into this game?

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The Half-Life 3 That Could Have Been (And May Still Be)

A year after leaving Valve, former story writer Marc Laidlaw released a short work on his website called “Epistle 3”. Styled after an epistolary letter, “Gertrude Fremont” describes how she and resistance fighter “Alex Vaunt” attempted to seize or destroy the “Hyberborea”, a scientific research vessel filled with space/time warping technology that the forces of the “Disparates” cannot be allowed to claim.

A change of names and gender pronouns make things clear: Marc Laidlaw was describing a continuation of the story started in Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and 2, where Gordon Freeman, Alyx, and other members of the Resistance work to stop the battered Combine forces from calling in off-world reinforcements, while searching for the whereabouts of the time-warped “Borealis” research vessel.

This time-travel subplot Marc Laidlaw alludes to in his “Epistle” bears striking similarities to the climax of Half-Life: Alyx. Marc’s “Epistle” describes Gordon and Alyx fighting their way through levels filled with temporal rifts. Similarly, the final level of Half-Life: Alyx is filled with all sorts of eerie temporal and spatial distortions, while the true nature of the “super-weapon” Alyx discovers allows her to see into the events of the future Half-Life games… and change their course of events.

Marc Laidlaw’s “Epistle 3” probably isn’t a perfect reflection of what Half-Life 3 was meant to be: still, the writers and developers of Half-Life: Alyx consulted Marc frequently over the course of their production, drawing on his extensive familiarity with the story of the Half-Life series and how best to implement it within a game environment. A good chunk of Marc’s vision for Half-Life 3 does seem to have leaked into the final product of Half-Life: Alyx, making for a narrative of desperate rebellion, mad science, and glimpses of uncanny realities beyond our current understanding.

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And Headcrabs. Don’t forget those pesky Headcrabs.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/half-life-3-alyx-leaks-plot/

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