Sci-fi author and former Valve employee Marc Laidlaw gives us...Half Life 2: Episode 3.

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https://github.com/Jackathan/MarcLaidlaw-Epistle3/blob/master/Epistle3_Corrected.md

Briefly:

After her father's funeral, Alyx Vance vows to commit herself to the task her father laid down before his death: locate and destroy the Borealis, a massive container ship previously owned by Aperture Laboratories. The ship is suspected to contain technology that would allow the Combine near-instantaneous time/space manipulation capability. In short, with it, they could rule the universe. Or universes. Alyx and Gordon travel to the arctic area where Dr. Judith Mossman last reported from (having located the ship) and the helo they're flying in is shot down.

Alyx and Gordon locate the Borealis, already in Combine hands. They call for a massive Resistance attack and, before it arrives, infiltrate the ship and fight their way through it. Along the way they locate Dr. Mossman and consult with her about the nature of the technology in the ship. Alyx wants to destroy it, Mossman claims that the technology Aperture Labs was working on can be utilized against the combine. Per the story, Alyx ends the conversation by killing Judith and telling Gordon that they have to use the ship as a weapon against the Combine homeworld (I'm assuming that thanks to modifications, the ship is capable of maneuver in space). Alyx gets Borealis moving, and they make an extra-spatial jump to where they think the Combine "home" is (whether or not it is in our universe even is left unanswered).

They program the ad-hoc drive system to make its fatal plunge into the Combine homeworld, but just as she begins to accelerate, time slows to a crawl. The G-Man appears out of nowhere and, with a smirk, escorts Alyx away, leaving Gordon to his fate. Time speeds back up, and as the corona of light around the Combine homeworld resolves into details, Freeman realizes that it - the "homeworld" is a massive Dyson Sphere. The impact of the Borealis won't even register for the Combine. It will be like blowing out a match. Just as Gordon realizes this, Vortigaunts appear and once again spirit him away.

He finds himself by the seaside, on what is presumably Earth, but in the distant, distant future. He is forgotten, his colleagues all dead now, and the Combine are still at war with the last shreds of humanity.

-fin-
 
Half-Life 2 should've pulled an Expanse and transitioned to fiction already.
 
Half-Life 2 should've pulled an Expanse and transitioned to fiction already.

If that fatass Newell isn't going to do anything with it they should just hand it over to Marc Laidlaw for just such a purpose.

Seriously fuck gabe and his online gambling house, his card games, and owning 80% of all PC gaming. I'm sick to death of it. Anyone here honestly think if Steam went tits up tomorrow they'd follow through on their statement that they'd release offline capable patches for games that "required" online? Newell's best trick was convincing everyone in the world with a PC to accept the most intrusive DRM ever - and I'm including fucking SafeDisk in that equation - and like it.

Buy physical copies, buy from GOG, shit, buy straight from the authors. Quit using Steam, though.
 
Physical copies of video games (especially PC games) is dead. However, I'm not a fan of Steam either. With the exception of a few multiplayer games that use their own launchers, I nearly exclusively use GOG.
 
I don't really mind Steam as a client, and a lot of games are only available on Steam so there's that.

I do mind a lot of stuff about Valve, though, not the least of which is the perpetual limbo Half-Life's been hanging in.
 
There's nobody to push Valve to do anything, though. They don't have money concerns as they own the biggest storefront in gaming, they don't have content concerns as they have an official store that users can get paid from, they don't have oversight concerns due to their lack of debt and "no bosses" structure (Except that word is, the culture there is as petty and snipey as you'd expect a managerless environment to be, and some people are certainly more equal than others), so they can just experiment as long as they like; and sometimes that kinda pays off (VR) and sometimes it doesn't (There are reports that there have been plenty of "HL3" projects that started, got so far, and then just petered out due to lack of interest, pressure of living up to such a big franchise, etc).

It's good to finally get some semi-official closure to the series, though. It's been too long now; given the timescale for AAA games, any new HL game wouldn't be likely to hit until 2020ish, and while a lot of people would like to see the series end, that's a generation or two of gamers who wouldn't understand what the fuss was about because they've only been exposed to the games that have learnt from the HL series. We should just let it go.

As far as DRM goes, I don't mind Steam. It's useful and non-intrusive.
 
If that fatass Newell isn't going to do anything with it they should just hand it over to Marc Laidlaw for just such a purpose.

Seriously fuck gabe and his online gambling house, his card games, and owning 80% of all PC gaming. I'm sick to death of it. Anyone here honestly think if Steam went tits up tomorrow they'd follow through on their statement that they'd release offline capable patches for games that "required" online? Newell's best trick was convincing everyone in the world with a PC to accept the most intrusive DRM ever - and I'm including fucking SafeDisk in that equation - and like it.

Buy physical copies, buy from GOG, shit, buy straight from the authors. Quit using Steam, though.

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