Halflife 2

Plot Summary

The original Half-Life takes place at a remote civilian and military laboratory called the Black Mesa Research Facility. During an experiment, researchers at Black Mesa accidentally cause a "resonance cascade" which rips open a portal to an alien world, Xen. Creatures from Xen flood into Black Mesa via the portal and start killing everyone in sight. The player takes on the role of Gordon Freeman, one of the research scientists who had been involved in the accident and who now must escape the facility.

At the end of the game, a mysterious figure colloquially known as the G-Man extracts Gordon from Black Mesa and "offers" him employment. Gordon is subsequently put into stasis.[26]

In Half-Life 2, the story resumes an indeterminate number of years after the Black Mesa incident, with the G-Man taking Freeman out of stasis and inserting him into a train en route to City 17. Official sources differ on the actual length of the intermission; a story fragment written by author Marc Laidlaw for the development team puts the intermission at ten years,[27] while Half-Life 2: Episode One's website puts this intermission as "nearly two decades"[28]. The game is set on Earth which has been conquered by the extraterrestrial civilization known as the Combine. This information is not directly relayed to the player; in fact, the friendly characters that Freeman encounters appear unaware of the stasis he was put in and assume that he has full knowledge of everything that went on since Half-Life.

The environments in Half-Life 2, in accordance with the game's story, all have a distinct post-apocalyptic theme, yet in design they are varied, and include the Eastern European-styled City 17, the zombie-infested Ravenholm; the coastal Nova Prospekt prison and the massive Combine Citadel. Viktor Antonov, the art director of Half-Life 2, who spent his childhood in Bulgaria, wrote that the developers consciously modeled Half-Life 2's setting on Eastern Europe because they were fascinated by the region's combination of both new and old architecture and desired to infuse City 17 and its environs with the same sense of history.

Plot

At the start of the game, the G-Man speaks to Gordon Freeman in a hallucination-like vision as he pulls Gordon out of stasis and places him on a train going to City 17 (to the slight confusion of the other passengers). When the train arrives, Gordon gets off and proceeds through the Combine's security checkpoints where he is detained by a civil protection officer. Once in an interrogation room, the officer reveals himself to be Freeman's former co-worker and colleague, Barney Calhoun, and helps Freeman to get to Dr. Isaac Kleiner's laboratory. After meeting Alyx Vance, Freeman is instructed by Kleiner to step into a makeshift teleporter so that he can be safely extracted to the anti-Combine resistance base Black Mesa East along with Alyx, headed by her father, Dr. Eli Vance. However, Kleiner's pet headcrab Lamarr disrupts the machine, and Freeman finds himself - after briefly appearing in several different locations including in the office of Dr. Breen, the administrator of Earth on behalf of Combine - just outside Kleiner's lab. With the Combine now alerted to his presence, Freeman works his way through the drained canal system,[29] avoiding enemy forces and using the help of human resistance fighters who see Freeman as a messianic figure,[30] to safely arrive at Black Mesa East.

Dr. Vance and Dr. Judith Mossman debrief Freeman on events since the incident at Black Mesa. As Alyx is introducing Freeman to Dog, her pet robot, and showing him how to use the new Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator ("gravity gun"), the lab is attacked and Dr. Vance is captured. Freeman is separated from Alyx, but she explains that he must travel to Nova Prospekt, a detention facility, in order to save her father.[31] Along the way, Freeman encounters other allies, including Father Grigori in the zombie-infested town of Ravenholm,[32] and Colonel Odessa Cubbage and his forces. After making his way across an Antlion-infested beach, Freeman reaches Nova Prospekt and begins to search for Dr. Vance.[33] Alyx eventually reaches him and joins in his search. Together, they discover that Dr. Mossman is a spy for the Combine, but before they can stop her, she teleports herself and Dr. Vance back to the Combine headquarters known as Citadel using a prototype teleporter.

Freeman and Alyx attempt to follow, but the teleporter explodes as they use it; they materialize in Kleiner's lab one week later, discovering that their actions in Nova Prospekt have inspired the human resistance to mount a full-scale rebellion, turning City 17 into a battlefield.[34] Alyx helps to assist Dr. Kleiner and other innocent humans to escape the city, while Freeman joins with the human resistance to dispatch the Combine forces. As the resistance gains the upper hand, Alyx is captured by the Combine and taken to the Citadel.[35] Freeman enters the Citadel to rescue Alyx but as he enters, all his weapons except the gravity gun are destroyed by an energy field; the gravity gun reacts to the field and becomes much more powerful, and Freeman uses it to remove the Combine forces in his path.[36] Freeman eventually reaches Dr. Breen's office, where Dr. Mossman is also waiting. As Dr. Mossman brings in Alyx and Dr. Vance, Dr. Breen attempts to threaten the Vances, but Judith Mossman has a change of heart and releases the three prisoners. Dr. Breen flees to the Dark Energy Reactor at the top of the Citadel and attempts to teleport away from Earth. Freeman pursues him and attacks the reactor.[37] As the reactor begins to explode a few yards away from Freeman and Alyx, time stops and the G-Man appears. He comments on Gordon's successful endeavors and then places him back into stasis before leaving through a door of pure light.

Narrative

Throughout the entirety of Half-Life 2, Gordon never speaks, and the player views the action through his eyes only. There are no cut scenes, nor are there any discontinuities or jumps in time from the player's point of view. Some have criticized these design decisions as narrative holdovers from Half-Life,[38] that effectively limit how much of the back-story is explained. Due to the lack of cut scenes, the player never directly sees what happens in Gordon's absence.

The ending of Half-Life 2 is also very similar to that of the original: after completing a difficult task against seemingly overwhelming odds, Gordon is extracted by the G-Man. Gordon is smugly congratulated and told that further assignments should follow. The fates of many of the major characters, such as Alyx, Eli, and Judith, go unexplained. Very few of the questions raised by Half-Life are answered, and several new ones are presented. The identity and nature of the G-Man remains a mystery. A number of these issues are addressed, however, in the sequel games, Episode One and Episode Two.