I was curious about how Raising the Bar was keeping the rebels from the retail version while also introducing the Conscripts, and it was something that Driver-Gomm had considered in-depth himself. If you go into the centre, closer to the Citadel, you’ll reach the New York-like original concept. In the canals, the city will go from a neighbourhood type area to a regular city with Eastern European type buildings. “Each layer, each circle, is a sector - the most outer one is the canals and after that will be the wasteland. “The gas mask concept will be used closer to the city because I imagine the city as a giant circle,” Vladimir says. So there’s a lot of filling in the blanks.”īut while certain ideas might conflict, the two teams are trying to make them work in unison. We have the names of maps, like Spire from 1999, but we have never seen this map. And we don’t have all the answers either. But each of these years had a really different storyline and different starts with different set pieces.
"2003 is basically retail’s story with one or two other tidbits but once you go to 2002 and before, you start getting into what most people would call actual Beta content. What was Valve’s pitch for Half-Life 2 in 1999? What was their pitch in 2000? 2001? 2002? 2003? And depending on the year you look at, it gets even further or closer to what we had at retail. “There are a couple of schools of thought - basically it boils down to you having eras in the storyline. “The Beta is a really complicated topic,” Driver-Gomm says. Two different projects sprung up to take this short story and turn it into a fully-fledged game, and that focus on the Borealis is what drew Driver-Gomm to the Beta. It followed on from Eli Vance’s death, taking us on the hunt for the Borealis, ending in a suicide mission where it would be flung into the heart of the Combine empire. This was after his departure from Valve and before Alyx’s release, laying the groundwork for fans to build from. The Beta concept had this dark and moody industrial setting, a feeling of combined technology that was developing and janky, which created an amazing environment.”ĭriver-Gomm got his start after leaving Project Borealis, another huge undertaking that saw fans adapt Half-Life lead writer Marc Laidlaw’s Epistle 3, a short story showing what the future of Half-Life 2 could have looked like. Half-Life 2’s world feels a bit more repetitive. “It’s like took everything awesome from the game and made it into a straight line. “I liked the retail when I played it for the first time but, when I discovered Beta, the retail felt like a downgrade,” they say.
Project City 17’s solo developer Vladimir has similar thoughts.
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