Half-life 2 Cut Content - Is it me or dose the cut content look better than what we got? - Games

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From what I can tell, it was because of valve just being unhappy with the stuff that they cut. Either because of some things sounding good on paper but didn't fit in the game once put in, a.i. issues (best example being the hydra), and them cutting areas from the game that led to some of the enemies being cut in the process too. Hope that answers your question.

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Considering the Cremator has a Pokeball on his stomach, some stuff may have also been cut due to copyright issues.

The thing is that this content we didn't see in the game make us wonder, "what if we got to have this stuff in the game, wow, that would be amazing", right? because this was never seen before in the HL series. But Valve saw it, worked on it, and thought, or maybe found out, it wasn't really that amazing for us customers to enjoy, so, well, that's probably why we didn't get this stuff, and wish we did. Most of the fault of this is the fact that it's been a long time since the last game, so we crawl around the old, not so known stuff about half life.

I wouldn't say better, just different. I think they ultimately decided to go with a style that better fit the feel of Half Life while appealing to a wider audience.

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I always thought that the hydra could be a cool kind of obstacle with just a bit of work on its design. The hydra had three (known) parts to it: Smacker, Seeker, and the stabby pwing pwing part that i forget the name for (impaler?). I've always thought that the seeker would search for you, and as long as you're in it's view, the smacker would attempt to whack aside any barrels or other props you hide behind, and the Impaler would, after a short pause and an audio cue, would stab at the location the player was when it had given the cue. Maybe the smacker would occasionally whack the player etc. etc. and you'd have to try to avoid it and such. Or, shooting the seeker and it'd blindly smack where the player was last seen. Stuff like that.

I like games with lots of varied enemies. HL2 felt kind of boring sometimes because it has only 3 type of enemies.

Some of the cut content is very cool. What I miss the most is the atmosphere from the concept artwork. It was much darker, more Blade Runner and dystopian/Orwellian than the retail product. I love HL2 as it is, but man, some of those ideas they had were pretty damn neat.

I wish the Houndeyes and Gargantuas were in Half-Life 2.

The laundry room in the beta Nova Prospekt looked a lot cooler than it did in the final release.

Valve did the same thing with L4D, made a dark game and lightened the tone for the final release. I'd imagine a lot of these things were the kind of concepts that work in theory but don't pan out in the actual game, or it just didn't match the vision.

[QUOTE=Sims_doc;39892854] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/lqdM58W.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Gv57vgO.png[/IMG][/QUOTE] holy fucking shit it's like sweet gordon and hella combine

There was a severe lack of Xenian wildlife in Half-Life 2. No bullsquids, gargs, tentacles, gonarch, alien grunts, etc. According to Marc, Alien Controllers were extinct. So I can understand that. But still, I was disapointed with the lack of Xen species.

I imagine Alien Grunts would be extinct too. Their sole purpose, like the Controller, was to serve the Nihilanth. They were mass produced in Factories operated by Vortigaunts. After the Nihilanth was killed, they were still hostile, as evidenced by Gman's "bad ending". Aside from that, I'd assume that any surviving Alien Grunts were wiped out by human military forces, and later on combine military forces. In fact, Gargantuas might even be extinct as well. We don't know their origins, but we do know that they served as a sort of juggernaut for the Xenians. Although one of the early HL2 drafts included a scene where a Gargantua gets obliterated by a Razor Train.

It would be cool to see some Agrunt synths.

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[QUOTE=xalener;39896943]It would be cool to see some Agrunt synths.[/QUOTE] I've always wondered about this. What if Agrunts [I]were[/I] synths? What if the Nihilanth just stole the tech from the Combine to make his own synth army of Alien Grunts?

I thought alien grunts WERE vortigaunts that were beefed up and armored.

most of the beta stuff was cut because VALVe wanted changed the story and not make it feel like just another dystopian future game. You can see allot of those cut idea's reworked in the retail version. second reason, but the most important is gameplay. Allot of idea's can sound fun, especially if you can motive them good enough. But once tested in game they don't seem to be as fun at thought. I have seen this many times in a gameplay course i follow at school, you have no idea how many of my 'good idea's' turned out to be a big flop. If you have head the final hours of portal(or w/e it's called) they give 1001 idea's that never made it in the final game because it wasn't as much fun in the game as it was on paper. Even worse, you can get to much focused on idea's that doesn't work, and lose allot of development time in the progress. So you see it's better to abandon a idea that's not really working out as fast as possible. Even if it looks as cool as the hydra. But i do agree that it would have been fun the have a bit more diverse enemy's. [QUOTE=0FucksGiven;39897286]I thought alien grunts WERE vortigaunts that were beefed up and armored.[/QUOTE] Yes, they where genetically modified vortigaunts. You visit the grunt factory in HL1.

Some of it i quite like the look of and hope comes back in some way, like the Cremator which wasn't completely cut (its head is ingame) but the majority of it was cut for a good reason. Most Valve games have had massive changes from when they were first shown - HL1, HL2, EP2, TF2, L4D etc were all different from the first pictures and trailers. Valve is willing to scrap something and try again until they are happy with it, that's a good thing. Even though some of the HL2 beta stuff does look good, what we got was still awesome. The beta stuff may sound good but we don't know how it would of actually turned out if it was kept. I'd be really happy to see some Civil Protection with Trench Coats though, that concept art looked really nice.

My main problem with Hl2 and the Episodes was that they scrapped all the big aliens. It was only...Combine soldiers, Giant bugs, and Zombies + Headcrabs.' That's how you can summarize the entire library of enemies in Hl2. Half-life 1 had the Vorts, Gargs, Tentacles, Mantas, Houndeyes, Bullsquids etc. Synths didn't really replace the role of the alien, they felt more like heavy weapons, akin to a tank or a chopper. The Hunter in Episode 2 was a bit more alien, I'd give you that but still... I really missed an alien presence in Half-life 2 and it's episodes. Seeing a few friendly Vortigaunts and space bugs is not enough. Quake had a similar change to the one that Half-life had, it went from epic big monsters and horrors with a few soldiers, to lots of soldiers/cyborgs and little to no horror/monsters.

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Lots of the cut HL2 content does indeed seem awesome, but one has to remember that it's easy to romanticize these things; it's not certain they would've retained it's awesomeness had they actually been implemented.

There is also the workload to consider. The leak stuff showed how little valve had done, buggy, blocky and unfinished. Its easy to romanticise about concepts but when a game is already behind schedule, a leak shows everybody how little is finished and there is a general lack of continuity and coherence the devs have got to make cuts and prioritise. Technical limitations aswell. The combine soldiers were originally meant to have unique numbers. Trench metrocops would have looked "cool" but the ragdoll would be expensive and buggy. Value also place a high value on fun, it something wasn't fun they would have no qualms about removing it.

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I am sure the Hydra would be possible with today's technology. As for the classic xenian aliens, Black Mesa showed us they can definitely be done well.

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[QUOTE=Sims_doc;39899132]Actual as for the Hydra, I think it was doable back then just it needed to be reshape for its environment not the environment for the creature.[/QUOTE] And because the hydra was great to look at, but not fun to fight.