Can I just ask what people expect from a half life story? Like it's always been pretty thin on the ground, right? What was the first game? Experiment goes wrong, aliens notice us and invade, we kill a bunch of them, there's the occasional macguffin, travel to their planet, beat the big bad enemy, boom, mysterious gman puts us in the fridge. The two expansions seem like the same story from another POV, I have no memory of any important events from either one. Second game, gman drops us mysteriously back like 20 years later. We kill a bunch of enemies, there's some more macguffin, the vortigaunts were enslaved now they're on our side. There's a bit of intrigue, we beat the local bad guy, the vortigaunts save us. The following two chapters, apart from having to rescue people, I couldn't tell you what even happens. The world is implied to be so big that you are an insignificant player and you could never hope to grasp what's really gping on, and we never get more than glimpses of what's really happening. It seems more like the idea of a world that leaves open the possibility of more or less anything happening and within which to set games, than a coherent story with structure and tension and stakes, beyond "world in peril" or "friend in peril", which is pretty bog standard stuff. Like sure we might be a bit invested in Alyx & her dad's stories, but I always assumed people were hyped for sequels because the games play well and have an interesting backdrop. What exactly is the special sauce that mark laidlaw brings? Yes the environmental storytelling was novel and well done, but it's always been so vague because they're so committed to never leaving the players POV, and they spend so little time explaining the actual world.

They might have just cracked a new mechanic. Let's not get too hasty - especially considering the reports of non-VR HL3 being beta-tested end to end, with such a mechanic: supposedly it has actually good procedural generation.

As an avid pre-Disney SW fan myself, fans weren't _that_ pissed at 7. Outside of it being ~~ANH again~~ very safe and Rey being too good at everything from the get-go with absolutely no character development to support that, 7 was met with mostly lukewarm reception. Not awful, but not great either. It played it safe and everyone could tell. Then Rian entered the picture. The individual that is [documented on video](https://youtu.be/K6qaclJf2GM) saying he wanted to make a movie that at least half of viewers hated. Well, mission accomplished, buddy. Tied up every loose end from 7 and tied up its own loose ends leaving absolutely no meaningful questions for 9. Not to mention half the movie could have been deleted with no consequence (seriously, what on earth was going on with the Canto arc?), multiple character assassinations, killed off a character with lots of potential to be a decent BBEG in the most unceremonious way ever, and introduced a _major_ canon-breaking scene. I feel bad for JJ on 9 honestly. How do you even follow up on 8? 7 was such a soft-ball lay-up for anyone to write a sequel to, and Disney thought the best guy for the job was Mr. I Want To Make A Movie That Passionate Fans Hate? Its almost like Rian was spiteful and wrote 8 to be bad on purpose because he didn't like that Abrams had written 7. Why they did not have JJ just write the whole trilogy is beyond me. Would definitely have been better than what we got, at least it would have been more coherent. At the very least, mid is better than awful. Maybe Rose Tico could have been a real character with actual development and purpose instead of a useless character with an entirely unnecessary death. The prequels are only viewed better now because 7, 8, and 9 proved something could be worse. As Qui-Gon Jinn said, "There is always a bigger fish."

Which episode was that?

Speaking entirely personally, I thought at least Half Life Alyx's story worked on two levels. It was about freeing the gman as Alyx but gman sorta represented... Oh man, now I'm worried I can't remember the game well enough to communicate my original thoughts. I remember playing it and feeling like the gman represented the writers or creativity, a bigger picture concept or something that went meta. And if that was the case it felt like Valve creating a piece of art that said Alyx and VR have revitalized our desire to tell stories and GMAN is free again. The moment they drop their new headset I'll buy it and play again just to relive the experience but I'd say I'm excited about Half Life because Valve makes A) good games B) they make solid diegetic games which I find to be kinda rare C) their games often feel like they came from a team of artists than just a team of coders. Maybe that's the polish or maybe that's the massive amount of testing I'm led to believe they do but when valve makes a new game it often feels like the guy who made Stanley Parable just made a new game - easy to recognize art because it's so good.

I think this is why I always loved System Shock and System Shock 2 so much more as the narrative building was so much bigger than any game I've played before I since. I wish someone would sort the licensing out for that game and bring us a System Shock 3.

I agree the diegetic storytelling is very well done and that did push the craft of game storytelling forwards, but the actual world itself is a lot of texture with very little substance. Loads of cool ideas, but almost no decisions, like they want the freedom to add anything at any time without ever restricting themselves by saying "here is how this concept actually works", or even "this is who this person is". We never really meet the aliens or the antagonists, ever. The gman is an alien in a skin-suit, and Breen is just a collaborator. They are both essentially puppets. Like, what was the nihilanth? We killed it, then... what? I guess the vortigaunts were freed, but how does that tie into the slug beings, the human cyborg slavery, any of it? The vortigaunts could easily explain at least some of the world, What does any of it mean? I get the idea of being deep in and unable to see the forest for the trees, and that is definitely a style of story that you can do, but it's unsatisfying long term. Eventually you have to get at least a glimpse of the broader picture or nothing has any meaning. The world has no rules, which doesn't make good science fiction. I say this as someone who regularly replays HL2 because I enjoy the texture so much, I just acknowledge it's very limited.

I mean, I guess you're right as far as I'm willing to debate the point. Does that change anything? I don't feel like the franchise has done the Lost thing where every episode (in this case game) only asks more questions and never answers them. I also don't feel like I'm dying to learn more about the world or that the small scope of their answers takes me out of the experience. Like, it's perfectly encapsulated to what I need to enjoy the "movie" that is this game. I completely agree that this has costs, and that it probably can't go on for forever. Like one of the costs is I don't super care about this world, it's not a world I want to run a TTRPG in, or could envision a hundred spin-offs. I want the end of this story and I'd be okay if it stopped. Idk, that's a fine thing to make imo. And again, it's been top of it's class in execution since it's inception (never played the smaller games like Blue something or other) so idk - hard for me to nitpick the world or the game. Now Valve please release your new VR set so I can buy it or the Big Picture 2 and get back into VR.

Episode 4 if I remember correctly. He is credited as writer on the Wikipedia list of episodes. I can recommend the rest of the season as well, less than two hours

I think this is partially discounting the people that do genuinely try their best to keep Wikipedia factual. There are certainly many people that contribute to Wikipedia and do an excellent job trying to maintain factually correct articles all across the site. AFAIK, they are not paid for this. In particular, math related pages tend to be the most pure pages since there is little room for opinion in such a topic. The problem is that even just 1 user abusing their "control" over a Wikipedia page will throw the entire site's credibility into question. People like that, unfortunately, are often ones that seek out places where they can have "power." Controlling information, or globally accessible pages that document events in history, no matter how small, is incredibly alluring for this kind of person. It is an issue inherent to the Open-Source style approach of Wikipedia. Anyone can make an edit, but any edit can also be reverted. For topics where opinion is introduced, this often leads to Edit Wars, fighting in Talks, and the eventual locking of the page so no further edits can be made.