Half-Life’s most iconic moments are on-rails. Literally.
The legendary opening to the 1998 original begins with Gordon Freeman taking the long, slow tram into Black Mesa. It’s a gradual process of immersion by submersion, as the game takes you deep into another world. The journey is so deliberately paced that by the time you reach the lab where Gordon will be party to unforeseen consequences, you feel wholly separated from the outside world. When his quest to escape the labyrinthine research complex begins in earnest, you understand just how far he has to go.
City 17 Has Never Been Explored With The Same Depth As Black Mesa
Over the course of that first game, we saw an awful lot of the Black Mesa facility. Its labs, hallways, underground rail system, the red rock landscape, its warehouses, breakrooms, and sewers. In comparison,Half-Life 2shows us much less of City 17. After Gordon arrives in the city (by train, natch), he sees the propagandized and militarily-monitored station, a few city blocks, some apartment buildings, the resistance’s laboratory hideout, sewers, and train tracks.
Not much else. That’s natural, it’s a metropolis, not a single research laboratory, and most of the game takes place outside the city. It wouldn’t make sense for Half-Life 2 to show us all City 17 has to offer and, to an extent, it remains an evocative environment because we don’t see much. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to see more.
Half-Life: Alyxgives us a broader view of the city, but not as broad as you might hope. You get this great view from Alyx’s hideout, looking out over the city and up to the Citadel, which looms over everything. You sneak through an abandoned distillery, a closed-up zoo, and other vacant places. But, the thing is, a ton of people live here. It’s a metropolis. Yet the most people we see is at the beginning of Half-Life 2, when Gordon and blue jumpsuit civs are running from the Metropolice through an apartment block.
As rumors swirled that Half-Life 3 might be open-world —rumors that, now, seem to be untrue— I spent some time hoping that that design choice would mean an open-world City 17, a game that would finally show off this memorable setting in greater detail.
Though it would half to be set before Half-Life 2, since the city is destroyed during the events of Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
Half-Life 3 May Be The End For Gordon, But A Spin-Off Could Still Work
Though HL3 is now thought to be linear andrumored to be the last mainline Half-Life game, I’m still holding out hope that someday we could get an open-world game starring a side character (maybe a buddy cop game led by Barney and a sassy Vortigaunt) set in the streets of City 17.
In the Half-Life games we’ve played so far, City 17 never gets to feel like a living, breathing place. It’s understandable that people would be going about their business quietly; in the midst of an ongoing, oppressive alien occupation you don’t want to attract too much attention. But people would still be meeting up with their friends, going to parties, enjoying art, working their jobs, and attempting to eke some joy from their existence, even under authoritarian rule. I want to see that side of City 17, and an open-world game would be an exciting way to explore it.
It could lean away from traditional Half-Life gameplay, and into Dishonored-style stealth-action on a sprawling map made from tightly designed pieces. Give me a party to sneak into, weapons to smuggle, freedom fighters to liberate. I want to see what the centers of culture in City 17 look like, even if they’re bleak, like the club the Nazis frequent in Cabaret or punk, but entirely underground.
Valve excels at open-ended exploration when it goes for it. The Highway 17 section of Half-Life 2 is one of the best bits in the game.That stretch is mostly lonely, but Gordon’s isolated drives through the bleak landscape are punctuated by wonderful moments of interaction with the Resistance warriors taking the fight to the Combine. A City 17 game could recreate this dynamic to some extent, keeping the streets quiet and calm while, behind closed doors, the Resistance is doing its best to keep hope joyously alive. Valve is making games again, and even if Gordon Freeman’s story is ending, there are more stories to tell in City 17.
