Science fiction writer Marc Laidlaw joined the budding Valve in 1997, and through his best pen, he personally composed two legends as the industry giant grew up: the half-life series and Dota 2.
He witnessed valve's journey from obscurity to soaring, and he also witnessed the team that was once enterprising and constantly making new works become brainy and "not counting three". Half-life 2: episode three, which was originally planned to end Half-Life 2, has been stranded for a decade in this team with sufficient resources and strength, and Half-Life 3, which is supposed to open a new era for the series – and even the entire FPS genre , has long since been reduced to urban legends and online jokes... Valve once had one of the most elite teams of writers in the gaming world: marc laidlaw, erik wolpaw and chet faliszek co-authored texts for the portal series were unimaginable luxuries of that era, but as Steam and Dota 2 grew, the survival and growth of the company became more and more distant from its former roots, and the sense of existence of the writer team became more and more weak. The three left Valve in 2016 and 2017, along with the only remaining possibilities of a sequel to the Half-Life series.
Yesterday, Marc Laidlaw revealed on a private blog a "fan fiction" that was supposed to belong to Half-Life 2: Chapter 3 — a timing that was probably not chosen randomly, as August 24 of this year is Valve's 21st birthday.
This one is titled "Epistle 3", even the name is so much like episode 3... The blog post deliberately distorts all the key words in Half-Life, such as the name of the protagonist, Gordon Freeman, being replaced with gertie fremont. Through the form of a "letter to the player", Dr. Freeman, who has always been silent in the game, tells his legendary experience after "Chapter 2" in an unprecedentedly talkative way - except that the last paragraph is more like the author's later experience of the development team of "Half-Life 2: Chapter 3", guiding the way for the "people with lofty ideals" in the folk.
The following is translated from the text after the keyword substitution:
Dear Players,
Zhan Xin is safe. It was as if I had heard your complaint: "Gordon Freeman, we haven't heard from you in a long time!" "Well, if you're willing to listen to me explain, I have a lot of reasons, the most convincing of which is that I've traveled to another dimension or something like that and can't get in touch with you by conventional means. That's about it, until eighteen months ago (Note: Marc Laidlaw resigned in January 2016) that my situation changed critically and was deposited on this coast (note: probably referring to the eventual stranding of the project). After that, I occasionally considered what was the best way to recount the experience of silence over the years. I'm going to apologize for making you wait so long — and that's the end of the apology. I'll have to explain as soon as possible (though it may be short, hasty, and lack of details) what happened after the previous letter.
First of all, you may remember the end of the long letter before, when the departure of Dr. Eli Vance (father of Alex Vance) shocked everyone. The Resistance was so badly damaged that it was impossible to determine the extent to which our plan might have been leaked, or even whether it would continue as originally envisaged. But after Eli's funeral, we once again regained the courage and strength to regroup. It was his daughter, the valiant Alyx vance, whose unwavering conviction guided us in inheriting our father's legacy. The signals transmitted by Eli's assistant, Dr. Judith Mossman, gave us access to a set of coordinates pointing to the South Pole, which we believe mark the location of the missing luxury cruise ship Borealis. Eli had argued that the Northern Lights should be destroyed so as not to fall into the hands of the Combine (cmb). But other members of the Resistance disagreed, and some believed that the Northern Lights might be burying a secret that would lead the revolution to success. In any case, these arguments are pointless until we find the ship. So, after burying Dr. Vance, I shared Alex and I sailed to the South Pole in a seaplane, with a much larger support group— mostly militia, followed by other means of transport.
I still don't know exactly what hit our little plane. In the hours following the crash, we crossed a cold wasteland in a blizzard, a process that was chaotic, vague, and inexplicable. The next thing I can recall vividly is that we have finally reached the coordinate location provided by Dr. Mosman, and where we thought we could find the Northern Lights, we found the imprint of evil Combined Forces technology: a complex defense facility towering over a large expanse of bare ice. But there are no traces of the Northern Lights anywhere... Or at least not found on the surface. In the process of infiltrating the Combined Forces facility, we noticed a recurring, unusually logical aurora effect—like a large-scale hologram looming in the field of vision. At first, we thought it was a huge system of Combined Forces lenses that had caused these wonderful phenomena, but Alex and I soon realized that we had seen the real luxury cruise ship Aurora, which was constantly jumping under the spotlight of the Combined Forces equipment. Aliens built the facility around it to capture and study the Northern Lights as it materialized. The coordinates provided by Dr. Mosman are not where it is, but a prediction of where it is about to arrive. The cruise ship is oscillating in the reality we live in, and its pulse is gradually stabilizing, but no one can guarantee that it will be fixed somewhere for a long time — or whether it will be fixed. We had to board the ship the moment it was fully present.
By then we had already been detained—not by the Combined Forces we had feared at first, but by the scheming, treacherous, treacherous and cunning servants of our former rival, Wallace Breen. Dr. Brin wasn't the same as the last time we saw him—I mean, he wasn't dead. The Combined Forces had at one point preserved his previous consciousness, and after his death, they poured this backup personality into a blank organism that resembled a giant maggot. Although this Bollinger maggot held a prominent position in the hierarchy of the Combined Army, it seemed nervous and frightened when it faced me. Wallace at this moment does not know how his former incarnation, the original Dr. Brin, died, it only knows that it was caused by me. Therefore, it is careful with us. Even so, it quickly confessed to us (and refused to shut up for a long time) that it was nothing more than a prisoner of the Coalition Army, and was distressed by its current ugly posture, and for this reason it pleaded with us to end its life. Alex thought that Wallace Brin's actions were not worthy of a painful death, but I had some pity and sympathy for it, and before I left, I probably did something that would hasten his death when Alex was not paying attention.
Not far from where Dr. Brin was detained, we found Judith Mosman also imprisoned in a Coalition interrogation room. It is not difficult to imagine that a conflict broke out between Alex and Judith. Alex accuses Judith of killing her father... But Judith was devastated by the bad news she had just heard. Judith tries to convince Alex that she has been a double agent for the Resistance, that she has only done what Eli has instructed, and that Eli has been risking being considered a traitor by all of her members. I'm willing to believe Judith, and Alex isn't. But from a pragmatic point of view, we still have to rely on Dr. Mossman, after all, in addition to the coordinates of the Northern Lights, she also has a set of resonance keys, which we need to use to completely drag the Northern Lights into this plane.
After we defeated a group of Union soldiers at a Union Research Station, Dr. Mossman precisely adjusted the frequency of the Northern Lights so that the ship could be temporarily present. We seized the fleeting opportunity to climb up, but an unknown number of Coalition troops followed. The Northern Lights resumed its previous oscillations after a brief appearance. The team that came to support us failed to catch up, and we were caught in a fierce battle with the Combined Forces present, and only then did we board a cruise ship that had once again anchored and sailed to another universe.
What happened next is more difficult to explain. I, Alex Vance, and Dr. Mossman looked aboard the Northern Lights for ways to maneuver the ship—through the power unit, the control room, the navigation center—and the ship's history unfolded before us in a nonlinear way. Years ago, when the Coalition invaded, the ship was moored in a dry dock on the shores of Lake Huron — right at the center of aperture science development — and a team of scientists assembled a "bootstrap device" in the hull that, if it worked as expected, could unleash a field large enough to envelop the ship. The field can be transferred instantaneously to any location without intervening in any space between the two points, nor is there a portal or any other device that acts as an entrance or exit; the device is able to achieve complete self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, the inventors were not given the opportunity to test the device. After the Combined Forces defeated Earth in just 7 hours, the aliens took control of the most important research facilities. The research team on the Northern Lights only wanted the ship to escape the clutches of the Coalition forces, and took the risk of throwing the cruise ship to the farthest place they could aim at: the South Pole. They didn't realize at the time that the self-lifting device was not only moving in space, but also in time, and that it wouldn't exist in the same place only at the same time. The Northern Lights spanned space and time at the moment of launch, between Lake Michigan during the Seven-Hour War and Antarctica at this moment; its existence was tightened like a rubber band, oscillating non-stop, but still points were exposed at certain moments, like harmonic spots on a vibrating guitar string. We took advantage of a overtone to take advantage of this boat, but the string is still vibrating in time and space, and we can only drift with the waves, drifting in every direction.
Time became more and more confusing. Standing on the bridge, we can see the dry dock of aperture technology, and at the moment of launching the teleportation, the combined army's navy, army and air force are approaching the Northern Lights, and at the same time, we can also see our comrades fighting bloody battles on the Antarctic wasteland, approaching the fickle Northern Lights; in addition, even other worlds, pasts and futures will flash in this universe. Among the many sights we saw, Alex gradually became convinced that there was a central staging area for a coalition army to invade other worlds, including Earth. While discovering this, we were also engaged in guerrilla warfare on the entire ship against the relentlessly pursuing combined army, and we tried our best to understand our situation and determine the future battle plan. Can we change the course of the Northern Lights? Should we let it run aground in antarctica and give our comrades a chance to do research? Are we going to destroy everything on this ship, including ourselves? The confusing, contradictory cycle of time plays out throughout the ship, and we who experience it all firsthand can't even think coherently. On the Aurora, which is half ghost ships and half nightmare amusement parks, we are constantly encountering countless different versions of ourselves, and everyone thinks they are going crazy.
Our thoughts eventually converged into one choice, and Judith Mossman argued that we should leave the Northern Lights and give it to the Resistance, so that our think tanks could study and tame the power. But Alex reminded me that she had vowed to fulfill her father's last wish to destroy the ship. She plans to initiate self-destruction for the Northern Lights, heading to the heart of the Coalition invasion hub. Judith and Alex got into a fight over this, and Judith had the upper hand, and just as she was about to turn off the self-propelled device and moor the Northern Lights on the ice, I heard a gunshot and saw Judith fall to the ground. In the end, it was Alex — or her weapon — who made the decision for us. After Mossman's death, we can only opt for suicidal impact. Alex and I grim-faced armed the Northern Lights, turned it into a missile through time, and drove it toward the Command Center of the Combined Forces.
At this moment, you will not be surprised to hear this news: the ominous guy appeared in a familiar guise — g-man. But this time, he wasn't showing up for me, he was showing up for Alex Vance. Alex has not seen the mysterious female teacher since childhood (Note: the name for g-man in the original text is the sexually transfigured mrs. x, so here was the schoolmarm), but she recognized him at once. "Walk with me, we still have unfinished business." G-man said. Alex went with him, and together they left the world where the Northern Lights existed. But there was no such convenient door open to me, leaving me with only the snickering and contempt of the guy. I was left alone on this heavily armed luxury cruise ship to the center of the World of the Allied Forces. After a dazzling flash of light, I saw a brilliant Dyson ball from the universe. The strength of the coalition army is boundless and unfathomable, and our futile resistance is only a drop in the ocean. I saw through everything. And the most important thing at the moment is the Aurora Borealis, the most powerful weapon of mankind, and the damage that its self-detonation can cause is tantamount to a match that is about to be extinguished, and I am about to disappear meaninglessly.
In the most critical moment, as you must have expected, the vortigaunts lifted the curtain of their reality, appeared as always, and rescued me from the ship and threw me aside. I barely saw the moment when the fireworks bloomed.
I wrote this letter after that. I tell you about my experience of returning to this coast. The path back to this familiar land is winding and winding, and I was even more amazed to see the vicissitudes of the mulberry fields. Time flies, and not many people remember me, not many people remember what I said last time, and people can't remember exactly what we wanted to accomplish. At this point, the failure or success of the Resistance has nothing to do with me. Old friends have long been silenced (note: the original text is a pun "be silenced"), or halfway abandoned. Although I believe that the spirit of rebellion still exists, I do not know and cannot recognize the vast majority of members of the R&D team. I hope you know better than I do what is appropriate, and I'll leave it to you. Please don't expect me to continue writing letters about these things, this is my last chapter.
In the midst of endless ends
Dr. Gordon Freeman